BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Max Keiser, Meditation Man, Stephan Livera ep221

Episode Date: December 4, 2021

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Wasabi wallet and fairly private. What's going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. Another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish? We've got a stacked panel this week. Very excited to have everybody on. Some returning guests. We've got a fellow Pleb joining us who had just a great topic that he pitched out on Twitter.

And yeah, so we're going to be chatting some Bitcoin. Plenty to talk about. As always, this is live. Anything can happen. So I defer to my good friend Bill. We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live.

Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. The fucking thing sucks. Yeah. If you haven't already, like, subscribe, share, all those things, help the show so, so much. So please do that. And as always, I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session.

All right. Before we bring in our guests, let's take a look at where we are on the show. the market right now. I'm pulling up the bitbow.io dashboard. We're sitting at $53,486 per coin. The sky is falling. Everybody, no, just stack more sass. You know, when in doubt, zoom out. And year to date really doesn't look all that scary now, does it? And also last year at this time, one year ago today, we were, you know, sub 20,000. So keep it in perspective, people. Stop crying. You're fine. Of course, shout out to sponsors of the show. Shake paid a If you're in Canada and you're stacking sats, easiest way to do it.

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Let's get our guests in here. Let's get rolling. We got TC. We got Stefan. We got Max. Gentlemen, welcome to the show. Let's do a quick round of intros to let everybody know who you are, what you do. TC, want to do an offset conscious intro here?

Yes, absolutely. Thank you for having me. This is really an honor to be part of this. I am a Pleb. I am a software engineer. I live in the U.S. And I've been in Bitcoin since 2017 or so. and I discovered the joys of Bitcoin Twitter earlier this year.

I don't know what took me so long. Everything has been right ever since. And it's because of that. But I'm here. Thanks for having me. Awesome. Glad to have you. And let's move it down the line.

Max, let people know. Yeah, I am Max Kaiser. I'm married to Stacey Herbert. And we do the Kaiser report now for 13 years, first to cover Bitcoin back in 2011 when it was a dollar. and still doing it. Living the dream, man. Living the dream.

Stefan, how about yourself? Hey, guys. So for those of you who don't know me, I host one of the well-known Bitcoin podcasts. I interview many of the leading people in the Bitcoin world, talking about economics, technology, finance, all sorts of topics, all ways for you to learn about Bitcoin.

And I also work at Swan Bitcoin, which is another place where you can buy Bitcoin. So that's a little bit about me. And thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for, for joining me guys. Everybody that's watching the stream right now, thank you, of course, for being here. If you're new to the show, really simple premise, it's called Why Are We Bullish? Because we're going to be dropping reasons why we are. We go by the three R's. Basically, somebody's going to give a reason why they're bullish. Then altogether, we're going to riff on that reason. And then we're going to rotate to the next person until we're through everybody. So I'm going to get us started off here. And my reason for being bullish this week is, So we saw earlier this week that Jack Dorsey resigned from Twitter and seems to now be focusing.

There is a rename of Square Inc. It's now called Block. They rebranded Square Crypto into Spiral. And the Twitter handle, the one that made me happy is it's changed to Spiral BTC. So as he's exiting and you're seeing all this crypto garbage proliferate through Twitter very, very quickly, you're seeing him pivot to position more Bitcoin-centric and all that stuff. And it seems like he's freeing up time to focus more on Bitcoin. We saw Square as well drop information on how they're focusing on hardware.

And they're looking at hardware in relation to NFC. That's kind of the route they're going for easy onboarding and also cheap. devices. So we're seeing a lot of interesting stuff around that. And so I guess my reason for being bullish is the Bitcoin brain drain in that a lot of people over the course of the year, over the past number of years, people are leaving their regular jobs where they've been for a while and they're moving into areas where they can focus on Bitcoin. Another great one that we've seen in the past little while is Elise Colleen.

She's just an absolute asset. Obviously, Michael Saylor this year with his positioning, you know, he didn't leave his company, but he's focusing so much of his efforts on Bitcoin and kind of spreading the why of Bitcoin. And even this past couple of weeks or through November, we saw David Marcus, who it was head of a lot of

Libra, Facebook. Yeah, Libra, Facebook, a lot of the financial and stuff going on at Facebook. And earlier in the month, he started tweeting stuff about how inflation basically whittles away your savings by half over the course of, over the course of a decade. And he basically said that Bitcoin fixes this. And then now it's the end of the month. and he's tweeting out how he's leaving meta, aka Facebook. He's now left. And I'm wondering if that focus is to maybe lean into something, again, speculation.

But I'm wondering if that might lead him somewhere down the path of Bitcoin and recognizing how what Libro was trying to do was a little bit off the mark because it got crushed immediately and how Bitcoin being a truly decentralized and censorship resistant and sound money is that proper response to what's going on right now. So either way, the brain drain into Bitcoin from everything else is real. And I think we're going to see a lot more of it in the coming years. So I was just going to open it up to you guys. If you have a favorite person who's who's kind of segues into Bitcoin, if you're seeing the brain drain else,

where, yeah, I'll open it up. I'm definitely seeing it as well with people who have been stacking stats in the background and they might have their Fiat job and now they're looking at ways to get into a Bitcoin company. Right. And we're seeing this even swan Bitcoin and other places where we're seeing people who come from quite, you know, premium backgrounds or whatever you want to call it, prestigious backgrounds in the normie financial world are now saying, no, I want to jump ship. I want to be in the Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is like the cool area to be now. It's becoming that way. And so I think we're only going to see more and more people coming into this space. And it only makes sense because there are so many Bitcoin companies out there who are starving for talent. They want people. They're trying to grow. And they need people. They need highly intelligent, hardworking people.

And so a lot of the, whether it's plebs joining or whether it's David Marcus or whether it's Jack Dorsey, refocusing his whole effort on Bitcoin, as he mentioned at Bitcoin 2021 last year, saying if there was something more important to work on Bitcoin, he would do that than Square and Twitter. And lo and behold, he's now left Twitter. So I think absolutely there's a lot to what you're saying. And I think it's going to become more and more that way. We're going to see more and more of this to come.

Yeah, absolutely. How about you, Max? So you can. A great example of it just today. Barry Rittholz in New York City. You know, I sat, Stacey and I sat down with Barry and his partner, Josh Brown, who people know from CNBC. We sat down with them in their offices 10 years ago. Bitcoin was under 10 bucks.

We gave him the whole pitch. They passed. Now today on Twitter, he's announcing due to customer demand, we are for the first time going to open up Bitcoin product here at Barry Ritholtz management. So that's part of it. That's part of the process. You know, all the dominoes will fall. I always say, you don't change Bitcoin. Bitcoin changes you.

So Marcus over at Meta, the Bitcoin got into his head and like a worm, it turned them. It changed them into a bitconer. This is unstoppable. It happens to everybody who spends even five minutes thinking about it, except for maybe a couple of people that have made kind of their name in being Bitcoin trolls. That seems to be the reason that they get up in the morning.

But other than that, it just, if you have any kind of sense of the trends happening around the world, particularly in the inflation front, it really pulls you in to Bitcoin. Yeah, absolutely. It kind of seeps into everybody. And unless you're directly incentivized not to like it, you know, if you're incentivized not to understand it, then, yeah, you're incentivized. push back or if you made a name for yourself that way, but otherwise, it's only a matter of time. Yeah, and I would just chime in and say, you know, myself personally, I've been the last decade at several startup companies, all of which tried to be disruptive. And I'm so happy that about three months ago or so I joined a Bitcoin company myself. And so I myself, am an example of

someone in the tech industry that just made the leap finally. And now I have that incredible alignment between my work efforts and what I am passionate about and what I believe in. And the disruption there is just going to be totally next level. The only other thing I thought of too was, I know I just saw, I think yesterday it was Goldman Sachs or one of these big Wall Street banks just announced that they're looking at doing lending on Bitcoin. You know, it just, It's yet another of countless instances over the last year or so of watching these banks. Loved the shirt there, Max. The banks are basically forced to adapt to Bitcoin and start adopting Bitcoin or else they're just flat out going to get left in the dust.

So I think the writing's on the wall. Yeah, we saw a couple. Another interesting aspect corollary to what we're saying here is how it's how it. it brings some people out of the shadows and they reveal themselves in a new way. So in the case of Ray Dalio or Charlie Munger in the past few days, they've come out and been China apologists. Charlie Munger saying, oh, we should follow China and ban Bitcoin. Ray Dalio talking about how great China is and we should follow China.

So clearly that's somebody whose orientation toward even their own country is, you know, problematic. They seem to, they seem to really have, for lack of a better phrase, their heads up their ass. And now we can see that plainly. And Bitcoin brought that out in them. Maybe we wouldn't know Ray Dalio was a sick puppy unless Bitcoin kind of brought that to the fore. Now we know the guys really got some problems. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's and it's unfortunate because you know, I've, I've gone. I've read his book and everything. And I think he's done some interesting. things in the past and he's a smart guy, but to see, to see the, to see people come out and, and I guess, yeah, Bitcoin kind of brings out that truth, right? It, it forces people to show

themselves for who and what they are over time. So yeah, we're definitely seeing a lot of that. And to say, you know, Munger, to say, I wish, I wish it had never been invented and that, that, you know, that China is doing it right by banning and preventing people from having a sound money that that can't be debased, you know, like how how insane or how much of an authoritarian do you need to be when you're praising a country that's clamping down on just like basic human rights? It's something else. So yeah, well, yeah, I'll wrap this topic here just because, you know, it's don't need to get too deep into it. But, you know, it's encouraging. seeing everybody.

I mean, I guess all of us have at some point or another made that shift to just a focus on Bitcoin. And I think there's going to be a lot more of it as it's growing as it is. But eventually, I mean, the end goal is kind of to make ourselves obsolete, right? The end goal is when everybody's using Bitcoin, they don't need us to tell them about it. They don't need us to talk about it all the time. They'll just be using it. And that'll be, it'll be nice, you know, kick your feet up and just know that you got to be a part of history is huge, which is exciting. So with that, I will move into our next topic.

We're going to bump it down the line. By the way, everybody watching. Again, thank you. Let's get those. Thanks for all the comments and everything I see coming through. And, of course, smash that like button. Give it a share. Let's get even more people in the room.

And let's jump to TC, man. You had a nice little rant when I asked for a Plyb to join. And I'm curious to hear your reason for being bullish this week. So take it away, man. Yeah. So my reason for being bullish, it's not just this week. It's sort of a very zoomed out reason. You know, I do have a family, and this touches on that because it has to do with just, you know, where the human race is going and where the world is going currently.

You know, my entire life, I've been living in this Fiat construct. And, you know, we're sort of at the point where we're seeing it really start to fall apart. But, you know, from a high level, the Fiat system really does incentivize people to behave in pretty awful ways. The system rewards lying and cheating and stealing and is really a huge factor in there being as much corruption as there is out there. And I also believe it really does reinforce and motivate humans towards conflict. Meanwhile, Bitcoin, on the other hand, is, I really do see it almost as this living thing. It's this being, Satoshi created this entity that is now sort of teaching humans how to take care of it and how to help it grow. And in doing so, it is incentivizing humans towards a lot of

positive behavioral changes. You know, I think we're incentivized towards cooperation, responsibility, conservation. You know, we have this thing called proof of work. And in the end, and I know I've heard Max talk about this, I think it really does incentivize us towards peace over conflict. So, So to wrap it all up, my reason for being bullish for Bitcoin is that I think that human race has its last chance here to get its act together. And Bitcoin is actively influencing our behavior. I think central bankers, when they figure this out, are going to be really jealous because that's their whole deal. Central banking is really just the art of trying to manipulate human behavior. But Bitcoin's doing just the best job possible to motivate humans towards better.

behavior, better incentives, alignment of incentives. And I think as a result, the human race has got a shot to turn things around. It really is that last bastion of hope for humanity, right? Like, you just see the perversion of the monetary system as when you actually dive into it, You see it and the second and third order effects of all of that where nobody plans for the long term and everybody is, oh, what consumerist behavior can I exhibit today because, you know, there's no ability for me to to plan long term and build a family and, you know, less people are having children because they're thinking, oh, what kind of world is this going to, and I can't afford it. And it's harder and harder to scrape by. And so all of these things just pile up and you get all of this short-term thinking and

selfish thinking and a lack of sense of community. And it's crazy how you don't draw the connection between that and money. It's like the last thing you would think of until you actually dive into Bitcoin and you get down that rabbit hole and you realize how much of a subconscious effect it has on all of us. So I don't know, Max, how do you feel about Bitcoin changing kind of the trajectory of humanity? Yeah, as I've said, it does demonetize violence and war and monetizes peace and love. You know, the thing about violence is that there's a lot of profit in violence. You know, you can buy a knife for $50 and stick somebody up for $500.

You 10 extra money. You know, America can drop a few tomahawk missiles on a country and hopefully steal all their oil. And there's a value in that. They don't appear very good at that type of thing lately, as we saw in Afghanistan. But it used to be better for America. With Bitcoin, you know, you make that investment, but you don't get anything back because the coin is unconfiscatable. So you've got to come up with some other way to make some money. And it turns out the only way you can get some money is by offering something of value that somebody is willing to give you Bitcoin for.

And that's peaceful. So humans are inherently peaceful. And the history of humans has been about trade. You know, 99% of human history has been as hunter gatherers that's been very, not very long. We've been in these concentrated city environments that are. think kind of breed aberrant behavior in terms of human behavior. Mostly we like to just trade and hang out in our groups, our clans, and we would avoid violence. But so I think Bitcoin kind of brings us back to a more natural state of existence where we're

trading and we're interacting with folks and all of the tropes of separatism like racism and and things like that that are developed by the warmongers to sell weapons, they get pushed away, really, because they're not making any more money. So they get demonetized. And fear is another one that gets demonetized. And when you remove fear, you have this void. And into that void rushes love. So love will always fill the void once you remove fear.

We know this from just innately. We know this. So when you have a global fear explosion, the atomic love bomb goes off. You have a whole step change in the evolution of humans. And we become much more who we really hope to be. We're waiting for that now. And Bitcoin allows that to happen. And I think we're on the cusp.

I think this generation, as miserable as things seem to be, it's the, you know, they always say it's darkest before the dawn. So we're on the cusp of a global love bomb. I'm looking forward to that. Stefan, any thoughts? Yeah, that's really cool. I think for many of us, Bitcoin isn't like a lot of what Meditation Man and Max are talking about. It's not just about the financial gains, right?

And that might be why people might, some people might first come to Bitcoin for that reason. But it really, it genuinely is about that social change that we think is, that we believe is coming because of what Bitcoin is going to. Because right now in the world, governments can easily tax and spend it. And they just have all this infrastructure set up that essentially raids the wealth of the population and enables, as Max is saying, the warmongers and the, right, and you look at the big defense contractors and how much money they profited out of all the wars that have gone on, whether it's Iraq and Afghanistan and wherever else, how much money have they managed to siphon in their direction all because of the Fiat money system?

or largely because of the Fiat money system, it's fair to say. Of course, it's not, of course it's fair to say maybe some of it would, you know, even on a hard money standard, maybe there might still be some small scale little fights going on. But for the most part, the large scale mass conflicts, I think, are mostly going to be diminished because how do you pay for it? And at the end of the day, when there's a lot of bureaucratic nonsense going on out there, how are they paying for this? Well, it's Fiat money.

It's cheap debt. And we need to take that away from them. Cheap debt has been an absolute bonanza for anyone is involved in the government, bureaucrats and all these people who just kind of waste everyone else's time instead of letting us be productive. Letting people be productive and get things done and actually spend time with each other in a good way, right? As Max is saying, as you guys are saying, it's like people spending time together in a loving sense and actually hanging out with your mates.

and chatting and whatever and doing your hobbies and whatever those things are as opposed to everyone working some ridiculous number of hours for the state, right? Because if you are paying, you know, 40% tax or whatever, 40% of your work time is going to some bureaucrat and some politician and some, you know, some beneficiary of that, some person who is finagling and wrangling around in the system to siphon money their way, right? They're rent seekers. And Bitcoin is about stopping that rent seeking and bringing back

honest, hey, this is the cost of something. If you want it, you pay it and that's it. It's just an honest system, right? It's not going to make, it's not a utopia. It's not going to make the world perfect, but it's going to be an honest system. That's how I see it. It's, uh, to talk about your, um, you know, if you're working and you're, you're paying 40% tax. Yeah, that's 40% of all of your time, uh, you know, and, and somebody siphons that away. And then, you're, you know, and, and then, says we're going to reallocate all of your time and work to whatever we see fit. But on top of that, you get the monetary debasement as well. So, you know, you're paying your 30, 40% tax.

And then you're also paying your, you know, what, 30% monetary debasement over the past year? That's insane. That is so much of your human time and capital just siphoned away and gone to a few people at the top to decide where they allocate it. wonder the whole world is bitter and no wonder will be far better off in a monetary standard where that's just frankly impossible. So I look forward to that. How did you put it, Max, that cosmic love bomb? That works. I very much look forward to that. So T.C., thank you for the topic. I enjoyed that. Let's keep it rolling. Everybody in the chat, keep them coming.

being here. Smash the like button. Give it a share. And we're going to jump to Max now. Max, what has you feeling bullish this week? El Salvador. The El Salvador story is really fantastic. So, you know, there's a country that made Bitcoin legal tender. And there's a whole history there in El Salvador in Central America, really of the colonial interests, primarily the U.S. exploits. natural resources in the region. And they've been under the thumb of their colonial masters like IMF, which is principally the United States. And they finally said, Basta, you know, they said, forget about it. We're going to, we're going to adopt Bitcoin, make it legal tender.

And what I'm thinking is the possibility here is that they can recapitalize that entire country. So they've got 20 billion in foreign debt. I think they can recapitalize themselves and wean themselves completely off the Fiat money debt and go into having no debt whatsoever and be a beacon in the region, get more countries to do the same. And the Bitcoin volcano bonds, as they're called, are looked to me to be extremely well thought through. I think they're going to be very, very popular. They're trying to do a billion, which I think they'll get over subscribed. The bond itself is very attractive as a bond, as a piece of paper. And the president is opening the welcome mat to Bitcoiners.

And we'll be back there in January. So that's very exciting. We don't have a return ticket booked. I don't know how long we'll be there, but it looks like we're going to be really exploring citizenship in El Salvador. It's on the table. It's an option. And I'm excited. You know, I've been doing this for over 10 years now.

I think El Salvador is really the most exciting thing to happen since the Genesis block. I think they're going to disrupt securities industry the same way that Bitcoin disrupted money. So this is really as big as the original disruption of Bitcoin itself. And so it's great to see the central bankers are now going to have to pay for all their skull dougary over the years. They're on the way out. I don't think central banking has that model as we know, it's going to be around in 10 years. I think it's going to be completely eviscerated. And that's fantastic.

That's getting rid of the worst part of. of this global malaise that we have now. It's really coordinated by these central banks. So we can get rid of them, which is, I think, going to be a huge step forward. I love the idea of what they're doing with this bond. Just in that, you know, typically to get this kind of capital injection, they would be going to the IMF, right?

They would be saying, can we get a loan here? And now, I mean, if this thing, If they end up raising the money that they want in a decent amount of time, you've got to imagine every other small country out there that typically relies on the IMF or a body like it to get money for whatever their terms would be is going to look at this and say, holy shit, they did that without the IMF and easily at a lower rate than the regular bonds go for. it's just they're sidestepping the entire

system and and again if this is if this is oversubscribed I gotta imagine there's going to be a few eyebrows perking up throughout the region and throughout the rest of the globe so I mean what does that game theory look like I mean

I don't know yeah exactly game theory goes to the sovereign level you know it's a speculative attack against the US dollar so same thing micro strategy is doing borrow cheap in dollars when the interest rates are still low and buy Bitcoin. You know, we saw this during Weimar hyperinflation, the industrialists of Germany borrowed against the central bank

at those low rates and they bought assets. And those are the guys who made out the best. They made a lot of money there. We saw George Soros in 1993. He did a speculative attack against the Bank of England and he broke the Bank of England. He made $1 billion in a day doing this type of thing, borrowing from these folks at really low rates. and then betting against them.

So here you're borrowing in dollars and you're making a huge bet against dollars. So whether it's micro strategy, now El Salvador, and anyone who's buying Bitcoin is essentially making a speculative attack against the US dollar, is all coming to the four. And the IMF is not an institution

that we would want to exist for one day longer than is possible. You know, the sooner that it's, The IMF is euthanized, financially euthanized, the much better off the world will be. Same thing for the World Bank, same thing for the ECB, Federal Reserve Bank, Bank of England, Bank of Japan. So this is the path, the path toward euthanization of the central banks. I love that.

T.C. or Stefan, any thoughts here? Yeah, I'm loving it. I think it's such a cool thing to see. of course, I mean, people have to, you know, be, you know, intelligent about what's going on and see understanding that there are forces allied against the common people. And these are the BIS, the IMF, central banks, you know, the Fed, all the, as Max was saying, these forces are allied against the every man. So these, they need to be taken out or their power restricted.

And we need to basically, we need to, after, you know, all this time of them destroying our purchasing power, it's time for us to destroy their power in general. And the way you do that is you rug them by stacking stats, by anything to do with Bitcoin and, you know, people who are taking out loans using the Fiat system to minimize how much, how many stats they're having to spend. Because in doing so, what are you doing? You're restricting the supply of Bitcoin. You're holding that back. and then again you're driving the price further up. And over time, we're advancing that process of hyper-bitcoinization. And so that's how I see it.

I did a recent episode with Dylan Leclair talking about this idea as well, like debt and Bitcoin. And why in some cases, if you are, think of it like this, if you have home loan debt as an example, but you haven't paid it off and you bought Bitcoin instead, well, in some sense, you're using the Fial system to delay spending your Bitcoin because you want to hold all that. So in a similar way, like people who are taking that even further are doing, say, the micro strategy, right?

They're borrowing Fiat money and then they're putting it into Bitcoin. Or another example might be borrowing Fiat money to put it into the Bitcoin bond. And you're sort of retaining some Bitcoin exposure as part of that Bitcoin bond. If you do it in a large enough size, you're getting residency or potentially citizenship in El Salvador. You're helping fund the alternative. You're helping build the alternative. So that's an example way of thinking about this. You're using the Fiat system debt against the Fiat system.

I like that. T.C., how about you? Any thoughts? Yeah, absolutely. I think El Salvador is such an incredible place for this to start. You know, I've thought for a long time that, you know, being in the United States and trying to, you know, orange pill so many different people and talking. to so many people who are just not receptive to even opening their minds enough to start understanding Bitcoin.

It's no surprise that it's in the more like the developing nations, the smaller nations, where you're going to see this kind of embrace of Bitcoin happen. And if you just look at El Salvador as the first, you know, they're dollarized. They're under the thumb of all those global institutions, IMF, etc. and they don't have sort of their destiny in their own hands in so many ways. So with Bitcoin comes this incredible monetary sort of renaissance there that can give them sovereignty in ways they've never had before. And it also, I mean, it's incredible to me.

They're tying this all into volcano energy. I mean, what an incredible thing to actually have a buyer in Bitcoin for their native. sovereign energy source that otherwise they wouldn't really be able to bring to market. So it's just a it's a really incredible synergy of those forces of, you know, having the ability to cancel out their debt and be, you know, whole and sovereign in a monetary fashion, but also to actually be able to monetize their their native energy resource. And you just start looking around the world, how many small countries are out there with broken current. or dollarized or just completely not in control monetarily,

but they have some kind of energy resource. They've just never been in a position to be able to actually bring it to market or even just adopting Bitcoin and gaining that sort of nation state sovereignty against the sort of world economy. And that just leads right into the geopolitics and the dynamics there. So it's just it's an incredible, incredible development. And I predict, should everything go well, we're going to just see an absolute domino effect of small countries. And that's where it's going to start.

It's going to start on the edges. You know, big countries like the United States are going to be one of the last, if not the last, to adopt this fully. And so I just, I'm really excited to see what happens next. I like early on how I can't remember who they were responding to, who Kulkele was. responding to, but somebody was saying, oh, well, you're, you know, you're putting your, your whole monetary system or, or whatever, at risk. And his response was something along the lines of like, well, how much worse could it get, right? Like how, how much worse could our current situation get? We're already kind of like the lowest part of the pecking order. Like,

it's these countries that don't have as much to lose that are most incentivized to try something new. And they're going to be the ones that are the greatest benefactors of this. And a lot of better off first world nations are going to have a really tough orange pill to swallow when they see it panning out so well. And they're the last to the party. It's going to be a big slap in the face. And there's going to be quite the transfer of wealth globally as people clue in to what's going on. And I do love the way that they've structured. the bond in that 50% is going into like mining infrastructure and all that. And then the other 50% goes into a Bitcoin buy that gets locked up for five years,

keeping in mind that in the history of Bitcoin, there's never been a four year period where it's been down in comparison. It's always been substantially up from where it was four years prior. And then they're going to be start paying out quarterly 50% of the upside of Bitcoin. And so like there's going to be, I feel like two knock on effects of this when people start looking at the bonds. One, if they if they do the raise and they get the billion, people will be like, oh, holy shit, let's, we should do that as a way to raise money. But two, when five years out after the six and a half percent coupon has been paying out annually, on top of that, people start getting, you know, payouts of the, the appreciation of the underlying Bitcoin. every quarter on top of that.

And they start looking at all of these other shitty bonds that are paying out like a percent. And, you know, like basically like negative four or five percent real yield. What is that going to do to the entire bond market globally? It's going to be. Well, it also correlates in the opposite direction of a typical bond, right? Because a treasury bond would go down in price with inflation. This is, this goes up. This is more like equity with a very juicy yield dividend of six and a half percent.

Plus, think about the positive carry implications here. For institutional players, you can borrow in yen at near zero, get a pick up a six and a half percent coupon. And then you could hedge that, you could hedge that by, let's say, in the credit default swap market on El Salvador. So your net cost to carry is probably going to be in the close to five percent. percent, which is guaranteed. You know, you've got it fully hedged. So 5 percent, and then you borrow against that, you know, you could very quickly get, I think what's going to happen is institutionally you're going to see this develop into a multi,

multi hundred billion dollar market pretty quickly. In this kind of market right now, that's, you know, there's over a quadrillion in traded in the derivatives market. And that's all basically credit default swaps and cross interest rate differential swaps. and hedging swaps. And so here you have a positive cost to carry of over 5% with almost no risk if you hedge it in with the credit default swap on the country itself. And that's like 400 basis points more than anything else out there. So I mean, this is going to this is going to be extremely popular.

The credit rating of El Salvador is going to go from, I think it's B minus. They're going to go to an A minus pretty soon. they're going to, I think they're going to get completely out of the wholesale market on the sovereign debt market and just go into the Bitcoin debt market. And the country is an emerging credit. You know, it's, this bond could trade at a premium. You know, the 6.5% coupon the next round, they could be offering 4.5%, 3.5%, and the existing bonds are going to be trading at 10, 20% premium over their initial listing price. So the whole thing is a virtuous cycle that's just heading, you know, straight up. And the infrastructure, it goes into Bitcoin City, which is going to be a magnet for corporations,

zero payroll tax, zero capital gains tax, zero income tax. That's going to attract a lot of companies to El Salvador. So their GDP is already seeing the impact of this. Tourism is up dramatically. They're going to do 10% this year, which is the highest GDP. They've printed since early 1990s. So you're looking for, I'm thinking GDP and El Salvador, calendar 2022 is going to be approaching 20%.

So it's going to be the fastest growing country in the world. They've got increases from the increased use of Bitcoin and Lightning for remittances as well. So there's so many forces. $400 million in remittance fees gets dropped. It's eliminated. It drops right to the bottom line. And, you know, just like Iceland was able to monetize their geothermal energy and export it as aluminum ingots, right? The Icelandic business model is we've got virtually free geothermal energy.

We're a big aluminum smelters and we can export the aluminum. That's how we export our geothermal energy. So here you've got El Salvador, they're going to convert their geothermal energy into Bitcoin, and that Bitcoin is the predatory apex predator in the world of finance. So it can go out there and it can start acquiring income producing assets. It can start acquiring all kinds of stuff. It can, it has the multiplicity impact on the economy is huge. And it's just the beginning.

that's why we're anxious to actually move there and become citizens there because it's like moving into you know it's like i'm being part of the american revolution in 1776 i mean uh that turned out pretty well this is the el salvador this is the salvadorian revolution and the impact is going to be absolutely humongous yeah that's yeah well i mean i'm excited to see how this plays out over the next I mean, not just year, but in the years to come. You know, and I think we can get into an instance where, you know, it's easy to forget that these things come in, come in waves and there could be periods where it seems like not a lot is going on. Like, you know, when the initial El Salvador announcement came out that they're making it legal tender, everybody's like, oh, there's going to be X number of countries that do that this year. but obviously some of these things take take longer to do and there's a lot of people that are probably watching and kind of seeing how things pan out but kind of like technology people

overestimate what can happen in a year or two years and they underestimate what can happen in a decade and I think this is going to be another instance of that where 10 years out you're like oh my god how how did so much happen in the decade. Meanwhile, everybody's like, wow, you know, whenever you get these little dips, people are like,

I see people in the comments right now that are, there's a few bears in the comments saying, oh, nothing's going to happen with El Salvador. I beg to differ, friends. I very much beg to differ. I think it's going to be one of the turning point moments in,

in human civilization where, the world starts converting to a Bitcoin standard. And gradually, then suddenly, I think it'll pan out. Yeah, I mean, if I look at my timeline on Twitter 2011, when I'm saying, hey, buy Bitcoin, everyone in the comments is saying, oh, it's shit, don't buy it, it's garbage. You know, that's the people have been saying that since Bitcoin was a dollar. They'll be saying it when Bitcoin is $5 million. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I guess it's part of just being a Bitcoiner. Like you get to you get to sit around and watch things happen in real time. And the whole way, there's always going to be more people saying, oh, it's, it's trash, it's not going to happen. But it's always a new shifted goalpost of what's not going to happen. Like the fact that that the current argument is no other countries are going to adopt this. It's just and like it's just. It's just El Salvador doing this, you know.

And it's it was just micro strategy doing this. It's it's just some tech nerds using this digital money. Like it's always it's just until it's just fucking everybody, right? Well, people have trouble expressing love. You know, when you're in elementary school and you like, a girl, sometimes what you do is you'll cut their ponytail off or something to show you you like them because you don't know how to express your love. So a lot of shit coiners and no coiners, they don't know how to express their love of Bitcoin. So they say something negative

about it because they're emotionally immature and very confused. And then they go through puberty. Like Peter Schiff has yet to go through puberty yet. He's still stuck in his prepubescent days. He hasn't grown any hair on his balls. He hasn't looked at Bitcoin like adult yet. He's still flailing about like a ninth grader. But when he does finally mature, and he allows himself to be see the truth, then he will be an ardent bitcoiner. But we, you know, it's not, you just have to let kids grow, you know, let children be children. And then eventually they mature. That's, it's, it's on a vector. They don't, you can't go backwards. You can't go back to the womb. Once you're out of the womb, it's all the way to the end.

Well, one day Peter will grow up, much like his son, Spencer. Yeah. I love it. Let's keep it rolling. Everybody in the chat, thank you for being here, of course. Smash, I like one, give it a share. And we're going to jump to our final reason. Stefan, you are up.

What are you excited about this week? What's caught your own? So I think it's interesting that the Fed has backed off from the word transitory. That used to be. So inflation, you know, the whole transitory argument, and now they're realizing, oh, wait, actually the people aren't even believing us now. We need to move. We need to try a new tactic.

And so put in other terms, people are starting to cotton on to the fact of inflation. Right now, any hardcore bitconer who knows, you know, worth his salt, has knows very well the problems of inflation. But what we're talking about is for the masses. When the masses slowly start to wake up and realize the problem of inflation, Well, get ready because people will start to do all sorts of things, whether that is running into stocks and property and so on. But most importantly, Bitcoin as the solution, as the answer to the problem of fiat money and central banking. So it's interesting to see.

So, I mean, as an example, let me just read a little bit of the commentary from one of the Fed chairments. San Francisco Fed president, Mary Daly, was saying, based on their comments, they were saying they wanted to get ahead of inflation. And now that, again, this is like obfuscation, right? They'll say this kind of, oh, look, see, we're going to get ahead of the Fed is going to try to get ahead of inflation by rapidly pulling back on the asset purchase program. So these people, they just talk nonsense, right? They just, they just spew diarrhea out.

They just spew random, you know, whatever, spew out. And basically they do baffle them with bullshit, right? That's their strategy. They just put out words and kind of, oh, this is quantitative tiding and the asset program and the whatever LARP program, whatever thing. At the end of the day, how much money did they print? How much money did they enable to be printed them plus the government plus the financial system, the banking system that enables all this money printing?

That's at the end of the day, you just break it down. You don't worry about whatever garbage words they're using. You just look at how much are they printing. And more and more people are going to start learning about, yeah, as the commenters is saying, shadow stats is one example. There's another one. I think Marty Ben has spoken about that as well. But yeah, basically there's other kinds of metrics of inflation.

Or you can just literally look at, hey, what is M2? How much did M2 go up? What did the various metrics of money go up by? And also, you'll notice that the Fed take away some of these data sets over time. They'll say, oh, we're not going to run employ. anymore. We're not going to show you what that is. So these are all examples, but ultimately, I'm bullish because more and more people are starting to realize that inflation is not just transitory. Now, the powers that be will try to say, oh, look, they're going to move to the next

goal post shift, right? They're going to start saying, oh, no, inflation is good, right? That's the next one. So at the start of, oh, inflation isn't happening. Oh, yeah, it's only a little bit. Oh, yeah, it's transitory. Oh, no, inflation is good, right? And we've seen that. There have been some articles out there where some regime supporting useful idiot is out writing about how inflation is good. Well, it's not and people are realizing it. So that's why I'm bullish. There was a recent article and it was again, some goon, you know, basically backing up the Fed saying how, oh, this whole narrative how inflation is bad for poor people is totally bunk. And their argument was poor people have a lot of debt.

And so the inflation will make it easier to pay back their debt, completely ignoring the fact that, one, they wouldn't need so much fucking debt if they could afford their bills. And two, that their paychecks, their salaries are not keeping up with inflation. So while it is technically easier to pay back the previous debt, they're going to be stacking more debt because they can't pay their bills at an increasing rate. And so like this argument that it's bad, they were saying it's bad for the rich, like that inflation was bad for the rich and good for the poor. Yeah. And you're looking at you're looking at the wealth gap and like how many like the wealth. Like the wealth gap grew so much this year. The richest who could afford assets were the biggest benefactors of this past year.

And to add to what you're saying there, Ben, I want to add something there because it's not just that the poor people have to go into debt. It's that their access to debt is far less. The price they pay for debt is so much higher. If you're a rich guy or if you're a big public company, you can access extremely cheap. debt and you can access a lot of it. But if you're a poor person, you can't. You're or if you can access debt, it's at, it's at basically highway robbery rates.

And that's such a big fundamental shift that I see that interest rate apartheid. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, yeah, like what, what do the, what do the, the poorest people do? They go and they get like a paid payday loan at like money gram or, or, or, or, or, all those like paycheck or or payday loan companies that are super predatory and you get these terrible rates and then you're just saddled with awful debt because you don't have access to cheap money like the people on top the people closest to the spigot right it's it's it's totally skewed towards those who are already the the best off to to continue to be better and better off than

everybody else and bitcoin doesn't allow for that like just because you're not you're not you you're rich in Bitcoin terms doesn't guarantee you any more Bitcoin. You know, you have to provide value. Oh, sorry. I was just going to say in 2008, after Lehman and Bear Stearns, they bailed out the banks to the tune of $800 billion. And I distinctly remember people really genuinely feeling outrage at that at the time. And people were camping out in tents in front of downtown banks. And, you know, there was actually some sense of injustice, even though I think the people at the time didn't even really fully understand what it meant. And today, in contrast, we are completely numb to this denomination of trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars. And it's stunning, the degree to which people have become numb to that.

the thing that that is so amazing to watch is that people are just going right along with these higher prices they might moan and complain a little bit but they keep buying the stuff at higher and higher prices and it's i think it is something that slowly people are coming to actually recognize something's going wrong i'm not so sure that they know why yet but i think it's going to it's going to need to get worse before people really, really wake up in mass. But I do think that the start of that is, you know, them changing that that language, that transitory thing was such BS. Well, there's never been transitory, you know, inflation's been eating away a purchasing power for 100 years. Sometimes they call it inflation. Sometimes they call it stagflation. And even up until

even a year ago, they were calling it deflation, even though it was inflation. purchasing power continues to go down because that's what happens when you print lots of money. But I think one of the points that people don't really understand would be structurally what's going on here. So I've been watching this for 40 years. You know, I started my career on Wall Street in the early 1980s during really the Greenspan era at the Federal Reserve Bank. And then Bernanke and Yellen and J. Pal now. And they've pretty much engaged in two things. The Greenspan put and the policy of extend and pretend.

So the Greenspan put is that anytime market sold off, he would print more money to make sure people had a lot of money to buy stocks. This was been going on for 40 years now. The extend and pretend model is that every time the U.S. needs to pay for a war or cover up some infrastructure, boondoggle, they recapitalize a lot of the government's debt, but at longer maturity and at a lower coupon. And so to keep those coupons low, the Fed keeps lowering interest rates, artificially suppressing rates at the levels they're at now, which are historically about incredibly, the interest rates in America are at a 240-year low to give you an idea. The interest rates in America have never been this low in the history of America. Interest rates in Great Britain have never been as low as they are in the history of Great Britain. So these are incredibly low interest rates.

And as part of that, what you have is duration risk. So because of this extend and pretend policy, the underlying capital structure of the United States is on these longer mature bonds, the 20, 25, 30 year bonds. 30 year bonds didn't even exist during Paul Volcker's day the last time we had a Fed chairman who raised rates. So that means that on the entire American economy and global economy is sitting on a structural tinder box of long rates that are incredibly sensitive to any uptick in interest rates whatsoever. So as people lose faith and fee out money and as they start to dump fixed income to, let's say, buy Bitcoin or just because the risk is intolerable, they're not willing to accept a negative interest rate bond anymore and you have an uptick and rates out of the control of the central

banks structurally speaking the entire structure crumbles like building seven on 9-11 it's just it's a controlled demolition it's just a complete evisceration of the entire structure and it can happen very very very quickly that's why it's important to own bitcoin as soon as you possibly can it'd rather be a year or two years or three years too early than a day too late because once the day comes when this thing blows, you're not going to be able to find any Bitcoin in size at anything under, you know, a million bucks of coin. And it's going to be, you need to prepare. I mean, structurally, just looking at the structure of this, it's, it's remarkably fragile. And it's, all forces indicate that it's about to crumble. And there's, there's no argument against it.

If anyone has an argument against what I just said, please let me know. But none exists, because I've been saying this for a while and no argument, counter argument has surfaced because There is no counter argument. We're literally on the cusp of a bonfire of the global bond market that is really historic. Yeah, absolutely. T.C. or Stefan, any thoughts on that? Look, it's just very long, drawn out structural issues in the economy. And the problem is the money.

And all of these other kind of downstream problems are coming because we didn't have a good sound money. Some money has two parts. It's chosen by the market and it's free of government interference. That's the second part. And unfortunately, the gold system and the system, the Fiat system we're operating under is highly government is under a lot of government interference. So it's not allowing a true market and free choice. And so fundamentally, as people start to move towards the system of free choice of Bitcoin, we're going to start to see a lot of the nonsense get washed away. It will get pretty, well, there'll be some pretty big changes to come over the next decade or so. But I think if you're holding sets, you're on the right side of the trade.

Yeah. And I agree with everything that's been said. I would just add, you know, for the history of the last 100 years or so, inflation's been a constant. It's been really insidious because it's happened sort of in slow motion as people are living in real time. You only see it when you when you really look over longer periods of time. And now that we're in this sort of crescendo, it reminds me of like a mad dash where they're trying to just steal as much as they can the wealth and time energy of the working population. And this is happening globally. So it's it's stunning. It's historic. And urgency and action are required. So

stack Bitcoin, get off zero, get it done. Absolutely. You know, these dips are a blessing. If you can call 53 or $54,000 a dip. But yeah, I mean, Bitcoiners are good at just kind of keeping their heads down and stack and sats at all times, you know, stack the dip, stack the crap.

stack the crab market, stack the all-time high, whatever you need to do, just keep stacking those stats because the world is too focused on short term. And just given our system, everybody is incapable of having low time preference. And so, you know, Bitcoiners have kind of tuned into that and hopefully are able to tune out the noise of day to day and are able to plan for the future. So that's why we're all here. I think what I'm going to do now is I'm going to start rounding this out. We'll get some final thoughts from everybody and we'll sign off here.

Everybody again in the chat, thank you so much for being here. Again, smash that like button. Give this a share. Yeah, let's get a round of final thoughts and also where people can find you. So T.C. I'll toss it to you first. Any final thoughts on today's conversation topics and where can people find you? Yeah, thanks for the opportunity for a final thought because I really want to say that you, Ben, have provided such incredible content for so long and I regularly point people to your

incredible tutorials. Thanks. Stefan, your interviews are just profoundly thoughtful and incredibly educational. Max, I've been watching you for years and you've really lived. lit a spark under the entire suite of topics that this all that this whole bitcoin thing touches. And so I'm just really honored that I was able to be on this platform and this podcast with you guys. It's it's really, it's been a pleasure.

You can find me on Twitter at Meditation Man. See you there. Awesome. Thanks for being here, man. Great topics and everything today. Max, how about yourself? Any final thoughts? And where can people find you?

Oh, people can find me on Twitter. Yeah, Max Kaiser is my Twitter handle. Also, the orange pill pod, which we do, Max and Stacy do the orange pill pod. Final thoughts would be that, you know, dollar cost averaging is the best way to accumulate Bitcoin over time. Just take your motions out of it. Stack. Set it and let it go. Set and go.

Either daily or weekly or whatever you're comfortable with. And outsource your. monetary policy to Bitcoin. That's what El Salvador has done. Think about it. It's an open source project. They upgraded it with Taproot and the country didn't have to spend a penny upgrading their entire monetary system. It was done for them by the volunteers who work on the protocol, which is really phenomenal. And you can do the same thing for yourself. Outsource your money to Bitcoin, put it on dollar cost averaging, and then do what you really want to do, like Brecki. Apparently, for years he's wanted to carve stones. Well, now he's carving stones. Why? Because of Bitcoin. Now he's a

stone carver. Wow. Who would have thought? I do love that development that Brecky becomes a stone mason. That's incredible. I didn't have that on my 20-21 bingo card, but here we are. Stefan. About yourself. Final thoughts and where can people find you? Yeah, look, I'm just excited to see what happens. I think the whole Bitcoin city idea is really incredible an incredible idea. And I think I'm excited to see many of these Bitcoin cities or things like that or projects like this form. So that way there's lots of competition. And then, you know, Bitcoin people will have choices. And so, yeah, it all comes down to really thinking about your long term and paying yourself first, i.e. saving into stats first and, you know, pay your bills and then stack with the rest.

That's essentially the approach that I take. And so I think that's really the way to navigate these times. And remember, if you're denominated in SATs, you will experience dramatic rise in your purchasing power over time. And this is true if you look at, say, what was the cost of, I saw it an interesting tweet the other day. It was like iPhone 4 costs, you know, I don't know how many hundred bitcoins or thousand bitcoins. And like now, you can buy an iPhone for a fraction of a Bitcoin. So I think that same factor or that same principle is going to apply. In terms of where people can find me, you can find if you search Stefan Levera in your podcast application or Stefanlavera.com, you can subscribe to the show.

I interview a lot of the leading people in the Bitcoin world. And of course, you can stack that at swan.com. So that's where you can find me. Awesome. Thank you guys all so much for being here. You're all welcome back anytime. And you're all also welcome back. I'm doing a Christmas special on December 23rd.

There's a ton of people swinging by for short little stints to say hello. So feel free to swing on in if you see fit. And thank you guys. Thanks again for being here. Thanks for inviting us. Cheers. Thank you so much. All right.

See you guys later. Everybody watching. Thank you so much for joining this fine Friday. for another episode of Why Are We Bullish? Had a lot of fun. Glad that you guys could be here in the comments and everything. Of course, smash out like button. Give this a share.

Subscribe if you're not already. All of those things really do help. Of course, you can also help out the show in another way by hitting up the previously mentioned sponsors down below. Those were Shake Pay, Ledden, Bitrefill, Keystone, and Bill Fottle. All of those are linked in the show notes. everybody's Twitter handle that was on is also linked down below. And if you really liked what you saw,

you can always drop me a Bitcoin tip at my strike.me page or actually on my Twitter handle, I just, I cheated the system. So I have access to strike in Canada, which I got early access just to make a tutorial video. But stupid me, I didn't even think of this until now, but I was able to use a VPN to then link my strike to my Twitter. So you can tip me on Twitter now, or you can go to strike.

Dot me slash BTC sessions. Type in any amount that you like. Hit the tip button. You'll be greeted with a lightning invoice or if you tap to the right, a regular Bitcoin QR code. Either way, thank you guys again for being here. Keep your eyes out for that Christmas special that's coming around. 30 guests, you guys, 30 guests on the show.

I've got the list in front of me. There might be more. There might even be more. But 30 guests, there's going to be 30. minute panels rotate. It's going to be a four-hour banger. It's going to be crazy. This will be December 23rd, starting at 5 p.m. Eastern time, and it'll go till 9. Yeah. So if you got to see the Why Are We Bullish with Michael Saylor and Jack Mallors and Press and Fish and all that, it's going to be, again, just like rotating guests throughout it. Throughout it,

there's going to be a ton of people. It's going to be wild and festive as fuck. Anyways, guys, thank you so much again for being here. Yeah, smash like, subscribe, all that good stuff. I'll see you guys next time for your daily session.