Roger Ver - The Future Of DeFi & The Benefits Of Bitcoin Cash

Full transcript: Roger Ver on London Real

2:24 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Roger Ver, the American entrepreneur, crypto evangelist, investor and business leader. You first discovered Bitcoin in 2011 when the price was still under one dollar and you called it “the most important invention in the history of the world since the internet.” You’re the founder of Blockchain.com and Bitcoin.com and you became an early investor in the Bitcoin startups Ripple and Kraken.

2:59 You have said that cryptocurrency is the future, stating that it will bring “more economic freedom to every single human being on the planet.” Roger, welcome to London Real. Thank you for such a great intro, Brian. Hey, it’s great having you here. I’ve been following your stuff for probably almost 10 years.

3:17 You know, it’s almost 10 years ago since I started this show, London Real, and, you know, I started it with, you know, having conversations with my Brazilian jiu-jitsu buddies, and I know you train. I know you’re a brown belt, I’m a purple belt, and you know, we were just having conversations, and, you know, it changed. We started talking about mindset and nutrition and physicality and then, you know, Roger, back in 2013 people were talking about this thing called Bitcoin, and I didn’t know who to talk to about it.

3:43 I put a tweet out, and everyone said talk to Max Keiser, right, in London, and I thought who is this crazy dude, you know? And we were battling back and forth on Twitter. He came over to the studio I didn’t know if I’d have to choke him out or not. But he came on, and for 90 minutes he just gave this crazy rant, went off on Bernanke, but also talked about this incredible, interesting cryptocurrency, and, you know, that was kind of the beginning, Roger, of my journey here with cryptocurrency on London Real.

4:13 Now, a couple years later, I had Andreas Antonopoulos on, and he came on in 2015, ’17 and ’19. And, you know, Andreas, he’s an amazing guy. He was visualizing the future, the internet of money. But at the time we were still kind of playing around with Bitcoin, and we just… I still couldn’t see it happening, and so we just kept doing what we were doing.

4:34 Last year, as you know, we had a head-to-head fight for freedom of speech. We did the second largest YouTube live stream in the world and it got deleted and banned, and we went on that whole journey. And then this year I ran for Mayor of London, and we had to go head to head just to have free and fair elections. They tried to ban me from campaigning. The police stopped me in the streets.

4:52 It was crazy. And then when we didn’t win Mayor, I started looking back into DeFi crypto. Roger, I was blown away by the amount of innovation that had happened even in the past 16 to 18 months, and, you know, I actually traded on Wall Street in the ’90s. I was involved in, on some really complicated fixed-income derivative trades. They recruited me from MIT just to do this stuff, and I thought I haven’t seen innovation like this in 30 years, and yet it’s happening from three dudes in Israel, or five, you know, girls in Sweden right, or anonymous people out there that are setting up these DEXes, and I was just like, wow, I want to be a part of this.

5:29 So we’ve kind of gone all in on DeFi. We created an academy. I got hundreds of students from around the world that are really embracing this idea, financial freedom. I’ve had some great guests on, and I couldn’t be more excited, but I really wanted to have you on because you’re one of the OGs in the space, you know, stands for original gangster. If people don’t know, I mean, you’ve seen 10 years of this, so you bring opinions to this space that a lot of people don’t.

5:53 A lot of people are new, and I’m wondering if you gave an honest assessment of Bitcoin since when you first saw it in 2011 until now in 2021, is it what you expected it to be, if you had to give it, some maybe pros and cons or some criticism or some praise, is it what you thought it could be, or did it surprise you in some ways and disappoint you in other ways? So one of my favorite thinkers is a man named Ray Kurzweil, who wrote an amazing book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, and a number of other great things, and he says that humans always tend to overestimate the amount of progress we make in the short term, but we underestimate the amount of progress that we’ll make in the long term. And I think the same was true of my involvement in cryptocurrency.

6:38 And there, when I got involved in 2011, it was less than a dollar. We all felt that, like, oh, in just a few months this is going to take over and be money for the world, and sure enough it didn’t happen within a few months, but here we are a decade later, and it’s really made amazing progress, but back then there was only Bitcoin. Today there’s Bitcoin, of course. There’s Ethereum, there’s Monero, there’s Bitcoin Cash, there’s a million and one different projects out there, and all these different DEXes, and this and that, and it’s just an amazing blossoming of innovation happening all over the world.

7:09 And the part that makes the innovation so exciting is that it’s permissionless. It cannot be stopped. And so to answer your question directly about Bitcoin specifically, the thing that everybody’s calling Bitcoin today, to be honest and frank with you, it’s an embarrassment. I’m ashamed of what Bitcoin became at this point. It was effectively censored, and someone like yourself who’s dealt with censorship directly, you know what a giant problem that is.

7:32 The fees intentionally were made so high on Bitcoin that everybody has to use a custodial account like Coinbase or PayPal or something like that. And we just saw on the news a couple of days ago, PayPal has talked about how they’re going to censor everybody that doesn’t hold politically correct views from being able to send payments with PayPal. Well, if your cryptocurrency is so expensive to use directly that you have to use a custodian to hold it for you, you’re subject to their censorship again, and that’s the entire thing we’re trying to route around with all this cryptocurrency stuff is to put people in charge of their own money, so they have permissionless peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world.

8:05 And yeah, a lot of people be mad that I’m calling BTC an embarrassment today, but that’s because they’re holding, you know, billions of dollars’ worth of market cap is in Bitcoin, and those people are talking their book, so to speak. But at the end of the day, try and make a Bitcoin transaction, and then try and make a transaction with just about any other coin. Any other coin works better. And in fact, to all of our viewers here, in the next 24 hours, if you just email me [email protected], I’ll send you out five bucks in Bitcoin Cash for free, no strings attached.

8:34 Just mention London Real, and it’s not because five bucks is a lot of money. It’s because five bucks isn’t possible to send directly from person to person on Bitcoin most of the time anymore, because it’s effectively been censored, and that’s why I’m going to send you Bitcoin Cash, or, you know, some other currency. I’d be fine with doing as well, but it’s just really, really amazing how the entire world doesn’t realize that Bitcoin has effectively been neutered from being peer-to-peer cash for the world.

8:58 It’s now just the speculative asset. And I was listening to your interview with Michael Saylor right before we jumped on here. He got involved in Bitcoin last year, in 2020, and I saw him saying recently that, oh, people tried to change Bitcoin, and like, that’s about Bitcoin that everyone’s calling today. That is the changed version. That’s the one that had its, you know, legs taken right out from under it and can’t work as peer-to-peer cash anymore.

9:20 It’s just this speculative asset where everyone’s speculating on future speculators, whereas the real action is happening in the DeFi space, of course, and on the peer-to-peer cash space. Like, we’re seeing this. If you go on the dark net market, and I’m not advising you to buy anything, but go on there and poke around and take a look. Nobody’s using Bitcoin. They’re all using Monero on there at this point.

9:39 So it’s really, really a sign of the times that if something doesn’t have a secondary use case, it’s not going to be used as a store of value. And that’s the whole narrative around Bitcoin. Everyone says, oh, it’s a store of value. Well, I have news for you. In the U.S., everybody uses the dollar as a store value because they can spend it everywhere.

9:54 In the UK, everyone uses the British pound as their store value because they can spend it everywhere, whatever currency winds up being spendable everywhere on the internet is going to be the same cryptocurrency that people wind up using as their store value. And, sadly, as someone that was launching the very first businesses in the world to start accepting Bitcoin for payments, Bitcoin stopped working for payments unless you’re using a custodian, and if you’re using a custodian, it’s not really any more exciting than PayPal at this point. Well, you know, you bring up an interesting point, and let’s jump on this now.

10:20 I was going to bring it up later, but, you know, we see this camp of Bitcoin maximalists. They call themselves that, and that really means, you know, the obviously not the Bitcoin Cash, but the Bitcoin maximalist. And we saw the conference in Miami a few months ago, right? And my buddy Max Keiser was on there. Saylor was there, and everyone’s there, and you see this group of people that only believe in Bitcoin, and they don’t want to even talk about anything else, and it almost boggled my mind.

10:47 And I mean, I’m good friends with Max. He came to my house for Thanksgiving, but it’s really been hard getting him on the show, because he said, “Look, Bitcoin won. Everything else is a s*** coin. I don’t want anything to do with this. It’s over.

10:59 It’s over.” And I’m like, “But wait a second, there’s other things happening here. You have to admit the Ethereum blockchain, their smart contracts. You have to admit what’s happening with these DeFi is you have to admit there’s innovation happening out there. You’d be a fool not to.

11:12 And, you know, Roger, even when I spoke with Michael Saylor, and we can talk more about those points as well. He even admitted, he said, “Look, I think he believes Bitcoin is cryptocurrency and digital property, but he said, “We will need a currency, and that currency will be a stablecoin.” And I said, “Okay, well, that’s stablecoin based on a smart contract platform.” And he said “Yeah, you’re probably right. Ethereum is going to be part of this ecosystem in some way.”

11:37 So it was nice to see a potential maximalist talking about other issues, but it also worries me that there are these really vehement camps out here that seem not to want to embrace what we all want, at least what I think we all want, Roger, which is freedom, right, which is governments not being involved in our lives, which is a lack of censorship, which is that’s something I think we all want, and yet, unfortunately, we’re seeing camps develop, and the way you’re telling it, now even the currency we think is now free is not. Is this an issue going forward, and is it going to be a problem? It was a giant issue, and it delayed the adoption of cryptocurrency around the world by, you know, years, if not a decade.

12:19 There, it’s really been a disaster. I think a great analogy of these Bitcoin maximalists here, that they say, oh, it’s only Bitcoin and it won and the game is over. It would be like a bunch of people that owned MySpace stock, and at one point MySpace was, you know, it was the social network that everybody was on, but for people that were using MySpace at that time, we remember when the page load times became really, really slow, and it became really hard to use MySpace, and at that point it was the dominant social network, but then when the user experience became, you know, slow and unreliable on MySpace, suddenly, boom, everybody jumped over to Facebook.

12:49 And I guarantee you that if Facebook’s user experience became really slow and unreliable, if they start censoring so much that there’s a revolt, people are going to move to the next thing, and, but that’s a good thing. When people move to a new and better product that it’s more reliable, that’s fantastic, and I used to have a BlackBerry at the time. It was a great phone. My iPhone today is much better than the BlackBerry, and I’m sure probably later this year an even better version of my current iPhone is going to come out.

13:13 That’s a good thing. That’s called progress. And so Bitcoin came out at one point. Well, that’s great. Well, then other cryptocurrencies, like Ethereum or Bitcoin Cash or Monero or take your pick, came out that work even better as peer-to-peer uncensorable cash for the world.

13:25 That’s a good thing. And if something even better than those comes out next month, that’s a great thing, that’s how humankind makes progress. And to sit there in your chair and say, oh, Bitcoin, I already won, and everything else is a, you know, part of my French s*** coin. That’s just crazy talk, right? We want new and better technologies to come out into the world.

13:44 That’s how humankind makes progress, and we’re seeing it happen at an amazing pace though in the DeFi space, in the cryptocurrency space, because it’s uncensorable. It can’t be stopped. The only way to stop this stuff would be to turn off the entire internet in the entire world and keep it turned off, and that’s not a practical thing to do at this point. So it’s really exciting to see the pace of innovation happening. Well, let’s talk about the censorship, because we see a lot of governments trying to censor, or at least threatening to censor.

14:11 We see our centralized financial institutions also trying to restrict us. I got a text message from NatWest a few days ago saying that to protect my money, right? I never realized that they cared so much about me and my money. They’re not allowing me to do credit or debit card transactions with Binance here, and people are getting these all around the world all of my students are, and we’re seeing a lot of these institutions coming in to protect us from what’s happening out there.

14:37 In your mind, can they be successful? Will they be successful? Do we need to watch them? Or in your mind, is this unstoppable? I think it’s unstoppable in the long run, but we want these amazing technologies as quickly as possible because they can certainly be delayed.

14:53 What if they delay all this from happening for, you know, another 100 years or a thousand years? That would be horrible, right? We want it now. We want the best things available for every human being on the planet as quickly as we possibly can have it. To the extent that governments are delaying it with their crazy lockdowns, their crazy economic controls, or their censorship of new ideas, that’s horrible for all of humankind, right?

15:13 It’s not good for anybody. So it’s really, really a big important thing for us to get out there and speak out against the censorship, to speak out against the control of people’s, you know, own money and what they’re able to do with it. This is a life and death matter for people around the world, because more economic freedom leads to more economic growth. More economic growth leads to a higher standard of living. A higher standard of living leads to people living longer, healthier, happier lives.

15:37 That’s what we want for everybody, and cryptocurrencies are the best tool the world has ever had to build that world for us to all live in together. Yeah, I think people really need to understand what’s going on with their centralized financial institutions. I worked in banking for 15 years. I worked on Wall Street. I worked in Chicago.

15:53 I worked here in the City of London, and I saw what happened behind the scenes. It’s an oligopoly of groups that basically control every moment of your life, almost every moment of your life, as a financial transaction, and you’ve been educated your whole life that you’re not smart enough to manage your money, right? That goes to the bankers, that goes to the fund managers, and giving you actually control, responsibility, your money. It’s counter-intuitive to this narrative.

16:19 That’s one of the greatest rackets in human history, and these banks extract, I would say, between 10 and 20% of people’s entire net worth per year through all these different transactions, fees, restrictions, the way they funnel that money in. And so I’m trying to really educate people and try to wreck them on both sides. First of all, the mindset, Robert Kiyosaki talks about it all the time. Poor people work for money. Rich people make money work for them.

16:43 So we have that whole block, and then on top of that, we think these banks are always looking out for us. It’s the only way to do it, right? The payment that takes three days to transfer money around the world, you know, that’s still normal for most people. And then lastly, I’ll say, the innovation when I was at Bankers Trust in New York City, we were working on these incredible new technology, but it was me and maybe 20 other global banks. Now with DeFi, we’ve got potentially 20,000 groups of people with this innovation, and you don’t have this restricted wall where we try to take all the profits.

17:17 So I think it’s important for people to realize that these banks, these beautiful things that, with the marble, you know, lobbies and the things we always think are these ex-institutions. I think they’re holding on for dear life right now to try to get us to stop going in to these DeFi protocols. Have you seen anything that has, like, made your alarm bells go up when it comes to statements banks have made, or even governments, when it comes to “Oh, we’re staying away from crypto,” or “We’re getting into crypto.”

17:48 Yeah, but this has been going on for a long time. So in 2011, my company MemoryDealers.com became the first established business in the world to start accepting Bitcoin for payments. But again, this was 2011. Nobody was really using Bitcoin for payments yet, but we put out a billboard and started doing national radio ads on more than 100 radio stations across the U.S., saying “We accept Bitcoin for payment at bimregulars.com.” And what was the response?

18:10 Bank of America, that I had been with for like 15 years at that point, I had all my personal and business accounts with them. They closed every single one of my accounts, even though not a single customer actually had paid us in Bitcoin, simply for the fact that we were advertising that we were willing to accept payment in Bitcoin. They closed all of my accounts, and so this was in 2011, and then later, in 2012, to help spread Bitcoin adoption, is money for the world, I was selling physical bitcoins.

18:38 They were called Casascius physical bitcoins. They were about the size of a quarter, and they had a hologram on them, and under the hologram was a private key, and so these coins either had one, 10, 25 or even 100 bitcoins on them, and that was selling these physical coins, accepting PayPal for payments, and we were shipping them via FedEx with a track number, and these were physical coins that had bitcoin, you know, private keys in them. We were sending in the mail, and then PayPal sent us an email saying, “Hey, we see you’re selling virtual currency for PayPal.

19:05 You’re not allowed to do that.” And I emailed them back, “Well, actually, we’re selling physical coins. We’re shipping in the mail with FedEx. Like, if that’s a problem, like let me know, we’ll talk about it.” Rather than replying at all, they just closed my account and banned me from PayPal.

19:18 So I got banned from Bank of America for accepting Bitcoin for payments, and then in 2012 PayPal banned me for selling physical bitcoins for PayPal. So this has been going on and on and on, and even just this, very recently, another bank that thankfully didn’t close my account, so I don’t want to upset them too much. I won’t name which bank, but I have some Grayscale shares traded on the, you know, public stock exchange. They’re going to be unlocked here in another couple of weeks, that I want to be able to sell, and they said, “Oh, we’re not even accepting custody of stock for cryptocurrency-related stocks.”

19:50 It’s just so crazy, the amount of pushback from the legacy financial system. But if you look at it, it’s kind of like the traditional taxis in France wanting to ban Uber. Uber gives people such a better experience that everyone wants to use Uber. Why would you use a normal taxi? Yet they then lobbied the politicians and lobbied the political class to go and ban people from being able to use something that makes their life better.

20:12 Cryptocurrency makes people’s lives better, yet the traditional financial system and traditional nation states are, for the most part, hindering and blocking and delaying the adoption of this better technology. That’s a shame for the entire world, and hopefully we can push through that and make it accessible to everybody all over the planet as quickly as possible. But you’re not gonna do that with a high-fee cryptocurrency that you can’t really transact with directly yourself.

20:35 So that’s why I’m a fan of things other than Bitcoin. I think today people should be embarrassed to promote Bitcoin as anything along the lines of a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. It just plain doesn’t work, and I know as somebody who was trying to use it for payments for the last decade. Yeah, and I want to get into that and talk about that whole ecosystem of cryptos. You know, you make a great point.

20:55 Unfortunately, we’re dealing with banks which have deep ties into governments, traditionally especially here in Europe. Sometimes it’s really hard to tell where the bank ends and the corporation ends and the government ends. So they’re going to be fighting. There’s this concept of the innovator’s dilemma. I’m sure you know it, but the truth is that the innovation never comes from the established business, and it’s not even a conspiracy.

21:15 It’s just the margins are so high. They’ve had these businesses for sometimes centuries. They’re always going to resist, and that’s why you need the fight out there, and usually the product has to be, I think, 10 times better. That’s the rule of thumb in Silicon Valley. These products clearly are, but it’s still, we’re in a fight right now, and it’s going to be continuing to be a fight going forward.

21:34 It’s going to be interesting. One thing I want to ask you about before we get into a lot of the details around these various cryptos, is censorship. You know, we saw yesterday BitBoy Crypto, who’s been on the show a couple weeks ago, Ben. His entire channel was taken down. I think it was 24 hours ago by YouTube.

21:52 I was shocked, and I shouldn’t be shocked, because I’ve gone head to head, had many strikes with YouTube. I’ve had multiple guests on this show that have had their entire channels deleted, and yet all of a sudden you got a guy out there who’s basically promoting crypto. He’s not promoting, the last time I checked, overthrow of governments, any criminal activity, anything like that, and yet the whole thing was deleted. Now he got it back, but it just makes me very concerned as to the censorship going forward.

22:18 And for people that don’t know, censorship is real. Last year we had a massive fight for it, and once they burn you, once you start self-censoring, you start wondering, wait a second, can I say this one thing on this channel or not? And pretty soon, all the media you’re consuming from these big tech companies that are bigger than the governments and more powerful than the governments, are now censoring the government, as we’ve seen, right? Facebook is getting direct instructions from the White House as to what sort of content to censor, so they’re joined at the hip, effectively at this point.

22:48 Yeah, but it’s something we, you know, we saw last year with pandemic. We saw it with politics, but I’d say, Roger, a lot of people don’t see it as clearly with crypto. First of all, have you seen a lot of things behind the scenes, and how do we try to keep an eye on this going forward? How do we try to get real information to the people? So the censorship in cryptocurrencies, from my own firsthand, direct knowledge, started as early as 2011, right?

23:17 So this is really, really so. In 2011, of June, for the first time in my experience with Bitcoin, there was the first big price run-up, and the price over the course of a couple of weeks went from around two or three dollars to 30 in June of 2011, and the main place where everybody was discussing Bitcoin at that time was a forum called bitcointalk.org, and on that forum everybody kind of knew everybody. It wasn’t a giant community at that point, right? The price was, you know, single digits when this took place.

23:47 And all of a sudden, what happened when the entire world and the mainstream media started reporting on Bitcoin, how it hit 30 for the first time? There was a flood of these, like, fake accounts on the forum that were just posting nonsense fluff, buy, sell, oh no, and just made the forum completely unusable. They effectively shut down the discussion place for Bitcoin at the time when Bitcoin needed to have these discussions the most, and the most new people were coming to Bitcoin to learn about it.

24:12 So as early as 2011 there was some sort of orchestrated attempt to disrupt the discussion platforms where people were discussing Bitcoin, and then much later on, I think it was 2015 or so, our Bitcoin on Reddit, and Reddit’s a whole other censorship story, but our Bitcoin was the big discussion platform where everybody was talking about Bitcoin. It had more traffic than every single other Bitcoin news website combined. And then all of a sudden, overnight, all the moderators that everybody knew got kicked out of their moderatorship position.

24:42 This other guy, using an alias, then imposed this draconian censorship policy that’s been going on to this very day. And at the time it happened, everybody knew what was going on. Everybody knew the truth. Everybody knew that Bitcoin was supposed to scale on chain, to be money for the entire world. You could read it right there on bitcoin.org, still to this very day, if you go on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

25:02 But then over time that censorship really, really became effective, and everybody that came to Bitcoin after the censorship started only got to hear one narrative, and it launched this whole new generation of Bitcoin maximalists that don’t know the truth, that don’t know that Bitcoin was supposed to be money for the world. And I guess that’s why governments engaged in censorship is because it just plain works, and that was really surprising to me. I was, I guess I was naive, and thinking that the truth would win out in the short term.

25:32 And I’m still cautiously optimistic that it’ll win out in the long term, but my gosh, in the short term, what a disruptive horrible thing it was for Bitcoin to have this censorship going on, of what’s supposed to be censorship money for the world. So if you’re using censorship to protect your censorship money, you’ve missed the entire point of what’s going on with Bitcoin. And that’s still going on to this very day, to where you’ll see people, you know, attack me and attack Jihan Wu, the man who brought Bitcoin to all of China and translated the white paper into Chinese and spread to the whole world.

26:02 Both of us today are big giant Bitcoin Cash fans, and you’ll see these Bitcoin maximalists try and claim that we’re scammers or attacking Bitcoin. No, we’re the people who brought Bitcoin to the world. And then you see much more recent, you know, newcomers to Bitcoin, like Michael Saylor, who just plain don’t understand because of the censorship that went on. And Michael, if you want to learn about it, I’m more than happy to give you a, you know, one-on-one private tutoring session on everything that happened and show you why.

26:24 Bitcoin Cash is a better tool to bring more economic freedom to the world, and there’s a fantastic website I invite people to look at. It’s called whybitcoincash.com, and it explains it so incredibly clearly. Yeah, look, censorship is real. And again, just to give people a very clear example. For nine years I sat in this leather chair and had long-form conversations with over a thousand people in the world.

26:46 I had everybody on the show. You name it: bodybuilders, actors, politicians, activists, Edward Snowden’s attorney. You know, you name it. I had him on the show, and it wasn’t until April 6 of last year, where I had a 60-some year-old man on the show. We had a calm conversation for two and a half hours, and that episode was even allowed to say his name.

27:05 Yeah, it’s David. It’s David Icke, and that was deleted and banned, and I got a real I got a real classic case of understanding what censorship was, and so you make a great point, Roger. People think Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, even the internet to a certain extent, is censorship-free, when all of those things are censored. Google is an agenda engine. It is.

27:28 YouTube is owned by Google. All of these things have so many things in place, and whether it’s a single actor or a group of people or a conspiracy or trolls, whatever it is, there are ways of shutting down narratives, and I ran for Mayor last year. You wouldn’t imagine some of the things that were coming out of the woodwork about me and my past and my businesses. It was incredible to see what could get manufactured, and it would change the ideas to where, as you said, anybody coming new to the game they only know that narrative.

27:59 And it’s a dangerous, dangerous piece, and that’s why freedom of speech is such an important piece of the equation here as humans, because if we can’t talk about it, there’s something wrong, and if you can’t have that discussion, there’s something strange. And, you know, last year we ended up creating our own separate Digital Freedom Platform and streamed 57 interviews on there with doctors, scientists, nurses, Nobel Prize winners, four-star generals. And the crazy thing is, Roger, is now 12 months later, most of those narratives are mainstream, and yet we couldn’t talk about it at the time.

28:30 So I appreciate what you’re saying about this, and let’s jump into these coins, because I had Michael Saylor on here a month ago or a few weeks ago. He’s got three and a half billion dollars in Bitcoin right now as a public company. He made a big bet. Obviously, we’ve got the maximalists on one side. We’ve got people embracing Ethereum, and I know you have as well with smart contracts.

28:49 You’ve got people like Charles Hoskinson, who’s going to be here in a few weeks, who’s creating Cardano and some amazing systems. Tell me, what does the world need to understand about these protocols again? The Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and all these other potentials with Ethereum and Cardano, and also, is it a net positive that Michael Saylor’s making the investments, even though you think he’s maybe investing in the wrong instrument? Is it still in that positive yeah.

29:16 I do think it’s a net positive because it’s putting the spotlight on this whole ecosystem. And so everybody, for the most part, hears about Bitcoin for the first time, but then when they go down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, they also discover, you know, the Ethereums or the Moneros or the Bitcoin Cashes or the Cardanos. And I’m a fan of anything that works. I literally put up the seed money to start Ripple, to seed money to start Zcoin, Zcash, and a number of other ones out there.

29:38 I’m a fan of anything that works, and at the end of the day, you can have the best marketing in the world, but if the product doesn’t work, it’s not going to take off. And so it’s a fantastic thing that we have this Darwinian evolution of cryptocurrencies getting better and better generation after generation. So Ethereum’s much better than Bitcoin. Maybe Cardano will wind up being even better than Ethereum, and maybe something after that will be even better than that.

30:02 So this is a fantastic thing for the world, and so the fact that I think Michael Saylor is mistaken, and being so excited about Bitcoin and, for the most part, being a Bitcoin maximalist, that’s sad for him and for his company, but it’s good for cryptocurrency as a whole, because people are saying, hey, a publicly traded company’s putting, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars into Bitcoin. Now they have billions of dollars plus worth of Bitcoin on their book. Let me look into this, and then they’ll see, oh, well, Bitcoin’s horrible for payments and doesn’t do much of anything other than hold it and hope other people will buy it later.

30:30 But look at all the cool stuff you can do with Ethereum or Smart Bitcoin Cash or Cardano or Monero or any of this stuff, and and then they’ll find the ones that actually work, and they’ll start using the ones that work, and then before you know it, we’re no longer dependent on the U.S. dollar or the British pound or the euro or any of these other things, and people will be able to use a form of money that they actually have complete control over themselves, and they don’t have to worry about being censored by their bank or PayPal or whoever else. This is a great thing for the world. So I guess, thank you, Michael Saylor, for bringing so much attention to cryptocurrencies in general, even though Bitcoin doesn’t do particularly much to advance more economic freedom for the world at the moment.

31:05 I appreciate their thoughts there. When it comes to the smart contract platforms, you know, the Ethereums, obviously Cardano actually hasn’t even launched, but there’s a lot of hype around it and the future, and all you said, these incredible DEXes and strange things happening out there. I mean, what excites you about that space? Like, what instruments are you looking at, and how quickly do you think that’s going to change the way we know finance in the next couple years?

31:29 Yeah, I think it’s the same story again. We’ll overestimate the amount of change in the short term, but we’re going to underestimate the amount of change that we make in the long term, and so it’s all happening, but, you know, one step at a time there. But the thing that got me the most excited about from the earliest days was this idea of peer-to-peer electronic cash, right? And so that’s your, something like your Bitcoin Cash or a Monero or Zcash, or some of these.

31:50 There’s a bunch of competitors in that space, and whichever one wins that’s fine as long as the world winds up with that. But then the next question is, what do you do with your peer-to-peer electronic cash? Well, you can buy your groceries, that’s great. You can, you know, do your payroll, that’s great. But how about investing?

32:04 Well, that’s where this DeFi stuff comes in. So it allows any investor anywhere in the world to invest in any other entrepreneur or even non-human entrepreneurial-type platforms, right? These various DEXes or DAOs, and nobody can stop you. No one can freeze your funds. Nobody can mess with your stuff.

32:19 It doesn’t matter if you know Janet Yellen doesn’t like what you’re investing your money in. It’s your money. She can’t block it. This is fantastic for the entire world, and so what’s going to be next? I think it’s all the various use cases of your peer-to-peer electronic cash, which are, you know, these DeFi projects and DAOs and who knows what things people are going to come up with next.

32:38 Although one of the other things I’m very excited about, our prediction markets. I don’t think people appreciate how big of a deal prediction markets are, because not only are they basically like a magic time machine, window into the future where you can see what’s going to take place in the future, but it’s also a tool for you to be able to figure out what actions you should take today to achieve your goals that you have in the future. So I think the vast majority of the world don’t appreciate just what a big, giant, important deal prediction markets are, and you know, you know, DeFi and peer-to-peer electronic cash from cryptocurrencies enable uncensorable prediction markets for the world, and I think that’s going to be a really big, powerful tool here that we’re going to see rolled out the next couple of years.

33:18 Can you go a bit deeper on that, as far as explaining what a prediction market is? Is this a way of having kind of a trustless source of projecting things out in the future, as opposed to other organizations that have agendas, or maybe you could explain that? Yeah, so it’s basically a way to harness the wisdom of crowds. Like, if I ask you what do you think is the likelihood of, you know, discovering a new, you know, subatomic particle in the next six months?

33:44 No idea, right? That’s not what we’re spending our day on. But let’s say you’re, you know, a nuclear physicist and you’re busy studying that sort of thing, and you think that they’re close to being able to do that. Will you have direct inside knowledge of that, right? And so all the people that have direct knowledge of that can go on a prediction market and say, okay, I’m going to bet that yes, the answer is yes, and they’ll put their real money on the line, because they have real knowledge about that particular subject, whereas you and I, we don’t know anything about that.

34:07 We’re not going to put our money on the line, so you can basically harness all the brain power of people around the world that actually have knowledge about a particular subject to the point where they’re willing to put real money on the line. So you can find out. So that’s a simple thing. A slightly more complicated one would be, okay, who’s going to win the next election? Well, maybe some people have some inside information about this or that, but you can harness all the different brain power of the people that actually feel that they have some real information on that.

34:32 But an even more useful thing would be, okay, let’s say we want to achieve, you know, whatever goal tomorrow, you know, scientifically, we want, you know, to extend the human lifespan by another couple years. Well, should the income tax rate be higher or lower, and people can bet money on that, and you can see, oh, well, here’s real people with real inside information that actually have knowledge in that space that are putting real money on the line. Well, they say, oh, well, if taxes are lower, the average human lifespan is likely to increase in the future.

35:00 That’s a really, really strong indication that we should do that sort of thing. So rather than just asking one single expert, you can harness the wisdom of, you know, billions of people around the planet with that. And the problem previously was, any time any of these prediction markets started to get much traction, a lot of the things that people like to do the most is with elections, and politicians hate prediction markets. With elections and they would basically ban their prediction markets and shut them down.

35:23 Well, now we have uncensorable prediction markets on the way, and it’s going to be really exciting to see the various ways they wind up being used all over the world. I love that. Tell me, are we going to see blockchain be woven in or become part of elections, government, you know? I know you’re not a U.S. citizen anymore. We’ll talk about that shortly, but like we’ve all watched what happened in the last U.S. elections.

35:48 The controversy surrounded elections, the mail-in ballots, etc. Will this ever one day be blockchain based? I think it’s kind of already starting, but maybe from a different point of view than most people have in the world. So I look at my life and my surroundings, and I think I know how to run my life better than any politician could run my life for me. And so, for example, I, you know, went in earlier and I traded some Japanese yen for this bottle of water here, and that’s because I valued the bottle of water more than the, you know, 100 yen that I paid for the bottle of water.

36:18 That was a vote of my preference. I could have bought Coca-Cola. I could have bought Pepsi. I could have bought some Japanese tea. I could have bought all sorts of weird things over at the convenience store here.

36:26 I chose water. Somebody else would choose tea. Somebody else would choose something else. And so people are voting with their money all the time for the various things they want. So, like, I donated to your fundraising campaign previously when you were going through the censorship thing.

36:41 Awesome, thank you. I voted with my money because I support the message of free speech, and I enjoyed lots of your programs. There’s lots of other YouTubers that I’ve donated money to because I support what they’re doing. Anytime you spend money on anything anywhere, you’re voting with your money, and I think that’s what’s so incredibly powerful about cryptocurrencies, is that suddenly now the vote with your money can’t be censored. And so, for example, if people wanted to donate money to David Icke, I think probably just about every financial platform in the world has probably cut him off.

37:11 Cryptocurrencies can’t cut him off unless you’re having to use a custodian with your Bitcoin, because the fees are too high to work with it directly, but every other actual cryptocurrency, they can’t cut him off. This is a really, really powerful tool. And people, I think, unless you study, you know, economics, and there’s a fantastic essay, or you can watch YouTube videos called “I, Pencil,” and it’s the story of a pencil. Are you familiar with the story, Brian?

37:33 Yeah, but tell it, because you tell it really well, and it’s a fantastic story. I’ll gladly tell it. So, like, it starts off with a claim from the point of view of a pencil, and the pencil says, “There’s not a single human being alive on the planet that knows how to make me.” And most people stop being a pencil. That’s so simple, anybody can make a pencil.

37:49 Like, what do you mean, nobody knows how to make a pencil? But then he goes into the detail, right? Of a pencil, for example, there’s the yellow paint, and to make the yellow paint, they dig, I don’t know, some dye out of the ground somewhere, maybe mix it with something else to make the yellow paint. And this and that, and then for the wood that’s in the pencil, they cut down trees somewhere else, and there’s the chainsaws that are used to cut down the trees, and the chainsaws are made with iron ore that’s dug out of the ground somewhere else, and they run on gasoline that comes from oil in the Middle East, that’s then shipped on a tanker to a refinery, and they refine it in the gasoline that then lines up to the gas station that they sell it to the lumberjacks, and there’s the restaurant that cooks the food for the lumberjacks that are coming down the trees to make the wood and the pencil, and then there’s the rubber tip on the end of the pencil that comes from, like, rubber trees in Thailand, and it has to get processed somewhere else.

38:33 It goes through the entire story of making a pencil, and you read the story, you realize, my God, the pencil was right. There’s not a single human being alive on the entire planet that knows how to make a pencil. But the way all of these people coordinate together, to come together, you know, these people haven’t met each other. There’s literally millions, if not billions, of people cooperating together to make this pencil that you can then buy for, like, 25 cents.

38:58 It’s the money. The money transmits the information as to what to make the pencil out of. Should the pencil be made out of wood, should it be made out of plastic? Should the rubber be from, you know, rubber trees in Thailand or somewhere else? And the money is the flow of the information for people all over the planet to be able to collaborate with each other, to be able to produce the most things for the most number of people, whether it’s pencils or pens or cars or clothes or jackets or bottles of water at the convenience store.

39:22 The money is what transmits the information on how to do that the most effectively, in the most cost-effective, beneficial manner for the most number of people around the world, and anytime governments or corporations get in the way of that flow of the money, they’re literally retarding the rate of economic progress of the entire world and lowering the standard of living every single human being on the planet. So that’s why it’s so incredibly important to have this peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world that cannot be censored, so that all of us human beings on the planet can collaborate together more effectively and more efficiently to produce the things we all want, whether it’s YouTube videos or bottles of water or pencils from the convenience store.

40:00 It’s the money that transmits that information. And so we need to get governments and corporations out of the way and out of the business of being able to censor the flow of money around the world. And that’s what’s had me so excited about cryptocurrencies for the last decade. Yeah, and I love how you explain that. It’s really capitalism at its finest.

40:15 It’s hard to believe that in the country you and I both used to live in, that they’re actually debating the merits of socialism and more government control. I think it was you, Roger, that once said, “Any voluntary action between anyone, anywhere, makes both people better off.” It’s a great statement. It’s a simple statement. It kind of embodies the invisible hand of capitalism that, you know, I think Adam Smith explained.

40:36 And again, when the government gets involved, it’s when you think they’re smarter than the market to make decisions. There’s been no case in history where that’s ever been the case, and so we need to find ways to streamline these things. And again, this, you know, digital currency is probably one of the biggest ways where you could force multiply that, and I really love how you put that. I want to ask you a couple questions just about some other random coins.

41:01 How do you feel about meme coins, Dogecoin, Shiba ones that, I mean, for all effective purposes, and I don’t want to offend anybody out there, don’t seem to have, you know, potential, you know, second-order use cases or potential, you know, DeFi platforms, and yet they still hold value, and people amass them. Are these good for the ecosystem? Bad for the ecosystem? Obviously, we see Mr. Elon Musk out there screwing around with his Twitter account. You’ve got someone like Charles Hoskinson who really thinks it’s a massive detrimental thing for the community, that it’s going to bring regulation that’s going to hurt all of us.

41:35 How does Roger Ver feel about meme coins? I think somewhere in between. So if you look at Dogecoin, it just plain works better for payments than Bitcoin at this point, and the inflation rates in the same ballpark. So as a store of value, Dogecoin potentially is better than Bitcoin at this point, and that’s sad for me to say, but that’s the truth, right? My emotions shouldn’t get in the way of the truth there.

42:01 And these other ones, is it gonna attract more regulatory scrutiny? Yeah, it probably will, and that’s why it was so incredibly important to push out this peer-to-peer electronic cash for the entire world as quickly as we possibly could. And that’s why the censorship and the delay of adoption by limiting the block size on Bitcoin was so incredibly frustrating, because it gave the politicians and the regulators time to catch up and realize, oh, our central banks and our magic money printing machine that everybody has to use, up until now it’s under threat.

42:27 These cryptocurrencies, people might actually start using them, and now it’s giving them time to delay and disrupt and try and regulate that sort of thing. And whereas initially my goal was to get as many people using it around the world as quickly as we possibly could, and so it would just plain become default money for the world before the regulators even knew what hit them. And now they’ve definitely had time to keep catch up, and they’re paying very, very close attention to the point where, here, in Japan, all the cryptocurrency exchanges, they’re not allowed to list any of the privacy coins.

42:56 You’re not allowed to trade your Monero, Zcash, Dash, Zcoin. Any of the privacy coins are not allowed on the exchanges here in Japan and in Korea and a number of other countries. That’s a really big problem, because if you look at what makes money money, fungibility is one of those things. Well, fungibility is just a fancier way of saying privacy. So the fungibility of these privacy coins is much, much better than the fungibility of an Ethereum or a Bitcoin at this point.

43:21 And so it’s a real shame that the regulators are starting to catch up, but Dogecoin definitely has some merit at this point and has a big market cap, and a lot of passionate Dogecoin fans out there. And what about Elon Musk? Is he a net positive for crypto markets, and what do you see when he tweets about Bitcoin, Dogecoin, etc.? I think Elon Musk is a huge net positive for the world, right? So we like to complain about PayPal, and I’ve done my fair share of complaining about PayPal at this evening, but PayPal revolutionized e-commerce.

43:50 As someone who was involved in e-commerce from the earliest days of the internet, selling Magic: The Gathering cards and Beanie Babies on Newsnet, where people would have to physically send me postal money orders in the mail, and then PayPal came along and people could send money right to my email address. It was a miracle. And so thank you, Elon Musk, for his role in that, and then now SpaceX and Tesla and all these things. So thank you, thank you, thank you.

44:14 And I think the world owes a debt of gratitude to all these amazing entrepreneurs that make people’s lives better off. And as you mentioned, that I mentioned, anytime anybody trades anything voluntarily with anybody else, both people are better off after the trade happens, otherwise it wouldn’t take place. And so I love all of my Elon Musk-related progress that I bought, so I appreciate his effort in that space or all those spaces, and I want to get into some of your background, because it’s pretty fascinating stuff.

44:40 But I also want to ask you about stablecoins. We’re hearing a lot of regulators talking about stablecoins. We’re seeing their market caps become quite big. It seems to be an incredibly useful tool for this ecosystem. How do you see this playing out?

44:55 Is there anything on your mind you think we need to look out for or be careful for, and do you think it will be a lightning rod for regulation? I think the entire space is already a lightning rod for regulation. The stablecoins certainly are part of that lightning attraction there, but because they’re incredibly useful. I know I use stablecoins almost daily as well. They’re really, really useful, but the thing that you have to understand is, if you’re using a stablecoin, you have the counterparty risk there with whoever’s holding the dollars or pounds or whatever the stablecoin is.

45:30 Someone somewhere is supposed to have that money in some account somewhere. If they don’t, that’s a big problem for you as the stablecoin holder. The other big problem is someone who is an early, early adopter of a company called e-gold in the earliest days of the internet, I think in 2002 or so. This company e-gold was fantastic. You could send any amount of gold via, you know, that you just transfer the ownership from your e-gold account to somebody else’s, and so I actually managed to sell some computer memory, and one of my customers paid me an e-gold, and it was great.

45:59 All right, the value of the gold would go up and down with the dollar, but they would pay me, you know, 20 worth of gold at whatever the exchange rate was at the time, and this service was really starting to get popular, where people all over the world were finally starting to be able to use gold as money again. And then what happened? The U.S. government literally came in and seized all the gold from this company, and tossed the CEO in jail, and all the users like myself, who thought I had, you know, a couple hundred dollars worth of gold in my account, never got it back, ever.

46:24 And probably hardly anybody else ever got their gold back. So if you’re using a stablecoin, you’re at risk of the exact same thing happening again, except for these things like DAI, right, where you have cryptocurrency underlying assets that just stay pegged to the U.S. dollar, which you can do now on Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash and a number of other things. This is really, really cool. So, like, if you have some, you know, Ethereum or Bitcoin Cash and you’re worried about the price volatility, well, no, you can lock your Ethereum or your Bitcoin Cash into, if you have 100 today, you’ll have 100 worth tomorrow, regardless of what the price of either of those assets do.

46:57 And there’s more and more that’ll be able to do that in the future. So that’s a really, really big deal, and I think we’re going to see more and more people start to use those as the user interface tools become easier and easier for normal people that don’t have, you know, PhDs in computer science. So, and, you know, at Bitcoin.com we’re busy building those apps to make that easy for people around the world to be able to use. So we’re gonna see more and more of that in commerce and in use around the world.

47:22 But that’s why I love actual cryptocurrencies so much directly is because there’s no counterparty risk. If you have your Bitcoin Cash or your Ethereum or your Monero in a wallet where you have the private keys yourself, there’s nobody in the entire world that can mess with your stuff, and that’s not true of most stablecoins. So it’s very important to understand the difference. Yeah, it’s been a big part inside my Academy, just trying to educate people on all these little nuances of counterparty risk, and how a future isn’t the same spot, and if it’s not in your gold wallet, there’s an issue.

47:50 And yeah, the stablecoin looks great, and it’s got the dollar, U.S., thing next to it, but how is it collateralized? Has it been stress tested in the market? And some of these algo ones, I still think we need to see a few more stress tests on some of these before we feel better, but it’s great progress. It’s amazing to see. You know, if you told me eight years ago when I was talking to Keiser about a stablecoin, my mind would have been blown.

48:12 You know? And so I love this innovation, and again it only happens, I think, when we decentralize. Roger, I gotta ask you a couple questions about you, because you had a great quote in an interview that I think embodies a little bit a lot of your story, and you said, “When I was in Tokyo, I sold my Lamborghini for Bitcoin,” when these days a lot of people are selling their Bitcoins and buying Lamborghinis, and I think it was kind of an indication that you were kind of in the entrepreneurial game really young.

48:44 You obviously were a big adopter of these coins really young. Tell me a little bit about that kid, Roger, who sold the Lamborghini for Bitcoin. Who was that guy, and what made him tick. Yeah, so I’ve been involved in e-commerce since the dawn of the internet, and I ran one of the most popular bulletin board systems in Silicon Valley, for those of us that are old enough to even know what a BBS was back in the day. And so I saw how incredibly difficult payments over the internet were until Bitcoin came along, and so there was no doubt in my mind whatsoever that people were going to just naturally start using Bitcoin for payments, and so I had a Lamborghini before Bitcoin had ever even been invented.

49:25 And then I was actually supposed to sell it to a friend of mine when Bitcoin hit five dollars for the first time, but that friend wound up being busy, so we never got around to it. And I actually wound up selling it to buy more Bitcoin when it was closer to maybe a hundred dollars a Bitcoin. But I had a, you know, Bitcoin-orange Lamborghini, just by chance that it was that color, but sold it to buy more Bitcoin in 2012, because there was no doubt in my mind people were going to start using it as money.

49:49 And then when we saw the blocks be allowed to become full, which made the transactions slow, expensive, and unreliable on Bitcoin, there became no doubt in my mind that Bitcoin is going to wind up becoming the MySpace of cryptocurrencies. It has this worldwide name recognition and a huge market cap, but the user experience is atrocious, and so MySpace had, you know, hundreds of millions of users. Probably it didn’t matter if the user experience is that bad, people are going to start using something else, and we’re already seeing it happening.

50:17 Ethereum is right around half the market cap of Bitcoin, and on some days the trade volume’s more. I’ve predicted it in the past, and I’ll predict it again. I think Ethereum will be the first one to eclipse Bitcoin’s overall market cap, and then once that happens, the floodgates will really be opened, and these Bitcoin maximalists will be exposed as the emperors with no clothes that they really are. And yet most of my students in my class now keep complaining about the gas fees they’re having to put on Ethereum to execute basic things on Uniswap, to move things between.

50:45 I mean, they’re literally crying, and I’m like, look, I’m just trying to get you to understand these networks. Is that gonna kill Ethereum, do you think? Or is that where Cardano comes in? Or do you think there’s all sorts of innovations with 2.0 and layer two solutions? Yeah, so that’s the big multi-billion-dollar question.

51:02 Is Ethereum gonna get their scaling act together? Is Cardano gonna do it first? Or another one that’s actually launching tomorrow is Smart Bitcoin Cash launches tomorrow. So Ethereum’s gas limit which is effectively how many transactions it can do per second, is 13 million. Smart Bitcoin Cash can run anything that Ethereum can do.

51:21 You can just copy and paste the code right over. So Ethereum’s gas limit is 13 million. Smart Bitcoin Cash’s gas limit is 1 billion. So that’s a really, really, really big step up there, and I’m really cautiously optimistic about that as well. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter which one wins out, as long as all of us humans around the world get to make use of it, and so we just want it sooner rather than later.

51:42 But Bitcoin with its one megabyte blocks, like, I think you have to be really, really have the blinders on to think that that’s the, that’s gonna be the future of decentralized finance. I would be embarrassed to try and promote the BTC version of Bitcoin today. To be honest, and what about the Lightning Network? You heard that brought up on the Bitcoin stage. A lot of ones like the Lightning is going to do this and that.

52:01 What are your thoughts on that? Just ask one of them to actually use it. It’s not there yet. They’ve been promising it’s 18 months away for over five years now. And then the big one that they all seem to be the most excited about is this Lightning wallet called Strike.

52:15 It’s just a custodial account. It’s not any more exciting than a PayPal account, so if you want to use that thing, go ahead and use it. But for me, I want uncensorable money for the entire world, and Lightning Network is not that. Maybe it will be someday, and if it is, fantastic, the world will get to use it, but it’s nowhere even close to being able to do that today. Yeah, I think you make some really good points, and I would encourage anybody who’s listening to us to go do your research and listen to what Roger’s saying.

52:40 Check out Bitcoin Cash. Check out Bitcoin. Check out a bunch of these networks, and ultimately it’s that the fees are going to decide. It’s back to that invisible hand. It’s back to the pencil.

52:50 And again, the MySpace reference is a great reminder to people who thought that would always be the social network. Just like people who maybe think Facebook will always be the social network, or YouTube will always be the video network. If we look at history, it won’t be. There’ll be something else that’s gonna be better, and it’s going to win, and that’s a beautiful thing. So I think we should look into all this, and again, check your narratives, because a lot of people are new to this space and they only have consumed, say, the last 12 months of information, which sometimes takes things away from the past.

53:24 As we know, Roger, I got to ask a couple things about your past because it’s fascinating. How do you, as a young man, process the fact that you get arrested for selling explosives on the internet and have to do 10 months in federal prison? How old were you at the time, and then how did that actually make you into a better man, a better entrepreneur, a better person? Yeah, I think I was 19 or 20 years old when I got arrested for it. So I was selling Magic: The Gathering cards, Beanie Babies, some computer parts, and then fireworks on eBay, because in Cabela’s sporting goods catalog, the number one sporting goods catalog in the entire U.S., they were selling this product called the Pest Control Report 2000.

54:05 I ordered some for me initially, and oh, these are great, every young man loves fireworks, right? And then I saw the people were selling them on eBay, and I saw, oh, I can sell them on eBay for a profit. So I put some of them on there, and today, it sounds, you know, this is post today is post, you know, 9/11, and eBay is a much, much calmer place than it was back then. You could sell, you know, assault rifles and bullets and, you know, anything and everything on eBay.

54:30 It was kind of a free-for-all back then, and so it wasn’t, it didn’t seem that wild at all to be selling these on eBay back then. The big, big mistake I think I made there, that was actually, I ran for political office in the United States. I ran for California state assembly as a Libertarian, and this was not too many years after there was this big incident in Waco, Texas, in which the FBI and ATF burnt to death a bunch of kids in a church. And even if their parents were religious nut cases, burning to death a bunch of, you know, one, two, three, five, six, eight, 12 year-old kids burning to death kids in a church is not okay.

55:04 And if you burn to death a bunch of kids in church, you’re a murderer, plain and simple. So the FBI and ATF, they’re a bunch of murderers for killing those kids in that church in Texas, plain and simple. And so for saying something like that, the ATF and FBI did not like it one bit, and so they started looking into me and who I was. And, you know, I think iran was the one who said you cannot control honest men. So the government makes so many laws that they can, you know, deem anybody a criminal any time to control them, and so that’s exactly what happened to me.

55:32 I wound up being the only person in the entire country to be prosecuted for selling those firecrackers without a license. I wound up signing a plea deal to do ten months in prison rather than seven or eight years in prison, which is what they were threatening me with. And even while I was in prison, the company that I had been buying them from, and the manufacturer, and these other dealers were still selling the exact same product without a license, and so I became the only person in the entire country to get in any sort of trouble at all for selling those without a license.

55:59 But there’s a silver lining there. I think if I hadn’t gone through that experience I would have been interested in Bitcoin, but not nearly as much as I wound up being interested in Bitcoin, because I got to see while I was in prison. There’s a whole, one of the rules in prison is you are not allowed to buy or sell or trade anything with anybody in prison, but that’s what makes human beings human beings, is trading with each other. Right? That’s why we have anything, and everything is the division of labor and trading with other people.

56:26 That’s how we have anything in life. And so in prison there’s an entire prison economy of people doing all sorts of things whether it’s cooking or doing laundry, or, you know, even sexual services are on sale. Like, there’s anything and everything that you can think of is available within the prison economy. But what do people use as money in the prison economy? Well, you don’t have dollars in the same way that you do on the outside.

56:49 People just naturally started using tobacco, postage stamps, and Top Ramen soups, and the reason they use those three things is because they’re all easily recognizable, easily storable, easily divisible, easily transportable, and they have an additional use case, right? You can eat the Top Ramen soups. You can smoke the tobacco, or you can mail a letter with a stamp. And so because all those things had those characteristics, they just naturally became used as money.

57:15 And so I had read about the origins of money in these economics books before I went to prison, and the theories of the origin of money sounded plausible to me, but then I got to see firsthand, right before my eyes, that the theories I had read about in the economics books were true in practice. And so then when Bitcoin came along, I had the theoretical evidence from these books I had read that Bitcoin was going to wind up being used as money, but I had the empirical evidence of my experience in prison watching things just naturally come to be used as money. That made me know, from both the theoretical and the practical, empirical side, Bitcoin was gonna wind up being used as money by people over the world.

57:50 So the first step for me was to buy a bunch of Bitcoin, and the next step was to start investing in the businesses and helping to build the tools to make Bitcoin usable as money for people around the world. And so that’s why today I’m busy investing in, you know, the DeFi ecosystem, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Monero, you know, anything that works out there as actual money for the world, because then it also helps disrupt the prison industrial complex, right? The prison I was in, about 75 to 80 of the people were there for victimless crimes, right?

58:18 If there’s no victim in the crime, it’s not a crime, and it’s the police, the judges, the lawyers, and the people they’re tossing those people in jail for victimless crimes. It’s those people that are the real criminals, not the people that are held in jail. And so I’m really here to build out this ecosystem of peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world, to empower people to have more control over their own lives, to where we can really scale back this prison industrial complex that’s tossing people in jail for victimless crimes, whether it’s smoking pot or you know, gambling on the internet or selling firecrackers to somebody who wants to buy firecrackers.

58:49 So I wouldn’t have been as excited about cryptocurrencies today if I hadn’t gone through that prison experience. It’s fascinating to know that that prison experience, those 10 months, gave you the best economics degree possible, and probably led to making you tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars based on those lessons implanted in your brain. That’s a pretty fascinating case in itself. Were you and are you still angry at the U.S. government or governments in general, and did that have anything to do with you renouncing your citizenship?

59:19 Because a lot of U.S. people think about doing that. I mean, I’m over here as a UK citizen and U.S. citizen. I still have to pay taxes. I still have to, you know, be part of that citizenship. Was that part of your decision?

59:33 Yeah, I was furious, absolutely furious. So when I got out of prison, with the way I had been treated, and that I had three years of federal probation to do as well, and my God, those people at the probation office, what a bunch of jerks, those guys were too. And the two jerks that I remember the names very clearly, the most, Nancy Kirk and Jose Martinez. Both those guys should be, or once a woman, but they should both be ashamed of themselves with the way they behaved and treated me.

59:58 It was just really disgusting. So one example of that is, you know, I was working really hard. I had my own business there, and I bought my first, you know, really nice house in a Silver Creek country club in Silicon Valley there, and I was 24 probably years old at this point. Beautiful house, beautiful, you know, light beige carpets there. The probation officer wants to come and inspect where I’m living.

1:00:19 That’s part of their job. So, okay, shows up there, and especially, you know, in Japanese culture too, don’t wear your shoes inside of your house. Like, that’s a big thing for me. Don’t wear shoes inside the house. The guy’s there.

1:00:29 The probation officer is there to inspect my house. It’s okay, you can come in and inspect it. Please take your shoes off before you come in. You know, my brand new house, I just worked so hard to buy and he says, “No, no, I’m gonna keep my shoes on.” I said, “Well, you can come in my house and inspect and do your job, but take your shoes off before you come in my house.”

1:00:45 He goes, “Nope, I’m gonna keep my shoes on.” And I said, “Well, then you’re not coming in my house.” He said, “I’m gonna keep my shoes on and come in your house, or you’re gonna go back to jail.” And he’s the guy that’s in the position of all the power there, so he then went and tramped around all over the inside of my house with the shoes on, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it, but he’s just, just doing it to be a jerk. Yeah, he could have taken his shoes off, but instead he just wanted to be a jerk and flex his power towards me.

1:01:11 So I had three years of federal probation. The day I was allowed to leave the U.S. I left the U.S. and haven’t lived there since. And during that time I was looking into renouncing my citizenship as well. I actually hired a firm to go and do all the research about how you can get citizenship somewhere else, because that’s the hardest part, and then the most important step, you can’t renounce your U.S. citizenship unless you have citizenship somewhere else, and so I didn’t do it right then and there, because it would have been a, you know, a very, very big part of my net worth at that point.

1:01:41 I wound up doing it later, but special thanks to, you know, the people in the government of Saint Kitts for allowing me to have citizenship there, and I’m very appreciative and thankful to them for that, and anybody can basically do that at this point there. But philosophically, I also want to point out, I think that citizenship is kind of one of these last, you know, vestiges of, you know, ancient barbarism. Why do you need a citizenship? Why should you need any of this sort of stuff?

1:02:07 Right? You should be, if you want to go stay in a hotel somewhere, the hotel should be able to decide if they want you to be able to stay in the hotel. If you want to buy a house, go and buy it. Like, this whole idea of citizenship is a rather crazy, and I think someday people will figure that out, but yeah, the prison experience definitely made me a year to renounce my U.S. citizenship, and then I have this additional, added benefit that even though I’m not living in the U.S. anymore, I’m no longer on the hook for all these crazy U.S. taxes and regulations as well, so it was, you know, multiple birds with one stone there.

1:02:36 You still struggle to get back in the U.S., or you can? Is it sorted now, or they’ll actually let you back in for conferences and things? Yeah, other than coronavirus travel restrictions, I can go to the U.S. anytime I want. I have a 10-year multiple-entry visa, so I can go to the U.S. anytime I like. Okay, fascinating stuff.

1:02:52 And why Tokyo? This is where you live now. Of all the places you could live in the world, why Tokyo, and will you stay there? I like Japan. Japan’s a wonderful place.

1:03:01 The way it started out the first time is once upon a time, there was a Japanese girlfriend before my prison experience, and then when I had gotten out of prison, I knew I was gonna leave the U.S., and so I didn’t know a whole lot about Japan, but I figured, oh, I’ll go give that a try, and it turned out to be a fantastic place. But if I had had, you know, an English girlfriend, I would have wound up in England, or if a Russian girlfriend, would have been Russia, or Brazilian would have been Brazil. So it’s just kind of by good luck, but I really like Japan at this point, but I love the Caribbean as well.

1:03:31 I’ve spent a lot of time in the Caribbean now as well, now that I have my Saint Kitts NNT and citizenship both. And tell me about Brazilian jiu-jitsu, because, you know, whenever I meet someone who trains jiu-jitsu, I’ll usually get along with them, because it means that there’s someone that’s willing to go out on the mats and repeatedly get humiliated, get beaten, lose, but they always have a long-term perspective that I’m learning, I’m getting better, and it seems to self-select a certain type of person. And, you know, to have a brown belt in jiu-jitsu takes many, many, many, many years, and I started training back in 2002.

1:04:12 I actually went to UFC 38 here, and London Brawl at the Hall, and I got hooked. I I’ve been blessed to train with people like John Danaher in New York and Roger Gracie here and all over Asia, but It changed my life, literally. And I’m wondering, why were you attracted to jiu-jitsu, and how has it changed your life? Yeah, there’s no faking it with jiu-jitsu, right? You can talk all you want, but once you’re on the mat, there is no faking it, right?

1:04:39 Like, so I can say on the podcast, you know, here I’m a brown belt. Well, you’ll know for sure if I am or not when we step on the mat. There’s no faking it whatsoever. And I think that’s one of the things that’s so attractive about it. It’s just so incredibly real.

1:04:52 There’s no faking anything in jiu-jitsu. And why did I start? I don’t know. I wrestled in junior high, in high school, and then I didn’t have much exercise after. I was just busy on the computer with my business, and then in my late twenties, I wanted some exercise, and so, you know, I’d watched, you know, all the UFCs from the earliest days and followed all that and went to a bunch of the Pride events in Japan, and was, you know, so, so fun, because I got to see that live.

1:05:15 You know, watching Fedor and Nogueira and Cro Cop and Sakuraba live in Japan were just wonderful, and so, started jiu-jitsu and just absolutely fell in love with that, and I’ve been doing that for, I don’t, like, 13, 14 years now, and there’s just still so much to learn. I’m just learning new things all the time. It’s just a never-ending journey of things to learn, and the realness is what’s just so attractive there too. There’s no faking it on the mat. Like, either you have the skills and the ability or or you don’t.

1:05:41 And, you know, it’s definitely a fight to the death, right? When you tap out, that’s it. If the guy doesn’t let go of the choke, that’s the end of your life there. So you’re trusting each other with your lives and your hands there, and not to hurt each other in the process of practicing hurting each other. Yeah, it’s a beautiful martial art, and it’s unlike any other martial art because it’s real.

1:06:01 It’s live, and you’re right. You’re basically, you’re basically fighting to the death, or to where a major appendage is gonna snap and break every single time you’re on that mat. There’s no faking it. It’s all real, and that’s why I think a lot of people are really attracted to it, at least certain types of people. And you can’t fake a belt.

1:06:18 You know, you know what the person is, and you’ll know within 10 seconds of rolling with them whether they are that belt. And, I’ve met so many amazing people around the world. I actually went to two events in Japan, two Pride Fighting Championships, and I went down to Rio de Janeiro and trained with the Brazilian top team guys down there, and went, saw them fight in Japan. So yeah, it’s, it’s an amazing art form. I encourage anybody to jump into that.

1:06:40 I’m getting my sons into it as well. Roger, I want to ask you a kind of a strange question. You know, a lot of people in life, and even in this crypto space, they dream of being rich, and yet for you, this is something I think you probably accomplished early on, and I was wondering if maybe you could glean some of knowledge of your knowledge or experience in this space, because it sounds like your relationship with money is different than a lot of people out there.

1:07:10 A lot of people say, once I become rich, my life will be fine, then I’ll be happy, then I’ll get the wife I want, and yet anyone who’s made money knows that doesn’t really happen that way. And yet you got to learn this lesson early on, Roger, and so I’m curious what’s your relationship with money been like over the years, and can you give any wisdom to people out there that are you know, waiting until they get this to allow themselves to be happy, you know, to do all those things they’re doing? I know it’s probably a strange question, but I think it’s something you can answer that maybe a lot of people can’t.

1:07:41 Yeah, I think the answer is that the happiness is the mindset. You can be happy right now today if you want to be, and if you have the right mindset When I, the first couple of months I was in prison, were pretty hard, and I didn’t have the right mindset, but once I had been in there and started to have the right mindset, even in prison, you can be happy. You just have to have the right mindset and look at everything the right way. So one example of that, there was a fun letter that was circulating around in the prison.

1:08:07 It was called, like, the top 100 things about being in prison, and at first you think, like, what could be the good things about being in prison? There’s nothing good about being in prison, and granted, I would much rather be on the outside than in prison, but there actually are a lot of nice things about being in prison if you have the right mindset. And so some examples of these things that were on the list about the top 100 things about being in prison is you don’t have to worry about what you’re going to cook for dinner.

1:08:35 You don’t have to worry about when you’re gonna have dinner, right? You don’t have to worry about paying your electric bill. You don’t have to worry about paying your water bill. You don’t have to worry about what you’re gonna wear tomorrow. You don’t have to worry about, you know, there’s a whole list of the things that you don’t have to worry about.

1:08:48 You have to worry about buying anybody a Christmas present. You don’t have to worry about going to anybody’s, you know, remembering anybody’s, you know, this or that while you’re in there. Like, there’s a whole, I wish I stole the list. I’m sure if you Google it, you can find the same sort of list out there. But once you have your routine down and some people that you’re friends with and and your, you know, positive mindset that, hey, this is part of the journey of life, and just try and enjoy every moment through your journey of life.

1:09:13 You can enjoy anything, whether you’re in a, you know, a 500-beat-down Honda Civic or flying around in a private jet. If you have the right mindset, you can be happy, and, if you’re always busy looking at the other guy and say, oh, well, that guy has more, that guy is this. Yeah, you’re not going to be happy, but don’t focus on what the other guy’s doing. Focus on what you’re doing, and focus on your life and enjoying your time and your friends and your family and your jiu-jitsu and your whatever it is that you’re passionate about in life.

1:09:39 Focus on that and enjoy the journey through life, because, you know, it’s scary, because the older someone is, you know, the more they seem to say, that, oh, the older I get, the faster the time goes. Well, take a moment and enjoy the time as it’s going by. Enjoy each day with your friends and your family and your activities that you’re there with, and don’t be complaining about it. Be enjoying it. Hey, I have a great day.

1:10:00 I have the water I need. I’m talking to interesting people. I have interesting friends and family around me. Like, life is good. Stop to appreciate the life around you, because if you’re too busy focusing about, oh, you know, that guy on Instagram looks like he’s having more fun than I am, well, don’t worry about him.

1:10:15 Worry about your life, and have the most fun and enjoyment out of your own life as you possibly can. And I’ll tell you, I’ve had, you know, Lamborghinis and other fancy cars. The truth of the matter is I almost never drive them, because, and then I wound up selling them, because they’re not that fun. They’re fun for the first day. They’re a little bit, you know, they’re still fun on the second day but by, you know, the 2,000th day they’re not exciting or interesting at all.

1:10:37 So the variety is the spice of life. Also try new things. Go out there and enjoy the moment. That would be my advice, and if let’s say you do really, really want a Lamborghini, or you really, really want whatever expensive fancy thing, the way to get that is to figure out what other people want in life, and figure out a way to give them the things that they want in life, and then charge them for it along the way, whether it’s, you know, selling powder, bottled water, or pencils or microphones or anything and everything that people use in their lives.

1:11:04 The way someone gets rich is by giving other people the things that they want. And so figure out what it is that other people want, and figure out a way to give them, give it to them, as part of a business, and that’s how you’ll be able to get more of what you want out of life as well. Do you think fundamentally, as humans, we have a dysfunctional relationship with money, that we do think of it in the wrong way, whether we’re brought up that way or we, because of the media or because of Instagram.

1:11:27 I mean, do you think that’s true? I think most people don’t even understand what money is money. Money is absolutely everything. Everything is competing to be money, from the chair I’m sitting in to this bottle of water to the table to the laptop, but all those things that I just mentioned, they don’t work very well as money. So people don’t wind up using those things as money, whereas the dollar and the pound and the euro and these different cryptocurrencies do work well as money.

1:11:51 So people have been using those things as money, but it’s anything and everything, but the end result you don’t want to wind up with a pile of money. You want to wind up with a pile of the things that you’re actually able to enjoy, whether it’s, you know, jiu-jitsu keys and a membership at the jiu-jitsu gym, or or, you know, cars if you like those things or computers or whatever it is that you actually enjoy directly, if you enjoy, you know, having a pile of gold coins or a stack of, you know, dollar bills or British pounds. I guess that’s fine, but focus on the actual things that you actually enjoy.

1:12:19 And I think a lot of people view money as the end goal. I think money is just the tool that you use to be able to have more time with your friends and family, or be able to do the activities with your friends and family that you want to be able to do. And so you should view money as the tool rather than the goal. Yeah, very good advice. All right.

1:12:37 It’s 2031. Roger, what are you doing with your life? If it’s a great year, 2031, what are the kind of things that are going to fulfill you at that point in time? It’s 10 years from now. Yeah, 10 years.

1:12:48 A lot’s changed in the last 10 years, and even more is going to change in the next 10 years, because the pace of innovation and the pace of progress is increasing. So in the next, in the coming 10 years, I want to focus a lot more of my time and money and effort on a human life extension. Right? If you die, you can’t spend any more time with your friends and family. You can’t do any more jiu-jitsu.

1:13:08 You can’t do any of the things that you love in life. So I want everybody to be able to have the opportunity to live life as long as they want to live it. If you get bored of life, well, you can commit suicide anytime you want, but I want people to be able to have the option of being able to live as long as they want with in good health, with their friends and family, and being able to do the activities. So I’m just be taking more and more of the money that I earned from my involvement in cryptocurrency and investing in these various businesses and start-ups, piling that into life extension technology businesses, and that’s going to be the next step in the next focus for the next 10 years.

1:13:38 Okay, but you also will be involved in the crypto space regardless, in some way? Of course, I’m not going anywhere. Okay, as, and you’ll be talking about it, but also investing on boards, on companies. It will be with the majority, maybe a few months ago, I took a really big step back and basically declined almost every interview request that I have. I took yours, because I know you from having watched your show, and you have a big audience, and I’m a fan of your message.

1:14:07 So thank you for that, but I want to focus more on some private time with my friends and family and that sort of thing, and so I don’t want to be as big of a public face for crypto, but I’m not leaving the ecosystem in any way whatsoever. But, yeah, I’m not going anywhere, but I’m gonna continue to take a little bit of time away, whereas for the last 10 years it was every waking moment all the time. And I literally gave Andreas Antonopoulos, one of your other guests, I gave him his first job in Bitcoin, and we paid him in Bitcoin for that.

1:14:36 So I’ve been around the space for a long, long time, but I want to spend a little bit more time with some friends and family and competing some more jiu-jitsu tournaments before I get too old. Yeah, you got one coming up, so bravo to that. That’s fantastic. Couple final questions, just about you. Best day of your life and worst day, your life.

1:14:52 What comes up to mind when I ask you those questions? What are those days? It sounds kind of crazy, I think, but I think the happiest day of my entire life was the day I stopped being an American, and I was no longer a U.S. citizen. That was literally the happiest day of my entire life. I think I was, I was, you know, more happy that day than when, you know, Bitcoin hit, you know, a hundred dollars or a thousand dollars or any of the price points that Bitcoin hit or anything else that’s happened in my life I think the happiest day was when I stopped being an American.

1:15:24 I just felt so incredibly free at that point, and just to finally felt like I had much more control over my own life, my own destiny, and my own future. So that was a really, really, really wonderful feeling. And the worst day of my life, I don’t know. I think it’s the mindset. Like, even I’ve had some, you know, bad things happen to me.

1:15:43 I think when the, you know, the FBI and ATF raided my place and took me to jail. Most people would look at that as a really really bad day. But now I can look at that and say, hey, I have some really awesome prison stories and stories of being raided by the ATF and the FBI. And so even when really, really bad things happen, you’d need to look at this overlying. And there’s a great, you know, proverb called the Chinese farmer.

1:16:06 I don’t know if you’re familiar with this, but basically it’s a story, and there’s the Chinese farmer, and I forget each step of the story, but like, the first one is like, some, you know, his horse runs away, and the neighbor says, oh, “That’s really too bad, your horse ran away, you needed the horse.” And the farmer says, “Maybe, maybe that’s too bad maybe, maybe not.” And then the next day, the horse they ran away comes back, but it brought three wild horses with it, and the next-door neighbors say, “Oh, that’s great, now you have three more horses.”

1:16:31 And he goes, “Maybe,” and then his son tries to tame the wild horses and gets kicked off the wild horse and falls down and breaks his leg, and the neighbors say, “Oh, that’s horrible. Your son broke his leg, he can’t help you around the farm now.” And the Chinese farmer goes, “Maybe,” and then the next day, the military draft tribunal shows up at his house, looking to draft people into the military, but his son has a broken leg, so he can’t be drafted into the military.

1:16:54 And the neighbors say, “Oh, that’s great, this,” and the farmer goes, “Maybe.” And so it’s kind of like this. You don’t really know in life, even if something seems really fantastic or really horrible at the moment, in the long term, maybe it’s not fantastic, or maybe it’s not horrible after all. And you really don’t know it at the moment with a lot of these things. And so just enjoy the journey along a long life, because you don’t really know where it’s going to take you.

1:17:18 And if you’d asked me, you know, a decade ago, did I think I’d be sitting here today having this chat with you? No, I wouldn’t. And where we’ll be in a decade from now, we don’t really know, but let’s enjoy the journey to get there. Yeah, I love that proverb. I’m really glad you said it better than I’ve heard it before as well.

1:17:33 You know, it does trouble me a bit, Roger, that a young man like you, who’s a risk taker, who’s innovative, who’s out there, you know, creating these incredible marketplaces and companies ends up having an experience where you want to leave what we consider the country that’s supposed to embody those kinds of things. You know, there’s something fundamentally wrong with that narrative. And it bothers me, and I guess it bothers you too, but do you ever wonder why that happened in a country where that’s supposed to be the place where that doesn’t happen?

1:18:06 Yeah, I think Americanism is an idea, not a place, and not even a country, right? It’s the idea that you have control over your own life and your own destiny and your own finances, and your life belongs to you. It doesn’t belong to the politicians. And, right, and that’s what the American Revolutionary War was fought over, and it’s kind of interesting, like, I’ll ask people sometimes, when is it okay to shoot the police? Right?

1:18:28 When is it okay to shoot a government agent, normal services never. You should never shoot the police, and you ask an American, that’s, oh, so you think America should still be part of England, and you can see the light bulb go off in their head. Wait a minute, America became its own country by literally shooting the police and shooting government agents and saying, “No, we will not obey.” And so maybe sometimes it is okay, right? Maybe this is going to be the moment where YouTube, you know, bans our video for even saying that sometimes it’s okay to shoot the police or shoot a government agent, but if the answer is no, it’s never okay, well, America would have never become a country.

1:19:00 And if you look at the history of human civilization, it’s the law breakers that make progress in society, right? What if Rosa Parks decided to obey the law and wouldn’t sit at the front of the bus, right? How many more decades would have gone by before people were allowed to sit where they wanted on the bus, regardless of what color their skin was? It’s the law breakers, like, you know, Rosa Parks and Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, that move society forward.

1:19:23 And so if people aren’t willing to take a risk and break the law, humankind doesn’t move forward. And so I think it’s really important to understand that sometimes it’s a good thing when people break the law. Yeah, really good perspective there, Roger. What scares you? Governments.

1:19:38 Especially after the little speech I just gave there. They’re the most terrifying entity on earth, right? They round up tens of millions of people and execute them, and then the people that do that, they laugh about it. Right? Now Mao’s Great Leap Forward.

1:19:50 He starved to death millions and millions of people, and everybody, you know, if you go to China today, there’s still, you know, statues of him and pictures of them all over the place, right? And then, you know, all these countries around the world, they do that, and then just people just turn a blind eye to it most of the time, and it’s horrible, it’s terrifying. And, you know, Dave Smith, a comic and interesting podcaster that I’m another fan of, I think he summed it up very well.

1:20:14 He said, “Governments are just mafias masquerading as charity organizations. They pretend like they’re here to help everybody, but the moment you resist their help, they’re going to come after you with their full vengeance and really do bad things to you. Just like, them off you with their protection money. If you pay their protection money, you’re not going to have a problem. At the moment you don’t pay their protection money, you better watch out.”

1:20:32 And so I’m the most afraid of governments. That’s the thing that I think is the most, frightening around the world. And what keeps you awake at night? Oh, I slept pretty well at night, sometimes. If I have a really hard jiu-jitsu training session, I toss and turn a bit, but other than that, I’m pretty happy in the daytime and at night as well.

1:20:55 My life is, I’m pretty happy, and I’m enjoying the journey and there’s nothing in the world that always just keeps you on edge, thinking, man, this is, I don’t know, I can’t be resolved while this is still happening, or have you made peace with it? I can tell you what frustrates me in the world. I think it’s that the vast majority of people don’t understand that the key to advancing all of human civilization, in addition to some people being willing to break the law here and there, it’s economic growth.

1:21:22 Right? The, the fact, like, it’s the miracle of compound interest just applied to the economy as a whole. Right? So, like, if you compound your interest over the next couple of decades, you really can have a lot of money by the time you’re ready to retire, if you start early enough. It’s the same is true with the economy of the entire world, that the rate of economic growth can be just one percentage point higher, you compound that over the next hundred years, it really, really makes a huge difference for all of humankind.

1:21:47 And so you have governments around the world, you know, with their lockdowns, if they f*** up the world’s rate of economic growth by, you know, even just, you know, one or two percent over the next couple of years, because they’re still busy doing this sort of nonsense that really is a huge detriment to all of humankind. And I think people don’t realize and understand and appreciate just how incredibly important the rate of economic growth around the world is, and how the governmental policies need to be the ones that incentivize and enable and allow the entrepreneurs to go out there and build their businesses and grow the world’s economy, which is just another way of saying grow the amount of stuff in the world that people are able to use and consume and enjoy in life.

1:22:22 That’s what’s going to drive human civilization forward, and we need to get the governments out of the way of the entrepreneurs to be able to drive humankind forward. And you see these, you know, various politicians like Elizabeth Warren and this and that, you know, saying, you know, kick out the entrepreneurs, and it’s just really disgusting to see these things. you know, nobody’s perfect in life, right? You know, Elon Musk’s not perfect. Neither, Jeff Bezos, neither am I, but look at, you know, what Amazon has done for the world.

1:22:49 Look at what Tesla and SpaceX are doing for the world. This is incredible. I saw some great meme on the internet. It was a picture of the Wright Brothers with their first plane. They said, “Look at those guys, you know, wasting their money and time on that stupid thing.

1:23:02 They should be building bicycles and giving bikes to people who need bicycles, right? For people who don’t know the Wright Brothers were building bicycles before they built the first airplane. That’s the exact same nonsense we’re seeing about the people complaining about these billionaires going to space, “Oh, look at them waste their money going into space.” What if the Wright Brothers hadn’t spent their money on an airplane? They just built more bicycles.

1:23:21 Well, maybe we wouldn’t have airplanes today. Everybody would be busy with bicycles. Well, today a few billionaires are going to space. Next decade, you know, the millionaires will go into space, and before you know it, it’ll be common air travel, a method for everybody. Just like the very first flat-screen plasma TVs, they were, you know, over ten thousand dollars each.

1:23:40 Almost nobody bought them unless they had a whole bunch of money. Now flat-screen plasma TVs are a couple hundred bucks, and almost anybody can buy it in just about anywhere in the world. The same is going to be true of this, you know, space flight. So get out of the way of the entrepreneurs. To the government, people, that’s my message, and that’s my frustration in life as I see all these politicians that they’re not doing anything themselves, and they’re blocking the doers from being able to do the things that they’re going to drive humankind forward.

1:24:05 So I really want to see them get out of the way. Yeah, and on that same note, I mean, do you think Jeff Bezos at Amazon and Apple Pay and Google, are they going to embrace and start accepting cryptocurrency payments even before year end? Is it just a matter of time before that happens? I don’t know if it’s before your end, but the writing’s on the wall. It’s happening, but it’s been a, you know, a continuous process over the last decade, right?

1:24:31 And so just this year PayPal announced it. People have been speculating about Amazon for the last decade. Is it going to be tomorrow? Maybe, is it going to be this year? Maybe it’s going to be next year or the year after?

1:24:43 Maybe we don’t, we don’t really know at this point, but it is happening. And is it going to be Bitcoin that wins out in the end? Maybe, but it seems unlikely to me at this point. So it’s going to be whatever is the most useful for the most number of people around the world. And it’s going to be continuous evolution, right?

1:24:59 The British pound, I think, is one of the longest currencies around the world. But how long has the euro been around right? The French franc is gone. The Deutsche mark is gone. All these other currencies they had around Europe are for the most part gone.

1:25:11 Don’t think that any currency is going to last forever, and I don’t think Bitcoin will either. Yeah, and I appreciate what you said about entrepreneurship. It’s fascinating to me to watch the narrative in America about socialism, and it just boggles my mind. I think it was Bill Clinton that said it was the econ, it’s the economy, stupid. And he might have been referring to something else, but again it is how all progress is made, and I think sometimes people associate it with, like you said, the billionaires that are going into space, and they get vilified when it’s why the world is a better place.

1:25:41 It’s why our life has gotten longer. It’s why our streets are safer. It’s why we have this innovation. So I appreciate you reminding us of that, Roger. You know, Roger, when I was preparing for this interview and I look at your life, I see a guy who does things, who takes action, and who pulls the trigger.

1:25:56 Period, and that’s taken you on a bunch of incredible adventures. It’s giving you a Wikipedia page. Would, by the way, are also censored, by the way, in case anybody wants to know. A snapshot of someone that’s hard to understand, and I’m glad we could actually have this conversation. Again, it’s so easy to be pulled into a media bias, and, you know, I’m sure you hear it all the time.

1:26:16 Well, what happened in prison, and what happened with this, and what happened with this, and you’re like, actually this is who I am. This is my story, and I see a guy who wasn’t afraid to go out there and take risks and create great companies and create great value for a lot of people and ask hard questions and I appreciate everything you do. I appreciate you sharing all your time with us, and I’m really excited for what happens with you for the next 10 years.

1:26:39 I also really appreciate you coming on here and talking about Bitcoin Cash, because we haven’t had anybody really talk about what’s going on with this instrument, what it was, that there was a hard fork, that there’s really something else going on here than what a lot of the new people to this crypto space don’t even understand. So I appreciate you articulating that. People can go to the website links below that you mentioned if they want to learn more about that as well.

1:27:04 Any final thoughts, Roger? Yeah, I just want to thank you for standing up for free speech, because if people aren’t allowed to be exposed to new ideas, humankind isn’t going to be able to move forward. Right? If people never were allowed to hear about the wheel, well, nobody would be able to use the wheel. Right?

1:27:19 It’s the same with all these new ideas. If you can’t discuss and hear new ideas, you’re not going to be able to improve yourself as a human being, and if you can’t improve yourself, the rest of the world’s not going to improve either, if nobody can do that. So it’s really, really important to stand up for free speech, and, you know, those were, those are really important ideals. So thank you so much for doing that, Brian, and being willing to be that lightning rod as well, because, as you know, when you stand up for those sort of things, the lightning strikes start coming from all sorts of different angles.

1:27:45 So thank you for that, Brian. No, my pleasure, and thanks for supporting us last year. It was a really crazy one, of the most challenging times of my life. Like you said, lightning came from everywhere, and honestly, Roger, it made me ask a lot of questions about what, what, what is freedom of speech, why is it important, and why is it important to hear someone’s perspective and talk about a perspective, and why is it important to be challenged in your own brain on your own ideas, and man, I really got a lot of clarity on it and I concluded that it’s always the right thing to do to have freedom of speech, and when we look back through history, I had Tim Kennedy on my show, MMA fighter and a Navy SEAL, and he said if you ever look back at history where they tried to suppress information or freedom of speech, it always results in these governments, like you said, of Mao and Stalin and all these tens of millions of people dead.

1:28:32 So can we just express the ideas, get it all out there in the open? It’s always going to be the right thing to do. So, yeah, I got reminded that last year, and we’re gonna keep moving forward, and we’ll be interesting to see what happens with this interview as we’ve streamed live here, Roger. So I appreciate you bringing in 100%. I expected nothing less at all thank you so much, Brian, for the opportunity, and I appreciate your efforts, and thank you to everybody who’s watching, and again, send me an email, [email protected].

1:29:02 I’ll send you some Bitcoin Cash for free via email. And as you were talking about the free speech when this civil war went on within Bitcoin about the scaling stuff and the block size I was on the fence, right? I was just listening to both arguments, and I leaned toward the big block side, but when I saw one side of the argument start to engage in censorship, that’s when I knew that the side that was still supporting free speech was the right side, and the side that I had to support, and sadly the side that started engaging censorship so far has won out, but that was the telling point for me, that, oh, one side supports free speech, that’s the Bitcoin Cash side.

1:29:37 The other side, that wound up becoming Bitcoin today, supported censorship and deleting anybody’s post that had a different opinion. Well, it was clear to me which side was, were the good guys at that point. It’s the side that supports free speech. So thank you again, Brian. Hey, my pleasure.

1:29:51 That’s always a good barometer. What’s going on. So appreciate that. There he is, Roger Ver. Follow this man, email him, check him out.

1:29:57 And, Roger, let’s do this in person next time in London or in Tokyo or something like that. Wishing you all the best. we