Bruce Fenton - Stop Giving Your Power Away: Why Bitcoin Offers Freedom & Hope

Full transcript: Bruce Fenton on London Real

2:54 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Bruce Fenton, the entrepreneur, investor, early Bitcoin advocate, and blockchain expert. You have spent 30 years working in financial services and are the CEO of Chainstone Labs with a primary focus on investing in blockchain startups. For the last 11 years, you’ve been at the forefront of the Bitcoin movement and are the co-founder and host of the Satoshi Roundtable, an exclusive, invitation-only event for leading figures in cryptocurrency and blockchain that I will be attending this week in Dubai.

3:33 You’re also a former candidate for the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire campaigning for sound economics, free markets, and human rights. You believe we have reached an important moment in our history, which you have called a fourth turning, and argue it is imperative we come together and work towards freedom over tyranny. You have also said that Bitcoin offers certainty in an uncertain world and that all of us need to be deeply concerned about CBDCs. Bruce, welcome to London Real in Dubai.

4:00 Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. It’s great having you here. Let’s jump right into what’s happening right now, which is the Satoshi Roundtable. It’s going to start in a few days. All the top people here in Dubai have been talking about it and buzzing about it the last few weeks that I’ve been here.

4:16 I’m excited about it. I remember hearing about it a year ago, and I was like, what’s this roundtable? What’s this roundtable? And it was kind of invite-only. I think I saw one picture maybe of the group at the end.

4:27 And I saw friends of mine, like, call the moon saying thank you for having me and a bunch of people talking about it. But I really wanted to come. And the only reason I’m staying until the Feb is because I wanted to be here for the roundtable. And so I know you’ve kind of called it the unconference. I know it’s the 10th annual, which is amazing.

4:45 But what is the Satoshi Roundtable? So basically, I had an idea. I was up at a conference in Canada about 11 years ago with some friends. And we were in the speaker’s lounge, and then we came out, and he was the CEO of one of the big wallet companies. And somebody came up and said, hey, can you help me with my wallet? We were writing a deep, deep conversation.

5:03 And he did because he’s nice, and that’s what a good CEO does. But then we kind of had a chuckle about it because our convo was interrupted. He said, we ought to have a conference with only speakers and no attendees. And I said, that’s kind of a good idea, actually. And I had always been interested in these.

5:18 I had always been interested in the idea of like a counterbalance to Davos or something like a libertarian version or a more free market, cypherpunk kind of version. But I like the idea of a smaller, more private, no media, no pitches, kind of off the record, privacy focused, controlled group. People think I’m an introvert, but I’m kind of a little bit of an introvert, actually. And so I consider this kind of an introverts conference. What I love about conferences is the one-on-one interactions and the convos.

5:55 And that’s what this is designed. It’s an event designed around good conversations. Yeah, because the best conferences I’ve been to, all the really good stuff happens in the speaker’s lounge a lot of times when you have this little… Actually, sometimes the best. I call it like the maple syrup of the conference.

6:09 Like everything’s boiled down and you’re in a room with 50 or 100 people that are either going on stage or they’re important enough to get in there. And then it’s just like, wow, if I spend two hours here, that’s more important than two months anywhere else. I’m literally ricocheting off the most important people. And sometimes I would just hang out in there and just literally approach people at the bar like I was picking someone up, like, hey, how’s the coffee?

6:31 Because you know you’re going to talk to somebody important. And so, look, I’ve been here for conferences like JITEX and Future Blockchain Summit and they’re amazing. But there’s people on stage. They can only say so much. There’s big booths and there’s just a lot of people there.

6:46 And so I’m really excited because this is going to be smaller. I know it’s like, you know, no media, no cameras, no name dropping. And then also I see it’s like a bunch of un-conference themes. So the Telegram group, people are already starting to say, hey, can we talk about this? Can we talk about this?

7:03 So I don’t know how that’s going to manifest, but I’m kind of curious. Yeah, we’ve got a good system now. It was around the third, fourth year that we really experimented the first few years and kind of hybrid of a conventional and unconventional. We had more traditional speakers and breakout sessions and debates. But around the what I realized is the less I did, the better it worked.

7:26 And so it was, you know, there was an urge that I had as an organizer. And a couple of the early years like, come on, everybody, we got this session over here. And people don’t want to be heard, especially a crowd like this. Everybody has something to offer. Everybody is a smart person who’s there for a reason.

7:42 So the more we give people control and we let them run their agenda, the better it works. So around the fourth year, we finally got that to kind of click and we got a facilitator. Now we’ve had another six years of working it that way. And basically it’s an organic agenda. So a couple of days before and especially the first day, a couple of days before we gather some topics and then the first day we kind of put it all on a board.

8:04 You say, you know, Brian wants to talk about mining and, you know, Marshall wants to talk about mining. Maybe you’ll combine your panel. Maybe you disagree. Maybe you want to do yours first and his right after because you have the same audience. Maybe you want to go, you disagree and you want to do a debate.

8:18 Maybe you say, you know what, Marshall’s more of an expert. I’m not going to do mine. I’m just going to attend his. And when we put all those on sticky boards and then the Bitcoin maximalists and the DeFi people and the Web3 people and the lawyers, there’s always a regulatory panel. That’s my least favorite.

8:34 That’s the last thing I’m interested in. I don’t want to hear more lawyers. No offense to my friends. I’ll poke in and say hi. But the lawyers love it.

8:44 Some of them stay in that panel all day. A lot of the Bitcoin maximalists stay with the other Bitcoin maximalists. So you can have very different conference experiences. And since everyone has something to offer, you usually have any given crowd. You’re going to have really high caliber people.

8:59 And sometimes the sessions end up with two people. And sometimes there’s the best sessions because they have that one or two or three people where they want to talk about whatever Puerto Rico tax treaty and how it relates to tokens. And then you have a big session. Last year we had CZ. He had a big session, 180 people or so.

9:16 Almost everybody goes to his session because he’s CZ. And so it varies a lot. Everybody has a different experience. And it’s organic. Very much like our space.

9:24 Decentralized and driven by creators. Those are the best decentralized products. You just let the world do its thing and it works. All right. So I shouldn’t panic while I’m looking through the app thinking what’s happening.

9:35 Because that’s the point. Just go with it. Just roll. And I mean my personal favorite thing is the meals and the side things because you’re always going to be sitting. And then that’s the nice thing too.

9:44 So you may have like the super Bitcoin maximalist group and the Ethereum group. But then we all have meals together. So you have just enough cross. And it’s small enough that if people maybe disagree with somebody, they don’t. They’re not going to get stuck with them.

9:58 But if they’re trying to seek somebody out and they really want to share an idea, it’s pretty easy to sort of find anybody. So yeah, just we go with the flow. I’m excited. And why in Dubai? You know, I’ve been coming here for 22 years.

10:11 And I’ve always lived in this region. I’ve lived in Dubai. I lived in Saudi Arabia for the better part of seven years. And so I’ve always loved this region. And I’ve always kind of wanted to do it here.

10:21 And it was finally sort of ready maybe a couple of years ago, but it’s really ready now. Now, coincidentally, it’s maybe the best place in the world because it’s such a hot spot. It’s so exciting. We typically used to do them in North America. We did them in Mexico, Caribbean, places like that, resort places.

10:38 And those are more vacation. You know, it’s a work event. But, you know, there’s just a little it’s just a little less serious from a work standpoint. People come to Dubai for especially for people coming from America. It’s a little more time commitment.

10:50 So they’re a little more like, all right, I really want to get something out of it and deliver something. And they’ll usually stay a couple of days on the end for other other meetings and things like that. So that works out pretty well. Would you say Dubai is the center of crypto? What would you call it?

11:05 I would say I would say Dubai is representing a new version of the American dream, a one of the most exciting cities in the world and a good model for what the world should do, which is, in my opinion, most of this great growth that we see is simply because they allowed it. They allow people to come here. We used to allow people in America. We had the Statue of Liberty who said, give us your poor, you’re sick, you’re tired, you’re hungry, come here and work.

11:27 And we don’t do that anymore, partly because we have so many entitlements. Nobody wants to, you don’t want to let people in if it’s going to cost you a fortune every single time somebody comes in. Dubai doesn’t have that. They have it very much like we had 100 years ago. They let people in and you pay your own way.

11:41 You pay your own way. You don’t come here and get a handout. You come here and you work. And that attracts all kinds of people from the very richest in the world to the very poorest in the world. And they all do better here.

11:52 And I think that overall, it’s very exciting. So it’s naturally become a big center. It probably is, if not the biggest center, one of the biggest centers for both finance and the crypto and Bitcoin industries. Yeah, I’m trying to give another city that I would stick ahead of Dubai. And I can’t think of one.

12:08 Yeah. I mean, San Francisco has fallen off the cliff. I mean, San Francisco is like a major liability now. It’s becoming like a Nigeria or something where you see the name and you’re like, oh, can I trust this company or not? I mean, I even question the people.

12:21 If I see somebody from San Francisco, I kind of say, why are you there? Like, what is the problem? I mean, do you not know that it’s bad? Do you think it’s okay? Are you too weak to get a bag and a ticket and get out of there?

12:33 You know, it’s concerning, you know, because there’s just so many problems and that’s a shame. You know, San Francisco was much like Dubai. You know, in the early 90s, I think San Francisco was probably the best city in the world. I loved San Francisco. I spent a lot of time there.

12:45 It was early in my career. San Francisco was very much like Dubai is now. It has very much the same vibe. I mean, that was the place you go. Now here is the place you go.

12:54 This is where there’s so much. And it creates more opportunity. The more builders that come, the more investors that come, the more stuff happens and then more people are here. It’s really an exercise or an example of network effect. That we’re all seeking in blockchain that Bitcoin’s maybe attained.

13:10 But this thing really has that. And the more people that come, the more of a success it becomes. Yeah, that’s one of the most exciting things having come here 22 years ago because one of the most exciting things was around 10 years ago, you started to see sort of second, what I would call like second tier businesses. So you have the big efforts where they say, okay, we’re going to build the biggest building in the world and the biggest mall in the world.

13:31 And then it took a few more years where you had like small entrepreneurs come in. What really excited me as a pro-capitalism person is to see small businesses, hair salons, little, you know, what we call bodegos in New York, you know, little cafes and little things that are owned by, you know, people from Pakistan or people from India who may not be wealthy or they maybe were a driver or something and they saved up money. Now they have a nail salon. I mean, that is, and then they get a chain and then some of them end up owning a hotel.

14:03 And there’s people who have made fortunes here. There’s people who’ve been here 20, 30 years who were literally poor, global poor. And they’ve now become actually rich. And there’s people at all different levels. There’s people who went from hundreds of dollars income to thousands.

14:17 And there’s people who went from millions to deck of millions. And it’s a land of opportunity for everybody, I think. Yeah, that’s a really good point. You have to have those small pieces, right? You can’t just have the big businesses coming in or the government’s doing the big projects.

14:28 Yeah, that’s what makes a culture. You know, when you go to Deira and you see this like, I think the lower and middle-class areas around Dubai are some of the most interesting because you have that, like, vibrance and excitement, you know, six people crowded in a small room and, but you don’t have the violence. And, you know, usually a poorer area of town, almost everywhere in the world, certainly in the U.S., is dangerous. It’s not dangerous here. It’s safe.

14:52 You know, they have no crime. So you have this, like, excitement and it’s the lower-income jobs of service, but they’re all, like, working hard. And I like that. I have a good feel when I go to those neighborhoods. I say, this is what it’s all about.

15:04 These are people making a better life for themselves and their family, and it’s exciting. And that base, you know, that’s the backbone. That’s what makes this whole place work. That’s the people that are serving you at the hotels and make all the fine stuff so that these billionaires and the big projects work. It’s a great relationship where both sides help each other.

15:21 You know, the rich people, you know, provide the great opportunity and then the workers provide the backbone. So it’s exactly how the economy is supposed to work. It’s a natural flaw that everybody should copy. Yeah, I love how work is important, right? That we forgot sometimes that work is there for a lot of reasons, right?

15:39 Keeps people focused, makes them keep trying to get better. You know, obviously, they’re creating income for themselves and creating value for themselves. Everybody’s working here. Whereas in certain places in the West, not everybody’s working. Yeah, we’re kind of beasts of burden.

15:53 You know, I have a working dog, a trained shitsund dog, German Shepherd. They want to work. He’ll invent a job. If he doesn’t have a job, he’ll bring a toy and then he’ll take it away from himself and he’ll make himself leave and then he’ll take it. He’ll invent a job for himself.

16:08 And humans need to work. You know, I was lucky enough to do well in business and I sort of got the idea to retire in 2017. And I don’t need to work again. I’m never going to work again. It only lasts about six months.

16:20 I wasn’t very productive. I played Fallout 4 video game for about three months. I sat on my couch. Then I said, I’m going to do something. I’ll do a startup. I’ll do some other things.

16:30 And we’re made to work. And you have a problem with the fiat money system in the U.S. We have so many people on entitlements. They sit at home and they’re incentivized to not work. And there’s all kinds of economic problems with that that we all know.

16:42 But what you’re also alluding to is the psychological problem. You know, idle minds. It’s not good for you to sit at home. Your health goes down. There’s all kinds of things.

16:51 You’re meant to work. No matter how much money you have, you should do something. Even if you could do charity work or something. But you should have something, some kind of task. It’s good for you and it helps you.

17:01 And I think it’s great for society. And you see it firsthand here. Everybody here is working. They have very, very, very little unemployment. Everybody’s trying to get better.

17:09 Yeah, also probably helps you live longer. Helps keep self-esteem going. It’s just such an important. I think we are beasts of birth. Yeah.

17:16 And again, if you ever take a dog like that and you’re not constantly working them, you’re going to have problems. Yeah. They’re going to come after you. All right. Tell me, what is the state of the union of blockchain right now?

17:26 We’ve seen some major things happen with the ETF. Most people I speak to would pretty much agree that the bull market is back. And there’s a lot of predictions about how big it’ll be and how long it’ll last, but people will say that’s true. We’ve seen, you know, regulation. You can tell me where it is.

17:43 But you’ve done this for 10 years, different satoshis. Where do you think we’re at right now? I think we’re in a good shape. You know, it’s very similar to the previous iterations. You know, the past is never a guarantee of the future, but we’ve had a lot of these cycles of ups and downs.

17:56 If the history repeats, then we certainly would be in a bull market and we could expect to see potentially, you know, much higher prices. I think that the ETFs are important because they show a new caliber and level of institutional, not just interest, but real participation. And there’s a lot of after effects and trickle down effects from that. You know, you have these companies like BlackRock and Fidelity. I come from this world, you know, this is my world for 30, way before Bitcoin.

18:25 30 years, over 30 years, I’ve been working with these kind of companies in finance. Nobody can sell like these guys can sell. When somebody like Fidelity or BlackRock decides to move a product, a financial services product, they know how to do it. They know how to educate consumers way better than we did. In our day, we had, you know, Roger Vere and Andreas and people, bless them.

18:45 They made this space what it is, but you had like a guy and another guy who’d go around and tell people Roger would go around and go up to stores and say, let me tell you about Bitcoin. He did it thousands of times. Andreas would go around and give speeches and they wrote a book. I think one of the first books. Now we’re in a different, and then, you know, and then you had Saylor was kind of the next level.

19:03 You know, Saylor brought in, him and Ross Stevens brought in what I would call an institutional narrative by buying a billion dollars worth of coins. It’s like, oh, okay, this is a real serious person. This isn’t just, you know, some smart people talking. And now we’re at a new level. You know, you have these really big players who can educate financial advisors and wealth managers by the tens of thousands who in turn educate their clients by the millions.

19:27 So that’s really significant. Just from a marketing standpoint, we don’t even know what’s about to come, is what you’re saying. And we saw the early remnants of it when Larry Fink is going on these CNBC shows and starting to talk about the asset. Michael Saylor loves those, by the way. I’ve had them twice on the show, but he’s always retweeting them out, calling Larry Fink, you know, the chief marketing officer for Bitcoin.

19:46 Yes. And recently, this really tickled Michael Saylor. He came out and said, Bitcoin is the asset that keeps you safe. I think that’s what he said. Nice.

19:54 Something like that. And so we’re seeing the beginning of what will be an all-out marketing effort. And when you run the numbers, and you know this from a financial advisor, I know this from studying finance, as an uncorrelated financial asset, it pass all the tests, right? It is a legit, non-correlated financial asset in a world where it’s hard to find non-correlated financial assets. So it’s almost a no-brainer from the Ray Dalio school of the more diversified assets, the better your portfolio performs.

20:19 Yeah. It really should be a part of a portfolio. And this marketing effort is also an education effort. And they’re very much aware of the Michael Saylor, Ross Stevens type of narratives. They’re going to implement all of that in their compliance-approved brochures.

20:34 And some portion of the advisors, and the wealth managers, and the clients are going to get it. And some portion of them are going to become true believers. Because a lot of people, including financial advisors like me, people who’ve been in finance a long time, have never asked the basic question of, what is money? What is money? We all talk about money, but what is it?

20:53 And what makes money good? Why is one form of money better than another form? And there are people who’ve thought about this for a long time, predating Bitcoin. There’s properties of money. You know, it’s durability.

21:02 It’s portability. You know, divisibility, these kind of properties. And historically, people have always gravitated towards the best form of money. And I think that this will create awareness to how broken the fiat system is, the dollar system, which runs kind of the whole world, and how much better this system is. And that’s all you need.

21:21 The next Saylor has never bought a Bitcoin yet. There’s going to be bigger and bigger people and bigger institutions and sovereign funds who are going to get this narrative because the narrative makes sense, at least it makes sense for some of us. Maybe we’re wrong. But there’s a lot of people like me that are, once you get orange-pilled, you’re a true believer and most of them don’t turn back. Yeah, it’s like a parallel universe.

21:42 I’m thinking of those old Star Trek episodes where you see a parallel universe and then you get to look at your universe under a microscope. And Bitcoin always brought you out. Here you have an asset. You know, it’s deflationary. You can’t really print more of it.

21:53 OK, wait a second. What are we doing? Right. Say you see COVID and you see what happens around all this stuff. And you’re like, well, wait a second.

21:59 What were we doing? Or say you see, I find the same with AI when it’s like, OK, you look at AI. Well, how does it learn and what does it do? And it’s like, oh, how do I learn? And what am I?

22:08 And so it’s another way of like looking back at yourself. So you think as people get educated about Bitcoin, they’ll really start to look back at our own fiat system and start to ask some big questions. Yeah. And you have a comparison now. And also for the first time in human history, others in kind of gold, you have a global money.

22:26 And it’s certainly in the digital world. It’s the first time we have a global money. So these tyrants have taken for granted that they have no competition. Well, now they do. Now there’s an alternative to these fiat currencies.

22:38 And people are going to ask, well, which one’s better? Especially if they see one continuing to fall. One of the greatest charts is US dollar versus Bitcoin. It’s not that Bitcoin’s gone up. It’s that the US dollar has gone down versus real money and sound money.

22:50 And when people get that, then that changes their whole focus. One of your pet thieves is when people say, Bitcoin’s not backed by anything. Can you talk about why that bothers you when people say that? Well, it’s a silly saying because there’s this idea that fiat is backed by the military or something. If you say, well, what’s fiat backed by?

23:12 Well, we have armies. OK, so what’s your army going to do? You’re going to kill me if I don’t use your money? You’re going to bomb me if I don’t use your money? OK, you can do that.

23:21 You did it with Saddam. He said he was going to go off the dollar, so you bombed him. And you bombed somebody else, and you keep bombing. But eventually, you’re going to run out of money to pay for your bombs, and I’m going to be stuck with my good money, and you’re going to be stuck with your bad money that you printed out of thin air to reward banker cronies and bomb people all over the world. So that doesn’t convince me that backing it with the military means anything.

23:44 It’s kind of a meaningless term. It’s not all money is backed ultimately because if governments had the power to back something by military or just we say it’s worth this, then Zimbabwe would be the richest country in the world. In my bag there, I have I think $100 trillion in Zimbabwe. No, I’m sure you’ve seen people keep them as souvenirs. Politicians don’t have that power.

24:05 They have ego. They have narcissism. They think they have that power. They think that they can decide things. But it’s not a real thing.

24:13 Ultimately, all money is backed by people’s belief in it, and we believe something is better. And that’s usually based on those principles that I mentioned, how limited in supply it is, how scarce is it, how rare is it, how portable is it, can you divide it, is it accepted, do people understand it? And that’s what’s going to make people gravitate towards. That’s why they gravitated towards gold and silver and copper and the US dollar and every other currency that has succeeded and failed over history has gone through those iterations.

24:40 Yeah, downside of the Bitcoin ETF, what will that be in your mind? That’s a great question. There is a big downside, which is the centralization of custody and control. And it’s inevitable. And also, if history repeats itself, we can predict that these ETFs and these big asset managers will end up with a lot of Bitcoin, and they’ll learn a lesson that has been a painful lesson for a few other people in history where they’re going to think that they can change Bitcoin.

25:07 Well, you know, I’m the adults in the room, and I’m going to tell you how it is, and you need reasonable KYC and AML in your code, of course. And if the developers won’t do it, we’re going to ignore that chain and make our own chain. Well, that’s been tried, and it’s probably not going to work. So I would predict that there’s going to be another fork at some point, you know, maybe the BlackRock fork or the AML KYC fork or something. And, you know, I predict that some of these institutions might get behind it or not, but I also predict that exactly what’s happened before, the decentralized army of cyber hornets and the nodes are going to decide that the real money is the Bitcoin that we have.

25:46 So you will have people trying to exercise control, and you do have central points of failure with custody, and you are removing yourself a little bit. The other thing is, it’s a way for government to gain more control. If you have your money at Merrill Lynch in an account, you buy BlackRock, it’s trivially easy for them to seize it. And that’s one of the great things about Bitcoin is that if you actually own your own keys, it’s almost impossible for them to seize it.

26:09 And that’s important because we are in a world where we have, you know, more and more government authoritarians trying to seize people’s money and stop people’s money, and in a digital world, that’s a power that you can’t have. What about the tail wagging the dog, where before we kind of felt like we could understand the Bitcoin spot market as volatile as it is, but now you’ve got this big-ass tail called an ETF that can literally wag the dog sometimes with flows that the crypto people will probably be like, what the hell is going on with this spot market? We’ve never seen this before. Do you think that will happen?

26:42 Sure, and you can also have the side effect of mass retail who can be even worse than the mass retail Bitcoiners. You could have a big sell-off caused by panic, and a bunch of people sell their ETFs. Those ETFs are going to have to liquidate. If the ETF gets a billion in liquidations, they are going to have to liquidate a billion Bitcoin, no matter how well they believe. There’s no manager who can decide like, I’m going to hold it anyway.

27:04 No, they’ve got to liquidate it. So there’s those kind of things. But we’ve dealt with similar issues before. It’s just on a bigger scale now. Okay, what about non-Bitcoin blockchain?

27:15 What are your thoughts on that, this entire industry? I actually mentioned to somebody this week about this Tush roundtable, and he said, oh, I can’t go to that because it’s a bunch of maxis. And I was like, nah, I don’t think that’s what it is. I know Bruce, and I don’t think it is. I think it’s just the young conference for that.

27:29 So what are your thoughts on games and DeFi and SocialFi, and how do you feel about that compared to Bitcoin? Yeah, it’s funny. We have maximalists who are afraid to come because they think it’s going to be too many alternate projects, DeFi, Ethereum, whatever. And we’ve got people from that who think it’s too many maximalists. It’s a nice mix.

27:48 And I think and hope it reflects my philosophy is a little different than a lot of the people who’ve been in this space. I’m not on one camp or another. I’m a free market maximalist. So I believe in the ideas. I believe in Bitcoin as the best money.

28:03 And I would say I’m a Bitcoin monetary maximalist. I think it’s the best form of money. But where I differ from other what you might call Bitcoin maximalists is I’m also certainly open minded to these other things. I think there’s other uses for blockchain technology, anything where you want to disintermediate a ledger, which could be securities, it could be collectibles, it could be even art, things like that. I think these are real use cases, even something in NFTs.

28:27 And there’s certainly a lot of silliness, a lot of scams, a lot of crazy, way, way, way overpriced stuff with ETFs, or I’m sorry, NFTs. But it’s also valid. I mean, art and collectibles is a big industry. There’s people buying virtual suits of armor in their Warhammer game for thousands of dollars. This is a thing in reality, particularly with Gen Z.

28:47 So I’m open minded to these things. And I have been, I haven’t been real active, and I haven’t bought a lot of these alternative coins and things like that. I’m not active with a lot of these ecosystems. But I’m in favor of letting everybody do everything, particularly if they do it kind of a fair launch. I’m not in favor of a lot of these heavy fundraising kind of projects.

29:04 But even with those, I’m like, hey, if you tell the truth and you don’t rob people and you’re not dishonest, a lot of them are pretty honest about when they do it. I was fortunate enough to buy into Ethereum at the crowd sale. And I wasn’t sold some bill of goods like, oh, this is going to go to the moon. I mean, if I would have, I would have put a lot more money into it. I didn’t know it was going to go from whatever, a penny to $2,000.

29:29 It was kind of an experiment. When I gave that money, I thought I was kind of donating to Vitalik’s project. You know, Vitalik was a Bitcoiner, because there wasn’t anything other than Bitcoin then. He was a Bitcoiner. He worked for Bitcoin Magazine.

29:39 And here’s this Bitcoiner who said, hey, I’ve got an idea. It’s kind of like colored coins, but it’s on a chain. I’m like, ah, that sounds cool. Sure, go for it. Try it.

29:48 And that’s my attitude about everything. Yeah, try it. Let the market see if it works. You know, let the market, maybe you want, I have a big pre-mine. I don’t like pre-mines, but if the market likes it and you can add value, yeah, go for it.

29:58 Tell the truth. Don’t rob people. Don’t hack people. Don’t steal. Don’t commit fraud.

30:03 We’re cool. Let the market decide everything else. And you definitely like DeFi because as a financial advisor, you like the fact that maybe people can decentralize the finance aspect. I mean, also from my background, I think it’s a great way for people to educate themselves about money, whereas it’s hard to do that sometimes in a real financial market. Yeah, there’s a lot of really neat things you can do to unlock trapped value in the world.

30:23 You know, the first securities came out in the 1600s, the Dutch East India Company, and that changed the world because before that, you had one owner, one project. So if you had a ship, you had to be a real rich person. You had to have a ship and you had your own ship. And if it sunk, you lost 100%. If we had pirates, you lost 100%.

30:40 And some genius came up with this idea and said, well, instead of you having a ship and me having a ship, why don’t we get 10 guys together and we’ll each own one tenth of a ship. We’ll buy 10 ships. And then if one thinks, we still have 90% of our money. So they did that. And that created the largest company the world had ever seen.

30:54 If you put it in today’s dollars adjusted for inflation, it’s a $9 trillion company. It’s bigger than Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Wells Fargo combined. They actually had armies and stuff. It ended up becoming kind of a big evil company. It was so huge.

31:10 They had their own army. But the point was it unlocked value. And what DeFi and this technology can do, it can unlock the value in the world. You look at all these buildings we just talked about right in this neighborhood, we should be able to, and hopefully in five years, 10 years, we should be able to buy a piece of anything. I should be able to look at a building and say, I like that building.

31:31 I want a piece of that. Or maybe I want to own a part of your studio. Or I want to own a part. I say, I like London Real. Could I buy $1,000 worth of stock in that, or $100,000 worth of stock in that?

31:42 And we should have a world where pretty much everything has a price. If I can just pull out a QR code, why can’t I send you a share of IBM on my phone? I’m a stockbroker. I own an investment firm. We have the technology to do it.

31:55 That should be a trivially easy thing to do. I can send you a Litecoin. Why can’t I send you a share of IBM? And especially, why can’t I get a share of your company? Or why can’t you buy a piece of my building that I own in New Hampshire?

32:08 You should be able to. And there’s trillions of dollars around the world in real assets of things that already exist that you can look at and hold and touch that could be tokenized and put into a way that you can have that value unlocked, same way Dutch East India Company did when they invented securities, which equity is maybe one of the greatest inventions in the history of finance. I mean, it’s like so amazing that you don’t even think of it as an invention.

32:34 But the idea of equity is a completely transforming thing for the economy. And I think this can be, too. Right. And limited liability and all these things unlock massive amounts of value that before you couldn’t really see it was there. Yeah.

32:46 Why does the same and tokenization does the same and all of that does the same. Absolutely. You’re predicting a Litecoin ETF coming up soon. And do you think an Ethereum ETF will be coming up this year? Seems like it.

32:56 You know, it seems like the question of Ethereum being a security has kind of been put to bed. I think for Litecoin, it always was because Litecoin is a direct, you know, code fork or chain fork of Bitcoin. And has Ethereum as a security been put to bed? Close. You know, there’s still the case.

33:13 There’s an outstanding case from the New York attorney general. But I don’t you know, from the SEC, also there’s time. You know, a good amount of time has gone by. It seems like if they were going to try and make that claim, they would have they would have done it. So I think they’ll be.

33:28 And you know, once you add these legal battles fought, I think it would be very, very hard to have a legal challenge on Litecoin and pretty hard on Ethereum. And there’s a handful of another dozen that would probably be easier than another dozen that will be harder. But eventually, I think if there’s market demand, you know, part of it is Bitcoin is a much bigger market, obviously, than Litecoin. So there’s not as much demand. But you only need 100 million or so to make an ETF worthwhile.

33:52 You don’t need to raise 10 billion like they’re planning with these other ETFs. So I think the market demand will be there. And I think that their legal path is there and it’s inevitable. And you know, my attitude would be let everybody do everything. I don’t I wouldn’t mind if I don’t mind if you call something a security or not.

34:10 I think it’s fine to define things as a security. The problem is that there’s so many laws. Once you’re called a security, especially in the U.S., it’s like the kiss of death. Like, oh, OK, well, now you we’ve designated use this thing called a security. Therefore, you have nine million pages of regulations that you’ve got to be burdened with.

34:26 Yeah, when I got to New York City in 1993, I had to study for the Series 7 and Series 63 exams, where I learned all about the history of the Securities Exchange Commission and what happened in 29 and 33. And I had to pass the test. I remember I went down to downtown and did it was actually on a touch screen monitor at the NASD. But, you know, when you look at the SEC, you look at an organization that was, you know, built 100 years ago to protect your grandma from buying a stock, you know, that maybe that maybe was fraudulent or she couldn’t find anything out about.

34:56 Fast forward 100 years, grandma can do her own research and do all sorts of things. Also, it’s chaired by a presidential appointed person who, in this case, I think is running for office somehow. You know, it kills me about Gary Gensler as he taught a course at MIT in 2018 on block chain. And I took the whole thing because there’s 24 hours on YouTube. And he’s surprisingly knowledgeable about this space.

35:19 Like, he’s really smart. And yet he seems to now have a completely different agenda and really slowed this down. What are your thoughts on that? And do you think a new president will just potentially appoint someone different and we could have a completely new view of block chain from Washington? Yeah, the rumor is that he’s been gunning for something like a Treasury Secretary job.

35:39 And, you know, certainly it’s that that’s a theory. But the fact is that he’s definitely close with Elizabeth Warren. There’s no doubt about that. And she has a heavy amount of influence. So that could be why he has his anti innovation stance.

35:52 I think a new president would help a lot for sure. If it looks like it’s going to be Biden. Trump now is going to be the race, maybe R.F.K. But if it’s somebody other than Biden, then I think that would be good. Biden has been very I shouldn’t I don’t even like to say Biden because it’s not really him.

36:07 It’s the Biden administration and the Biden handlers because he’s not making any decision at all. He came and decided what to eat. So the actual people making the decision in the administration are horrible. They’re anti freedom status. And so anybody would be better than them.

36:22 And I think America has reached a point where it is becoming uncompetitive and there’s so many economic problems. I’m hoping and thinking that the pendulum and America has done this many, many times. We’ve had some bad years 1968 other years where we’ve almost fallen into tyranny. And then the voters come back and do what we do best pendulum swings the other way. And I hope that happens.

36:42 And I would like to see, you know, I was a big supporter of a fake Ramaswami. You wanted to cut all federal agencies by 75 percent and eliminate some of them. And that would be a great thing to do. You wouldn’t even notice if you cut these agencies by 75 percent. I actually even being a very much anti-government libertarian and cap type of person, I never had much of a problem with the SEC.

37:05 My whole career, 30 years, I always felt like, oh, yeah, they chase the bad guys. I don’t I don’t have a problem with my local police. I don’t I don’t have a problem with, you know, I didn’t have a big problem with them. But now they’ve they’ve stretched. If you could just get them back to the way they were earlier in my career, where they they used to chase bad guys, I think that would be a fine thing.

37:21 I wouldn’t even call for eliminating them. There’s a lot of other there’s 20 other agencies I’d get rid of before I get rid of them. But I think that you could definitely scale them back significantly. And that would be a big win for America and for innovation. And so you think it’s possible that America comes back and starts to play a bigger or even dominant role in blockchain.

37:39 Yeah. And we we sort of have to if we are to be the America that we’re supposed to be. If we believe that we’re the land of the free and the home of the brave and, you know, all of these things, that this is the place where you can have an American dream. And we believe in innovation. We want to not give up our power for tech and everything.

37:57 Then it will be. But, you know, it is a race and the world does change. And you’ve now had in the time that I’ve come here a radical transformation of this area. And in the last three years, well, from the roundtable between the one that we did in Mexico and the first one that we did last year, we had 50 people move from our list. We have a list of 800 or so who’s who VIPs in the space.

38:19 50 of them moved to Dubai in the last two years before the last roundtable. And then between that roundtable and this roundtable, another 30 have moved. So these are 30 people. Some of them are extremely wealthy. Some of them all have businesses.

38:35 They’re all usually at least pretty significant all the way up to very significant financial resources. Some of these companies, they range. They may be 30 people, but they may be 3,000 people or more. And so now we have over 80 people. Plus, there’s another 50 who were already locals who weren’t on our list.

38:52 So now you have like, OK, we’ve got 150 people or something of sort of our, you know, call it the thousand who’s who of the industry that speaks volumes. And a lot of them, they love it here. And some of them feel betrayed by the U.S., particularly people from places that have completely failed, like San Francisco and the taxes and the issues and the legal. You know, it’s not insignificant. So many people in our industry have been sued and had problems.

39:14 A lot of them. And there’s a lot of people from outside of you say, say, you see big websites. We’ll serve everybody except the U.S. So I hope and I’m trying to be optimistic as an American. I hope that pendulum swings the other way.

39:27 It can happen quick. We have a lot of great advantages in America. If we get our act together, get a decent president, get some common sense, we could turn it around in a matter of months, in six months. I mean, all you got to do is change a couple of policies and you’ll have a flow of capital like you’ve never seen before. Yeah.

39:43 Man, that’d be amazing. Let’s talk politics. You ran for Senate in New Hampshire. What were some of your political platforms? And then I want to get your thoughts on the U.S. presidential race and then, you know, Vivek and some of the current events.

39:55 Yeah. So I ran. I’m a libertarian. I ran as a Republican, you know, kind of a liberty Republican. I think somebody like Congressman Thomas Massey is pretty much exactly my.

40:07 I don’t know of a single opinion I’ve disagreed with him on. So that’s, you know, Rand Paul, Thomas Massey, these kind of liberty type voices. That’s sort of my opinions. So that was the platform I ran on. It was very, very, very against the COVID, the lockdowns, the mask mandates, the injections.

40:24 You know, I got kicked out of eight school board meetings, removed by police five times for coming in there, ripping off my mask. You know, or a face diaper, as I call it sometimes. And so it’s adamantly against those policies. I’m against tyranny. I’m against human rights violations.

40:39 And one of the things I tried to do is try to appeal to the freedom oriented side of people even on the left. You know, there’s a lot of people on the left I try and find common ground with. Most people on the left are against the drug war. I am, too. You know, I’m actually in favor of a much more open immigration policy.

40:56 If we could get rid of the entitlements, I’d like to just open up. Sure, let them in. You know, I don’t have any problem with them. The only problem I have is if they commit a crime, which we should kick them out, and we should have very good law enforcement that protects life, liberty, property, and your body. And it doesn’t cost me anything.

41:11 But if I could sign a thing and say, you know, these people aren’t going to come in, they’re not going to hurt you, they’re not going to commit crimes, doesn’t cost you anything, great. Come on in. I’d love it. You know, my friends here, it’s so much easier to have employees. You know, you have all these different people.

41:26 You know, there’s all kinds of different wage levels for different skills. You know, we have this discrimination thing in the U.S. where you say, oh, you know, you have to make $15 an hour. Well, you know, there’s people who can’t read. And those people, you can’t make $15 if you don’t know how to read.

41:42 Well, guess what? In this part of the world where they have actual free markets like we used to, you can get a job if you can’t read. It may not be $15 an hour, but you know, it’s funny. When I first used to come here, people gave me a real hard time. They said, oh, you know, they paid people $10 a day.

41:56 I looked at it. It wasn’t really true. The lowest people were still making $30 a day. Well, guess what? That’s not even a thing now, you know?

42:03 And there’s still people living with 20-year-old propaganda. They think this place is built on, you know, slave labor or something like that. It’s a free market is what it is. So the market adjusts to where it is, and the wages here have gone skyrocketing through the roof. There is people who are making $30 a day, and now they’re making $150 a day, and it’s a radical, radical difference in their whole life and their whole family’s life.

42:25 And that’s the way that the economies work and markets should work, voluntary trade between people. So that’s the solution to it. Amen to that. What was your political experience like? It was a good experience.

42:36 It was interesting. I learned a lot. I got kind of a PhD in politics. I was a first-time candidate. You know, it’s the third-highest office you can run for in the United States.

42:45 There’s hundreds of millions of dollars in these campaigns. There’s a lot to it. It’s the big leagues. You know, you’re on the big stage and stuff like this. And I came in very late, so I knew my odds were low.

42:56 And I also was almost overboard with my rejection of doing things by the system. You know, I didn’t say the things that you’re supposed to say, and I didn’t take the advice that you’re supposed to take. I did things my way. You know, even people like, you know, even Senator Rand Paul, who I love, who gave me certain advice like, if you say this, you’re going to tick off the McConnell crowd kind of thing. And I’m like, I don’t care.

43:21 I don’t like McConnell. I’m going to say what is on my mind. I’m going to speak my mind, and I’m not going to say the sound bites. I’m not going to play the games. And so, you know, that, of course, puts you at a higher risk of losing.

43:33 But it was a good learning experience, and I’m glad I did it that way because it was a lot less energy than trying to put on some face or, you know, twist something around. And I respect that. I like the political candidates who do that. So I think it was a very good experience. I got to kind of meet everybody in the state and become an active person in the politics of my state.

43:53 And I learned a lot behind the scenes. Like, before we started, I was mentioning to you how important I learned money is. You know, your ideas and your speaking skills and things like that don’t really matter, unfortunately, as much as the money. And so I got a, you know, glimpse behind the curtain, and I’m glad I did it, and I thought it was very interesting. And you ran in 2020?

44:14 Twenty-two. Twenty-two, okay. Sounds a lot like my experience running to be mayor of London. Yeah. I got a Ph.D. in politics.

44:22 I saw a lot of things behind the scenes. I saw what it takes to run a campaign. I saw how the media is weirdly kind of complicit in a two-party system, and it all just kind of goes around and around. It was pretty wild, but I’m glad I saw it, and I learned a ton in the process. Good.

44:39 I came much closer to my political system, and even the people of the city, for sure. Yeah. Now, fast forward to this year. You’ve just had the primary in New Hampshire. Mm-hmm.

44:48 It’s the second state to do that after Iowa, right? Yeah. So you guys were right on the front lines. Yeah. What were you doing there with who?

44:55 What did you observe? So I came out. I hadn’t planned on endorsing anyone, and I met Vivek. It’s really easy to meet candidates. They’re everywhere in New Hampshire.

45:06 So I met Vivek, and I just really liked the guy, and everybody has seen his viral videos. He has a million of them, the clips. He’s just absolutely brilliant. He nails things again and again and again. I kept seeing his interview.

45:19 This guy’s unbelievable. And then I met him a couple times, and pretty quickly I decided to become a supporter. And then I became active, and I hosted some events at my house. He made me the New Hampshire co-chair of his campaign, and I did what I could to try and help him. I haven’t talked to him about this specifically, but I think that he would probably have some similar experience to us.

45:42 He certainly got his ideas out there. He doesn’t seem like he’s crushed from his loss or something. I was amazed. Literally the next day, he’s right back on the road. He’s doing his things like he didn’t even miss a beat.

45:52 He’s certainly not the kind of guy to view this as some sort of negative thing, and I don’t think it is. I think it’s a very positive thing. He has put himself on a national stage. He’s gotten his ideas out. It’s very interesting.

46:03 He changed the race. The way that he talks about certain issues, about race, transgender issues, these kind of things, he says it in a way that he can kind of get away with, that other people haven’t been able to. And he made it a safer thing to talk about, to say, hey, wait a minute, men don’t belong in women’s locker rooms. And maybe reverse racism is racism. D-E-I-J is racism.

46:30 And maybe it took him to say that for people to feel a little safer. But it did change the narrative. Because he’s so articulate also, he certainly doesn’t come across as a bigot or a racist or any of the things that the left often throws at people. They throw those terms at Trump, even though Trump says very similar things to the vague. But the vague’s delivery on who he is and how he’s delivered, I think, was very, very successful.

46:56 So I think his campaign was a big success. I’m looking forward to him being on the scene for a long time, hopefully as president one day, hopefully certainly in higher office. Yeah, I had found myself using a lot of his language when I’m talking to people about issues. And I watched a bunch of his viral moments, and he went all in on Iowa, right? He spent weeks there going to these tiny meetings, which I guess is what you do in these states, and having these open debates with people in a coffee shop that are throwing probably everything they heard in the Western media at him, maybe not even knowing what they’re saying.

47:29 And then he’s like, okay, let’s talk about this. Let’s talk about race. Let’s talk about all these old movements. And it was impressive, the way he can articulate. I respect that because I am a big believer that we find truth through discussion and debate, and we have a lot less of that now.

47:45 We have this polarized system where one side believes one thing, one side believes something entirely different, and you don’t even know what’s actually true. And I believe that you’ve got to talk it out. And I want to hear what your opinion is. If you disagree with me, maybe I’m wrong. I want to hear.

47:57 And I feel strongly about my opinions. Maybe you’ll change them, but I want you to at least hear my side, especially about if you’re doing something I think is evil. If you’re supporting a war or some violent action or something, I feel you owe it to yourself to at least hear me out. Just like if somebody said, you know, Bruce wearing a green shirt is evil, I’d say, really? Well, can you explain it to me?

48:15 Because if it is, I want to know. I’m not going to wear this shirt anymore. And I want to know what you’re thinking. And that’s been lost in a lot of politics with our polarization. I think I really respect.

48:26 I tried to do the same thing in my campaign. I was always open. I never said no to any discussion. I did man on the street talks. And I think that’s crucial.

48:35 I think every politician should do it. And I’m glad that he did that. And I think that we should do more of that. Yeah, we should do more of that. Unfortunately, we’re doing less, aren’t we?

48:42 Absolutely. And in our tech platforms, it’s kind of siloed and bounces around in an echo chamber. And then people don’t want to talk at each other. They want to yell at each other more than anything. Whereas you’ll find if you have it sit down, if you were locked in a in an elevator with that person for three hours, you probably walk out, you know, understanding who they are.

49:00 Yeah. And understanding, I think what is really important is to understand that people generally are coming from a good place, whether whichever side you are on LGBTQIA, Israel, Palestine, whatever controversial issue most people feel, even if they very strongly, even if people I feel very strongly different, most people are doing it because they feel that it is good. They feel that they’re protecting their people or that they’re doing the right thing or they’re doing the moral thing.

49:32 Most people are not, you know, twisting their mustache. They say, I’m going to be evil. You know, they think they’re good. And so it’s important to respect that for people to say, OK, maybe I completely disagree with you, but I want to hear why you think. And I at least respect, OK, I totally disagree with why you want to do this bombing people over here.

49:52 But I if I can respect your opinion that you’re at least doing it because you think it’s the right thing, you think you’re going to save lives. You know, I mean, the Hiroshima bomb, you know, did it stop the war? I don’t know. You know, it’s a different topic. But if somebody supports that because they felt that it OK, we cost 500000 lives to save a million lives.

50:12 OK, I’m not going to question their morality. I could question the decision. But I think if we have that mutual respect where we say, OK, at least we may disagree, but at least we’re both trying to make the world a better place. I know I’m trying to make the world a better place. I really feel that I’m trying to base things on a moral and peaceful philosophy.

50:26 And I think most people also are. Yeah, I do, too. But we usually forget that because we get so polarized by the opinion. Yeah. And then we just think they’re monsters.

50:34 And the truth is most people are monsters. They just want us best for their family. They actually usually want simple things. Freedom. They want to raise their family.

50:41 They want to build their business. But yeah, we definitely need more debate. Yeah. What does the race look like now? Vivek dropped out.

50:49 Now he’s on stage with Trump. Trump’s battling Haley out in the Republican ticket. We keep hearing rumors of what’s happened on the Democratic ticket. We don’t know. But what’s your assessment of what’s going on right now?

50:58 It’s a very, very interesting race. It’s chaotic and concerning. I do worry that the Democrats will do anything and everything they can to keep him off the ballot. They will jail him, use illegal tricks, illegal tricks. Who knows?

51:19 I wouldn’t put anything past them. I don’t bet on them playing fair. I think that there is a… And this goes back to my point. There’s a Trump derangement syndrome, as we call it.

51:29 There are people, and I disagree with them. I’m not a huge Trump fan, but I certainly don’t buy… And there’s a lot of things that are just flat out false about him. There’s things that people believe about him that are not true. The quote that’s often quoted even by Biden himself, where he said, white nationalists and neo-Nazis are fine people.

51:45 That’s not true. He did not say that. He specifically said, I am not talking about the white nationalists and fine people, because he knew the media would… But they still took the first part of the quote, and they never did the second quote. You can see the transcript.

51:56 So if somebody specifically says, I am not talking about this, you can’t attribute that quote to them. But they did, and then they did it again and again. The New York Times did it. Biden did it. And it became part of the psyche of people who have Trump derangements in them.

52:10 But to my point before, they believe the right thing. They believe this guy who said to inject bleach, and they believe that he’s raped 70 people, and they believe that he led a coup and was going to take over the country. They believe this in their twisted little way, and they’re completely wrong. But they’re doing what they think is right. And that’s a problem, because if somebody really believes that they’re morally right, they may do an immoral thing.

52:35 There may be somebody, and I’m not accusing major Democrats of it, there may be somebody who thinks he should die. There may be somebody who thinks that, you know what, maybe I’ll bend the rules on this thing and this legal procedure. Maybe there’s a judge. I think the judges are corrupt. I think that this last case, they didn’t even allow him to speak.

52:51 I never heard of that in America. You’re supposed to be allowed to defend yourself. So I do worry about people, particularly those who are so ideologically driven and blinded by hatred for him, that they’ll do something immoral or unethical or violent, even, to stop him. They’ll do anything. It’s the narrative of, if you say he’s Hitler 2.0, what would you do to stop Hitler?

53:12 Anything. So there are some people who would do anything to stop him, and I do worry about that, and I worry about all kinds of tricks where they could try and have, you know, boot him off the ballot and then pull some trick at the convention and get Haley, who’s basically a Democrat, get her the nomination or something. And then on the dumb side, you have this, you know, incapable leader, and the Democrats are afraid to say it out loud because he’s their leader, but everybody knows that he’s completely and totally incapable of doing anything.

53:41 So that puts them in quite a pickle. But luckily for them, they have a bunch of NPCs who will do whatever they say, so they can switch him out and put somebody in last minute, and everybody will, you know, yes, sir, whatever. That’s our team. We’re going to do Team Blue no matter what. Which they will do, you think.

53:56 So a new cement or Michelle Obama and I think they have to, you know, sadly, I think that probably a lot of these Democrats are hoping that Biden will pass away because I, from my understanding, they tried to get him to step down and he didn’t. And so they know that he’s a very weak candidate. So their only hope is either get some proxy like Nikki Haley in there or push through and hope he wins and keep running it with this shadow government that they have or hope he dies or replace him somehow and get somebody like a new summer Michelle Obama.

54:29 And that’s really their only play. And how does Bobby Kennedy play into this whole thing? He’s interesting. I’ve met him a couple of times. He’s very good on some points.

54:38 I disagree with him on some points, particularly foreign policy. But he is an interesting case. I like his policies on COVID and he’s been speaking truth on that. But it’s very, very, very difficult to win as an outside candidate. It’s never happened in modern history.

54:57 And he does take votes from Trump. So that’s, you know, maybe a benefit to Biden. You could end up seeing Democrats kind of almost supporting him if they think that those numbers are going to work that way. But, you know, he’s another ex-factory in this very weird race with a lot going on, a lot of global conflict, all these legal issues. Trump, it’s chaotic times.

55:17 And it’s a bit concerning because, you know, you could be just a couple little events could really throw us off track here. You could end up with a constitutional crisis. Or, you know, if you have two different people who think they’re the nominee and, you know, there’s major questions about the election or anything like that, we could end up in a serious trouble. Yeah, it can be an interesting year still. Jim Rickards, our friend on the show, called it Lawfare, is what they’re using now, you know, weaponizing law to try to, you know, stop him from running or keep people from being able to vote for him.

55:50 And then again, he’s one of three guests that independently brought up, you know, assassination possibilities on my show, which is not a word anybody wants to hear. Right. Again, I guess they’re thinking if someone will stop at nothing or the derangement syndrome gets so high that that just becomes a danger. Yeah, yeah, I’m not. I wouldn’t accuse the, you know, high government officials of doing it.

56:10 Although it’s not unprecedented in history, but it doesn’t have to be. It doesn’t have to be, you know, the Biden administration who decides to do this. It could just be one lone crazy person. I mean, you and I both know from running for office, there’s crazy people out there. I mean, crazy people like deranged people.

56:26 You know, you say things that are simple truths, and they’re very, very, very, very angry. And luckily, he has good security. But it is, it’s very concerning. The environment in the U.S., it feels tense. It feels, I feel sad a bit about the world, about the way that America is, my country and everything.

56:44 Yeah, it feels a little tense and looks a little tense watching it from across the pond. What is the fourth turning? Because that’s something I haven’t heard before. But, you know, you’ve talked about it. Yeah, I didn’t come up with the term.

56:55 It was, I’m not sure if they came up with it either. I think they came up with it. Charleston Howe wrote a book called The Fourth Turning back in 94, I think it was. And they had done research that said that every 100 years or so, every four generations or so, we have massive change. And a lot of that is driven by demographics.

57:21 Generations are distinctly different. The Bob Hope silent generation is different from the boomers. The boomers are different from Gen X. Gen X is different from millennials, and millennials are different than Gen Z. They are different.

57:35 I mean, there is distinct differences in opinions and politics and everything about these generations and how they work, you know, how they operate and what they do. The silent generation and to some extent, the boomers were builders. It’s like the old meme you’ve seen, you know, strong times or whatever, hard times created, weak men, you know, this thing. Yeah. And so what their research indicated is that every four generations or so, you have a radical shift in everything where our world changes.

58:03 It happened 100 years ago with the World War I and the creation of new nations and the drawing of new borders. And typically, and this has happened for going back, you can go back centuries, where around every 100 years or so, and there’s even things in different cultures in India, in Islamic culture, before they ever even studied demographics, there’s these concepts where they call it, you know, basically a time of change, a time of epic chaos and change. And in these times, which we’ve seen many times in history, you have a change in borders, money, thoughts, systems, religion, how people think, how people work, how they interact.

58:41 And we’re clearly in one of those right now. And what’s interesting about this book, The Fourth Turning, they predicted this in 94. They said it’s going to happen. They said, well, look at the clock. The last one was 1920.

58:52 The next one’s going to be about 2020. And sure enough, exactly like clockwork, they were exact, because I read the book when I was a financial advisor when it came out, because I followed a guy named Harry Dent, who took their research, and he implied it to investments. So he would say things like, okay, baby boomers, once they reached age 45, they started buying Harley Davison’s because they had a midlife crisis. Harley Davison’s stock went through the roof.

59:17 Once, you know, 17-year-olds don’t buy $40,000 Harley Davison’s, 45-year-old men, that’s who buys it. And there’s all kinds of demographic data. You know, they have data on potato chip purchase. The highest peak potato chip purchase is 46-year-old women, because 46-year-old women have, on average, you have your children at age 26. So they have teenagers as children, and the women are usually the ones who are shopping, and they have the kids who eat the most food.

59:44 So you can track all of these things. They know that the average people replace their roof when they’re 65 years old because they, on average, bought their house 25 years earlier and you need to replace your roof after 25 years. So in big mass numbers, when you have millions of people, they’re very, very predictable. So I had followed this research for quite a while, and I’d been thinking about it. I’m like, right, I have four times coming.

1:00:05 And then, sure enough, around 2018-19, other people started talking about it more. I said, oh, I’m going to reread that book now. And then it became very, very obvious right in the early parts of 2020, February 20… Oh, here it is. This is the Franz Ferdinand, this COVID thing.

1:00:20 This is the thing that pops the bubble and pops the bubble and makes the world change. You know, Franz Ferdinand was attributed for the reason that the assassination of this Archduke was why World War I started. That wasn’t why World War I. It’s a million other factors and this fourth turner. Otherwise, it would have just been somebody that got assassinated.

1:00:39 And also, COVID would have been another flu. But because everything else and all these broken systems and old systems, you know, it goes with age and demographics. You have these old systems, you know, the New York Times, the World Economic Forum. These systems are falling and you have new powers rising, TikTok and Joe Rogan and decentralized stuff. You got, you know, Gen Z making their own memes, video.

1:01:01 Memes didn’t even really exist a few years ago. So you have a whole different way of thinking and communication and that’s what we’re in right now. And it’s an exciting time. It’s a scary time. Unfortunately, it has usually come with global war and bloodshed, but it is an amazing time that we’re in and it’s a time of opportunity.

1:01:18 So yeah, you know, and then now the how is alive. I think Strauss had passed away and he wrote a book called The Fourth Turning Is Here, which just came out like last year. So it’s here and it’s a neat thing. And so we need to know that we’re probably in it, know there’s going to be a lot of flux and fluidity and not run away from it. Just be here for it.

1:01:41 Yeah, be here for chaos. I’ve always kind of done well in chaos. Our crypto space is full of chaos. I don’t think chaos is bad necessarily. You know, you just kind of got to go with the flow and, you know, like a Tai Chi master kind of let the, you know, like if you’re in the waves, you don’t fight them too much.

1:01:59 And just, you know, I think it’s a time to be conservative. You know, I try and you want to have a good base of operations, not be too crazy, be aware that the world is crazy, be aware that crazy things can happen. But it’s also historically some of the greatest opportunities in history. I mean, who wouldn’t have wanted to live in New York City in 1922? You know, it’s exciting times, you know, and in a period of 10 years, you went from going on horseback to driving cars.

1:02:22 And now we have a period of 10 years where, you know, nobody worked from home. Everybody, nobody had used Zoom. I never used Zoom until three years ago. You know, almost nobody had used it. You know, it didn’t even exist five years ago.

1:02:34 IPhones didn’t even exist 10 years ago. And I tell my kids these things, you know, we used to have three channels. You couldn’t pick what you wanted. It’s very, I don’t feel I’m that old, but it’s a very, very different life for my children. And so it’s exciting.

1:02:46 It’s exciting. And you’ve got to look on the optimal side. Talk to me about CBDCs. What do you see as the danger? I’ve had Chris Giancarlo on my show, who’s running something called the Digital Dollar Initiative.

1:02:58 He’s a former CFTC chairman. Really, it was interesting talking to him. I’ve talked to him twice now. He was first of all wanted to let us know that, you know, he was responsible for the first Bitcoin future, you know, Ethereum future and how the CFTC was different than the SEC. But he went on to say that when the politicians are ready to adopt something, they’ll grab whatever’s there.

1:03:18 And it was his job to kind of educate them. And he wanted the digital dollar to represent everything great about America, which is freedom, et cetera. Curious what you think about his initiative. He also reminded me the digital you want from what we see about it is as bad as we would think it would be. And it’s been rolled out to 100, 150 million people.

1:03:33 And it’s, again, highly censored form of money. He might have even said this is maybe one of the most important fights in humanity. And maybe it is. I just read, reread 1984. And, you know, you look at it, this dystopian future where technology is so ubiquitous that it’s hard to even get around it.

1:03:51 And I get the feeling that if we if a CBDC does go into place, getting rid of it might be very, very hard. The same way it’d be hard to get rid of Big Brother in 1984. It’s just so ubiquitous. The cameras are everywhere. The security force is so there.

1:04:05 It’s like it’s hard to see there’s a way in on that. Whereas now I feel like we do have a way in on that. So just your thoughts on all of that. Yeah. The central bank digital currency is a big risk in a digital world because I don’t believe politicians can control their desire to want to be able to shut money off.

1:04:24 They could try and design it. I mean, there’s two kinds of politicians kind of say, well, sure, we should be able to control money. And they’re just complete authoritarian tyrants. But even the sort of well-meaning ones, they say, well, we’re not going to do that. Do you really trust the government to not use a power if they have it?

1:04:38 You don’t want to put something in their control, because they can always change it. This isn’t code like Bitcoin that can’t be changed. This is something that the government’s going to run. A president or somebody can order him to change it. And the power to shut off money in a modern digital world is a power that is too great.

1:04:53 It’s too ubiquitous, as you said. You can’t do anything. If they shut off my money because I say wrong thing, which I do all the time and you do too. And we know these tyrants have the will and the desire. We know that there are people who want to shut up you and I.

1:05:08 There’s a whole bunch of people who wish that Brian and Bruce would never say another word. And if they could silence us, they would. And if those people have power over ability to shut off our money, it doesn’t matter how wealthy we are, it’s off. I wouldn’t have been able to talk to you because I wouldn’t have my internet because I wouldn’t be able to pay for my internet. I can’t pay the $10 if I don’t have a credit card or a bank.

1:05:31 I wouldn’t be able to take my Uber to come here. I wouldn’t have been able to get my flight to come to Dubai. I could sit on my farm and yell at my chickens, but I couldn’t make an impact in the world. I couldn’t even go to a local political event. And that is a power that you just can’t have.

1:05:45 And Trudeau has already shown that he has not only the will, but he’s actually done it. He shut down those truckers by trying to grab their Visa and grab their PayPal and things like that. And believe me, if he would have had the ability to shut them down at the root of their money with a CBDC to say your $100 bill can’t be spent, then he would have. And all you need is one Trudeau to put us into a new darkness of tyranny because if you can succeed at that, think about the power that he would have.

1:06:14 That protest would have never existed. We wouldn’t even hear about it. And you shut off everything. They don’t have internet access. They can’t coordinate.

1:06:21 And you could just be a complete tyrant. And because it doesn’t take direct violence, you can just lure it over from some fancy marble office that they paid for and just, oh, I’m going to shut this down and maybe CLN gets on the wrong side. He went, oh, shut them down. Shut this down. And that’s just way too much power because it is a digital world.

1:06:42 There’s no alternative now. I can’t say, oh, go ahead. Shut my money down. I’m going to go to the bank and take out the cash. Well, the bank wouldn’t give me the cash, or I got it hiding in my safe.

1:06:51 Nobody has money in their safe. You can’t use it. I don’t even think I could buy. I don’t know if Emirates takes cash. If I come in there and pay for cash, maybe I’d be able to get here and maybe I’d be able to pay.

1:07:03 But it’s more and more difficult to use cash, particularly if I’m here for three weeks. You’re not allowed to even take more than 10 grand. I spend more than 10 grand. So then what? You can’t operate without it, unfortunately, in our world.

1:07:18 Bitcoin is an alternative to this, and we have alternatives outside the system, but the idea of the government, we just can’t allow them to control it because it is an ability for them to imprison us. And they don’t have these rights. This is the other thing we need to push back on. The very idea that they should have any rights to this stuff is flawed. They don’t have a right to know AML, KYC.

1:07:39 We act like these are some sort of birth rights of government. They’re not. It’s none of their business. For thousands of years, humans have traded with each other. It is not the business of some tyrants in some fancy offices to say, oh, what are you doing there?

1:07:50 Brian and Bruce want to sell something to each other. That’s none of your business. And it’s very recent. In my career, early in my career, I could open an account with you, and you could buy Microsoft stock, and I didn’t even need your ID. I didn’t need your social security number.

1:08:04 I could open an account over the phone. A few years before me, you could even pay with cash. Well, now, if you want to open an investment account, I’ve got to get 30 pages of documents for you, and they will seize your stuff. And they were very close to being, if you donate to a charity they don’t like, and we’re not quite in America where saying words will get you shut down, but we’re pretty close. And in some cases, even words can get you to lose your bank account or something like that in your industry.

1:08:33 If you’re in the marijuana business or guns, which are perfectly legal businesses, they’ll shut your account sometimes. So it’s something to definitely keep an eye out for. Yeah, in Britain, we’ve seen some bank account access be restricted by certain political candidates. And in America, yeah, if you were doing certain types of businesses, you would be restricted from banking, like the OnlyFans thing, with VF says and stuff like that. So, yeah, it’s dangerous in that sense.

1:09:00 Trump recently came out and said, I will make sure no CBDCs happen. What did you make of that statement? Well, that was great because it was right after his meeting with Vivek. I was in New Hampshire, he said that. Yeah, Vivek said that to him.

1:09:12 I think he had a short amount of time, and he had some influence. So I was happy for Vivek that he had that opportunity. I was happy for President Trump that he took it and listened, and it kind of implemented it right away. He saw it, DeSantis saw it, some of the other ones had seen it. You know, I think it’s great.

1:09:28 He’s coming out on the right side of freedom, and I’m glad he’s talking about it at such a high level. But it’s not obvious that he could actually do that as president. Well, I think he would have immense power to put a stop to CBDCs. I think a president could. You know, they have immense…

1:09:42 I mean, another president could come later and try and redo it, but if Trump really put his mind to it, if he gets into office and he instructs the Fed and the Treasury and, you know, agencies, SEC, CFTC even, just said, absolutely not. None of my watch. We’re not having it. It is unconstitutional based on this administration. Nobody’s to do it.

1:10:03 And then, you know, Congress can even cooperate. You know, it seemed some of the states, the states could say, okay, no CBDCs allowed in our state. But at a federal level, you know, having a president against it would be a really, really good thing for the future of human freedom. Yeah, I was happy to see that. And also interesting, the crowd in New Hampshire roared when he said it.

1:10:20 Yeah. That’s him. He said, oh, you guys know about that? Yeah. And I was playing that video with some of my students the other night, and I was like, this just shows you, you know, how educated America is.

1:10:29 I mean, it’s estimated 35% of Americans own crypto, something like that. And so the fact that, you know, you got a roar from an audience, which I don’t think was under 20 average, you know, that was amazing to see. Yeah. And I love your example about what financial freedom gives you and without it, how deterred you are. I actually had Dan Held on the show, he was going to be at your event, actually.

1:10:52 And he’s an OG Bitcoiner. And I remember talking to him about my freedom of speech issues that we faced in the past with tech companies trying to shut us down and government regulators. And he said, Brian, I’m a big fan of freedom of speech, but without financial freedom, freedom of speech is a luxury. Right. Because without financial freedom, you have nothing.

1:11:10 You can’t eat, you can’t this, you can’t that, you can’t that. Freedom of speech is way down the pecking order. And you just kind of demonstrated that with what could happen if they turned your money off. And you’ve got a whole lot of problems. And speech ain’t one at this point.

1:11:23 And so it is the ultimate form of control, really. And that’s what we’re looking down the barrel of. And we’ve got, you know, a government that’s done it in the east and a government in the west that has yet to do it. If it’s done or done right, and if it was done immutably, it could embody everything that America originally embodied, which is freedom. Yeah.

1:11:44 But that could be changed or it could be done opposite. Yeah. And we’ve got to push back against the idea that these things are even legitimate. Yeah. We’ve got to push back against the legitimacy and say, you know, government comes in and says, hey, we want to know what’s going to say, wait a minute, bro.

1:11:57 That’s not your job. Well, who said it’s your job to know what we’re doing? Your job is to protect our life, liberty and property in the U.S. Your job is to enforce the Constitution. And by the way, you’re failing miserably at that.

1:12:07 So why don’t you get your act together, focus on the stuff you’re supposed to and let us do our own thing. It’s completely and totally illegitimate. And so not only is it horrible, but they don’t have any good reason for it, too. It’s not like, oh, you know, this is going to be some great thing that we have this right to do. No, you don’t have any right to do it whatsoever.

1:12:23 And it’s terrible. So it’s like doubly bad. Yeah, I totally agree with that. I saw some meme the other day on Twitter where it was maybe making fun of the fact that the government was asking to know like all of your digital asset holdings. And it was like, OK, so do you also want to know every single watch that I own, every single piece of clothing that I own?

1:12:40 I mean, some of these things are less valuable or more valuable than my digital assets. And you’re saying, oh, I want all of these. Yeah. And so we’re having a conversation that we shouldn’t even be having. It should be, this is none of your damn business.

1:12:51 Yes. And the government needs to do these things and not these other things. Great point about AML and KYC. They roll these things off as if, you know, that’s normal or legal or but it’s not right. It doesn’t need to be.

1:13:03 Yeah. And the IRS has been, you know, really working to map who owns what and the idea that they can ask you, you know, it’s just like I have comic book collections. Know their business, what comic books I have. It’s not very valuable. But if it was, that’s still none of their business, you know.

1:13:20 Amen to that. We’ll push back on that. You’ve said some interesting in the past and I wanted to ask you about it because I kind of find it interesting. But you said that when you looked at the system and saw that the system uses violence to support laws and that sometimes people, no matter how well their meaning they are, they can potentially use violence to back those things that your entire outlook changed. And I just wonder what you meant by that because I didn’t understand it and also I’m sure there’s something deeper there.

1:13:49 I think all good moral people want to be peaceful, you know, and if you hopefully if you have anybody over the age of five and you say, is it OK to hurt somebody else? They say no, you know, if they didn’t hurt you, you know, can you do violence to somebody else? No, you shouldn’t. And you should teach a child this. And we forget this when it comes to laws.

1:14:11 I want people to see the gun in the room that every law, no matter how well meaning it is, it is ultimately backed by force and violence. And anytime anybody tells you what to do, whether they’re a legal authority or something else, a good way to figure out where they think you are and where you are in the power hierarchy is to say, or else what? You know, Rosa Parks, you’re not allowed to sit in the front of the bus. Or else what? Well, or else we’re going to arrest you because you have the wrong skin color.

1:14:40 Well, that’s an immoral law. You don’t have any right to because arrest means force. You can’t arrest somebody by saying, hey, you don’t do that. No, it is a force. You do it or else.

1:14:50 I got the handcuffs. I got the taser. I got the gun. And that is violence. It’s a threat of violence.

1:14:55 If I go to anybody in Dubai and say, hey, you do this or else I’m going to tase you. Dubai authorities or the US authorities are going to consider that assault. You’re not allowed to threaten somebody. The only ones allowed to are government. And all laws are force and violence.

1:15:11 And some people misunderstand this. They say, oh, your pacifist force and violence is needed sometimes. Oh, I agree. It is. But you have to say only when it’s moral.

1:15:19 The only time to use force and violence is in defense or in enacting justice against legit laws. Legit laws are life, liberty, property, and body protection. So it is not legitimate to say, I’m going to have a law that says you can’t say these words because then you are a person doing violence against a peaceful person. So all laws that are not related to protection of life, liberty, and property are illegitimate, in my opinion. That includes all AML, KYC, accredited investors, speech laws, laws that say what restroom or locker room you have to use, laws that say you have to put this person on a sports team or not, laws that say you need to file this thing.

1:16:01 And if you have a digital asset chain, you need this license and you need an exchange, you need this license. All of those are illegitimate. They’re all illegitimate laws. The only legitimate laws are you don’t steal from somebody, you don’t take from them, you don’t hurt them. If somebody hurts you, yes, you can use violence against them.

1:16:18 But if somebody hurts your feelings or they didn’t fill out a form, it is not legitimate to use violence. Therefore, it is not legitimate to have that law because all laws are backed by violence. And if you want to prove it, you just disobey the law like I did with the school board. I’d sit there like this and take my mask and throw it on the ground. Guess what?

1:16:36 The man with the gun comes up to me and tells me to move and I did that on purpose and I said it in the meeting, I said you are doing violence against me. I am a peaceful man. I’m your neighbor. I’m in your town and you’re going to throw me out. You’re going to point a gun at me and throw me out because I don’t wear your political signal, your face diaper, and that is not your right to do that.

1:16:55 I’m the peaceful one here. You are the violent one here, especially in the case later in it where school board members are going around without their own masks. And that is completely illegitimate and you have to go back to that. Now, if I go punch a school board member, of course the cop has a right to punch me back or they have a right to punch me back. They could put me in a handcuff.

1:17:13 But we don’t have legitimacy for this. And so all of these laws need to be disregarded and peaceful people, all good people and moral people should internalize this and understand this and understand that laws are violence, that you are going to end up in a Rosa Parks situation. Because Eric Garner was killed in New York City because he had loose cigarettes because some busy-body, pin-headed tyrant, some Michael Bloomberg guy who didn’t like the idea of 17-ounce sodas, decided, oh, well, you can’t have loose cigarettes.

1:17:45 That’s bad. And somebody, maybe even well-meaning, a lot of these laws are well-meaning. Oh, we’re trying to help the health of people and we’re trying to reduce street crime or whatever clownish reason they had for it, Eric Garner died because he refused to follow their rule, because somebody’s always going to refuse. There’s always going to be a Rosa Parks. There’s always going to be a me.

1:18:06 There’s always going to be an Eric Garner, who either through ignorance or disobedience or stupidity or advocacy says no, or else what? No, I’m not wearing your mask. I’m not moving to the back of the bus because I got the wrong skin color. I’m going to go ahead and sell loose cigarettes if I want to because I want to feed my kids. And the cops came to him and say, you’re not allowed to sell loose cigarettes and he resisted and they killed him.

1:18:29 And that’s what all laws will do. There’s nothing so small that they won’t kill you for it. So you have all these, oh, yeah, you know, with the deodorant has, there’s too many deodorants. You really ought to have a form to do deodorant. Well, if I want to sell deodorant and I don’t do that, eventually they’re going to come to my home and kill me.

1:18:45 If you’d all, if you keep refusing, so they say, oh, yeah, yeah, you know, if you want to do a new blockchain, fine, just file a form. Well, what if I don’t feel like filing your form? Then what? You’re a violent person. You’re going to come, oh, well, we’ll send you a letter.

1:18:59 Okay. What if I rip your letter up and throw it around on the trash? Well, I’ll send you another letter. Then what? Well, then we’re going to seize your assets.

1:19:06 And then what? Then we’re going to come to your house and then I’m going to shut my gate. Then what are you going to do? You’re going to bust through my gate. Then what are you going to do?

1:19:14 You’re eventually going to shoot me. You’re going to shoot me in front of my kids. You’re going to haul me off in handcuffs. Why? Because I didn’t fill out a form.

1:19:22 I didn’t see that. So basically, 99 percent of laws should be out the window. We have a million pages of laws in the United States. Ninety nine percent of them are junk. They’re related to hurting feelings or not empowering tyrants or some busybody wants a cut of this or some well-meaning do-gooder bone head who thinks they can micromanage it.

1:19:42 Some Bill Gates type person who thinks they’re smarter than everybody. And, you know, I know public health and I can do this and not a lot of them are well meaning, you know, oh, yeah, you know. And you see this all the time. They say, oh, oh, you know, there’s too much obesity. Let’s outlaw this and let’s make this and let’s mandate that.

1:19:56 And we’ve got to make every kid do this. And, you know, they some Pete Booty said he wants to have a year of mandatory national service at age 18. Or else what, bro? Or else what? You’re going to put me in a cage because that’s what it is.

1:20:11 They will put you in a cage. Laws are not optional. If they were optional, they’d be called suggestions. And I got no problem with suggestions. You want to go and if you want to I lived in Saudi Arabia.

1:20:21 We had the very strict religious police and they they changed it a little bit. They used to go around. They say you must wear a head scarf and then they softened it a little bit and they said, please, sister, wear a head scarf. There’s a big difference. I got no problem with somebody of any religion saying, you know, you’re immoral.

1:20:39 I don’t like orange ties. Brian, you better not wear an orange tie. Great. They control you. They can heal you.

1:20:44 They could say orange ties are terrible. They can run a billboard. They can boycott you. No problem. But if they say, Brian, if you wear an orange tie, we’re going to fine you.

1:20:53 No, because if you refuse that fine, they’re going to escalate and escalate and escalate and eventually put a gun in your face. They don’t have a right to put a gun in their face because you wear an orange tie, even if they’re correct. Right. And it really is a bad idea, even if an orange tie really is harmful. And that’s so key.

1:21:09 If there’s one message I could get to people in the world, it’s to see the gun in the room. When you utter those horrible, horrible words that every politician utters, there ought to be a law. That’s the most bumbling, goofy, stupid, ham-handed, violent, authoritarian words that somebody can say. Bernie Sanders, there ought to be a law. You can’t have Uber.

1:21:30 They can do this. No, there ought to not be a law. We got enough laws. Don’t kill people. Don’t steal their stuff.

1:21:37 Don’t lie and commit fraud. Don’t hurt somebody’s life delivery property body. It’s it. We knew these a thousand years ago. You don’t need anything else.

1:21:45 Everything else is illegitimate and is backed by violence. And back to the example of a five-year-old, violence against peaceful people is wrong, and it is immoral. And that’s the core that we should all be operating our way of thinking about laws. So any time anybody hears, there ought to be a law. Think about the gun in the room.

1:22:03 Think about, is it worth killing somebody for? You know, should rape be illegal? Absolutely. Should hurting somebody, you know, and we can debate on, you know, things like flying over somebody’s head or driving real fast on the road. Those are worthwhile debates, but it’s always got to come back to this.

1:22:18 Is for some violence legitimate and needed? Right. And so the next time someone sees a law being passed through, even though it’s small or it looks like a suggestion, they need to see that it’s ultimately backed by violence against a peaceful person. Yeah. And I think one of my guests on the show called it the he called it, I think, the totalitarian tiptoe, where it’s a little bit more and it’ll be a little bit more and a little bit more.

1:22:40 And then pretty soon you realize that, oh, my gosh, all my rights have been encroached and it’s backed by a government that will do violence to get me to do it. Yeah. And no, I think it’s really important. And especially in finance and stuff, a lot of times, I’ll do this little thing, I do this little thing and do this little thing. And but when you really realize it, yeah, if it comes down to it, they will throw your ass in jail or whatever they have to do in order to ensure that.

1:23:05 So we should be saying no. Right. That stops. Yes. Need less government.

1:23:10 It’s always hard to believe. Bruce, take me forward 10 years. Satoshi Roundtable 20. It’s in Dubai, of course. And it’s now 2034.

1:23:19 What is the what is the blockchain space look like? What does this whole thing look like? And yeah. Wow. Yeah.

1:23:27 What do you think it does? I’m not going to actually buy some Bitcoin. I respect you too much for that. What is it? It’s either going to be gone or real high.

1:23:35 I think and hope that we will definitely have that world of decentralization where we will have priced assets all over. Hopefully that will help borders come down. We’ll be able to take that QR code and I’ll be able to buy a share of a building here or a hair salon or a comic bookstore in Seattle or Dubai or Saudi Arabia or Taiwan. And we’ll be able to trade that amongst each other. And you’ll have a massive market with hundreds and hundreds of thousands or millions of assets, land, businesses, small businesses, large businesses.

1:24:06 And you’ll have more price discovery and more trading of those assets and more freedom which will be better for, it’ll unlock value. It increases value just like Dutch East India Company did. It enables founders to pass their businesses. Small businesses are real hard to pass on. But if you had this kind of, it was easier to move equity along.

1:24:24 Owner starts to get 10 years out from retirement. They start giving off equity to their employees or start selling a little bit at a time. And then they exit gradually and the business survives instead of dying, which is what often happens because it’s too hard and clunky to move around. So there’s a lot of benefits. The whole economy can be lifted.

1:24:42 The whole, it benefits everybody. If you have more trading and more price discovery, you can move things with less friction. We could, you know, you know the value of these buildings and these assets and things like that because you can trade it back and forth. And hopefully, on the money angle, we have sound money in the form of Bitcoin where we’ve abandoned these tyrants. We’ve left our abusers.

1:25:03 We’ve, you know, mothballed this ridiculous experiment. Bitcoin is a silly idea, by the way, but with a much more silly idea is the idea that Janie Yellen and Jerome Powell and pinheaded tyrants are going to lord over us in some office that they made with money they stole from the people and sit here and say, well, I’m going to decide what money is. And they print a button, you know, Neil Kashkari from the Fed prints a button on a computer and they just create money and give it to BlackRock.

1:25:36 That’s not money. That’s a scam. If that was an alt coin, that would be, they wouldn’t even be able to post on Twitter. They’d be railed so bad. It’s like, wait a minute, what?

1:25:46 You just invent it out of thin air and you give it to your friends? That’s not money. That’s a scam. And they pretend it’s money because it used to be backed by gold 55 years ago and it’s never been backed by gold since then. So it’s just an illusion based on its previous reputation.

1:26:02 And so hopefully that’ll be in the dustbin as well. And if it is, if we can fix the money, we can fix the world because the money’s broken. And that fake phoning money that they print out of thin air and give to their cronies causes the wars. It causes the destruction. It causes the for-profit prison and the drug wars and all the stupidity.

1:26:18 Even obesity. Even obesity is caused by this because in the U.S. we have the electoral college and we have corn subsidies and they’re subsidized to make corn and they print all this money out of thin air and give it for junk products. And that’s why, as fiat has gone up, you see this chart, you know, what happened in 1971. Everybody should Google that.

1:26:37 What happened in 71? There’s a thousand charts of everything that changed as soon as we went off a real standard of money. They started printing money out of thin air and you end up with bad incentives. Whether it’s the food industry which causes corn syrup or the for-profit prison system which has more people in the United States in prison than Soviets had in gulags or it’s the never-ending wars around the world where we spent 20 years in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban to replace them with the Taliban or we’re bombing brown people all over the world and we’re putting weird and sick, bizarre social ideas and free speech limitations and censorship on the people or we have people, you know, frisking you in your airport.

1:27:14 All of this is rooted in a broken, flawed money system that they print from thin air with wild abandon. Bitcoin represents an alternative to that. It crushes that system, goes back to real money, sound money, that politicians can’t print from thin air. They want your money, they got to work for it. And that would literally reduce war, maybe even end war, radically increase peace, radically increase effective economy and it would completely change the world.

1:27:39 We could be in a new era of peace, human prosperity, happiness and get these tyrants and their violence and their guns and their bombs out of our lives unless we really, really, really need them, which we don’t right now. And that means a dog gets abolished? It’s going to be a while, let’s see, 10 years you said, it probably won’t be gone in 10 years. I hope it doesn’t matter as much in 10 years. I hope you go to the currency exchange and it’s Bitcoin up here with 80, 90% of the global market share and then maybe the dollar down here second.

1:28:11 There’d probably be a dollar for a while. Maybe you’d have some countries, you’ve got Argentina, El Salvador, maybe even in this region, somebody’s going to have a basket and they’re going to have either part or all of some currency or one currency or an alternative in their country that is backed by Bitcoin. And that’s a completely different form of money. So I’d like to see us move more towards sound money. You could have the dollar backed by Bitcoin.

1:28:38 They used to have Fort Knox and they filled it with gold. If I was advising a president, I’d say start buying Bitcoin, back it by Bitcoin and gold or just Bitcoin and half sound money again. And so that could happen. So maybe dollar would be number one, but it’s backed by Bitcoin. But the point is if you can’t print it from thin air, you can’t do all these crazy, stupid shenanigans that cause death destruction on a scale like nothing else ever has.

1:29:01 Yeah, and I hope everybody can really meditate on that. It takes a little while to see the correlation or connection between all these events you said and just fiat money. Yeah. But it’s there. We’ll just go down deep.

1:29:11 I remember Max Keiser telling me when he came on my show like 11 years ago that, you know, fiat created all wars. And I was like, what are you talking about? But look, you just broke it down. You know, if you’ve got this useless money, you can print at any point in time and you can throw it at all these silly things. Then you’re going to do things that don’t make any sense.

1:29:27 Right. And you’re going to create all these problems. If you really had to count every penny because each penny was a penny, then you might make more intelligent decisions and not go do all these things you shouldn’t be doing. And if you had to ask him for the money, if I come to you, if you’re American and I said, hey, Brian, can I have 30 grand? You say, what for?

1:29:44 Oh, I want to lock up a guy because he had a forbidden plant. He’d say, I don’t think so. I want to lock up a guy because he killed 10 people, maybe. But if you say, you know, he has a forbidden plant or, you know, he said the wrong thing or whatever. Or if I say, hey, can I have 70 grand?

1:29:59 Well, why? Oh, I want to go and kill people in Afghanistan for 20 years. It costs 70 grand per taxpayer to have our war on average, to have our war in Afghanistan. If you had to ask people for that, nobody would have done it. I don’t think Dick Cheney himself would have paid 70 grand of his own money.

1:30:15 Nobody wants to bottle nap out, but when they have no accountability, they don’t even have to ask you for the money they can rob you without robbing you. It’s a lot harder to say, give me the 70 grand. Oh, I’ll just print the 70 grand and your money will be worth 70 grand less. And that’s the way that they do it now. They print it from thin air, devalue your money.

1:30:31 That’s why you’re getting a milk and your gasoline and everything else keeps going up in costs. And people are especially hit by it now. And a lot of them are, it’s interesting, a lot of people on the left complain about prices going up. Everybody complains about prices going up, but a lot of it is because of their own monetary policies. All this COVID nonsense, foreign wars, all of these things, that comes from this printing money from thin air.

1:30:54 So much to think about. Bruce, I appreciate you dropping science on us. I’m really looking forward to this Tushya Roundtable. I’m assuming we’re going to have a lot of discussions like this and more going out. Absolutely.

1:31:05 Thank you for running for Senator New Hampshire. It’s a bold move, and we need more people doing things like that, to put yourself out there and put these issues on the line. So I appreciate that. And I appreciate a lot of these thoughts. It feels like I’m making progress when we’re talking about these important issues out there.

1:31:19 Now that Bitcoin ETF is happening, pretty soon all these boomers are going to have it in their portfolios, whether they know it or not. They’ve been orange-pilled a little bit. It feels like we’re making progress here. I think so. And you’re doing your part, too.

1:31:30 So I appreciate you having me on, because you’re getting the right words out there and showing the right message to the people. So I appreciate it. Thank you. I enjoy doing this. I’m looking forward to this weekend.

1:31:41 Let’s do this again sometime in the future, shall we? Absolutely. Thanks, Bruce. Appreciate you. And I want to say thank you to Web3 TV.

1:31:49 We’ll see you next time on London Real.