BTC Sessions - BTC Suppression, Next Gov Buys, Monarchy Comeback | Prince Filip Karađorđević

Starting point is 00:00:00 I feel there are people actively suppressing the price. You're a whale and you have access to a lot of bitcoins. You can really suppress the price. I was brought on to Jan 3 to open the doors to presidents, prime ministers, royals. We've had a lot of good conversations. I think Samson's been very busy. You wanted to speed up hyper-Bitonization. The conversation about monarchy returning in some countries, I'm hearing about it more.

Starting point is 00:00:22 I'm hearing about it in Romania. I'm hearing about it. Even in France. Obviously here in Serbia. Today we are joined by royalty. That's Prince Philip, heir to the Serbian throne and CSO at Jan 3, the Bitcoin powerhouse behind Aqual that's pitching reserves to emperors and presidents. In this episode, Philip breaks down how institutions and central banks are thinking about Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:00:42 I was in traditional finance and an asset management firm. Central banks, I mean, they worry about, it's a competitor to central banks. The next government likely to start stacking. It's more the center-right party, but also from the more progressive left party as well. There is interest. And why Bitcoin radically changes our system. of governance. Bitcoin helped me understand monarchy better than ever before. Plus, Prince Philip shares critical historic lessons like why Surrey experienced one of the worst

Starting point is 00:01:09 cases of hyperinflation ever at 313 million percent per month. People's life savings were wiped out in a matter of minutes. Good morning, Prince Phillips. Thank you so much for joining us today. Very excited to have this conversation. To kind of kick things off, you've been working with a lot of high-level actors, both in governments and institutions as well, too. And even just to give it. us a quick lay of the land and how things are going. Is there any recent developments? There's anybody you're looking to talk to in the future that have been recently that you're able to share with us. So yeah, good afternoon from Serbia. Yes, so we've, we've had a few conversations

Starting point is 00:01:48 at the moment with a Jan 3. I mean, for listeners who don't know what Jan 3 is, it's a company started, it's a startup, a Bitcoin-only startup started by Samson Mao. He was a former executive at Blockstream and then he decided to start his own company called Jan 3. Everyone knows what Jan 3 comes from. He managed to get the URL for that. No one actually took that, so that was quite lucky. That was a lucky. I figured somebody would have been parked on it already.

Starting point is 00:02:17 Yeah, exactly. So his vision was that he wanted to speed up hyper-bitonization. And by doing that, he wanted to be able to speak to nation states to big actors, corporations, and just individuals around the world. And that's the top-down approach. We all know Bitcoin is a bottom-up grassroot approach. That's the strategy. But, you know, there's always could use with a lending hand from top-down.

Starting point is 00:02:41 And it gives Bitcoin some credibility. You know, if you speak to a minister, a president, prime minister and stuff, you know, that helps for people to maybe pay attention and listen. And so that's one of the things that we do is at Jan 3. But the other, our bottom-up strategy, Jan 3, is that we've released. our aqua wallet, which we'll talk about a little bit later. That's a Bitcoin-only wallet, but with USDT on liquids, so Bitcoin-centric chain, side chain, layer two solution.

Starting point is 00:03:11 And yeah, we can talk about that later, but your question was about conversations. So I was brought on to Jan 3 to create, to open the doors to individuals, the people around the world, to presidents, prime ministers, royals and stuff like that. And we've had a lot of good conversations. The recent ones, I would say that I think Samson's been very busy. He was earlier this year and Q2 and Q1 and Q, anyway, it doesn't matter. He was in Japan, meeting with various politicians there. And at that, when it was in Japan, we got an introduction and to possibly make a connection

Starting point is 00:03:52 to the emperor of Japan. And I sent him a very nice letter. We had it translated into Japanese properly, and we had that sent to the Empress. So hopefully we'll make a connection with that. But Samson met with some very big politicians there, one from the center-right sort of, called a populist. I mean, what is democracy, populism or meritocracy, whatever. But it's more the center-right party, but also from the more progressive left party as well.

Starting point is 00:04:22 So there is interest there. Japan is that, you know, they're talking about it. So he also met with a central bank there. I actually had a meeting with central bank. And we tried to shield them, you know, Bitcoin as a reserve. It's a no-brainer. For us, it's a no-brainer. But for them, it's still something to get over.

Starting point is 00:04:43 I'm kind of curious. I want to tease that apart just a little bit. So we're having conversations with high leaders in the government, potentially the emperor, which is unbelievably cool. Just for the record, I think it's unbelievably cool that I'm talking to a prince who's talking to emperor, so this is all lots of fun for me. But those conversations that you're having, what sort of pushback or hesitation are you finding? Where is it that they're deviating or they don't get it or they're just not interested right now? Well, it could be a few things.

Starting point is 00:05:07 I mean, it could be ideological, it could be operational. I mean, finance ministers, they worry about like the volatility of it, rating agency optics and things like that. central banks, I mean, they worry about the, if, I mean, they worry about a lot of, not worry about it, but they, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a competitor to central banks, really. So there's just, that way. I think so. Yeah. They don't really, okay.

Starting point is 00:05:30 I mean, we, we haven't spoken to many central banks, but it's mainly just, I guess, it's an exercise of learning, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, it can probably fit in. I mean, regulators, they worry about, uh, a lot of things. I mean, and energy ministers fear about, ESG blowback and that sort of stuff and how. But obviously, we sell it so that, you know, when mining, you can fix flare gas, it can do a lot of good thing. You know, Bitcoin is always seeking out wasted energy, stranded energy and monetizing it and making the energy grid.

Starting point is 00:06:02 An energy more efficient. It's also an energy, a renaissance movement as well. So we have a lot to tell them, a lot to sell, but there's this pushback. And making connections with politicians, with leaders around the world is not, it's, it's easier than none because, you know, it's all about connections and having interest in the first place because you're not going to be able to get a connection and say, hey, do you want to talk about Bitcoin? They'll be like, no.

Starting point is 00:06:28 It requires some connections, some introduction beforehand. And, you know, we have a few of those. I have a few of them. And my name helps to open some doors. It helps to create that connection. I have some credibility. But of course, we also rely on you guys, on Bitcoiners all around the world. And we rely on your connections.

Starting point is 00:06:49 And people come to us saying, hey, we made a connection with a so-and-so politician, some ministered this, or maybe if you're a president or prime minister, can you help us? And we're like, great, yes, let's start a telegram group or signal group and see where it takes us. And we have many conversations with really great Bitcoiners all over the world. that's that's that's it's funny just on that too so it's just at the canadian bitcoin conference and one of the things i was talking about with some of the guys there is it kind of reminds me of a fight club like we are everywhere but you might not even realize that we're hidden in the shadows and particularly it feels to me like um bitcoin was established by gen x but millennials are kind of taking

Starting point is 00:07:25 the lead at this point and really pushing it out to the masses and millennials are in that point of life right now kind of will say around like me like around mid 30s or so where they're entering into maybe the mid or higher level roles in management and they're working their way to the top of the chain. So it's fascinating to know that you've got this network of Bitcoiners that are hidden behind the scenes that are getting closer and closer to leadership positions at companies and governments and different organizations that are then able to help you get in there and start to have those next level conversations for mass adoption on the on the nation state level. Right. Yeah, I didn't really, I didn't look at it that way, but, you know, boomers are still

Starting point is 00:08:02 in control. Yeah. Oh, God. Boomers are still in control. They still, I mean, asset-wise, they still have the, the, the, the biggest weight on their side. But yeah, no, but in terms of positions that now, millennials are now seeping, I mean, seeping there and taking over those positions now, the high level management positions. And that's great for Bitcoin because we understand it better. And eventually, you know, the Gen X, is it Gen X is below us?

Starting point is 00:08:27 Yeah. Yeah, Gen X is. These guys are the ones who need it the most. These guys, we're not careful. They become nihilists. You know, they're ready for some, any sort of change. they are you know they will take and you know some of them if if they get pushed in the wrong direction you know they it's it could be quite quite quite sad but now bitcoin is giving them hope

Starting point is 00:08:48 and stuff so a lot of gen xers are waking up to bitcoin and understanding that bitcoin is has can bring a beautiful future Philip I think you mean gen zers or millenniales sorry the jens zers yeah yeah yeah i have all right backwards yeah ix above yeah us gen xx are already nihilists that that chip has sailed i mean we are yeah I'm curious then. So when you got brought into this role to make the connections to start working with these people, just for some context,

Starting point is 00:09:14 what were you doing beforehand, before moving over to Gen 3? That's a good question. I was in traditional finance. I was working in London in an asset management firm. So, yeah, I was actually working in quantitative equities as a portfolio analyst in quantitative equities.

Starting point is 00:09:35 So it's a team that was, that had a lot of quants in there. I wasn't one of them. I was mainly looking at portfolios and taking care of clients. But yeah, quite a lot of smart guys there. That's, well, the product, I don't know if you ever heard about factor investing. I have not. Can you explain this?

Starting point is 00:09:53 Factor investing is when you used four factors. There's like four or five factors that can help determine how attractive a stock is. So you have like value and you have growth. Everyone knows about that. Then you have sentiment moment. and then you have quality and I think I said them all. Yeah, quality, value, growth, sentiment, momentum. So that's like four or five.

Starting point is 00:10:15 Yeah. And so you use, we use algorithms to select. So to first rank those stocks in their own selective universe. So if you have global universe or maybe just US universe or global X, Europe or global X something, or maybe emerging markets or global with emerging markets. And we rank stocks against each other and we rank them according to their sentiment or their momentum or their growth score or their value score or their quality score. And we've sort of picked the ones that do the best, maybe tick maybe two or three or more boxes.

Starting point is 00:10:54 And that's kind of the quantitative side of it. But then there's a human side, which is about 10% of it, which is about then they do the rebannancing and select the trades helped by the machines. No, so to some extent it actually works. It was actually quite good, and we actually have to perform benchmarks. And when you look at the kind of quantity like that, they do generate quite a bit of alpha in that respect versus the benchmark. But these are relatives. These are not absolute strategies.

Starting point is 00:11:22 They're not like hedge funds. These guys are actually just trying to beat the benchmark. So these benchmarks providers like MSCI or SMP and things like that. You just have to beat them by 2 or 3 percent a year. and you'll be doing all right. I'm very curious. Something that jumped out of me there, and you might not have any information in this is built to,

Starting point is 00:11:43 of those factors, were there any that were perhaps weighted more than others or that were commonly more successful? And the only reason I'm asking is because it jumped out to me of how far we are in late stage fiat, like if sentiment, if sentiment is all you need to know and you're going to hit pretty good,

Starting point is 00:11:57 that tells me that the underlying fundamentals of the company and its profitability really doesn't matter. Sentiment was really, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's foam. It's just foam. FOMO, yeah, exactly. Sent to momentum is a lot of it. It's just FOMO. It can be anything pushing that stock.

Starting point is 00:12:11 But yes, it does derive some value from other good metrics. But in general, it's how a stock is performing. If it's picked up some momentum and people just jump onto it. The ones are two interesting ones that we hear about the most in the asset management world is value and growth. So growth, you know, you're talking about your big. So fangs, so your Facebooks, Amazon's, Google's and apples and things like that. These are the big growth, growth companies, which have a huge, but that's not, yeah, a lot of concentration in those guys because they have grown so much that they make up like two or three

Starting point is 00:12:54 percent of a given benchmark. And so everyone's going to be kind of almost overweight on them at some point. value you know value is we always seem to be in the growth market with the way with all the money printing there's something I wasn't really switched on to before is why is growth in recent years in the recent 10 15 years 20 years or almost coming up to 20 years

Starting point is 00:13:15 since the great financial crisis was growth was always more in favor than value because yeah because of all the stimulus that was being pumped into the markets and stuff so it made sense it suddenly started to make proper sense as I start to learn about Bitcoin value, you know, value, I value the value guys because the value guys actually make some good analysis, but it's, they have, they have, they have, they have, they have roth stacked against

Starting point is 00:13:39 them. And it's still not saying the value is that it doesn't outperform at all, because there's points where, you know, like during, during, during, during, during COVID, when that, when that, when that, when that whole shit happened, it tanked the markets and sort of value started of out of, well, there was some other weird stuff happening there because some people kind of knew what was going on. But in general value, we would have performed better, slightly better after COVID,

Starting point is 00:14:02 slightly better during COVID, but then right after COVID, when all that stimulus came in, then if you were not overweight on growth, you would have been taken out. I mean, you would not be performing well. And it kind of goes against the rationality.

Starting point is 00:14:16 You think like during COVID, during a plan, careful what I say, that pandemic, that you were there. I've said it before. You think that during the plan that you would, you wouldn't see much growth.

Starting point is 00:14:29 It would not be a good, a good place for, for markets. And generally, you think you would see, you see, you see, you would see stock markets tanking to, to all-time lows and stuff like that. But what we actually saw was absolute opposite. And when the, when they reached the bottom in March 2020, then by later that year, by August or September 2020, we're already touching all-time highs in the S&P and Dow Jones. And people are like, what's going on? And I'm like, oh, yeah, this maybe is.

Starting point is 00:14:57 a time when I'm learning about Bitcoin and realize what's really going on. Yeah. This might be actually not be the indicator that you think it is is pointing to something else right now. Gary, give me one second and I promise you'll hop it. I'm curious, you may not, but do you still have any contact with the old colleagues from the Tradfai world, and do they think you're absolutely crazy for what you're doing or any of them starting to see the light? Yes, so when I first got into Bitcoin 2017, and that was during the early 27, early mid-2017, and there was a couple of other guys in the company that were getting into Bitcoin as well. So we were talking, people overheard here and there. So there was talk about

Starting point is 00:15:35 Bitcoin back then. And people thought, oh, yeah, that's crazy. What's all that about? And at that point, I was still very naive to it all. And I said, you know, it seems like a good investment. I'm still at that investment stage, you know, just trying to understand it. And obviously, distracted by other things available on Coinbase, you know, so I bought some light coin, some Ethereum. We all make mistakes. We all makes, yeah. And there were people in there saying, oh, you know, this is, this is some scam.

Starting point is 00:16:04 This is bullshit. Yeah, they're kind of right, actually, because, you know, Ethereum and like when are. So, yeah, but they were like, oh, yeah, it got to 10,000. And they go, then you're going to sell for it. I'm like, I'm actually kind of like this. You know, I'm sticking around. I'm kind of sticking around. I'm kind of sticking around where you should sell.

Starting point is 00:16:20 And I heard one of our portfolio managers, one of our senior people on a team, you know, I got on really well. She says, I just advised my so-and-sore relative to sell his or her Bitcoin at 10,000. I was like, that's a big mistake. That's not going to be worth a lot more in the future. And this is me, not really knowing much what I was getting into, thinking, you know, this is, I kind of got, because it was my best friend, Llan, who got me into it. And he said, look, this is a good inflation hedge. And this is going to, this is going to change.

Starting point is 00:16:50 This is going to revolutionize the financial world. But of course, we were also into buying all the other shit coins. And it was a day, 2017 was a time of what you call it those. The ICOs, yes, sorry. I can't forget that, but I did forget it for a second. I lost a bit of money doing the ICOs. But we were thinking what the next strategy were joining some like groups here and there to try and figure out what the next ICO is and trying to make some money.

Starting point is 00:17:22 You know, I rarely, we rarely made in money. But we're always just hungry to try and, to try and we'll just pull it off the next time. We'll 100 X,000 X next time and things like that, but never really happened. Never, never happened. But anyway, what I went with this, yes, so finance guys, a lot of them were just questioning it and saying, yeah, that's a scan. This is, you know, this is not really good to float much for, you know, this is all going to crash and stuff. And, you know, it did crash. Of course, the price crash and stuff.

Starting point is 00:17:48 But that didn't deter me. I actually stacked more. I sold most of my my my my my most of my chip coins because I saw those those tanked even more and quietly was stacking throughout 2018 19 and then then end of 2019 to 2020 oh yeah when 20 when COVID hit I bought I bought that when it slumped down to like $3,000 again I was like wow that's amazing damn you just backed up the truck I will take everything you will sell me yeah exactly but I wish I had more a more more more dry powder as we used to call in the training days back then but I didn't have that much, but like I managed to get a little bit of that,

Starting point is 00:18:22 a little bit of a bite on that price. I was really happy with myself. And I remember showing enough, but talking to people, now is a good time to buy, now, right now, now. But do you know, this is terrible? Yeah, we're going to laugh at you in the future. I was like, yeah, we'll see about that. And then slowly, around 2021,

Starting point is 00:18:39 as I was transitioning out of, like, this was 2021 as I became a full-fledged maxi by then. our team partnering with another team who also does some sort of quant stuff and other fantastic asset management these weird stuff we're going to start creating a portfolio of crypto

Starting point is 00:19:05 of like Bitcoin centric related companies and the people who were put in charge of that were people who were very vocally against Bitcoin and then had to against me as well Just we had some laughs about it. But the next thing you know, they're trying to determine which countries, which companies had exposure to Bitcoin or crypto or something like that.

Starting point is 00:19:27 And so, yeah, it kind of went around full circle in them. It was hilarious. So then by 2022, they actually opened up a fund where they started tracking Bitcoin-centric companies, like exposure to Bitcoin, not actually buying the thing. You can't. I mean, asset management world, you have to be able to buy the actual thing. require like the reshaping of the industry and the regulations and the hoops and things you have to jump through will be would be insane.

Starting point is 00:19:56 I mean, you could do it. They could do it. But we're still a bit far away from that. I mean, some are, but I mean, through ETFs and stuff. But actually owning the thing, no, not anytime soon. Yeah, I think even just trying to figure out how your key management. Okay, this company is going to own it. Who's going to have keys to this thing?

Starting point is 00:20:17 because it'll be a little bit tricky at that level. Exactly. It's just the regulations. I mean, regulations are structure. The company is not set up for it yet. Yeah, they own it when they buy ATFs or we think they own it when they buy ATFs.

Starting point is 00:20:33 reasonably certain. Yeah. But there was who was it who said that they can convert to Bitcoin from ETFs recently? It wasn't Vanguard? Fidelity. Not Vanguard. Sorry, Vanguard relate to it. Fidelity, I think.

Starting point is 00:20:44 We're talking about in-kind redemption and in-kind creation. In-kind redemption, in-kind creation, correct? Yeah, you know more than I do. Yeah, Fidelity was quite ahead of the game, actually. They wrote that really good report about Bitcoin, basically separating it from the rest. And I thought that's fantastic. That was in 2021, I believe, or 2022. Yep.

Starting point is 00:21:05 They're doing their own custody solution. They've definitely had Bitcoiners in their midst for a while that had everybody's ear making those connections. So respect of fidelity. And the other respect to is not, asset management to KPMG for writing that incredible report about Bitcoin being the best ESG assets that you could ever have. I don't think I saw that one. This is one that you've got to share.

Starting point is 00:21:29 This was written in 2023. So just type in KPMG Bitcoin ESG. And it's a report written with the KPMG logo there. So one of the big four logo that basically bigging up Bitcoin. I mean, it's not perfect, but it's fantastic. And just that's a great tool to use to give to that type of person, that the people I used to work with. You know, it's like, hey, here you go.

Starting point is 00:21:55 Check this out. Yeah. It helps. It helps. Are you sick at the Fiat-funded fast fashion that falls apart quicker than the dollar? You know, the cheap stuff made to drain your wallet one inferior product at a time. Stop it. There's a better way.

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Starting point is 00:23:23 isn't paper Bitcoin, withdraw to self-custody at any time. Insured and auditable, it's perfect for adding Bitcoin to your corporate balance sheet. If you or your business is in Alberta, switch to your Bitcoin refuge at bow valleyCU.com. Scan the QR code or click the link below. It's a wonderful tool to give people permission, too, that somebody's interested, but again, they're concerned about that ESG Fah, that bad narrative. of coming out. It gives them another kind of arrow in the quiver that they can use like, no, no, we're actually good on this front as well, too. In the same way that, you know, when you're talking about Japan, the one thing that struck me, I was thinking about nuclear energy.

Starting point is 00:23:55 Like, what a great place to have Bitcoin mining if you have an abundance of nuclear energy. And that the, fortunately enough, the AI that craze actually kind of helped us because I think we've got it, where is it, Microsoft's bought some three mile island to try and spin up nuclear. And it's shifting that narrative a little bit and making it more acceptable to create more energy for these sort of things and hopefully will help push us forward. Gary, did you have any questions or thoughts there, buddy? Yeah, I had a few, but just, you know, first off, if you're wondering who when the company controls the keys, it's always the person with the best mustache.

Starting point is 00:24:25 So just so you know, in the future, that's who handles it. That's the rule. That's the rule. No, your highness, thank you for joining us. Never said that before. I do have a couple questions, actually. You know, you're from a traditional finance background. We've talked to trad-fi people before, and I talk to trad-fi people.

Starting point is 00:24:42 I know some personally. And I always wonder what causes somebody to sort of, I don't want to say see the light because like you said, you didn't see it initially. Like you started in 2017 because you thought, hey, this could go somewhere. This could be a good investment. But it took you a few years to fully get it and go all in. And that was the same with me. I didn't get it all overnight. And Nathan as well, a lot of other people. But I do wonder what caused you? And I don't want to say because it's so cliche to think outside the box when so many other trad-fi people dismiss it. And why did you pursue that? Because I'm sure you must know still people in the Trafai space who still poo-poo, who still say this is nonsense. I just, I wonder from a psychological level, what causes somebody to say, hey, let me take a chance on this. I think it's open-mindedness. That's number one, being open mind.

Starting point is 00:25:31 And I think a lot of the people that work in traditional finance, they're the upper managerial class of society, the top layer of society. And whether they're open-minded or not, they also have reputations to keep and protect. And that's why this class of people are also the ones who are most subject to indoctrination. And yeah, so, yeah, the things that happened over the last few years work the best on them over the, you know, like the COVID stuff and Ukraine war and all that sort of stuff. These are the guys who are buying, who are buying, who are drinking the Kool-Aid the most. So for them, understanding Bitcoin, it's like, it's like goes against their principles, their world.

Starting point is 00:26:18 And yeah, I think that's what is. So they're, they're just trying to protect what they know, what they understand and what they're comfortable with. And that, you know, I understandably, you know, they just want to try to feed their families and trying to try to get the next paycheck and stuff. I mean, they do well, of course. We can't, we can't be, they're incentivized to do this. It's not really there being malicious or anything.

Starting point is 00:26:39 It's just you would do it. I mean, most people would do it too. I mean, what separated me, and I'm not trying to blow my own trumpet over here, is I guess there was just a few of us who are a little bit more open-minded, I guess, a little bit more, we question things than we're maybe, maybe it could be some background or something or something that's happened to us earlier in life or something to things that we've seen or whatever is, but I don't know, but some of us are more aware of what's going on, of what's really going on.

Starting point is 00:27:04 And that's kind of believe that's what helped me. And even though, yeah, even though, yeah, some of my friends who are a lot of them in that sort of managerial class I talk about, even though they know I'm into Bitcoin and they, and they know what I'm doing and stuff, they're still not really convinced at all. You know, we had some, we have some good conversations and it's kind of frustrating sometimes. but yeah, it's difficult to understand this. I mean, what also helped me is studying it as well. And I really did put in the hours to studying it around 2020, 2020, 2021. And seeing things on Bitcoin Twitter helped as well. I always say this that I opened up.

Starting point is 00:27:53 I reopened a dormant Twitter account I had for like 10 years and started following. This was like for 2020, I started following under crypto accounts and Bitcoin accounts and things like that. The next thing I noticed is like actually the Bitcoin maxi guys are speaking a lot of sense over here. You know, and it was great to see. Then things happened and you start to learn about like the difficulty adjustment. And I thought that was, that was beautiful. I mean, that's the kind of the glue, the gel that keeps it all together.

Starting point is 00:28:23 And that's, that was like quite beautiful. And then to see it in practice around 2021 when a China banned Bitcoin mining. And it's seeing that huge down. with adjustment and then Bitcoin becoming the hydro where you cut off one head and 20 other heads grow. Decentralization. You just, yeah, anti-fadryl at its finest. It was beautiful. That was, that clinched it. That clinched it. That's really cool, man. I guess I also wonder you said they're not acting maliciously. And I agree. I don't think I try not to attribute to malice, what could easily be attributed to ignorance. That's a kind of a little variation on that saying there. But I do wonder

Starting point is 00:28:58 if there is any strategy among traditional finance, you know, your Jamie Diamond's of the world to poo-poo it while they can sort of stack behind the scenes and get their ducks in a row. And then publicly they can say, oh, yeah, no, this is great. We all of a sudden changed our minds on this. Have you encountered any of that in traditional finance? No, okay.

Starting point is 00:29:19 No, but you do feel like that's going on. You do feel like there's a lot of, I mean, okay, yeah, Bitcoin's maturing and you're going to get a little rebattling When Bitcoin pumps, you're going to get people rebalancing and selling off. And then when Bitcoin dips, you're going to get a lot of people buying. So you're going to get slightly less volatility on the longer, on the longer term and stuff. But still, I feel them, you know, this is me feeling and no, no evidence whatsoever is that there are people actively suppressing the price. It feels like it.

Starting point is 00:29:51 Really? I think, I think it is. I mean, and again, no evidence, no nothing. it just feels like that we could be a lot higher than we are right now. Agreed. It almost like my justification for it again, it's just a possibly just even cope was that I going approaching six figures. I figured that that was such a psychological number for a lot of people.

Starting point is 00:30:11 Like imagine you got in like a hundred bucks or sub a thousand bucks and you have a hundred K kind of in your mind is the dream number to get to at some point. That I imagine that was the price target for so many people that were in the space for an incredibly long time that the reason why. with all the additional institutional demand. I think there's just that many OGs taking the lifestyle change that they're basically saying, like, you know what, I will upgrade from here. I'll make some changes from here.

Starting point is 00:30:36 But it's interesting that you would spend so much time in Tradify because your intuition is going to tell you something, right? Like your subconscious is what, like 10 or 100 times faster than your conscious brain? And so if your guts telling you, like, I think some shenanigans are happening, probably, well, I can almost guarantee some are happening, but maybe there is substantial at some extent. I mean, just look, just look at the history of the stock market. look at how much insider dealing, trading and stuff there is.

Starting point is 00:30:57 I mean, you can't inside trade Bitcoin, but it's definitely, it is the world west, and it's 24-7. And, you know, you could, you can literally do anything, anything with it. I mean, obviously, you can't actually push the price to any way you want, but, you know, if you're a whale and you have access to a lot of bitcoins, you can really do, you can really suppress the price. It's, I mean, I just think it's, if they can, if you can do it, they will. but it's not something they can do forever. Correct. Yeah. Prince Fibblight just do want to point out,

Starting point is 00:31:29 if you know what the president is about to tweet in 30 minutes, you can inside a trade anything. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that was quite the sell-up. I think, what was it? Yeah, somebody had a giant short position, 30 minutes before that tweet came out. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:31:45 I mean, that's the stuff that we all hate and that's, but that's just the system that we live in, you know, the world that we live in today. If you have access to information, you will use it to your advantage. and you can't stop that. You're 100% right. Sorry, Nate, did you have something there you wanted to?

Starting point is 00:32:00 I did. I actually wanted to jump off the world that we live in today because there was another topic that's kind of taking a big right turn here that I wanted to discuss with you, which was kind of the history of Serbia and what we can learn from that in terms of where we are and where we're going.

Starting point is 00:32:11 So we've had that, most people have that normalcy bias in the sense of the way things are is the way that they would kind of always be, that they think that the current organization of nations in the world will perpetuate into the future. But it was only about 34 years ago to the day, roughly, that we had the dissolution of the

Starting point is 00:32:29 Republic of the Yugoslavia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. And Serbia, modern-day Serbia, as we know, based on the borders, I think has only been around since about 2006. So first and foremost, kind of just taking a look at the past. Can you help me understand what actually happened during this period? And in particular, was the currency at all involved in contributing to the chaos in terms of what happened? Sure.

Starting point is 00:32:53 You're looking about the last 30 years. If we go back to basically the fall of the Soviet Union and the fall of the, what's got, Republic of Yugoslavia, turning into Serbia today, can you give you a little bit of backstory on that transformation that resulted in the country that we have today? And if the currency was involved. You would have to go back a lot further to fully understand it. Let's go back further. Start with ancient Rome. Exactly. No, yeah.

Starting point is 00:33:19 And where do we can start? No, let's try and keep it to the last 30 years. Let's try and let's see. So the last 30 years is characterized with a lot of huge sovereignty changes within Yugoslavia. So 30 years ago, it was Yugoslavia. But let's rewind a little bit back, actually, to Yugoslavia was created in 1919. It was first the kingdom of Serbs, Kurds, Khorats, and Slovenes. This was created by King Peter I.

Starting point is 00:33:53 and his son his son would later be king Alexander I first and they did so to unite the people of the Balkans as as the fall of the Austrian Empire and to the threats of of Germany

Starting point is 00:34:09 and other forces around and the Ottomans in the air and the dying Ottoman Empire he helped to unite the people and create a sort of little small empire where we're you know together we're stronger that then

Starting point is 00:34:23 and then later turned into adding three more states, which was then Bosnia, Herzegovina and Montenegro and Macedonia, and that's what turned into the kingdom of Yugoslavia. Then King Alexander was sadly assassinated in Marseille, France. And this is where, you know, history gets kind of interesting around here. This is his assassination in Marseille in France was people said it was it was some hard, you know, some hardcore nationalist from Macedonia or from Croatia, who were not happy with Yugoslavia and wanted their own state with the ones who did this. But I think I always have the suspicion of this, and people do have suspicion that there was other forces at work.

Starting point is 00:35:07 Because at the same time, King Alexander was one of the champions of the Little Entente, the Petit Entente, which is a defensive pact of some very big countries, which included France, Belgium, Czech Republic, not Republic there then, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece, I believe, and a couple of other ones I'd please don't quote, but don't, yeah, it has to be there. Anyway, and when King Alexander was, it wasn't his idea, this was actually a French initiative, but King Alexander was one of the biggest champions of it. When he was assassinated afterwards, then the Little Entente-Pact, defensive unity broke apart and ceased to exist, which also would have added as a way of stopping, this would have helped to stop

Starting point is 00:36:00 Germany's Hitler's expansionism during the Second World War. So maybe someone knew what was happening and that someone, because this was 1934, this is just about when Hitler became to the power. But at that point, we didn't know Hitler. No one, anything, Hitler didn't even know that he was going to be expansionary. But someone else kind of might have predicted that, which kind of led to the Second World War. It's very interesting, too, because even, sorry, I just jumped up. That he happened to be, if France was the kind of the organizer behind it, but he was the biggest champion,

Starting point is 00:36:27 to be assassinated then in France just seems maybe just too coincidental. Exactly, exactly. Some weird things. And I'm what I'm trying to, I'm slowly learning in my art history a little bit. And I'm trying to study it when I have time. Very complicated. European history, especially Balkan history. I mean, Balkan is the word has its own meaning, the fractured history.

Starting point is 00:36:45 It's volatile history. But it's fascinating. And yeah, and it's made me ask a lot of questions, and I'm not getting a lot of answers because it's very difficult to find the answers. But you kind of get a gist of what's kind of what happens. So when King Alexander was assassinated in 1934, that led to, so he was his son, my grandfather, King Peter II, was too young at the time. He was only 11 years old when he was assassinated.

Starting point is 00:37:10 So there was three people that took charge of Yugoslavian. that then one of them was the cousin of King Alexander, which was Prince Paul. Then when my grandfather became of age in 1941, then he became king. There was a coup of a tar happening there as well because Prince Paul kind of, anyway, I'm not going to get into the weeds over there. By that point, we're in the middle of Second World War, and it wasn't a great time. At that point, when King Peter II became king and became of age, you know, he had to, we had to evacuate the country. And so this led to, he was protected and told advised because of his young age, but also he didn't have the best advisors around him, I've got to say. But to flee the country, I think he could have done a better choice.

Starting point is 00:37:58 I mean, not him himself, but he could have had better advisors, but he fled to the UK. And then the UK welcomed them with open arms. And this is where things get very interesting. People know about this is that actually the UK were very close. world family very close to our family. Like the Queen of England was my father's, former Queen of England, Elizabeth was my father's godmother, King Peter II's best man was King George. So it's, yeah, so we were close to them. Yet here's the interesting thing. Then around 1944, so within our country, we had two divisions. We had the partisans, which were the commies,

Starting point is 00:38:37 a socialist, and we had the Czech mix, which were the royalists. And they were sort of fighting together. against the fascist, against the Bolsheviks, and then which was a shorter occupation, and then the Germans, the fascist, which was a lot, was a lot longer occupation. When we got rid of those and defeated, essentially drove them out, then we turned on each other, as we, as Balkans usually do. Naturally. Naturally. Revolutions.

Starting point is 00:39:06 I can already hear it in the background. Yeah, you can hear in the back. There's tears. That's my daughter, Maria. So, yes, so that led to, so then they started, they turned to each other, civil war happening during Second World War, ugly times, horrible times, you know, these both sides. During. During.

Starting point is 00:39:26 Yes. Oh, geez, okay. It was horrible. It was really horrible. This also comes from, Serbia was the country that actually had the biggest casualties per capita per per percentage population during the first World War. You know, we lost about 30% of our population, 20% of our population. half of like of working age men.

Starting point is 00:39:45 It was horrible. It was horrible. We had the biggest, one of the costliest nations. So anyway, second world war, then that led to, so yeah, partisans and Chaknix turned on each other. And we were, the Chachnix was originally supported by the Brits. But then a decision was made. This general Fitzroy McLeon, Scottish guy, from the Conservative Party led an operation

Starting point is 00:40:15 then to flip the support and push for partisan support for the partisans and say because someone somewhere made a decision that it would be better to have a socialist, a communist or socialist republic installed in Yugoslavia, then it would be having a kingdom. Why? Because a kingdom is very independent and

Starting point is 00:40:40 it's less subject to outside influence. Whereas the socialist republic, they knew very well that this would actually require help from abroad because socialism fails, communism fails, and it'll be easier to control. So the powers that be decided it was better to have Yugoslavia as a as a failing socialist republic. And this is evidence even in their GDP, you know, 60% of Yugoslavia's trade during Tito was a general who became. came who became the dictator that 60%, 60, 70 or so percent of GDP of Yugoslavia actually came from the West. We were never really fully behind the Iron Curtain.

Starting point is 00:41:22 We were dancing between both sides of the Iron Curtain. Tito was the biggest king of the mall. He was educated individual with very big taste, and he confiscated everything from the, from the bourgeois and from the elite class. from all the monarchist people and stuff. And he killed a lot of people doing this as well. But he actually confiscated like 33 villas and stuff. And he was living, he was living the life.

Starting point is 00:41:50 But also he was also very good at being a diplomat and organizing. He's the one who led the non-line movement, which is like the movement of the second world, of communism, of African countries, Asian countries all around the world. He led that. So this was a way that the West could have their control of the other side. of the curtain of the other side of the world through Yugoslager. So it was strategic.

Starting point is 00:42:15 But that all felt, yeah, sorry. No, I was just going to say, I just recently had a conversation with Tom Luongo, and it's funny because everything that we chat about, it always comes back to the city of London being the one behind the curtain, the one pulling the strings. And once again, I'm being told that, like, yes, the Brits may have got their grubby little hands in there. Oh, the Brits are fantastic when it comes to foreign policy.

Starting point is 00:42:32 They are the kings of as great as they are and as many beautiful things invented. And, you know, I've lived most of my love in Britain, and I have loads of British friends to stop. They really screwed up. And I say this was, I say this with love. I say this with love, really. I mean, yeah, they're just champions of that. Imagine mining Bitcoin, cheaper than buying on an exchange

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Starting point is 00:43:46 it's important because this was, that Yugoslavia was strategic. This is, Belgrade was the center of the Balkans of the geographic center over here. It was like the melting parts of the, of, central eastern Europe. And then when, what happened was Tito died in 1980, NATO was, NATO was started to be formed around those years. I don't know the exact years. NATO was starting to form. And then the east, the eastern answer to NATO was the Warsaw Pact. That's the eastern equivalent of NATO. When that fell apart, then that fell apart and NATO won, essentially, then that's when interest in Yugoslavia started to die down and money started to be pulled out and stuff. And so, that's around in the 1980s and beginning 1990s.

Starting point is 00:44:45 And that's when we started to especially in the, even in the 70s before Tito, there was inflation, but 80s started getting worse inflation. By the 90s, we actually had one of the biggest bouts of inflation ever in the history of hyperinflation, the third worst.

Starting point is 00:45:02 Really? Yes. Oh my God. I didn't know this. I didn't know that. No, yes. So, I mean, if you go back, if you go back,

Starting point is 00:45:09 it was the socialist, it was the socialist who introduced pure fiat into the economy. We didn't have, we had, the the U.S. Slavia and Serbia before that was always based on some extent on much more hard money standard. You know, we,

Starting point is 00:45:27 the kingdom knew about the kingdom knew about the values of hard money. Obviously, it wasn't far from perfect. It's not Bitcoin. But you could just see it in the architecture as well. You can see it in how the things that were built during the kingdom last. The things that built during the kingdom have much more beauty to them. You know, they were built in the eyes of God, the eyes of low time preference and stuff.

Starting point is 00:45:50 And then you had this drastic huge change post-World War architecture and its soulless. It's godless, horrible monstrosities. It's, you know, it's this brutalist stuff, which some lefties are tried to make beautiful and say, oh, look, brutalist is nice. I said some really nice examples. No, sorry. It's all, it's disgusting. It's angular.

Starting point is 00:46:12 It's horrible. It just digs into your soul and takes it out. It's like disgust. Yeah, it's just, oh, it's horrible. It's ugly on purpose. It's absolutely awful. It's even like where I am, there's one building. And I got to bring this up because it's just so, Gary, it's the most ugly building you've ever seen.

Starting point is 00:46:28 It's a new building. And they purposely have the windows and things not aligned. So not only is it just a box, but it's a skewed box. And it's gross. I lived and worked in D.C. for 10 years. I could go off on brutalist architecture all day. It's awful. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:46:44 I can see a lot of it here. You see a lot of beautiful examples. Beautiful, I say, you know, sorry, horrible examples. Horrible examples. But then you see it juxtaposed with some beautiful examples of what real architecture is. And yet you could excuse that there was no money, you know, Second World War rebuilding and stuff like that. No, actually. We had the Great War.

Starting point is 00:47:06 the First World War, which we had to suffer by capita by percentage the worst ever, by any country involved in the First World War. Yet somehow we got our stuff together and it was tough, but we were able to build even more beautiful architecture, leading into the 20s and the 30s, some incredible architecture. So, yeah, Joe goes to show. That was also thanks because of the incentives of being a monarchy. and based on more of a hard money standard.

Starting point is 00:47:40 You're taking pride in what you have. You're taking pride in what you have. So we're at, I think we're in the 1990s. We've had the third worst inflation. Prince Philip is going to be a quiz on all this later. So 1990s, we have the worst inflation ever. Like in 1992, 1994, it peaked. It peaked like, like, what is it, the calculation of 3.1 times 10 to the power of whatever, eight per month or something.

Starting point is 00:48:12 I can't even conceive that. Yeah. It's horrible. You know, people's life savings were wiped out in a matter of minutes or months, you know, weeks, not even days, days, basically. So just dump trucks of bills to buy a loaf of bread. Yeah, exactly. It's proper waymaster things. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:48:29 It's horrible. Absolutely horrible. So then there was the Avramovic program that was launched in 1994 to stop this inflation. And that was the new diner, the noviti diner, which was pegged one-to-one to the Deutsche Mark, ending hyperinflation. But that's interventionism. And we know intervention always leads. It always leads to more problems. You know, kind of fixes it very much in a short term.

Starting point is 00:48:57 It looks fantastic, looks stable and everything. But you're just going to have second, third, horrible order of effects afterwards. So that was 19th, up until then in 2009, in 2000, August, or so sorry, October 5th, 2000 was when Milosevic was finally, was ousted. And I would say when neoliberalism, neoliberalism became, was introduced into Yugoslavia. And we were still Yugoslavia up until, up until 2004 when we just became Serbia and Montenegro took away our title of Yugoslavia.

Starting point is 00:49:40 We're just known as Serbia Montenegro. And then in 2006, which you were correct in saying this is when Montenegro had the referendum and they voted themselves out. And we just became Serbia and there was Montenegro. And in 2008, which we don't recognize as was with no referendum was the was the, was in Kosovo. Yeah, and that's still an issue that we're still dealing with today. You know, like half the world, half of the world don't recognize Kosovo. And some big countries don't recognize Kosovo, like Russia, China, India, Spain, Greece, Indonesia.

Starting point is 00:50:16 You know, some big countries out there don't recognize Kosovo. So then, yeah. And then since then, I would say, I would come and say that we've got the Soviet dinner. And in 2017, our current government that we have now, regime, they pegged the dena to the euro uno unofficially, unofficially pegged. And this sells the illusion of stability, as I said. And, you know, the guy right now, the regime right now sells himself as being stable because of this, they maintain this illusion of purchasing power. And it's been pegged at 117 dinars to the euro ever since 2017.

Starting point is 00:50:55 If you just look at a chart, you see all this volatility, volatility in 2017, then it just goes flat. And it looks it's people think it's great, you know, at the beginning it's fantastic. We can, we can, we can, we can afford to import, to do it for imports and stuff. You know, we've got, we've got purchasing power against the rest of Europe. But what does that do to our local staff? It destroys the local markets. And this is the second, third order effects. There's always going to, you know, if you can fiddle with, with, with price, if you have

Starting point is 00:51:26 price controls and having those interventions, you're just going to lead to more problems. and we are seeing this now. We're seeing horrible bouts of inflation. I mean, I say not hyperinflation, but we do have pronounced inflation here. It's not nice. It's not nice at all.

Starting point is 00:51:42 Part of the reason why they did this as well was this is actually AIDS Europe more than it aids us is that we do 60% of our trade, 40% of our trade, no, 60% of our trade with the European Union,

Starting point is 00:51:57 of which is a good chunk of that. I think 40% of it Germany. And so this is one way just to facilitate trade, but it doesn't really help the average person here so much. What's the main export? Main export here part. We have minerals as well, but also fruits, produce, but also parts as well. We do a lot of assembly, car assemblies and things like that here. Oh, okay. This way for Europe to basically strip resources a little bit and pull them out Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Starting point is 00:52:31 Prince Philip, stepping back, I do have a question for it. It's not often I get to interview royalty or any, you know, head of state or anything like that. But we went over the history of Serbia. And as Nate mentioned earlier, you know, we kind of live in an era where we have some recency bias. Like we all just assume, hey, democracy is how it is. And this is the way modern nations function when in reality it's a very, very recent thing. historically most nations have been dictatorships monarchies empire as all sorts of things you know i yeah go ahead no no where this going yeah no i i i guess i wonder um do you

Starting point is 00:53:13 see a transformation over the next 20 or 30 years with any specific nations perhaps moving away from democracy without making a judgment on it whether it's good or bad because i can tell you i personally view democracy is just a means to an end. I know a lot of people say, well, democracy, we should be fighting for democracy. Well, you know, you should be fighting for liberty. And if democracy is the best way to secure that liberty, fine, so be it. But if there are other ways, great. Do you envision any return to monarchy in some countries in the near term or possibly long term or some other new system that Bitcoin would kind of ring into the future? So, yeah, it's an interesting question because I see more people talking.

Starting point is 00:53:55 about monarchy these days than ever before and even myself i wasn't fully switched on to about the incentives of monarchy pre-bitcoin i think bitcoin helped me understand monarchy better than than ever before as well as also having a family as well because yeah monarchy and family bitcoin it lowers your time preference and that's really one of the things that's uh you wake up to and monarchy monarchy's incentive is is that it's uh it's a long-term thing and, you know, create stability over the long-term continuity. And that's something that we're a lot of parts of the world are grappling with.

Starting point is 00:54:37 And I think the conversation about monarchy returning in some countries, I'm seeing, I'm hearing about it more. I'm hearing about it in Romania. I'm hearing about it even in France. Obviously here in Serbia, you know, if anywhere could, monarchy could return easily. It's over here. It could easily happen here.

Starting point is 00:54:56 Our constitution is still the same of the kingdom of Yugoslavia constitution. It was just changed a little bit to become the socialist constitution. So technically, it could be done quite easily with a few legal decisions. But obviously, you'll probably need a populace. You might need a plebiscite for it to happen or not. I don't know. We haven't actually explored that yet. But you'll need definitely the support of the public for that to happen.

Starting point is 00:55:20 Do you view, I mean, aside from just even changing ways of governance, what do you view near or long term as the future of the nation state itself? I think, well, look at the, okay, to answer this, I think you have to look at how democracy is actually working today. And I think when, and this is when you study democracy, you study the history of it, you know, the first, the first, the first. guys who were the early proponents of people pushing for democracy never really envisaged being used in a population of more than like a hundred thousand or so people and what we have now is we have this huge democracy everywhere and they the general public in the democracy are largely uninformed and you have elites

Starting point is 00:56:23 of very highly informed individuals and always the highly informed elites always going to be able to gain the unformed so it's always going to secure towards favoring the elites and you're always going to end up having corruption and what we're seeing right now everywhere around the world is

Starting point is 00:56:39 growing corruption openly but it's legalized to some extent and it's and it's accepted but it's everywhere and I think that's something that wouldn't have under monarchy you wouldn't get that so much because you don't have the short-termism. You don't have the short-term favors being made out to those who help fund the people who get into the power for only a few, four, five years,

Starting point is 00:57:07 saying, you know, we pay for your campaign, give you this, that, that, and we'll pay you back. You know, if you get me into power, you know, I can give you this, you can give you that. And this is an exchange that happens. And it only really happens at those at the highest level. And now over time just becomes more concentrated and it becomes even rampant and it destroys civilists. It's destroying us. I mean, but this is also studied by, who is it the Greek guy? Who did the Anisiclosis.

Starting point is 00:57:37 Pibylis. Pibblis. What's his name? Pibblis. Pibblis, yeah. Yeah, sure. And now we're at the seventh stage right now. So Pibblis is anisiclosis, is that you start where. with essentially you start with some people in an anarchy.

Starting point is 00:57:57 I'm not saying anarchy in the bad ways. It's people in natural order. And then from there, rises a strong leader, a strong man, essentially a king. And in the beginning, the king is good. And people look up to him and civilization progresses. And he has his heirs and stuff. And they're all going well until one day, then the air has become weaker. weaker and become more tyrannicals.

Starting point is 00:58:21 So you end up losing those strong leaders, good leaders, and you end up getting tyrants. So then that you can move from stage one, which is the kings, or monarchy, to tyranny. So then you get people who are more in the aristocracy who start

Starting point is 00:58:37 to rise up against that and take down the king or whatever there's rising up, and then you have an aristocracy. And aristocracy goes very well and stuff, but then, you know, these guys get they did they they they they do each other favors and they they they they do each other favors and they know it becomes bad and then aristocracy turns into a what's the word I'm looking for uh uh shit show no shit show yeah um what do we have over here we have

Starting point is 00:59:06 uh was it we not like in the capital is what is it in um in the russia you have oligarchy oligarchy oligarchy oligopoly was there yeah yeah there we from the aristocrity to oligarchy and that's not you know public don't like that people are like that so then all of a sudden they rise up and then next thing we know we end up getting with democracy and then democracy then goes all well and good and stuff but then because the incentive structures of democracy is is what we're talking about right now lead lead us into what what a pillar list talked about was a mob rule or chaos and then from there this is where we are probably right now is between democracy and mob some sort of mob rule even though i question

Starting point is 00:59:48 in the mob rule because I don't think we have teeth so much in the public anymore that we can bite back. Or maybe we do, I don't know. We don't have enough strong men. We don't have enough for hard men, hard people out there. Or maybe we do with the younger generations. But then from there, we will then write a strong figure will rise up again. Or monarchy will be questioned again. And then that's when we return to the cycle.

Starting point is 01:00:09 I mean, this cycle was studied by John Adams when one of their forefathers and stuff. and he was a big pillabless reader and stuff. And he used anislyclosis, I believe it's cool, and try to sell it to the other guys, to the other, to the other four files like Jefferson and stuff and try to teach people about it. And it's all great, but obviously in the States, we have kind of a mix, a little bit of mix of that.

Starting point is 01:00:32 You know, we have kind of what happened in America, is very much similar to what happened to Rome. And you probably know about that more than I do. We make the comparisons all the time. Yeah, exactly. And now we are reaching that point where Rome is, you know, kind of failing. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:00:51 Yeah. I mean, you know, we talked about, you know, knowing the president's tweet 30 minutes beforehand and have that huge insider training. I mean, that's like a sign of a declining empire when you can make that sort of massive public corruption and nobody's going to do a thing about it. It's just, that's what it is. That's how it happens. And, you know, you lose faith in the institutions and you see what happens. Nate, did you have something? No, I'm sorry.

Starting point is 01:01:14 Sorry, no, yeah, what I was saying to that is, and I think that cycle, my ana-cyclosis, it would help if they had Bitcoin. I think if you had Bitcoin, you would smooth, I think it would smooth things out a little bit, and it could be a great tool in maybe stopping at one of those stages, and you'll end up having just monarchy, or you end up having just aristocracy, or just end up having a more efficient form of democracy. But so, no, it won't be perfect, but I think Bitcoin having that hard money that people can't debase away and, you know, money clip away or print away like they've done

Starting point is 01:01:48 in countless times in history. That's going to, which is one of the main reasons of why civilizations have always collapsed. I mean, not the main reason, but it's one of them. And I think that helps. Bitcoin helps. Do you believe Prince Philip? I'm sorry, Nathan. I just have one quick follow-up. You know, you talked about how the history of Yugoslavia, initially, you know, pre-World War I, it started a sort of separate nation states and came together to be Yugoslavia. And sorry, you had something you wanted to mention. No, we, yeah, sorry, we talked about the smaller nations and stuff. But no, no, no, continue, continue, sorry.

Starting point is 01:02:21 Well, I guess I'm just wondering, that seems to have been kind of a trend throughout a lot of Europe where you had, you know, Italy was a bunch of like disparate states. Germany was a bunch of disparate states. And they formed together to be these large nation states. And then over time, more recently, we've seen a lot of these larger nation states break up. Do you see the future in, I guess, smaller-sized nation-states or larger-sized nation-states or the elimination of the nation-state altogether? I think further down the line, maybe a few decades from now, yes, you would probably

Starting point is 01:02:53 get what Hans Herman Hopper, the Hoppian vision is that, yes, is that we would actually break down to be smaller states, as you talked about, like how Germany was in the last, in the last, two centuries ago. It was last even before, before First World War, Germany. was, you know, was a, was a mix of how many small kingdoms, like 30 or 40, 40 kingdoms. Hey, we're from Bavaria. Hey, yeah, exactly. And it was fledging.

Starting point is 01:03:21 It was growing. It was fantastic. Because why? Because there were smaller populations, people were being, and people, the different, the different small kingdoms where aristocracies were competing against each other. And they were trying to buy, you know, trying to be the best. And in doing that, the incentives were lying. were perfectly, what more aligned.

Starting point is 01:03:41 Plus they had more of a hard money standard by then. So I think we could, you know, we could come down, we could be going down to that route because the whole idea of having bigger nation states, that expansionist mentality is starting to break down right now. You can see it now with the European Union, with Brexit happening in other countries, with more forces coming, more voters trying to, are more voters trying to, are more into the idea of leaving the union for obvious reasons because they have no sovereignty.

Starting point is 01:04:16 The European Union went far beyond its means. It became way too political and it should have stopped at a common market at a free market economy and that's it. But obviously it went too far. But I guess this is also thanks to the idea of the money printer. They wanted to create the ECB at the end of the day and look at what's happening right now. And this, you know, these money printers actually aid expansionism as well because when you have the money printer, you can, you know, you want it all. You can do it all. Of course. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:04:48 Agreed. Especially on the ECB note, too, with the creation of a single currency, but not having a single tax authority, I think as well, too, was one of the major issues, which is why I was going to continue to try and get more power within its grasp, I suppose. Right. Exactly. The one thing that actually really stood out to me when you guys were chatting there as well, too, is that it's the same pattern, both on an individual and kind of a nation-state level. a sense that it's like king to oligopoly, yep, to democracy. And it's like small city-states to like larger countries to like giant centralized country. And then we just fracture apart and

Starting point is 01:05:17 repeat the whole thing again. And I agree that I do think Bitcoin will at least slow or change or stabilize that cycle at some point in time. Because even just intuitively, like the idea of having small monarchies, small kind of little fiefdoms on a Bitcoin setter makes sense, right? Because if you think about even the distribution of it, you have these giant Bitcoin holders who are going to have all the wealth. We're going to buying a lot of land, and they're going to own that land, like crown land, but they're going to be like,

Starting point is 01:05:42 okay, maybe I can let other people live on said land that I own. And essentially, you've just established another monarchy living on his private property, the land of the king there. I was super curious about this, and you might not have any more information, but I did want to touch on. So you mentioned that we have this idea of returning to monarchy potentially in Romania, France, and Serbia.

Starting point is 01:05:59 And so first and foremost, what is going on in Romania and France, if there's any little movements or rumors happening there. And then secondly, what is the probability that I'm currently talking to the future king of Serbia? I'll start with France. France has two or three pretending families to the throne. One of them is the Bonaparte, Napoleon Bonaparte, which I'm friends with. Good guy.

Starting point is 01:06:29 Yeah, me and Napoleon, we go way back to. Yeah, exactly. He's in finance, traditional finance. Yeah, I don't think he doesn't quite get Bitcoin yet, but maybe one day. So, and I think France, you know, with what's going on, which is happening everywhere in the world right now, it's not doing the best. So the idea maybe can be floated right. I'm saying kind of maybe further away in France. That's why I started France.

Starting point is 01:06:57 But Romania is somewhere that could be quite relatively close. and we are friends with the royal family in Romania. We're actually the next in line to the head, Nicholas and his wife Alina, they became godparents to my second child, our daughter, Maria. And so we're quite close to them. And Romania suffered a very similar story to Yugoslavia, the fall of the monarchy happened more or less at the same time. time. So yeah, there's

Starting point is 01:07:34 and a lot of people out there are, you know, they're starting to question that, you know, trying to raise the question about, you know, maybe it's a good time to return back to constitutional parliamentary monarchy. And same here in Serbia. This has always been in question. Ever since the death of Tito, that

Starting point is 01:07:49 people are, yeah, if history had to be corrected, the way that the monarchy was taken away of over here, then if you wanted to correct history, then you would return back to where we were before and have a constitutional parliamentary monarchy. Whether that will be my father or myself or my son, I don't know, but definitely people are

Starting point is 01:08:12 talking about it more. If you probably did a poll right now, you'd probably be about 30%, 40%, who would not even question it and just take it, you know, whatever shape or form, but maybe let's say 30%. Then you have maybe 30, 40%, that will be about who are just indecisive. And with some good campaign, you could probably turn a good chunk of that around into been pro monarchy. And then you get, you know, like 10, 20 percent who would just be like, nah, not at all, you know, of course. I mean, can't satisfy this why everyone. Never could. Gary, I did want to pivot the conversation briefly before we get to the end.

Starting point is 01:08:44 But before I do, did you have any other questions? Anything else you want to talk about that as well? No, I mean, I guess now I'm just, I don't know. It's going to be too much to think about, but I'm just kind of running things in my head. We talk about a bit of the advantage of a monarchy in some ways because of long-term thinking. And like you said, there's no guarantee that the future lineage are going to be good monarchs. You could have your wise, benevolent Marcus Aurelius, and then next generation you got Joaquin Phoenix. And like, all right, well, we're going to shit now.

Starting point is 01:09:12 I guess I just wonder, could there ever be a system where, you know, you could have that benevolent monarch, the wise, beloved monarch or dictator, and then find a way to choose the next one that doesn't necessarily mean like, oh, yeah, just put my kid in charge. Yeah, that's one of the issues about. about monarchy is the heretriesis, the lineage is always, you can always get a bad egg. But usually, okay, that's always kind of weeded up before they actually have, before they actually get into power is that they, usually there's, there's,

Starting point is 01:09:45 one of the may, one, someone might have to be forced to be abdicate or so forth. But then once they're, let's say they're in power, then you would have to have a strong advisory body around that would, pick up on this and have to manage the king better because at the end of the day, if you get a bad egg, if you get someone a tyrant, then quite often that the tyrant could be taken out and there will be some cup that are either from people close by or actually from the populace if he's really bad. But you know, it's a nice euphemism, taken out. That's taken out. But also you can fix that going forward to like, you know, you can make sure like there's weight. You can have like, a decision-making, like the next air, come from the family, but not necessarily the eldest.

Starting point is 01:10:35 It can be someone, you know, it can be someone, it can be a cousin almost. This is some of the countries, some, like the Arab countries, I believe, Amman does this. And I think, I think, I think I don't know, Qatar, Bahrain do something similar. I don't know if it's directly. Saudi Arabia does it too, but then. And Saudi as well, yeah, yeah. They cage or kill the other people. Like, I'm in charge now.

Starting point is 01:10:56 but also I think if you have if you have one of the things if you did if you did have an absolute monarchy and you did have a bad king but you didn't have a printing money printer then you would yeah you would you'd help to stop a lot of that a lot of those games but when it comes to decisions and stuff like that then you would you'd have to create a system where the king is not necessarily so much in control of he is the just like the money printer is the the the the lender of lost resort the king actually would be the the the the law of lost resort you would have a lot of privatized court systems you know like you know to you know to incentivize to to to to the best service possible and stuff so you don't actually you never really use the king as a decider so the king really is more of a figure of stability and stuff so he wouldn't he he he would find a very difficult to use to to to go beyond on the constitution and start doing wrecked stuff. So you'd have to

Starting point is 01:12:00 have some sort of system where only when some decisions can't be met privately through the open market that it would go to the king. So I don't know. It's a good question. It's something that we could talk about. Obviously monarchy is not perfect. I mean, I think a good

Starting point is 01:12:18 book to read about this, about how or what the, well, I don't know if you've heard about Hanson and Popper's democracy, the god that failed. haven't read it, but I've read it. But it's a good read. It's 13 standalone chapters that talk about, well, they stand alone. He wrote them separately, but put them together in a nice good order.

Starting point is 01:12:39 And the first chapter is if you're going to read any of them, I think read the first one because it talks about low time preference, beautifully written. And then the other chapter really like is when he talks about, because he's, Hans Herman Hopper, it's a bit of it. He's a libertarian, so to speak, but he's a Hopian, which he's also one about family. he's a conservative And this is the other thing is If you have a system where you

Starting point is 01:13:02 Where I mean hard to swim Like family is like It's the basic unit of civilization It's not It's it's the hard The basic unit of civilization is the household basically Families raise children

Starting point is 01:13:18 They transmit language and faith And train habits and accumulate small capitals That compound over across time basically You have, if you damage households, you will feel it everywhere, basically. So you need to strengthen them. And I think this is the thing is you have the big emphasis on letting families be families. And this is something that comes naturally through Hopper's natural order is that his book that he wrote was about the economics and politics of democracy, monarchy, and natural order. saying that democracy is the worst and worst of two evils versus monarchy, monarchy, lesser two evils,

Starting point is 01:13:54 and natural order is basically anarchic capitalism. But he's saying that, you know, he's a conservative, he believes that, you know, that we need religion, we need families, we need that the ranks and the guilds and churches that kind of bind us together and stuff. And that kind of leads to having a monarch actually at the end of the day. And, you know, you could actually argue that you could actually have some sort of, I won't call it absolutely monarchy, but like some monarchy overseeing an anarcho-capitalist system. Yeah. And that monarch would be like the protector of faith, of culture, of traditions, of customs.

Starting point is 01:14:30 Because, you know, a libertarian without any structure, can end up doing some stupid things. Without, you know, freedom without responsibility, without order, you is chaos. It's horrible. I just got to say, like, something jumped out of me while you were talking there as well, too, is that essentially at this point, if that sort of system were to evolve, then the monarch is just there really to enforce the rules of the game.

Starting point is 01:14:55 And what really we need for an anarchocapolis, because again, it's rules, but not necessarily rulers. So Bitcoin is a system with rules, but not rulers that enforces the game of how we're going to interact. Church and culture also are a system of rules so that we can all play the same game together so that we can interact without.

Starting point is 01:15:11 And it seems to me that like the only, really the monarch would only ever have to step in to kind of re-oer, affirm or perhaps mitigate issues with the rules of the game that the anarchist society is playing. So, yeah, so the king basically can't really step in unless he's actually cool to step in. That's the idea. Yeah. He is the crown is based on the steward of continuity.

Starting point is 01:15:32 Interesting. And so in a way, he's not, he's not actually an absolute monarchy, so to speak. It's actually natural order. It's like, it's liberty, but with, uh, with, uh, with a caretaker, uh, with a continuity, with a steward, as I said. And in that respect, it's not even absolutely. It actually mimics a little bit more of a parliamentary monarchy, like basically like a parliamentary monarchy or a constitutional monarchy,

Starting point is 01:15:57 whether the king actually has more powers. But you also, in the constitutional parliamentary, when you take away democracy and you actually, yeah, I just have free market. But this can only really happen under a hard money standard, under a Bitcoin standard, so to speak. I agree 100%. And I didn't even argue that the monarchy at that point is transitional, almost in the sense that on a hard market,

Starting point is 01:16:18 money standard and a more free market economy as we got to get kind of go towards an anarcho capitalist that the need for the king to step in will be reduced and it may just be purely ceremonial culture at some point in the future at some point in time yeah and it's i mean that's beautiful i'm not saying that because i potentially could be a monitor but i'm saying that it's actually beautiful prince phillip's bump in his own bags yeah exactly by king coin coming soon All right, beautiful. There was a few more things I did want to touch up. And then you've been so generous for the time. So I'll try and keep him relatively quick.

Starting point is 01:16:52 Because one, what is exciting going on at Jan 3 that we didn't touch on yet? What are you guys working on? What's really going well right now? What do you want to share with everybody? And then additionally, too, I did want to just pick your brain because I believe you're a little bit more traveled than I am and have at least a better sense of Europe and that part of the world. For anyone who's thinking in the terms of like flag theory, setting up the citadel, maybe trying somewhere else. Because I'll tell you right now, I'm in Canada, which by the way, I saw someone point out, we had that like no Kings protest against Trump. Did you see this, Gary?

Starting point is 01:17:19 Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. We have a king. We have a king. Yes. And we're having the no king's protest. It's absolutely ridiculous. So for someone that might want to get out of Canada, any suggestions and what's going on at Jan 3?

Starting point is 01:17:32 So, Jan 3, recent things is we have our dolphin card. Dolphin card. You heard about this. Yes. Yes. Yes. I love it. Good.

Starting point is 01:17:44 Good, good, good. So Dolphin card is, we've come out of beta and now we're expanding it to more users. And so far it's doing quite well. Yeah, there's some issues that we're going to iron out here and there, but that's normal. But this is a fantastic way of actually living on a Bitcoin standard. So you can load up the card with $4,000, expend up to $4,000 a month. And it's a visa card. And you can basically load it up, first load up a little bit first, just to make sure it works.

Starting point is 01:18:11 So go to a terminal and just see if it works there. And if it goes, you know, if it works, it works and go for it, basically. And this is one of the things that we're adding to, added to a marketplace, you know, so when you have aqua wallet, you have a marketplace, so which is one of them is for swaps. So that's when we swap between Bitcoin, main chain to Bitcoin liquid and also to UST on liquids, all on Bitcoin. And then we're going to on there, we're going to add some other cool marketplace things, you know, paying utilities and all that sort of stuff to do.

Starting point is 01:18:43 exciting announcements we're going to hopefully have down the line on Aqua. We also in Jan 3 opened up earlier this year our AI Lab, A1, A1 Labs. Oh, I'm not familiar with this. Yeah, this is new. Tell me about this. So the first product that we're going to be releasing that is ECOS. And ECOS is like a free private AI transcription app. and it's like it runs entirely on your on your device using like lightweight AI models and and it's

Starting point is 01:19:20 basically keeping a way of keeping your audio notes privately while delivering like speeches and and multilingual and doing so delivering accurate multilingual transcription sorry without ever connecting to a server basically so it's it's just one way of just very cool yeah of keeping of being organized and stuff something I'm going to be using a lot because I'm not very good at note taking at all And, you know, someone, you know, when I'm constantly speaking to people and trying to learn stuff all the time, and I said, I'm terrible note taking. This is going to be really good because it's going to be real time, fully offline. And it can run locally on your phone. And it could be supporting like over 100 languages.

Starting point is 01:20:00 And it can organize those on your notes and your folders and you can edit stuff. And it's just going to be very easy. And it's going to make my life, your life a lot easier. So that's the one thing that we're going to release soon. Ecos on A1 Labs, Jan 3. Beauty. Looking forward to it. Yeah, thanks.

Starting point is 01:20:18 What else? Well, yeah, we're also doing the process of doing some ATMs in Dominican Republic. We've just, yeah. So that's just a pilot out there where we just got them. We've had them shipped out for a while ago, but they were stuck in transition. But hopefully those will be up and running soon. Quick note on that. I'm actually kind of curious because really like, for my,

Starting point is 01:20:41 understanding one of the big target markets was Latin America offering these stable coins on liquid and then try to make basically transition people to Bitcoin, right? Show them it there, get introduced to what they're more familiar with and then work with them. How is that going? Are you seeing more Latin American users come on that are using both USDT or so USDT on liquid as well as Bitcoin? Is it still difficult to get in that market? No, it's, it's, look, it's great. It's what, it's working. It's working. It's, it's, it's, uh, USDT is the most used, it's the most used, uh, crypto, I hate to say that, in Latin America. It has the most transactions, but a lot of it on Shikwin rails.

Starting point is 01:21:22 So ERC 20, trons and other things like that. And this is why we make it really easy for Janth, for AQUI and for users, is that we have it on Bitcoin Liquid, but you can transfer from any of those shikwin rails, and it will appear as Bitcoin Liquid. So, yeah, we're seeing a lot of volume these days. you know, we're averaging about $20 to $30 million of volume a month. Wow. And, I mean, obviously, we take a very small fee from that, very tiny fee.

Starting point is 01:21:50 It's not much. You know, we need to be doing into the billions to get, to make much money out of that. But it's encouraging to see how much volume there is happening there. So this is happening from all sorts on Bitcoin to Liquid Bitcoin and then from USDT to Liquid Bitcoin to Liquid USD. and where am I going with this? It's, yeah, you asked about seeing the numbers. So the numbers is like, yes, so we've had a good amount of down. I think we've now crossed 100,000 downloads since since we've released Aqua Wallets.

Starting point is 01:22:27 Congratulations. Thank you. So it's going, no, it's going really well. There are some potential competitors out there, but that's good. Competition is healthy. and we are we you know we're going to have some really exciting other updates along the line you know with with dolphin card with other sort of marketplace solutions you know bitcoin i mean aqua is going to be aqua is going to be the real next big super app bitcoin only super app i love it and then the last part

Starting point is 01:22:56 was uh if i'm leaving canada where am i going where's the best place for bitcoin citadel oh that's a good question i would say other than Serbia obviously obviously obviously No, working on that. Serbia is going to be ready in the future. It's prime. You know, we're going to, yeah, we're going to make it there, especially when it becomes a monarchy. Yes.

Starting point is 01:23:17 I mean, what are you going to have to choose? It depends what? The flag theory is what, the six flags, isn't it? It's like you have like the residency, you know, business, citizenship, tax domicile, asset and data custody and energy and land. I don't know. Differently. Where do you think is the most hospitable place for a bitcoiner?

Starting point is 01:23:41 People will obviously say El Salvador. I don't know about that. I mean, I think, I think Switzerland. Really? Yeah. That's the first time I've heard of Switzerland. Good old Switzerland. I think Switzerland is, you go to Lugano.

Starting point is 01:23:54 We're going to Lugano for the Bitcoin conference there. And you can transact with Bitcoin there. And they have no capital gains tax on Bitcoin. So it's, and it's great. It's stable. it's it's a good place to set up to have real residency. I guess if you have citizenship from Switzerland, it's fantastic being a such a good,

Starting point is 01:24:14 neutral, powerful country. We talked about tax and then energy and land. I mean, yeah, it's Switzerland takes a lot of boxes. And history of sound money too. I think the last one to go off the gold standard. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Liechtenstein as well, but that's in Switzerland.

Starting point is 01:24:29 So, I mean, the good thing about Liechtenstein, if you like it, you know, you can smoke in restaurants there. Oh, good old days. Yeah, exactly. Beautiful. I think maybe UAE can. I've heard good things. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:24:46 Portugal, to some extent, because it says there's something sexy about Portugal. Singapore because of stability. Then you have the smaller places like Prospera, maybe. I've never heard of Prospera. Prospera is in... No offense, Prosper. No. To our one listener from Prosper.

Starting point is 01:25:04 No, Prosper is the free city in, in, I even forgot what it is. It's in Honduras, Honduras, Honduras. Yeah. They're going to be pretty pissed at Serbia now. I know, no, we know who you are. No, but they're tiny and stuff, but like you can go there. You have like, these are like cool small private cities that could have, so future could turn into next Singapore or something.

Starting point is 01:25:31 That's amazing. I look forward to it. Gary, you know, last minute, thanks. No, no, it was great. Thank you so much for your time. Really interesting stuff. No, fantastic. Good to speak to you guys. It was wonderful. Prince Philip, before we let you go, where can people follow you, find more of your work? Which is to go check out? So my role work, just follow on my Twitter as a X handle, which is Prince Philip 1.

Starting point is 01:25:51 But they have Bitcoin stuff at Jan 3. And I'm also on Instagram, and Jan 3 is also on Instagram as well. Hey, you. Yes, you are watching the Bitcoin price movements and the latest exciting news. It's awesome to stay informed, but the real power of Bitcoin comes from taking control. Don't just watch, take action. Head over to btcsessions.ca slash learn for free step-by-step tutorials that guide you through every major skill you need to know, plus full video playlist for deeper dives on any topic you like. And if you're ready for the ultimate fast track, scroll to the bottom and check out Bitcoin Mentor.com.

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BTC Sessions - BTC Suppression, Next Gov Buys, Monarchy Comeback | Prince Filip Karađorđević

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