Max Keiser - The Banned Episode: Would You Rather Trust Your Bank or Bitcoin?

Full transcript: Bitcoin Will Hit $100,000 In This Pandemic

0:57 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Max Keiser, the American journalist, broadcaster, and filmmaker. For over 10 years, you have hosted the Keiser Report with your wife Stacy on the television network RT where you discuss finance, current affairs, and cryptocurrency with guests like Alec Baldwin, Russell Brand, and of course me. You also host the weekly economics program Double Down on Radio Sputnik, have written for the Huffington Post, and are regularly interviewed for your insight on finance and cryptocurrency. You continue to broadcast throughout the global lockdown discussing the impact of COVID-19, the opportunity in crypto and the damaging propaganda coming from the mainstream media. Max, welcome back to London Real.

1:37 Max Keiser: Oh, Brian, I can’t tell you this is fantastic. You know, we had so much fun when we were both up in Shoreditch on the Old Street roundabout storming London doing our independent media and great time. Great to be back.

1:51 Brian Rose: It’s great to have you, Max. You know, before we get started, I wanted just to announce to everybody that we are now streaming on our brand new Digital Freedom Platform, which is a censorship free independent broadcasting system that is of the people, by the people, for the people, and available exclusively through our website at londonreal.tv. Just want to ask everyone watching this now if they could share the link in the sidebar to all your social media channels. Let me just repeat if they can just share this now on the sidebar to all of their social media channels. This is very important and I always ask simply ask their friends and family to give us 15 minutes and then they can make their call. Max, I pledge to you and everybody watching this that none of this conversation will be edited, censored or removed or banned and that anyone in the world can watch the full episode of this free at londonreal.tv/keiser.

2:35 Brian Rose: Thanks to the generous donations of over 27,000 people around the world, including you, Max, also known as the London Real Army. For anyone wanting to become a founding member of the Digital Freedom Platform, you can visit londonreal.tv/freedom to donate and fight with us on the front lines to protect our human rights here at London Real. We’ve been a platform for free speech since 2011. And Max, I’m excited to have you here today. I wanted to ask, you donated to the digital Digital Freedom Platform. Why did you do this? And what are your thoughts about us being censored on almost every single digital platform and attacked by the mainstream media as well as Ofcom. What do you think, Max?

3:10 Max Keiser: Yeah, that’s right. I am a member of London Real Army. I believe I am a sergeant in the London Real Army and it was a great pleasure to donate to this massively successful crowdfund that you did. I think you raised over a million dollars and then you did that remarkable live stream with 1.3 million streams which was incredible. And the need for what you’re doing is real and the censorship that’s going on across these media platforms is getting onerous and there really needs to be a push back and glad to see that you are leading the charge and the freedom platform is much needed. I just I guess it’s predictable to see what happened with the sites like YouTube and others that had to cave to political pressure pressure and shareholder pressure and really abandon their remit as they established it when they were starting their services that it would be free and open and everybody would be able to communicate. Of course, success breeds a lot of complications and when you become politically influential like we saw in the 2016 election and it suddenly became apparent that the alternative media and social media was shaping the narrative leading into the 2016 campaign. This really blew a lot of people’s minds.

4:34 Max Keiser: And coming on the other side of that, we saw attacks on people like Alex Jones and others because the narrative, the political narrative wants to be controlled by the same status quo, the same people that have been doing it for decades and they don’t want anybody challenging their space and they have corporations doing their bidding or vice versa. Corporations are doing the politicians bidding. There’s a lot of there’s a symbiotic relationship there, isn’t there? It’s kind of proto-fascist, if you will. And the you know I mean you’re pushing back and you hit a nerve and the success speaks for itself.

5:12 Max Keiser: I mean the response that you got was incredible and I know having known you now for 10 years I know you’re going to do an incredible job with the resources now that you have been provided to you.

5:23 Brian Rose: Yeah. Thanks Max. I appreciate that. You know I mean I’ve never ever experienced push back like this. I’ve never experienced the deplatforming, the shutting down of not just the social media and broadcasting platforms, but other services surrounding that and things like Dropbox and payment services just being closed down. Some of the stuff I can’t talk about and it’s almost like playing whack-a-mole and cat-and-mouse with some of these platforms. And like you said, there’s this weird intertwined relationship between politics and corporations and you know, political contributions. And sometimes there’s quid pro quo and sometimes maybe there’s not. It’s hard for me to know what’s going behind the scenes, but all I know is a couple things. First of all, we’re being censored massively. Second of all, there’s a massive demand for freedom of speech. And based on the Icke broadcast last weekend, I mean, you know, for someone who’s supposedly not supposed to be heard, you know, 1.3 million unique people tuned in to watch that thing.

6:20 Brian Rose: So, it’s weird. You get these mixed signals like this message is dangerous and yet everyone wants to hear it right?

6:27 Max Keiser: Well, you know, I can you mentioned something there you said there are things happening that you can’t mention so I would guess having been a broadcaster in the UK that what you’re experiencing is that you’ve been getting some communication from the broadcast regulator and the problem there or the situation there is that according to the laws and rules in the UK Hey, you can’t even talk about what has been the communication between you and the regulator. So, this is a very interesting situation in the UK because free speech is curtailed in the UK. It’s not you say often on your broadcast recently that you refer to the American free speech and the constitution, the bill of rights, the right of free speech and it’s very separate than what is considered to be free speech in the UK.

7:20 Max Keiser: In the UK, libel laws are designed to protect the wealthy, to protect the powerful. And in 2010, interestingly enough, Barack Obama changed the law so that it eliminated this libel suit tourism that was going on. Anybody could be sued in the UK for libel, but Barack Obama changed that and now it no longer applies. Is you don’t have people shopping their libel suits in the UK because it is so favorable to the rich and the powerful the laws the speech laws in the UK and that’s a situation that just gets really really harsh at some point.

7:55 Brian Rose: And that was Barack Obama changed that for the UK or the US?

8:05 Max Keiser: He changed that to stop the libel shopping that was going on. There was one case in particular that triggered him to pass this law in 2010. That made it situ the situation became that if anyone tried to sue an American for libel, it would have to be considered libel by US courts for it to be considered libellous in the UK.

8:26 Brian Rose: Got it.

8:31 Max Keiser: That knocked out all of the potential libel suits that you see that were brought against an American. In America, we have a lot of shortcomings, but we have the best free speech laws in the world and certainly a lot better than the UK. In when we were broadcasting in the UK, we found ourselves being constantly crimped by the regulators who were getting into our face and telling us what we could and could not say. And it really kind of it puts a damper on what you can do as a journalist in the UK.

9:01 Brian Rose: Yeah. I mean, you and Stacy were really kind of a precursor to some of the things that I’m experiencing. I remember you saying, Brian, you know, I can’t mention this on like your podcast because of Ofcom on Keiser Report on the RT and I remember giving you a perplexed look cuz it didn’t make sense to me and I just assume free speech laws were the same in the UK as they were in America, but they’re not, right? And is that one of the reasons you guys left here?

9:29 Max Keiser: Well, it’s not, you know, it’s a lot of reasons. As we know we’ve lived in different cities over the years and it was certainly it wasn’t a reason to stay in the UK. We did a lot of reporting on fracking and on British fracking and this was very interesting because the regulator really was contacting us on behalf of the frackers on behalf of the UK energy industry. They would they would contact us. Ofcom would contact us and say, “We’re speaking to you on behalf of this fracking person, this company, and we want you to do this and do that.”

10:08 Brian Rose: That’s crazy, Max.

10:08 Max Keiser: Well, I mean it’s really it’s this is why in the UK you have you have people who like to circumvent the onerous laws in the UK by engaging in a lot of very fanciful speech and a lot of double entendre and double speak and things like this. You know because they can’t really be direct. You can’t say you can’t be a direct person. You can’t speak directly in the UK. You have to always speak obliquely. So, I mean, you’ve lived there for a while now.

10:49 Max Keiser: You’ve had this experience when you’re talking to someone, a British person, you feel like they’re always avoiding the point. They’re always somehow trying to get to around and circumvent and they’re never they’re not very direct at all. They’re always trying to insinuate something and they’re they you know, they use their eyebrow a lot. They’ll just say and you know and right and I was at a loss for many years trying to figure out why all the pantomime why can’t you just speak directly and then you know I finally figured out that the libel laws are so harsh there people cannot speak directly so they’ve developed this kind of British pantomime where they speak in innuendo and eyebrows and you know and it’s not they because of everything they can’t say and it becomes a farce after a while and you know the stereotypical vague mumbling British person is for a reason. The libel laws do not allow direct speech.

11:39 Brian Rose: Yeah. And that’s what I find so frustrating about this entire exercise for me for the last 6 weeks is that we’re being censored and now it’s affecting the way we behave without us even consciously knowing it because we thinking, okay, someone’s going to sue us, someone’s going to censor us or someone’s going to do something, shut down our business if we speak freely. And that’s the worst type of censorship when you know, you can’t even freely speak your mind and then you’re not even conscious about it anymore. And it’s really frustrating. And just to finish with Ofcom, I mean, you know, we have a relationship with London Live, a television station here. I’ve been giving them my content for years and they’ve been rebroadcasting it and they got censored for one of the David Icke episodes. Funny enough, one that’s actually still public on YouTube. But they got their knuckles rapped by that regulator. And by the way, Ofcom is also decides who gets the 5G licenses.

12:34 Brian Rose: So again, and like you said, they’re doing the bidding of the fracking companies. How is that an independent agency? It’s all just quite ridiculous when you look at it. And yet we all pretend that there’s freedom of speech in this country and there just isn’t, right?

12:48 Max Keiser: And then you have, you know, the BBC is an interesting case. You know, like 80% of the content, broadcast content is through the BBC. The BBC has its own regulator. And there’s a lot of issues as well with the BBC. You know, one thing that’s kind of interesting and it’s a subtle form of censorship. If you go to YouTube and you watch Max Keiser, Stacy Herbert Keiser Report video, you know, it’ll say on YouTube this video, this ours RT and RT is in part funded by Russian government. Okay. Now, if you if you click on a BBC video, it’ll say this is a BBC video. It’s publicly funded.

13:27 Max Keiser: Publicly funded. Now, it’s interesting because the way the BBC is funded and the way the RT is funded is exactly the same. They’re both state funded. They’re both funded by the state. One, in the BBC’s case, they apply a special tax from the government called a TV license. That is you must pay or go to prison. And then that money is used to create state their state broadcasting content that’s funded by the state. And in RT, they don’t have a special tax just for TV. It’s just taken out of the general purpose tax that they collect, but it’s there they’re still government funded. It’s not publicly funded. The BBC is not publicly funded like the public broadcasting system in America used to be where they would call people up every year on a telethon and solicit donations from the public. That’s what public funding is, right? That’s not the BBC.

14:21 Max Keiser: The BBC is government funded. And I would say government controlled because I’ve done many many shows, BBC shows, and I can tell you that every word that comes out of there is government, government reviewed, government edited, government censored. The difference with the RT is that RT is government funded, but it’s not government controlled. So that’s the big difference between RT and the BBC. So YouTube should have a disclaimer at the bottom that says RT is government funded but not government controlled and under the BBC it should say BBC is government funded and government controlled. That would be honest.

15:01 Brian Rose: Yeah, that’s a great point to make. And we’ve been hit by some very critical articles by the BBC and it’s clearly clearly biased towards the government. They’re also being threatened to have some of their funding removed. So, I think they’re getting in line even more by backing exactly what the government says and its policies. And just some of the journalism, I mean, it’s just blatantly one-sided, biased by an institution that holds itself up to be this impartial representative of the news. And it’s just not.

15:32 Max Keiser: Well, I’ll give you another, you know, let’s talk about this word impartial for a second. Now, I’ve been on BBC many times, and again, it’s very it’s a unique experience because when you before you are a guest on the BBC, you get called by a pre-producer, a pre-airing producer, maybe even two of them. They ask you what you’re going to say, and then they respond to you by saying, “You know what? Your answer is not impartial enough. Try it again.” So, then you give them another answer, and they say, “Well, that’s better, but it’s still not impartial enough.” Then you figure it out. You say, “Oh, okay. You mean if I just parrot the government line, I tell you what the government says, and then they’ll say, “Oh, that’s right. Now you’re being impartial. Thank you.” Say that on TV. If you go on TV at that point and do not say exactly what you said you were going to say in the pre-interview, they will never ask you back.

16:25 Max Keiser: And so, they use this word impartiality as a way to get around being direct. Again, it’s not direct, right? No British person can be absolutely direct. They have to be completely circumspect about everything and be oblique, right? So they don’t say you must say the government line to be on BBC. They say you must be more impartial and they keep saying that until you parrot the government line.

16:48 Brian Rose: Wow, that’s incredible and it makes a lot of sense. Also, what I found fascinating was when our massive live stream on YouTube of the Rose/Icke 2 conversation, the one that was the second largest YouTube stream in the world that day when it was deleted and banned 30 minutes later on YouTube, I couldn’t get my YouTube representative on the phone. And again, we’ve had a relationship for eight years, probably paid them, you know, seven figures in advertising revenue. The next day they spoke to the BBC first and the BBC reported they had spoken to YouTube and you told them exactly why they had pulled the our episode and I didn’t hear from my rep for 24 hours later and I was like what is this funny relationship between YouTube, the BBC, the government that I’m obviously not part of and again you know there’s more and more of those stories. So I’m getting a quick education in how all this works. It’s kind of frustrating, but also Max, it’s great to see that people really want to see something that’s independent and I’m having incredible conversations like you and I couldn’t have this conversation if it was being streamed now on YouTube because probably no one would ever see it. So, actually, it’s changing the type of conversations we have, which is a beautiful thing.

18:01 Max Keiser: Yeah. No, I agree. I mean, what you’re doing over there is fantastic. I mean, I can I can feel the passion when I’m watching the videos. You’re just like you can’t got to a point where you had to just make a move. And you’ve been you’ve been talking about growing businesses and being a kind of a business coach for years and then suddenly you were your own coach, right? You were coaching yourself and you applied the everything that you teach people in your courses over the years and it worked fabulously. I mean within two or three weeks, you know, that just been an incredible success.

18:32 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s true. And our courses are full and we’re teaching people how to build their businesses, especially in this digital economy. And so it’s been a it’s been a very interesting time to say the very least. What have you been watching Max? I mean when you see these last eight weeks, you know, what do you see in the world? What’s the Keiser lens on everything that’s happening?

18:52 Max Keiser: Well, it goes back to what we’ve been saying on Keiser Report for 10 years and what Max and Stacy have been reporting about really for almost 17 years that when you have an economy built on fiat money, that is to say, unbacked money that’s printed without any accountability, you know, you end up with a lot of bad investments, misinvestments, bad behavior. It rewards bad behavior. It squeezes out good behavior and good investments. And this goes on year after year, decade after decade, and you end up with a failing economy, a failing currency. And this is this is just the latest chapter in the US. You know, this is just the latest chapter in an economy that’s been undergoing what you could call a controlled demolition now for more than 30 years. So this latest COVID-19 panic has been encouraging the central bank to print exponentially more of their fiat money and they’re making the situation much much worse and so that’s what we’ve been covering and so we’ve been kind of predicting this in 2008 when they had the global financial crisis the response at that point they could have gone two ways Barack Obama was and his lieutenants like Larry Summers and others.

20:18 Max Keiser: They could have either bailed out the debtors, which was the historical precedent. Usually throughout history when you have a crisis like that, you bail out the debtors, or you could have done something highly unusual and unprecedented by bailing out the creditors. And they decided to bail out the creditors. They bailed out the banks who made the dodgy loans. They bailed out the banks who took the risk to making the dodgy loans and they gave them a fresh injection of credit and they expanded their remit. They expanded the amount of credit they could borrow.

20:54 Max Keiser: And so at the time in 2008, we said definitively on the Keiser Report that okay, this is the absolute wrong way to go. And all they’re doing is they’re kicking the can down the road. They’re deferring this crisis. It will come back bigger, 10 to 50 times bigger in 10 to 12 years. Okay, here we are 12 years later and exactly what we predicted is happening. It’s the it’s the part two of the 2008 global financial crisis. It’s a total liquidity squeeze. It’s the breakdown in credit all over the world. And it’s encouraging these central banks to respond in again a similar way by simply printing exponentially more fiat money which of course is going to make the situation that much worse.

21:42 Brian Rose: Yeah. When I hear when I first saw you know Trump talking about the two trillion and then the six trillion and when I saw you know them talk about the furlough program here and they’re cutting these billions and billions of pounds of checks to people. I mean, the first thing I see is a mess, but Max, the public says, “Oh, this is great. We’re going to have money. Everything’s going to be good.” How do you explain to people that actually they’re going to pay for it in the long run, and it’s they’re going to pay actually more than they’re even getting, right?

22:07 Max Keiser: Well, the explanation, there’s actually an economic term for it. It’s called a Cantillon effect by an economist named Cantillon. And he described quite eloquently what happens. The central banks print money and it goes into the hands of the gazillionaires, the people who are friends of the central bank first and then it trickles down to the hoi polloi, the man on the street at some point at a later date. But by that time the purchasing power of the money has been lost and they are faced with loss of purchasing power as the money is being printed. Meanwhile, the people who are at the head of the line, the friends of the central bank are using the money that they’re printing that they’re given first.

22:56 Max Keiser: They’re using it to buy assets like fine art stocks and bonds in many cases and things that have that go up in value. They appreciate in value. They buy expensive homes with it. And so their wealth is being concentrated more at the very top. And the everyone else’s wealth is being their purchasing power is being destroyed at the bottom. And so this is how and why you see this the impact of money printing on the economy. It creates an extraordinary concentration of wealth at the top and it creates more poverty at the bottom. And there’s one chart that you can look at that depicts this whole process brilliantly in one image and that would be the money velocity chart. So the money velocity chart simply tracks the rate at which money is circulating through the economy.

23:50 Max Keiser: So if money printing worked to the way that it was that they’re telling us it should work, then the money velocity should hold firm or actually should go up because if you’re adding money to stimulate the economy, you should see that money velocity or the amount of times money is going from bank to bank to bank, from consumer to consumer to consumer, it should it should you should show some activity. But for the past 15 years, if you look at that money velocity chart, it’s gone straight down. And in the last six months, it’s taken another huge leap down. Money velocity is hovering just above zero. So that tells you that when they say they’re going to print a trillion pounds or half a trillion pounds, that 99% of it goes into the pockets of a few folks at the very top at the banking pyramid.

24:39 Max Keiser: And that’s where it stays. Doesn’t go anywhere. They just hoard it. They hoard the cash and they don’t circulate it. They don’t make loans. And in the UK, you have a huge scandal with RBS and other banks that were caught actually trying to profit at the expense of their customers by attacking companies that they’ve made loans to by with viable companies that had no problems. RBS was discovered to cut their credit off suddenly hoping that they would go bankrupt so that they could buy assets for pennies on the dollar and sell them to one of their subsidiaries, one of their divisions. And so this has been a scandal now for 20 well at least 10 years for sure. And but this is exactly what happens with this money.

25:28 Max Keiser: It feeds the kleptocrats. It feeds the worst players in the economy and who have great political power. So of course the those kleptocrats want more money printed because they want that the additional wealth that it gives them and they the poor classes the middle classes the lower classes they think they want more money to be printed because they think it’s going to help them. But it never does. And the because the purchasing power is being destroyed. So and they have no organized labor. They have no way to increase the labor their wages. So it’s just going to continue like this until you end up with what I call neo-feudalism which is a really going back to the middle ages. You’ll have an extraordinary concentration of wealth in the monarchal class, the aristocrats, and everyone else are basically peasants or serfs, and they’ll be, you know, sheltering at home on social media clicking ads for a protein pill, right? I call this the casino gulag where you are live in a gulag which is made possible by central banks and their money printing and your only hope for survival is to click on enough ads during the course of a 24-hour period to rent to win a protein pill to keep you alive for another day.

26:50 Max Keiser: So that’s the casino. You just hope you can win that protein pill. So, it’s a casino gulag made in the neo-feudal model engineered by central banks because they’re they want to be monarchs of course, you know, they who wouldn’t want to be a king. They all want they just wanted they to be a few kings and everyone else is a peasant. That’s where we’re heading in all this. This is what’s happening.

27:16 Brian Rose: Yeah. And for people who think this might be some strange fantasy, I mean, right now the Fed is printing money and they’re buying anything in sight, including corporate debt, right? So, they’re buying up, you know, corporations and basically the state is owning a lot of that debt. And if they continue, like you said, pretty soon it becomes feudal where this the state or this top level of people own everything and now all of your dollar savings are worth nothing and you’re sheltered at home and it’s exactly what you’re describing, right, Max?

27:47 Max Keiser: Right. So the Federal Reserve now owns one-third of America’s GDP by their by buying bonds, stocks, junk bonds, ETFs, and all this other stuff. So they’re printing money for free and then they buy the assets. So you know on Wall Street you would call this a leverage buyout, right? So a leverage buyout is you borrow against the assets of the company you want to acquire, then you acquire it, then you sell it all off and then you end up owning those assets for virtually nothing. So here the central bank is printing money for free and using it to buy all of these income-producing assets.

28:26 Max Keiser: They’re going to buy all the property. They’re going to buy all the utilities. They’re going to buy all of the biggest corporations. In Japan, the central bank owns 100% of GDP worth of assets. They’re already at 100%. So, I think the US will equal Japan in this sense. So, they if they bought $6 trillion worth of these assets re over the past, you know, they’re up to $6 trillion now. So to get to 100% they have another 16 or 17 trillion dollars of purchases to go and I fully expect that to happen. The debt in the US was that I think 24 trillion now expect that to go to 50 trillion and the global GDP debt to GDP is close to 300% debt to GDP.

29:15 Max Keiser: So you’re talking hundreds of trillions of dollars globally and that’s all managed by a few people in the central bank who manage everything like the Vatican would manage the Catholic Church going back into medieval times. This is the new papacy and this is the new medieval model. We’re heading back. You know the whole idea of liberalism of the renaissance of free markets and everything that we enjoy that’s a pretty new idea. It’s only a couple hundred years old, really 250 years old. And it was kind of a blip on the historical timeline. If you look at the broader picture of the last 2,000 years, we’ve been living more like slaves for 2,000 years than we have in the last couple hundred years. And now I think we’re going back to the way we were living before.

30:05 Brian Rose: And these the central bank and the Federal Reserve, they have these really cool sounding names, but it’s really hard for most people to understand what they really are, right? There are these strange kind of like shell entities and behind the scenes most people don’t really understand what’s happening.

30:24 Max Keiser: Well, it’s a group of private bankers and up until recently, central banks were not joined together. You know the different countries would have different central banks. So you see a lot of dynamic interplay between different countries would raise rates, other countries would lower rates and there it was kind of a hold over from the mercantilism from you know a couple hundred years ago where there was more a strategic game going on with people’s with sovereign countries but starting in the 80s they became all fused together into one global central bank. Nomi Prins writes an excellent book on this called Collusion where and she was a former Goldman Sachs banker and she describes how all these banks are colluding now.

31:05 Max Keiser: So the global central banks there’s six or seven the major major ones you know they are now basically making a run at taking complete control the global economy using the free money that they print. And you know, it’s funny because they keep saying they’re trying to fight deflation because, you know, the central bank sees deflation. They say, “Oh, you know, there’s too much deflation. We need to print more money.” But the joke is that the money printing causes the deflation. So, and they know this, but the mainstream media just repeats what they hear. They the mainstream media will say the central bank is going to print more money to fight deflation.

31:43 Max Keiser: But in fact, we know now without any there’s no equivocation at this point that this money printing is causing the deflation which is what they want because it allows them to buy all these assets much cheaper which is what they’re doing. So now into the mix of course comes Bitcoin you know and I think that’s the big you know savior for everyone going forward because of everything that it offers. But you know to finish up this point I don’t see any any stop to the current trend of central banks printing trillions and buying up and taking private the public domain taking private democracy taking private everything.

32:26 Brian Rose: It’s a scary scenario. I want to get into Bitcoin for sure. Before we do, how bad is this recession going to be and how are people going to feel it? And then finally, what can they do about it?

32:38 Max Keiser: I think the I think it’s going to be a total transition. So we’re leaving the period of globalization and we’re moving toward localization. So even when Trump came into office, he said he’s anti-globalist. He says he’s I’m America first. So in globalism really ended at that period. So up until then there was a 20 year 25 year period of just in time delivery of manufacturing in China and sending to the US and it’s having your taxes paid in different countries at different rates and everything was globalized and then and starting in 2016 that’s now starting to come apart and now in the US for example they realize they’re going to have to manufacture a lot more domestically. They can’t expose themselves to having their pharmaceuticals made in China or India.

33:27 Max Keiser: They have to do this domestically and so it the costs all the way around are going to be a lot more expensive to maintain a globalized economy in that way. So we’re going to end up more for regionalism and localism and as such you’re going to see the economy just change a lot. So I think there’ll be a lot of entrepreneurialism and there will be a lot of startups and entrepreneurial activity but it’ll be in very different than anything we’ve seen in current times and new markets will open up but they’ll be more locally based domestic based types of businesses and we could go back to a more mercantilist kind of global economy where countries are competing with each other in way that we haven’t seen in a long time under the under the globalized model, countries were not really competing so much with each other. You just had a few corporations that were gaming the system.

34:23 Max Keiser: It wasn’t really competition. But now we’re going to see, I think, more competition, more mercantilism or neo-mercantilism. And this will also probably usher in at some point, Brian, I believe that the only way to fix the global currency problem is they’re going to have to bring back gold and back gold to these national currencies to some degree, either a 20% gold standard, a 40% gold standard, or higher, so that they have a way to bring back some meaningful accounting standards because right now there is no meaningful accounting standards. It’s just fiat money versus fiat money.

35:05 Max Keiser: Nobody really knows anything anymore. It’s lost in a in a in a fog. And so they’re going to have to bring back gold. And then this will also change people’s comp orientation toward business and finance and entrepreneurialism when you have an actual yard stick to use to build your business and to build your country’s wealth. The wealth of your country. So I think those are those are changes. So I don’t So it’s not I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be where you go into a depression part two and it’s just you just have this dead economy for many years that you’re just waiting for something to pull you out of it like a war or something like that. I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s going to transform pretty dynamically pretty quickly into something completely different.

35:54 Max Keiser: I think a year from now, two years from now, we’re going to look back at the economy pre-COVID-19 virus as being something very much in the past that doesn’t exist anymore. And we’re entering into completely different economic model and there’s going to be a lot of winners and a lot of losers. You know, a lot of people won’t adapt. They won’t like this change or they won’t follow then and they won’t they won’t carry through to the next era. A lot of people will, you know, particularly a young generation, the millennials and the Gen Z. They’ll be like, you know, I was really shut out from the from the boomers wealth. You know, they took all the wealth and there’s left very little for millennials in Gen Z. They we gave the millennials in Gen Z all of our debt. You know, they have all the student debt. They have all the national debt. You know, they got all the debt.

36:44 Max Keiser: The boomers have all the money. And now the wheel has turned. I think the boomers are now going to start to fade away and they’re going to start to go bankrupt. But these millennials in Gen Z, I think now they have a chance to rebuild the global economy more as they want to. So I’ll be interested to see myself how they do it.

37:05 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s a fascinating new new new world order. Do certain industries are they just going to disappear? You know, airline travel, retail, commercial, real estate, what do you see happening in these spaces?

37:21 Max Keiser: The short answer would be yes. Right. So all those things you just mentioned seem like they got big problems. The retail space was already losing to Amazon, right? So retail was already getting crushed by Amazon and so now that trend is only being exacerbated. Amazon is going to get you know three or four times bigger and retail as we know it is really going to change and probably disappear. The airline industry is probably going to become more like a utility industry. So, it’ll be more like state airlines that are run by the state just as a service provided by the state. There won’t be private airlines as such because the airline industry has always been a boom and bust industry and it’s always been extremely hard to make money in the airline industry. Warren Buffett himself invested in the 1989 in US Air, lost a lot of money and vowed never to touch another airline again, only to reenter the airline market, buying into airline stocks a few years ago, taking huge positions and then just getting wiped out again.

38:27 Max Keiser: Lost 50 billion in the last quarter at Berkshire Hathaway got destroyed by the airline industry again there. It’s uninvestable the airline industry. Richard Branson, you know, it looks like Virgin Air is in big trouble. Has got to the end of May to find some financing as I understand it. It doesn’t look good and some other airlines have declared bankruptcy. So the airline industry is going to have to be run like more like a utility and the cost it’s going to be a lot more expensive and the idea of getting on a you know 20 bucks to get to the south of Spain for a holiday. You know I think those days might be over. And so that’s the story there. The other other industries, restaurant industry, any so anything like you know it’s going to again it’s going to we’ll see how this new generation deals with this because they’re going to have to come up with some highly creative solutions. The winners obviously so far you’ve got zoom is a huge winner teleconferencing you got a company like DocuSign because everyone not meeting in public anymore and they’re doing virtual meetings they’re doing public signing they’re doing signing online through DocuSign which is a way to trade legal signatures online that stock is doing well because this kind of fits into this new paradigm commercial real estate looks really bad especially if you have companies like Twitter saying Jack Dorsey announcing recently that he would extend the policy of people not have can work from home indefinitely.

39:59 Max Keiser: So that puts the you know the whole industry on alert like does this does this mean that everyone going forward will have the option of working at home. So that means the whole idea of the office gets, you know, disassembled and commercial real estate office real estate markets look like that’s terrible going forward there’s a big trend for people to move out of cities and so you’ll see some depopulation going on there and that of course affects the restaurants and everything the social the theater New York theater all these things are going to be impacted severely one of the big winners would be virtual reality. You’ll see more conferences heading into virtual reality that been you seeing two or three now where you know you strap on the goggles and you’re in the virtual reality space and people are now getting acclimated to that as being the new normal so that you don’t need commercial real estate for that.

40:56 Max Keiser: The whole idea of property, you know, in the UK, people love property, they love real estate. It’s such a national obsession. And it’s done well for 20 years. You know, I when I was living in London, I know so many people, they don’t really they haven’t worked in 20 years because the value of the flat in Soho or Shoreditch, you know, is going up 15 to 20,000 pounds every year. And they could just take and they and your bank account was tied to that and you could just you know became an automatic teller machine and that was going on for 20 years. The property markets in London as you know have been going up sharply for 20 years and that bred a whole generation of folks that just lived on this kind of property appreciation. Didn’t really do anything else for gainful employment.

41:46 Max Keiser: But now that’s looks like that’s going to go in reverse. Plus it’s deglobalization. So, you’re going to see less Saudi and Russian and Chinese billionaires buying up these expensive homes in London because there’s a lot more tensions now geopolitically between these countries. So, you don’t have that money flooding in at the high end. And so these these are some of the changes, but I definitely think if you go through every industry group, it’s going to be a profound change in every single industry group in some way.

42:17 Brian Rose: Yeah. It’s so strange that all these things we assumed to be normal ever since you’re a kid, you know, that now it’s a new normal, you know, like you said, everyone thought, “Oh yeah, 20 bucks I get to the southern coast of Spain. You go to work someplace, right? Public transport, I want to live in a city. I want to go shopping.” Like that’s all completely been turned on its head. So, it’ll be interesting to see. And I agree. I think the innovators are going to be the winners here. And the younger generation while the older generation probably locks themselves down. What about I want to talk about crypto definitely. What about the COVID-19? Do you think people should get back to work? Do you think it’s been overdone? I think you’ve been locked up for a couple months now, you and Stacy, but you guys always have a party on your own anyways. So, what do you see?

43:05 Max Keiser: Yeah. I haven’t left the house now in 72 days. So, you know, and I could I could happily be here another six months. You know, it’s fine by me. This has been the greatest time ever. It’s a lot of fun and, I’m doing a lot more baking and cooking and stuff and we do our show, we can have on two iPhones, we can shoot the Keiser Report and it’s no problem. But, you know, my take on COVID-19. So, you know, I know that at the moment that you’ve got now this, it’s been politicized to a great great deal about staying at home or not staying at home and certain rights and freedoms, etc. But for me, I go back even further back to the beginning of this whole thing a little bit more to give you my take on this and what I think about.

43:55 Max Keiser: So we know that back in December of last year, you know, all those images were coming out of China, coming out of Wuhan of people dropping dead in the street or collapsing in the street that they were on massive lockdown and that this COVID-19 was spreading and that was an economic calamity and it was after they’ve already had two or three of these things in the past, SARS and MERS and you know this is like yet another you deadly virus and so I don’t accept the fact that the as the US government claims that they were kept quote in the dark about what was happening in China.

44:41 Max Keiser: Because anyone with a YouTube connection who’s online could have seen what was happening in China and to claim ignorance is you know quite astounding. Furthermore, you know, as an American, 50 cents of every tax day dollar I pay goes to the defense establishment and the intelligence services. You know, they their budget is like $1.6 trillion dollars a year, including the CIA. So, I ask you know, where is the CIA?

45:16 Max Keiser: They’re they’re spying on every country in the world 24 hours a day. They put in the surveillance capitalism, right, is rampant. They know what everybody’s doing. They put a bug in Angela Merkel’s phone. They tapping her phone conversations, right? They know every what everybody’s doing all the time. So, if in fact they want to claim that they had no idea what was happening with this crisis, then I you know, pay me back the money I gave you the last 30 years. I would like my money back, please. Because you obviously have been wasting it. Furthermore, you know what’s really shameful with the CIA is they can’t even do a coup anymore. Like they’ve now tried to stage a coup in Venezuela three times in the last, you know, three years and they just can’t seem to. It’s not the CIA I grew up with.

46:13 Max Keiser: You know what? What’s wrong with these guys? They can’t even do a coup anymore. Furthermore, they can’t even do a coup in their own country, right? And we now know, looking back, the whole Russiagate hoax that there was an attempted coup that Obama initiated essentially to get Trump out of office with the help of the CIA and others. They can’t even do a coup in their own backyard, much less in Venezuela. So, again, why am I paying for this? Why am I Why are they taking my money to do all this? It’s a waste, you know. Give it back. Give it back. Give it back to me and I’ll invest it in some startups, you know, I’ll invest it in some entrepreneurs. I know how to get an economy going, not the CIA.

46:54 Max Keiser: That’s that’s my first take on it. And then from there, it, you know, it has now spiraled into a whole different beast.

47:03 Brian Rose: And do you think people should be worried about going outside or do you think in six months people will realize this disease only affects sick people and a small percentage of the population? It turns out it’s just another version of the flu and we’ll move on.

47:19 Max Keiser: Well, you know, the risk was that the emergency services, the hospitals would be would be overwhelmed with patients needing ventilators and things like that. So that’s the risk. If you get into that scenario, then it becomes triage. Then you have to decide who lives, who dies and patients won’t who are already sick with cancer or something like that won’t be able to get medical attention because the services hospitals become overwhelmed with patients. So in the UK, Boris Johnson he has his five stage alert. You know, he said that level five you get overwhelmed and we want to avoid level five or I’m level four, right? But he’s aware that if you do get an increase and it spreads from the senior care homes where there’s been a complete devastation, people have been wiped out.

48:07 Max Keiser: You do have a real medical crisis and that’s something to be avoided and the only way you can avoid that is through the stopping the contagion. So and the only way you can do that is by implementing measures to stop the contagion. So some simple measures could be for example just requiring masks is a simple measure you know in the US I think there’s been is how many billions of dollars been now dedicated to coronavirus relief but I don’t think the US actually has been manufacturing any masks yet but that’s the very simple solution it reminds me of you know before 9/11 there was always a need to put a $50 lock on the cockpit door to separate the cockpit from the rest of the plane. And many times people said, you know, that is actually a vulnerability.

49:04 Max Keiser: You know, you really need to beef up that security. But of course, that would mean airlines spend 50 bucks for airplane. But, you know, they decided, you know, maybe we’ll take a chance. Then they had 9/11 and now of course they had to spend all that money on that and they had to spend billions and billions and billions more on all this advanced security you know apparatus in place. So the same thing with this I mean this is this idea of a pandemic is nothing didn’t come up it’s nothing new. There should have been preparedness already in place. There should have been a lockdown immediately for however many weeks to get the contagion rate down to under you know to levels that are manageable. But that’s not that’s not the case because that health is not a priority in that sense. It would be too costly. It would cost corporations money to be prepared in this way and so that’s not the direction that they took. So instead, they gambled that this contagion would never happen.

50:08 Max Keiser: Well, it did happen and now they’re unprepared for it. And now there’s total economic chaos. There’s medical crisis potentially. And it’s they’re going to be in the US, they’re going to be people that are going to go out in public. They’re going to spread the virus. Then that they’re going to be there’s going to be a spike in deaths. Then there’s going to be a call to go back home and then the people will get bored. Then they’ll go outside and there’ll be a spike again in death. So this cycle is going to repeat for a couple of years. In Asia, because it’s more of an autocratic government, they have the ability to very, you know, autocratically and dictatorally tell people you must shelter at home, etc., you know, and they have a different they’re having a different experience with this than in the US. So, but I don’t I don’t see any I don’t see there being any kind of lapse in the current mismanagement of this for another two years really. And by then the economy will be so destroyed in so many different ways that on the other end on the other side of this you’re just going to have a completely different global macroeconomic picture. It’s just going to be very different.

51:29 Max Keiser: I think the US many people have talked about the US as this the era of the US the American century you know the 20th century was the American century. I think the 21st century will not be, you know, the American century. It’ll be it’ll be a different have a much different character. It could be a more of an Asian have a more of an Asian character. If a if a country like China were to come out and say, “We’re now going to back our currency in gold, then they would basically have an incredible advantage in the global economy and the US dollar would immediately crash enormously and you know, we would we would be in a Chinese century at that point.” I don’t know what’s you know I think that they would they probably talk about doing that and they would but they the responsibility that comes with that is enormous and you know it’s as long as they’re just kind of getting by at the moment I guess is okay but just knowing that they have that option I think should put people on alert you know that they’re living on borrowed time in the US with the US dollar as world reserve currency that situation’s going to and when it does, it’s going to be quite painful. Quite painful.

52:49 Brian Rose: Wow, that’s a fascinating outlook and I really value your opinion, Max. You’re obviously really knowledgeable about this stuff and you’ve been watching it and talking about it for the last 20 years. Let’s talk crypto. And just for people to know, I mean, you were very very early on talking about Bitcoin. You know, ever since I met you, our first episode was talking about Bitcoin some seven years ago, I think, on London Real. Strangely, when you were at my house, you and Stacy, for Thanksgiving back in the day, a Bitcoin was traded at the dinner table, I think, for $1,000 at the time. And, you know, you had your own Maxcoin. You’ve been, you know, way ahead of the curve on this. And apparently you’re also Satoshi Nakamoto’s representative on Earth.

53:36 Brian Rose: Maybe you can talk more about this, Max.

53:39 Max Keiser: That’s right. We in 2011 we Keiser Report basically put Bitcoin on the map. You know, at that point it was it was known in circles around you know hacking community and some tech circles and things like that. But we really put it on the map in 2011 and brought it to the world audience. And so we still every day get contacted by people who bought were buying Bitcoin in 2011 when it was a dollar when we first started talking about it who are now millionaires and they call us and thank us and say you know and it’s very heartening to hear how they’ve passed you passed the benefit along. They’ve created a startup or they helped their family or they help somebody get into college or education or something like that. So that was really the beginning of a of a major phenomenon and it continues to grow and it’s really I think just starting now to be appreciated more by a wider audience exactly how profound this technology is and what it does to fiat money, what it does to the central bank model and what it does to change people’s perspective. You know, as far as changing the way people think, Bitcoin, I always say, you know, you don’t change Bitcoin.

54:49 Max Keiser: Bitcoin changes you. You know, when you let it when you let the idea of it percolate in your mind, it’s it changes the way you see things and it changes you your attitude toward money and you start to understand the value of having hard money versus fiat money. And it has it can really uplift people from from having a sense a mindset of poverty to having a mindset more of success but you know I mean I obviously I can talk a lot about it in many many different ways but I’ll say that you know as an opening comment.

55:28 Brian Rose: Yeah. Now you say hard money. When most people think of Bitcoin they think of the complete opposite of hard money. They would probably think hard money is gold or honestly Max they’d probably think hard money is dollar US $100 bills when in fact you would probably tell them that is slowly depreciating to nothing especially as more money is printed. But how would you convince you know my I would say my grandma but my grandma’s passed away my aunt in Denver Colorado that the Bitcoin is something that could really be a game changer for her life if she invested in it.

56:00 Max Keiser: Right. Well there’s you know there’s three forms of money really. There’s fiat money like the $100 bill. There’s gold and then there’s Bitcoin. So the fiat money I think we can easily appreciate is just paper. There’s nothing that backs it. According to the New York Times, you know, Paul Krugman, who’s the economist over there, when asked this question about what backs the US dollar, he says, well, men with guns. Okay. So if there wasn’t the US army, if there was no Pentagon forcing people to take the dollar in to countries around the world like Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, you know, wherever, you know, it would have no value. In other words, the US foreign policy is accept our dollars or we send in the Marines, right? It’s just there’s no and we know now printing trillions and trillions and trillions of them and they can print $6 trillion dollars in three weeks.

56:59 Max Keiser: Obviously that doesn’t have any any value. It’s interesting that the amount of taxes collected in America were last year in total were roughly three and a half trillion dollars and the Fed printed over six trillion in a day. Right? So the question becomes why do I even pay taxes if you can just print trillions like that? Why? Why even why are you bothering me for taxes? What’s the point?

57:14 Brian Rose: Wow.

57:22 Max Keiser: Point is that they don’t need people’s taxes. They don’t need people to work when they can just print for themselves as they do. So, I think the case against fiat is pretty clear and understandable. The case for gold, you know, gold has it. It’s been around for thousands of years. And you know, why did gold become the store of value and the medium of exchange that it is over the thousand years? Because it has great store of value in that if I get paid gold today, that gold I can put it I can use it to buy something tomorrow or next year or five years from now. So it maintains its purchasing power. It maintains its value. The cost of a suit 300 years ago might be an ounce of gold and the cost of a suit today would be roughly an ounce of gold, right? A very nice suit at 1,800 bucks. But nevertheless it’s maintained that purchasing power. So it has this long storied history to it. Plus it also has properties that were talked about by Aristotle. It’s scarce. It’s portable. It’s divisible and it’s desirable. This is what Aristotle spoke about 2,700 years ago. He talked about gold as being the perfect money. So now let’s talk about Bitcoin. First of all, does it fit those Aristotelian criteria?

58:42 Max Keiser: Is it scarce? Yes. Is it portable? Very, very portable. Much more portable than gold. Is it divisible? Extremely divisible. Much more than gold. Is it fungible? That’s another property of gold that was talked about at that time. It is fungible. It’s probably that’s one area where it’s not yet as equal to gold. And it’s used by people as a store of value be primarily at this moment because of its scarcity and going forward as you see the fiat money kind of disappear and people looking for alternatives they’re they of course they’re going to go to gold but as gold source it becomes harder and harder to source gold and it and that’s becoming the case is that it’s the premiums on gold start to move up and gold becomes harder to source. What’s the next closest thing to gold that you can put your hands on that will offer store value medium exchange properties and this brings you to Bitcoin. Now from there you d you kind of dig down into the next layer of the technology and you have you ask yourself what gives it this hard money aspect. Why is it considered hard money?

1:00:11 Max Keiser: You have to look at it as the expression of this enormous global network of computers that are working simultaneously via the protocol to maintain the network and maintain Bitcoin’s monetary policy. It has a very strict monetary policy of certain amount of coins being generated every 10 minutes. That’s part of a disinflationary monetary policy that extends from 2009 to the year 2140 and slowly seeps into the ecosystem, the financial ecosystem, these bitcoins every 10 minutes. And as this occurs over time, the network because the desirability to obtain those coins goes up. As the fiat money world collapses, the network gets stronger. The amount of computer power or hash rate continues to go up every year, every quarter to maintain the solidity and the security of that network.

1:01:08 Max Keiser: Then you dig into the into the technology a little bit more and you say, well, how does the network maintain itself against these outside risks? And you find different layers to the stack of the Bitcoin protocol that are ingeniously engineered in ways that protect this hard money. One ingenious aspect would be the difficulty adjustment which happens every two weeks. So every two weeks the protocol searches the network of computers to find out what is the capacity out there to continue the network going forward. And if it’s become saturated with a lot of computational abilities then it raises that difficulty adjustment. If there’s a drop off in computer power, it lowers the what’s called a difficulty adjustment and it finds the sweet spot within that network to keep encouraging those folks who are quote mining on the network to keep at it, spend money, exert energy, and there’s a lot of energy that goes into creating these coins.

1:02:20 Max Keiser: They’re limited supply. They are a store of value that is comparable to gold in that it’s a rare it’s an extraordinarily rare commodity. Bitcoin is actually a rarer it’s probably the rarest commodity out there. And now that they’ve had this halving event where the coin emission every 10 minutes is cut in half, the so-called stock-to-flow ratio has become even better than gold. So the amount of the amount of gold that’s pulled out of the ground versus the amount of gold above ground is roughly 3% or so.

1:02:59 Max Keiser: Now with this halving that’s gone on the Bitcoin protocol that flow of new coins being created to the stock of gold actually out there in existence has become more favorable than gold. So it’s become harder than gold on that stock-to-flow model. And at the bottom the bottom line is this, Brian. Money is whatever people say it is. If people use gold as money, it’s money. If people use Bitcoin as money, it’s money. And it’s up to the community really has the final say. Anything can be money. Over year over many, many years, many attempts have been made to establish money, whether it’s cowrie shells or beads or stones, and many things have been money.

1:03:42 Max Keiser: But gold survived all of different attempts to make all these different types of money and it’s still used as money. Bitcoin is now being used by 50 to 70 million people depending on how you calculate as money and that number is going up a great deal going up sharply. And when you see what’s happening in the banking system in the central bank system, people are flocking to hard money and they actually they of course gold is on their list as a place to go, but increasingly more people are realizing that Bitcoin fits the bill. And when you see someone like Paul Tudor Jones, you know, the news last week of Paul Tudor Jones, who’s one of the most famous hedge fund managers in history and I remember when I was working on Wall Street in the 80s, he was really the star hedge fund guy of the 1980s.

1:04:28 Max Keiser: And I remember him very well. We used to talk about Paul Tudor Jones, you know, in such revered tones, you know, he was such a legend. He’s such a legendary guy. And he came out last week and said that he’s buying Bitcoin. And he made some very good good points. He said number one, it’s like buying gold in the 70s. So he’s making the comparison to gold. He’s also remember in the 1970s gold went from 35 to 800. So he thinks that Bitcoin at 8 or 9,000 has got 20x or 30x upside which is remarkable. He says it’s the fastest horse in the race.

1:05:07 Max Keiser: So he’s saying, “Yeah, I think all this money printing is going to cause inflation and I could buy gold and I own gold, but Bitcoin is a gold surrogate that’s going to move a lot faster. It’s the fastest horse in the race.” And if you look at the numbers a little bit, if Bitcoin’s market cap approaches gold in the let’s say 8 to 9 trillion dollar range, that would mean for every dollar price appreciation in gold, you’re going to get $25 to $30 move in Bitcoin. So it’s a it is the fastest horse in the race. And he also you know when Paul Tudor Jones who puts one to two% of his funds into Bitcoin and he starts to get an he starts to get a return on that’s beating his competitors that means every one of those other hedge funds out there have to follow the alpha dog.

1:05:53 Max Keiser: You know Paul Tudor Jones is an alpha dog in the in the hedge fund space. So now they’ve got to put one or two% of their portfolio into Bitcoin just to stay competitive with Paul Tudor Jones or I think I may have just said Alex Jones but I meant Paul Tudor Jones and so then you have a cascade effect you have a knock-on effect and as George Soros wrote in his great book on the subject one of his books he talks about the concept of reflexivity. And this is the concept where price appreciation causes price appreciation essentially once once prices start moving up, people buy stuff reflexively and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And so then you just have it just becomes part of the new normal. And look at it this way, my final point would be that right now there’s about a hundred trillion dollars in investable funds around the world in that are managed for the behalf of the several thousand billionaires and multi-billionaires out there. And less than 1% of that 100 trillion is invested in gold bullion as an investment.

1:07:06 Max Keiser: So now fiat money starts to collapse, central banks start to collapse, banks start to get in trouble again. That 1% goes to 5%. Gold now goes to $10,000 an ounce from $1,700 an ounce. And Bitcoin then, you know, you’re talking approaching $100,000 an ounce. When I saw you back in that Thanksgiving seven years ago, my price prediction for Bitcoin, even though it was under a thousand then and we started buying it at a dollar, was ultimately to get to $100,000 per coin. And that’s still my prediction. That’s still where I think this is going. And you know potentially higher as it becomes more competitive with gold bullion. You know, finally for people who just don’t get it, right?

1:07:52 Max Keiser: So, if grandma or aunt, you know, Lucy just doesn’t see how this can be hard money, then, you know, at some point the market just moves away from them, right? They don’t you don’t need to bring the whole market with you. You the market moves and it doesn’t if people don’t want to be in the market, they can choose not to be in the market. For millennials and Gen Z on online with Cash App, which is run by Jack Dorsey over there at Square. He’s adding hundreds and millions of dollars of Bitcoin every quarter. It was the second, it was a huge driver for Square’s profits last quarter was people buying Bitcoin on the app, Cash App. Okay.

1:08:34 Max Keiser: So it’s happening. You know, the revolution is happening. People can ignore it. Like Peter Schiff is somebody who for some reason has made a sideline a cottage industry of being like the Bitcoin basher that is the most known Bitcoin basher and it does he doesn’t seem to mind being wrong for 10 years even though I personally asked him to buy some at a dollar and again at $10 and again at $100. I begged him in person at his home when he was living in Connecticut. I said, “Peter, you’ve got to be in this.” And he just for some reason he feels empowered by being the guy who didn’t get on this incredible freight train. I don’t I don’t understand it, but he gets a lot of traffic being this Bitcoin basher. But he’s been wrong now every year for years and he’ll be he’ll be wrong for the next, you know, 10 to 15 years. He will never ever be right on this.

1:09:24 Brian Rose: Is it is it is it true you gave Russell Brand a million dollars worth of Bitcoin when he was on your RT show a few years ago?

1:09:36 Max Keiser: Yeah, I gave him a chunk when it was still under five dollars. I gave him a bunch. I think he lost it. I gave Alec Baldwin a bunch. I know he lost his lost his sold lost it or actually lost it. Yeah, they lost it. They just didn’t write the number down or whatever. It was like a paper paper wallet that they just misplaced, threw away and now it’s worth millions. No. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely more than that. Yeah.

1:10:01 Brian Rose: Ma Max, are you and Stacy filthy rich from Bitcoin?

1:10:06 Max Keiser: Well, it’s an interesting question because I don’t see ever spending any of them because that would mean going back into the fiat world and I don’t want to give the fiat world any power. I just want to I want to take it away from the fiat world has to be demolished. The best way to do it is to go into Bitcoin. So, I don’t I’m just gonna HODL. And I get a lot of joy out of watching Jamie Dimon over JP Morgan, who was such a bitter Bitcoin basher five years ago. He’s now accepting Bitcoin accounts. So, he’s had to do a complete turnaround. It’s embarrassing. It must be embarrassing for him. But if he had any shame, he would be feeling ashamed. But and to see the old line banks and the establishment banks now have to capitulate and understand that either they go with Bitcoin or they’ll be destroyed, right?

1:10:56 Max Keiser: That’s a lot of fun. But the only way to do it is you’ve got to you got to HODL. You got to you got to you got to just keep pressuring the fiat system into collapsing. And that’s my goal really has been for a while. It’s to watch the legacy banking system collapse is the most important thing for me to witness.

1:11:18 Brian Rose: So you’re holding on to your Bitcoin and always have.

1:11:20 Max Keiser: Yeah. I want until all these banks are destroyed, right? You know, we got to get rid of them. It’s like this worst than coronavirus. You know, it’s the worst infestation we’ve ever had to deal with are the JP Morgans, the RBS, HSBC, Lloyds Bank, Barclays Bank, Salomon Brothers, of course, is gone now. I mean Goldman Sachs. You know the these are the worst scourges of our day and they destroys people’s lives. They destroyed our money and Bitcoin is the way to kill them off metaphorically speaking of course you know to get rid of them and so that’s we’re doing a great job. You know, they’re that this that this next two or three years, you’re going to see real fireworks both in the collapse of banks and the rise of Bitcoin.

1:12:19 Brian Rose: Yeah. Well, we’ve already seen obviously a big price rise in bitcoins and the other cryptos. I just got paid I think yesterday. Someone bought one of my business accelerator courses with Bitcoin. I use it and I mean honestly, it’s super relevant to what I’m dealing with right now, Max, because I got payment platforms trying to shut me down. Lord knows if the government wants to start to play with me and my money and with crypto that’s not an option, is it? So I don’t have to worry about anybody trying to regulate my money. When Andreas Antonopoulos was on my show, he’s been on three different times. You know, he talked about even just the privacy factor that all of us forget about. I mean, all of your, you know, your whole life is really people think they worry about their social media information. Your spending information that your bank knows can pretty much tell them everything about you and that’s all in the hands of your banks and governments. Talk about freedom of information.

1:13:12 Brian Rose: I mean that’s dangerous. So obviously Bitcoin gets around all that stuff, right?

1:13:12 Max Keiser: Well, we saw that with WikiLeaks, right? They PayPal shut them down when they were fundraising and Julian Assange started collecting Bitcoin and based on what we know from the public records he’s sitting on about $50 million worth of Bitcoin approximately but nevertheless it’s uncensorable you know you cannot censor Bitcoin it’s also unconfiscable you cannot confiscate Bitcoin so these are two things that are not true with gold and they’re not true with fiat money. Also, with Bitcoin, unlike gold, there’s no need for verification by a third party. In other words, if I do a transaction with you for gold, you have to make sure that gold is real gold, that it’s not fake gold. That the weight is correct. And you need to typically go through a third party who is a registered surveyor or authenticity providing service right and with Bitcoin that’s not needed because the transaction is the settlement the transaction is the verification every single everything on the blockchain is completely verified every 10 minutes it’s completely audited every 10 minutes so that makes it superior to gold and in those ways as well. Aside from being as good as gold, it’s superior in that you don’t need a third party verification. It’s uncensorable and it’s unconfiscable.

1:14:47 Max Keiser: So those things make it better than gold.

1:14:51 Brian Rose: Yeah. One thing we’re going to obviously add to our Digital Freedom Platform is people that can donate with crypto. Let me ask you another question. I mean obviously the Bitcoin protocol was they came up with it a long time ago, maybe 12 years ago. I’m not sure exactly when. And obviously people say amazing things about blockchain, the distributed ledger. This is something we’re also going to implement for our freedom platform. So there’s not one source of failure. Because we’ve been maliciously attacked quite a few times now on our on our servers. What about other cryptos that have come out since that might have, you know, newer ways of looking at the blockchain? Are there anything else that you see out there that potentially could still be, you know, complementary to Bitcoin?

1:15:36 Max Keiser: Not really. There’s nothing no coin out there that can do that Bitcoin doesn’t do already or will be able to do shortly. And what you’re buying with Bitcoin is security. So there’s been a couple of major hard forks in Bitcoin like Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Satoshi Vision and they’re not secure. They’re just not secure. I wouldn’t put anything on those chains or build anything on them because they’re not secure. Other coins are clear exit scams. They have huge premines that the founders are selling or dumping and making a lot of money. A lot of people are losing money and they have no use case. So like a Ripple or Ether even is a exit scam.

1:16:15 Max Keiser: It’s to be avoided. And those are the those are the top coins. And then you start going down into many many more beneath that and it just becomes lunacy. If you look at the total crypto market as a whole, Bitcoin right now has 85% of the hash power and 65% of the market cap and that number is just going to keep going higher. So within five years, Bitcoin will have 99% of the hashing power and 99% of the market cap, right? And everything else will be just completely marginalized. You already see now the volume in trades. I think Bitcoin now has 90% of all the volume of all these between three top coins with Bitcoin dominating. They have 90% of the volume.

1:17:00 Max Keiser: So the daily volume in the other 5,000 coins is so minuscule. It’s to is to be completely almost non-existent. So they’re completely useless. They have no purpose whatsoever. And you know so they will all just fade away. There were there was between 2014 and 2017 there was this big period of all these coins coming out and there was a lot of experimentation and the message was always this is the new bitcoin this is the better bitcoin etc and none of them worked. I think we can definitively say now that none of them worked and that with what with the way that Bitcoin’s going, no one’s going to ever catch up to what it’s been doing. And it’s similar to the protocol that runs like the internet itself or email itself, right? When these protocols become entrenched and the network effect expands and they become ubiquitous, you know, there might you never go back, right?

1:17:53 Max Keiser: People might say that they’ve got the next best protocol for the internet, but you know, they’re never going to introduce it because the current protocols are already ubiquitous and entrenched and are never going to change. So, it’s just that’s what happens when you introduce something like Bitcoin in 2009 and it gets to where it is today. And you had the period where people tried to compete with it. They failed. And so I think I mean what you’re talking about over there at your shop in terms of a blockchain solution for what you’re doing that’s slightly different in that it’s just simply okay you’re going to have a way to use a spreadsheet a very advanced spreadsheet to make sure that you’re delivering what you say you’re going to be delivering in a transparent way but you know that’s great okay but it’s not it’s not competing with gold right Bitcoin competes with gold Ethereum will never compete with anything.

1:18:45 Max Keiser: It’s a busted project. XRP was never going to compete with anything. It’s a totally busted project. Nothing else out there has really done anything. And so it would not make any sense for folks to think about those especially if they’re trying to build some wealth. If you’re trying to build wealth, and by building wealth, that could mean even just $1 a day in Bitcoin over the course of a few years. You know, you’re probably going to make a million bucks instead of playing lottery tickets. And Americans spend $1,000 a year on lottery tickets. You should be buying Bitcoin every single day. Don’t play the lottery. You know, instead of in the UK, instead of playing lottery, instead of playing this types of doing these types of things, they should be buying Bitcoin every single day. It’s the only way you get individual sovereignty. The governments, the UK and the US, they are under extreme stress.

1:19:40 Max Keiser: There’s a lot of political upheaval. Banks and the global economy are under severe stress. You want to have an unconfiscatable, uncensorable store of value that only you control that will get you through the next five years. What the greatest achievement for Bitcoin probably to sum it up in one sentence is that it separates money from the state. Before Bitcoin, the idea of non-state money was inconceivable. It was talked about on the fringes by some economists as being possible, but not until Bitcoin emerged do we have the absolute existence of a hard money gold substitute that is outside of the state.

1:20:28 Max Keiser: So if you are not happy with the state and you want to opt out, you need to become individually sovereign. And there’s only there’s the best solution by far is Bitcoin.

1:20:41 Brian Rose: Wow. You really know how to break it down, Max. I appreciate that. This is really science you just dropped. Max, I want to end with just getting your advice because I mean, you’ve been a pioneer your whole life. You know, Hollywood Stock Exchange in the mid-’90s. Obviously, you and Stacy, serious, you know, independent media pioneers. When you were in London, you were doing the radio show as well as the Keiser Report. You guys travel all around the world. You live in Paris, you lived in London, you lived in New York City, there in there down south where you are now. How did you constantly keep thinking outside the box? Obviously, you were at PaineWebber and Wall Street in the 70s and 80s. How did you constantly think outside the box? Because, you know, most of the guys you graduated NYU with or you went to Wall Street with, they’re all still doing the same thing.

1:21:25 Brian Rose: I mean, you must have a good relationship with fear, with risk. What is it?

1:21:31 Max Keiser: I would say my greatest strength is also my greatest weakness in that I am in a steady state of anger. I’m easily angered whether it’s by injustice or by boredom or by having to endure poorly designed stuff. It makes me angry and I express my anger by taking action. Either I move country or I build something like the Hollywood Stock Exchange or I get into Bitcoin. It’s an expression of a deep rooted anger against complacency.

1:22:09 Max Keiser: The weakness, the problem is that anger can be get uncontrolled, right? You can get a fire can become a raging fire and so then you know that’s that then is counterproductive. But I would say that it’s just a matter of trying to maintain a balance and then the result is kind of a peaceful balance between being a little angry and being very angry. And also my kind of persona, if you will. I mean, the person people know me from on television is someone who’s got a bit of a hair trigger anger issue that but I tell you do media and I do media. It’s hard to play with that as in a media context because to be able to think clearly and be angry at the same time is not easy.

1:23:16 Max Keiser: So my I’ve mastered the ability to be rageful but to be thinking clearly. So if you look at those early interviews from years ago on television and things where I’m yelling at people or screaming at somebody, I’m also composing pretty coherent sentences. So that’s not easy to do. It just comes it comes after it’s just like something that developed over years. I don’t know. So I don’t the net result is you know when you add it all up it’s just about feeling an equilibrium with everything around me you know it’s just like everything has to be in has to have an equilibrium has to be in balance and that’s the greatest kind of feeling I would say since 2003 since I essentially married Stacy. Then we have something that when you add Stacy and Max together, it’s 1 + 1 equals, you know, 100, right? So there’s just there’s something else altogether that is has a lot of value that has carried us through all these journeys in the last in the last 16 years. You know, we’ve had this incredible global voyage of just traveling around the world, doing stories, meeting people and working with entrepreneurs and things, but that’s just been like we followed our heart.

1:24:54 Max Keiser: I would say the relationship, the common heart of the relationship is our guiding star.

1:25:04 Brian Rose: And how do you guys spend 72 days in the same house together and yet still broadcast together, which means you work together, you bake bread together, you’re probably on the ketogenic diet together. How do you do that all? Come on, give us some relationship advice. And is Stacy going to poke her head in here and say hi to you before the end of the broadcast?

1:25:29 Max Keiser: Yeah. Well, it’s a matter of it’s an interesting question because when I met Stacy in the south of France, you know, we really we just kind of it was we were in the same internet cafe at the same time. We just met kind of spontaneously and we just started talking and you know, for in a lot of ways that conversation’s just been going on for 17 years. Right. I don’t I feel like we’re still on our first date. I don’t It’s just hard to explain, but it’s just like Stacy is just somebody who is just part of part of me, I guess.

1:26:12 Max Keiser: I just don’t I don’t separate. There’s no separation between me and Stacy. For me anyway. I don’t know. I’m not going to talk for her, but I don’t see any there’s no separation. We’re kind of the same same thing, same person. We have the same brain, right? I mean, I we a lot of times we are totally reading each other’s minds in a lot of ways. I mean, it’s kind of weird, but like we’ll have entire conversations, but we won’t actually say anything, but then the next day we’ll refer back to a conversation that we didn’t actually speak, but we had.

1:26:48 Brian Rose: I think you told me that when you were in London, and by the way, you moved into the same building I lived in, which was a little weird, Max, but since it’s you, it’s okay. You said I think when you do your radio show, sometimes you guys would wake up in bed and literally like stick a microphone on and do the radio show laying in bed and then finish recording. That seems like such a Max and Stacy thing to do.

1:27:09 Max Keiser: Yeah, we did that. Yeah, we were doing the Resonance FM in London, a show every week. We did that for over 10 years and it was very stream of consciousness. And we did that for a long time. Then we stopped doing that a few years ago. But there’s when people watch the Keiser Report, they’re seeing us, you know, in situ, you know, they’re seeing us in within the relationship. You know, we’re actually this is almost like in the 60s or 70s there was when I was in New York, there was still at that time a concept of live theater of natural theater of where where people would watch you’d go into the theater and there would be a people or a couple would be on stage and they would be living they would be having their daily life. They’d be eating breakfast.

1:28:01 Max Keiser: And this was kind of considered experimental theater at the time in Greenwich Village and downtown and during an interesting period in theater in New York, the Living Theatre, I believe it was called. And so this is kind of similar to the Keiser Report is actually it’s especially now in lockdown, it’s in our actual living room. So we’re actually just you know turning the cameras on during a conversation and then the macro picture is very is reflective or reflexive of the micro picture. So any any relationship has the same dynamics of any of any organism of any system whether it’s the cosmic world cosmos the world a country a town a house the dynamics are similar the fractals are different right but the dynamics are very similar.

1:28:49 Max Keiser: So if you if you have a successful relationship, you are have a successful relationship with the cosmos, right? If you have a successful relationship in your house, you are successfully married to the universe because it’s all they’re all related on different scales. This is the thing that love teaches you is that you are fused with the underlying reality of balance that’s there and accessible. It can only but you the easiest way to reach it is through a loving relationship.

1:29:25 Max Keiser: That’s how you that’s how you reach the motherlode of balance and perspective and tranquility. And if you touch if you get into there you are now at the running at the same heartbeat as the universe or the metaverse as the case may be. So that’s what that’s the value of it. I mean, I wouldn’t want to step out of it just like I wouldn’t want to jump off a building. I wouldn’t want to jump out of an airplane either. So I want to be part of that universal truth, that universal consciousness. And you know, getting it back to Bitcoin, I think, you know, Bitcoin does actually reflect this universal collective unconscious in a way that we’re just now starting to understand because of the brilliant way all the aspects of the protocol are balanced to bring out the best in people that are likely to become good characters already, they become better characters.

1:30:30 Max Keiser: Bad characters who started off as bad characters become worse characters. You mentioned Andreas Antonopoulos who I’ve known since the since we both have been in Bitcoin roughly the same time. He went from being a good-hearted giving person to becoming like almost a saintly figure in the Bitcoin community. He it the protocol transcended him to become more of who he was. Then there are people like Peter Schiff for example who the protocol exaggerated his worst tendencies. So he became a worse person but than he was already in that trend. You see that happening and continuing and he just goes deeper into the dark the darkness of fiat money. And so why does it do that? Because the proto the incentive structure within the protocols layers of technological innovations is so finely balanced.

1:31:28 Max Keiser: It’s so perfectly attuned to the to the universe and the metaverse that we are responding to it on a globally unconscious level in ways that are transformative. We are becoming it’s an evolutionary step in a lot of ways. And like I said before, if somebody says I don’t get it, I don’t understand it. I don’t want to get it. That’s fine because evolution, you know, it makes its move with or without you, right? You can go with the evolutionary change or not. That’s up to you. But for me, I feel like I’m, you know, taking that step and it’s exciting and that’s where I’m at.

1:32:11 Brian Rose: I love that explanation, Max, and now thinking about Bitcoin in a completely different way, but it makes sense what you’re saying. And watching you and Stacy makes sense, too, on screen. It’s always entertaining and you guys always bring out the best in each other. And I would say your signature on Keiser Report is that controlled anger. Like when you when you came over to my flat for the first time, like honestly I thought we were going to get in a fist fight after our Twitter exchange and you blew up at my webcam and talking about Bernanke. But like you said, it was an extremely well articulated argument and that’s what you do great on Keiser. You bring the emotion and the logic together and you guys bring out the best in each other too. What are your plans both of you for the next like five years? Do you have more documentary films? I guess you’re not doing conferences. Are you going to be broadcasting out of the home? You got other ideas? What’s happening?

1:33:04 Max Keiser: Well, yeah, I guess the next five years do more I think we just started like a Sunday Periscope on Twitter called Lockdown with the Keisers. So, we’ve been doing it for a few weeks now. So this is more like our old radio show. So it’s a long format 45 minute plus format where it’s just Max and Stacy, informal just talking about stuff unstructured and so we started that just recently and that’s a lot of fun and I think we always we’re always in the market to do more short documentary series. Stacy produced two documentaries last year. One was called Bitcoin: The First 10 Years, with the title To The Moon, which is available on RT.

1:33:53 Max Keiser: You can find it there. It’s a 10-part series that covers the 10 year first 10 years of Bitcoin. And she also produced two series two seasons of a show called Front Running. No, one series the first series of Front Running. So it was a political chat that we shot in Brooklyn in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And we have some great guests there. And that was a I think that was a 12-part series that went out on RT that she wrote, directed, produced, co-presented, and did everything really with our usual crew of editors and so that went over really well. So, we hope to do Front Running part two. We hope to do we have some ideas for some new series that we’d like to do. We did another show called Great American Pilgrimage where we traveled from California to Florida and like took the temperature, the political temperature of America. That was another I think 10 or 12 part series show that Stacy produced and that was an interesting shoot because you’re traveling with a crew for a few weeks on the road and it’s a lot of fun. A lot of adventures really.

1:35:12 Max Keiser: So that’s a lot of fun. So we’re always looking to do those types of series and we’ll continue to do I have a venture capital fund called Heisenberg Capital and I’m started making investments in Bitcoin 2011. For example, we invested in Kraken when it was worth $5 million. They just did a raise at $4 billion. So it was like 160x return. That was nice. We’ve got about 10 or 12 venture capital investments that we’ve been made back in the early 2011 2012 2013 period that are just now becoming quite large like Bitso is the biggest exchange in Latin America. ShapeShift we invested in which is pretty big now. Bitfinex is big, very big now. So we’re always looking for good venture capital investments.

1:36:02 Max Keiser: I was just talking to some people this morning about some new investments who are thinking about making in the Bitcoin space using the that vehicle Heisenberg Capital and so yeah venture capital broadcasting documentaries podcasting and getting more into my baking. I make cakes and pies.

1:36:28 Brian Rose: But you’re keto as well.

1:36:28 Max Keiser: But totally keto. Really thing about keto is that you can substitute almond flour for flour and substitute keto sugar for sugar and you can do you can make great cakes and pies and things.

1:36:40 Brian Rose: And you’re keto. There you go.

1:36:48 Max Keiser: Hope I didn’t blow your ears out.

1:36:51 Brian Rose: And you’re and you’re a keto man now.

1:36:55 Max Keiser: Yeah, keto. You know, when I met Stacy, she was doing keto actually, but you know, it was at that time it was called something else. It was the Atkins diet, right? The Atkins diet goes back to the 70s, I believe. And then it was like rebranded as the keto diet. But keto diet is definitely very good. Plus, we do intermittent fasting, so we don’t really have anything to eat after 3:30 in the afternoon until 7 o’clock the next morning. So, we eat during that like eight hour window.

1:37:26 Brian Rose: And is Stacy gonna poke her head in and say hi or not? Come on, Stacy.

1:37:26 Max Keiser: In the kitchen now preparing something keto delicious, telling me they need to wrap it up.

1:37:38 Brian Rose: Yeah, we do wrap it up. Max, how do people find you website? Obviously, they can find you on your own YouTube channel for Keiser Report on RT Keiser Report is there. How else can they find out more about all this stuff?

1:37:45 Max Keiser: Well, my new Twitter handle is realMaxKeiser. Okay. The old Twitter handle, Max Keiser, back in September of last year, it just froze up. And I have access with my password and I can get to it, but when I try to post something to it just goes into this recursive screen, a loop that goes nowhere. And customer service just completely is nowhere. So, I started a new one called realMaxKeiser. So that’s my main Twitter Twitter handle.

1:38:22 Brian Rose: All right, we’ll follow you there and find out what’s going on. Max, thank you very much for being here. I really appreciate you and Stacy. I always forget how smart you are and how well you can articulate some of these things. Honestly, your explanation of Bitcoin is some of the best I’ve ever heard. And I’ve had Andreas here three times. So thank you.

1:38:40 Max Keiser: Well, Andreas is kind of the godfather of it all. I mean, he’s got the best YouTubes. If people really want to find out stuff about it, they should go to YouTube and go to Andreas Antonopoulos. His YouTubes are probably the best YouTube, you know, videos on explaining Bitcoin. I would say I’m more in the metaphysical aspect to it. Is it more appealing to me on many levels because it plays more into my long-term interest in Jungian psychology and cosmic psychology and things like this. But that’s where I would suggest people go to find out. There’s a lot of good apps now. If you want to get Bitcoin, you don’t you never had Bitcoin. You go to this Cash App on your phone, you can just buy $1 worth of Bitcoin. It just goes into your Cash App. If you if you start to accumulate a lot of it on that app, you can offload it onto a wallet, a secure wallet, and you can you can do that if you want, but it’s the easiest way, I believe, to just get into it. My friends over at Swan Bitcoin also have a new service where it’s dollar cost averaging.

1:39:40 Max Keiser: So you just set it up to be every week you’re going to put five bucks into Bitcoin and it just does it automatically and I know those guys well. That’s the it’s pretty new Swan, but they’re getting thousands of signups. I think now the usability of getting Bitcoin is so much easier. When I when I started in 2011, it was really hard. And of course, a lot of people use the Mt. Gox exchange which went bust and all those problems. But now it’s really really easy and I think that’s why we’re seeing mass adoption because it’s just so freaking easy. But anyway, yeah, that’s cool, man. I’m glad to finally reconnect with you and congratulations on that massive success with the London Real Army. I’m very proud to be a sergeant in the London Real Army. I wear I’m waiting for my t-shirt and I hope to spread the London Real Army message all over America.

1:40:32 Brian Rose: I appreciate that, Max. The donation meant a lot. I think you’re actually a lieutenant and the swag is coming on the way. So, I expect pictures on your Twitter page of the London Real Army. But no, really, thank you and I appreciate the advice about dealing with Ofcom here and the regulators and the social media platforms and yeah, we’re fighting every day and planning on exactly spending this stuff intelligently over the next 12 months, all the money we raised and not wasting it and using it when we need it. So, that’s what we’re doing here. Come see us in London sometime. Send my love to Stacy. I miss you guys. You got an open invitation for Thanksgiving dinner and be well, Max.

1:41:06 Max Keiser: Yeah, we’ll have a we’ll have a Thanksgiving dinner over Zoom. The new normal. Oh no.

1:41:13 Brian Rose: All right, Max. Thanks so much.

1:41:13 Max Keiser: Thanks so much, Brian. Have a great one.

1:41:17 Brian Rose: All right. Bye, Max. And thank you for watching us on London Real. You can watch our old episodes with Max on londonreal.tv or on YouTube as well. I think we have two previous ones. And again, go to londonreal.tv/freedom if you want to join Max in the ranks of the army as one of the founding members. And that’s it. We’re out of here. Thank you so much. Bye.