TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #144: Michael Krieger

Episode Date: March 27, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with Michael Krieger, founder of Liberty Blitzkrieg to discuss: - Gold markets - The Empire - Most recent bailout - Great Awakening - Why Michael is still bullish on Bitcoin - Bitcoin + Oil & Gas Industry - Un-schooling - much more Follow Michael on Twitter Check out Liberty Blitzkrieg Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app.

What's up freaks, it's your boy Marty here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt. To keep it short, I had the immense pleasure of sitting down with Michael Krieger, Liberty Blitz on Twitter, founder of libertyblitzkrieg.com, somebody whose content I've been getting a lot of value out of for the last almost a decade, and somebody I've been waiting patiently to have a conversation with for quite some time. i was holding out to do it in person but since the virus is sweeping the world i figured we might as well do a remote episode because i think michael's thoughts in these trying times

are very valuable this is actually a very positive and optimistic episode so i think you guys are going to like it this episode of tales from the crypt is brought to you by the cash app you freaks know all about them they're helping us stack sats they're helping us stack slivers of stonks if we want to and they're helping us with their boost program on the sat side you can buy sets spy sets stack sets excuse me sell sets receive sets send sets and now they're making sats to standard if you have an android phone you should be able to toggle and make it so sats for the standard it's pretty incredible on top of that it seems like they're going to be rolling out auto buy feature uh soon trademark and uh yeah stacks that's on the cash app and now with cash app

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and $10 is going to go to our good friends at Owls Lacrosse. Download the Cash app today. Please forgive my early morning podcast ad voice. About to record with Rodolfo Novak. He's the only person I'd wake up very early for to record a podcast, so we're about to rep it. I think you guys will enjoy that too.

Enjoy this episode with Michael Krieger. I had immense pleasure sitting down with him. And again, very optimistic and positive after having sat down with Michael. Enjoy. You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins.

In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy Marty Bent here. very excited for this episode sitting down with somebody i've been reading for geez almost a decade now it feels like definitely seven or eight years as somebody's inspired me to start writing and uh is one of my favorite warriors for freedom in the digital age i'd like to introduce you freaks to michael krieger founder of liberty blitz craig oh marty thanks

that's such a nice introduction like um i want i want a lot of people to understand that one of the biggest purposes of me doing what I do, writing, tweeting, all that stuff, you know, it's not for money, obviously, because you don't really make any. It's to try to inspire other people to question their lives, what they're doing, how they see the world, so that then they can repurpose their own skill sets towards essentially ushering a new era, a new world, a better world, which is, I think, what all Bitcoiners want. We all know how completely messed up this world is. Otherwise, we wouldn't be involved in this game. So we're all, you know, we're not just early, right? I think Bitcoiners are not just early adopters to Bitcoin. I think

we're early awakeners, right? Like we're early to the whole game and how the whole game needs to change. So it's bigger than Bitcoin. I mean, we recognize Bitcoin is key, right? To this transformation, but it's obviously a lot bigger than just that. It's everything. No, I completely agree. And again, thank you for all of your writings over the years. They've helped me and i fell down the rabbit hole of liberty blitzkrieg uh after the after the 08 uh crisis and you sort of illuminated like you just mentioned my eyes to uh the messed up parts of our society mainly the banking system and uh security apparatus and the government that we're subjected to and it seems like we're in a very similar time particularly right now today as uh

the the as congress is passing a quote-unquote care bill um a a another bailout it seems um and it seems like this may be another inflection point where uh more people are awoken to the fact that we live in a very corrupt system but uh we're going to get into a lot of things in this episode but let's start with something that you've been passionate about since you started writing which is the gold markets and it seems like there may be uh finally has been talked about a lot forever in the gold world is the disconnection between the physical bullion market and the paper claims market. A lot of gold bugs seem to believe that the paper claims market sort of holds down the price of physical bullion. And it seems that, I don't

know whether it's because people can't transport gold due to the lockdowns caused by the virus, or if there's a material decoupling going on because too many people are demanding physical gold, but it seems like there is a wedge being driven between the physical bullion price and the paper claims price. Yeah, so just a little background on me because probably a lot of your listeners don't know.

I was on Wall Street for 10 years, so I'm quite a bit older than you, Marty, from 2000 to 2010 when I resigned. I was a commodities guy that whole time. I was an oil analyst in equity research at Lehman Brothers. And then at Sanford Bernstein, I was a commodities desk trading analyst. So I covered all the commodities, macro stuff, et cetera. So, you know, when the financial crisis hit, I was still on Wall Street on a trading desk.

And when I saw the theft that was going on to benefit people like me, that's when I became, quote unquote, radicalized. You know, that that's when that's when my entire perspective on everything, including my career, my success, the money I was making came into focus and I changed. my entire life within a year or so. You know, I quit, moved to Colorado all in 2010. It was a lot of changes. But the thing is, back then, this was pre-Bitcoin, right? I mean, 2008, 2009, the crisis was pre-Bitcoin. And so to me, right, you go to gold, you know, to sort of voice your displeasure with the monetary system. That was gold or silver. That was the way to do it. So whereas a lot of your listeners probably discovered a lot of things through Bitcoin, right? How things work, started questioning it by digging into Bitcoin. I come from a little bit of a different perspective

because I knew how rotten it was before Bitcoin. And then I was in a little bit of a dark place, right? Because I couldn't see a way out. I couldn't imagine what the new world could look like, right? Because gold obviously wasn't going to replace everything. We moved too far into the digital world so that when Bitcoin came out and I finally really took the time to dig into it in 2012, then I, then it was like, that changed my life because I could get out of the dark hole because I saw an alternative. I saw a digital alternative and I saw the genius of it. And so for me, it was like, Bitcoin was what I'd been waiting for for years and just appeared. And then I just got, got all into it. So, so, but to go back to gold, right. Since I've been following

it for so long, more than a decade, pretty closely, you know, probably since 2007, when I was on Wall Street. As you mentioned, yes, there's this idea, which I adhere to, that keeping the price of gold, right, down is a key to maintaining the financial system and the supremacy of the US fiat dollar. I believe that is correct. What's interesting about right now is that for 10 years, you always do hear people saying oh well like the physical market's tight or it's so tight it's going to break down everything's gonna break down but it never does right never does but there does seem to be something different about what's going on now i think there's two things to be aware of first of all in the past you mostly heard coins being tight right like you couldn't buy gold

coins and all that that's interesting but not gonna break the system what matters is 100 ounce bars 400 ounce bars stuff like that like that needs to get tight for it to really matter okay and so what happened earlier this week is that the comex 100 ounce bars there was a failure to deliver um and so now what they want to do at the cme is introduce a new contract where you can settle with 400 ounce uh bullion bars from the lbma in london etc etc okay now there's a few things to be aware of here. As you mentioned, right, refineries and production of gold is shut down in a lot of ways. So of course, that's going to impact, right, the supply of this stuff. But here's the weird thing. If that's the case, okay, if all of a sudden there is tightness in supply,

what is the market supposed to do? Market's supposed to go up in price. You go up in price to clear the market, right? You don't just freeze a market. And it seems that the gold market's sort of freezing right now, right? The deals aren't getting done in the way that they're to meet demand, which means there's no market, right? There's no real market for precious metals because the price is fake. So, we seem to be at an interesting inflection point. Now, I don't want to overplay this because people do overplay this all the time, right? We don't know yet how this is going to play out, but it's got my attention. It's got my attention in a real way that hasn't for a long, long time.

So I think pay attention. This guy, Roy Seabag, which I've been retweeting today. So he's part of Gold Money, right? Which buys physical for its customers and stores them in vaults overseas, right? I think Europe and Asia. He's a great resource right now because he is actually buying physical bars

for customers as we speak. And what he said today was that he had 100 million to buy. He was able to get it, but he can't get more than that, what he wants. And so he's actually asking, you know, if you're a bullion bank, if you've got bars, I'm in the market, right? But he's saying he's having trouble getting supply. So, and I, you know, he has no, you can say, oh, the guy runs a gold company and all that, but I don't, I don't take him as someone who's going to, who's going to lie about this. I mean, your credibility is just totally shot because he runs a business. He's a public person.

He's not an anonymous guy, just blogging about it. Right. And he's actually in the physical market. So I take what he says seriously. So we'll see how this plays out. But what I want to point out is that, you know, and this is important for Bitcoiners too. I know a lot of Bitcoin people don't like gold. I'm personally a fan of owning both. But while accepting that Bitcoin is the genuine revolution, right? I mean, that is the revolution, but you should still own gold in my opinion. But the key is this affects everything. Because if the gold market actually is an inflection point where things really start getting disruptive and changing, it'll wake people up to Bitcoin too. It'll wake up a whole new generation of people to what is going on.

Can you even imagine 99.9% of the world has never thought about gold for more than two seconds in their lives, right? All of a sudden, what if the gold market just blows up? I mean, you're going to red pill so many people because of that. Well, what would that blow up look like? It would just be a complete collapse of the paper claims market and physical bullion would skyrocket in price. Right. So it's hard. It's hard to say. So right now, as I mentioned, there doesn't seem to be anyone really making a market in the physical market. Okay.

So I think one of the ways it could look is that yes, you get people actually making a market for bars. So like, let's say someone like Roy's like, okay, we're in the market. You know, how much do you want for the bar? You know, maybe he, maybe he doesn't, maybe he fills that. And then you can, and then you can actually have a physical bar market that's trading at a price that is disconnected from the paper market. That's possible. There are a lot of ways that you could, you can have, you can have all sorts of paper markets blow up. You can have the entire derivatives market blow up. It's really,

it's beyond my comfort zone to speculate specifically how it'll go down, but, but it will be a domino, right? I mean, if you, if you think coronavirus as a domino, which I do, right, It's like the first kind of domino to start tipping in the financial system and the geopolitical environment as well, by the way. You know, something in the gold market could be another domino and then another domino, right? I mean, it's the whole thing, as I think you concur, is the financial system globally is a racket, right? It's just made of phantom prices. And what I like to talk about a lot, I recently did this in another interview. I don't think people think about this as much, but the U.S. is actually, people think it's this military empire. I actually think it's an industrial empire, but it's really a financial empire since 1970, right? Financialization took over with the Fiat USD. And so the way that the U.S. actually exerts power, of course it has a strong big military everywhere, but it can't pay for all those bases without the Fiat Reserve USD, right?

So we have a financial empire that relies on this reserve currency. And so if gold starts exposing a bit of the racket in the financial system, you can expect more dominoes to fall after. So that's one of the reasons I'm paying attention. Yeah. And just diving into what you just described there, the financialization of our economy over the last five decades has led to some weird situations. like our supply chain has been completely globalized we're not industrial anymore and we're finding as uh this virus slows down the economy that's leaving us pretty vulnerable in a vulnerable spot we we have no local strength if you will uh and then on top of that as uh we have financialized the economy this has pissed people off we have weaponized our our monetary

system and the financial system and it seems like countries like russia and china may be posturing to move away from that which could be another domino that uh that falls uh because of because of this virus and the slowdown in the global economy things are fucked man and it's and so that's what we were discussing before we hit record there is a bailout that just got passed through congress believe it's less go to the house and get signed officially but uh it got passed with unanimous by in a unanimous fashion uh which you said is never a good sign it seems like they're trying to paper over the systemic problems that exist do you think they can do it again after 08 yeah okay so that's exactly right like as we were talking about earlier um i see

this okay first of all i see the entire 21st century is just trash right for the u.s like complete dystopian garbage um from 9-11 right i mean for me 9-11 was very personal you know i'm a new york city kid grew up in manhattan i worked on wall street i was there three world financial center on september 11th i saw the first tower come down like in person saw the second one um as i was actually i saw no i saw one come down person one from television but um but anyway it was a very personal moment and um i i saw how my government abused me afterwards because in the aftermath of that being being so personal i got very emotional you know i was one of those people like oh we got you know we got to get those terrorists we got anything you know let's just

do this and then years later when i started really sort of figuring out some discrepancies with that story and also witnessing how quickly we were stripped of civil liberties, I got very angry. You know, that was like the first, that was one of the early steps of sort of me changing as well is realizing how clearly my own government or the people that control the government intentionally, emotionally used my vulnerability to take advantage of me. And then they, so they weren't able to do that in a way, right? But that was the next crisis where they consolidated power, And you've seen, okay, the proof is in the pudding. When you see levels of wealth inequality skyrocketing because financial assets and real estate bubbled up like crazy again, and the people who have access to cheap money are just making leveraged bets on that at the lows, you see the results. okay you you forget you know these statistics of you know gdp or average this or average doesn't

matter right what matters is like is like what's the median you know how's the median person doing you know and you see life expectancy has been dropping birth rates are at multi-decade lows suicides through the roof um yes of course like certain people are prospering but but but but a lot of people are in a depression right 50 of the country's probably been in a depression for the last 10 years. Nobody talks about them, right? Journalists don't talk about them, right? They just interview, you know, hedge fund billionaires. It's pathetic. You know, so here we are at the third, right? The third big moment crisis of this century. And what the establishment, right, the oligarchy is attempting to do is further consolidate power. And as I mentioned to you

before we recorded, this is what power does, right? We're an empire, okay, and an oligarchy. I call it the imperial oligarchy, which means power, there's great power, great wealth, but it's concentrated into a few hands and those hands run the country in various ways. So what are they going to do in a crisis? Of course, they're not going to reform, right? I always say empires don't reform, they collapse. There's a reason for that is because they don't ever get a wake up call, right? Because if their last two attempts to consolidate power and pillage worked without response, if they were able to keep things together while pillaging and consolidating power, of course, they're going to go for it again. So right now, they're going for it again. Here's where I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful for two reasons.

First, the system is way more fragile, way more Ponzi-ish than it was then because they just built another Ponzi over a Ponzi over a Ponzi. but secondly is generational right i mean i'm sure all your listeners are familiar with like the 80-year cycle outlined in in the fourth turning um you know and that's really important like so for you for example you're quite a bit younger than me so when i think you mentioned during the financial crisis you were in college okay you have no you had no voice at all right you're a college kid reading my stuff well guess what now you have a voice right you do you have a big boys, and not just you, but a lot of people like you. So I think that there is a capacity now to push back. And we have Bitcoin, right? We have we have things we can we can do. So there's a

capacity to push back in a way that didn't exist then, right? Like I'm a Gen X, you know, almost a millennial, but basically late, very late Gen X. And I was one of the few people, you know what I mean? I was like screaming into the wilderness, I feel like I have a lot of allies now, you know, and a lot of allies that are younger than me that weren't around and didn't have a voice. So, you know, let's do this, right? Let's, let's do it. Let's raise hell. Let's act, let's do whatever the heck we can. And I think, I think we can, we can actually, we can actually use this, right? They say, never let a crisis go to waste.

We should take that to heart, right? We should not let this go to waste. I agree. And I think the, I mean, what they're trying to push through right now is definitely going to piss a lot of people off our boy rudy havenstein tweeted out a wall street on parade article which highlighted one of the sections uh and the powers that they're trying to give the fed are pretty ridiculous the text of the final bill was breathtaking and the breadth of new powers it bestowed on the federal reserve including the fed's ability to conduct secret meetings with no minutes provided to american people and this is one of the my favorite topics that you

always talk about is the two-tier justice system and the basically black box that is given to the fed and the powers that be and the uh we are we plebs are subjected to to all the law all the laws by the letter of the rule where they are allowed to just do whatever they want behind closed doors and like you said uh every crisis they try to consolidate more power and consolidate more power and especially after the last 12 years the fed's reaction to 08 like it's going to be hard to believe that they can fix anything going forward considering how bad they messed up the response to 08. We're already right back where we were. And now they just want to consolidate power more and not tell anybody what they're doing and just bail out the banks and give money

to the banks without any recourse at all. Right. So this is one of the key things that I've been trying to get across recently. I wrote about it in my repo article. And I wrote about it this past, my latest article which was titled power grab um the the fed right we we like to talk a lot about oh this is what the fed's doing and this is what i think it's going to lead to fine right but that's small picture stuff right we should always be big picture here because the the system itself right like the the way power functions is the key if we don't understand how power functions we can never fight back against power and create a better system because you're just going to constantly be fighting for scraps right which is what most politicians do most mainstream um uh political

movements are basically like oh please let me have some scraps right like raising taxes right that's just going for scraps it's keeping the system in place but like let me have some food off the table that's not that's not real right that's that's just being a slave so so with the fed it's the same thing why why does the fed exist like it does okay now personally i don't think we need a central bank i know you liked my tweet last week where i was saying that you know from from 1842 to 1913, the U.S. had no central bank and we had a booming economy, right? Railroads, like all sorts of stuff. Car was invented. Flight, right? So in my opinion, we don't need a central bank, but these are the questions we should be asking, right? Do we need a central bank? Is it

necessary? Okay, fine. Let's say you think we do, okay? Well, certainly there's no justification for a central bank acting like this one does, right? Like if you're going to have a central Bank, and you're saying it's in the national interest, then there should be public debate over everything that the Fed does, because the Fed is throwing trillions of dollars around, right? That's what they're doing. But they just do it, right? They just act. They don't have to ask anybody. They just do stuff. And this is where, you know, this is a big red pill, I think, for someone, if we can get it across to them. Like a lot of people, their eyes glaze over when you start talking about, oh, this is how the Fed does things. Why don't you just ask them, listen,

We have a central bank, right, that's in charge of the U.S. currency and creating it, right? And, well, the banks create currency too, but you know what I'm saying, like high-powered, like, right? Why is there no public oversight, really? You know, why is there no debate on what they're doing, right? Shouldn't that be something that the public gets to decide on? Like, shouldn't the public be able to say, hey, if you're printing $2 trillion, send me $2 trillion worth of checks? or let's build high-speed rail or whatever. These are decisions that the public should be consulted on

if we're going to allow that kind of power because this is the greatest power that there is, right? So that's what I really want to get across. We should be questioning the entire apparatus. Yeah, well, I think Neil Kashkari on Sunday really fucked up by admitting that the Fed has unlimited cash that they can print and that had people start to question,

well, if you have unlimited cash, why do we pay taxes at all? Why don't you just print the money? Exactly. Like why, why do we pay taxes? And also where, where, who gives you the authority to just make these calls? You just, anytime, you know, and, and look, one of the things that I wrote this piece all the way back, I think in 2013, it was called the stock market food stamps for the 1% where I was explaining that the stock market going up, like people have been conditioned, right stupidly to think that the stock market going up is good for them or it means the economy is good or but but that's but that's that's rubbish right that's just not true first of all you have to ask who owns most stocks uh second of all you have to ask why is the stock market going

right like in certain periods of history um let's say the railroads are being created okay the world is changing in this fundamentally good way i would say right and you get a boom right or the automobile or something like that. You know, and so innovation is changing the world and you probably get a stock market boom, but stock market booms aren't always like that. So the last 10 years, right? Like I wrote this tweet, I said, 2010, 2020 was bullshit. Like the whole thing was bullshit. Right. And I believe that. I mean, tell me what, what amazing other than Bitcoin, right? Other than Bitcoin, what amazing innovation really changed your life? Like in such a wonderful way happened over that decade i mean certain things but i get but really no i mean i you know

it was mostly bubble asset prices going up because it wasn't just stocks it was bonds it was real estate um and the beneficiaries of that you see it again the proof is in the pudding the primary beneficiaries of that are people who own assets and and particularly people who own assets with leverage right you borrow and right the only the only experience most people have with this and this thing you need you know most most of your listeners probably realize but you need to think about the most only the only potential for an average person to to make money off leverage is buying a home right because you're borrowing let's usually 80 of the value um putting down 20 equity and then if it goes if it goes up 50 you're not making you know 50 you're making much

more than that because if you sell, because you use leverage. But here's the problem, right? Most people that buy a home and they make those big gains still need to live somewhere. So if you sell your home, you got to go put it into another home that's also risen in price. But if you're a financial speculator, right? Or if you're one of these guys that have excess money, right? You're not buying your primary residence, but you're buying like Blackstone did, right? After everyone got kicked out of their homes, you're borrowing and you're buying thousands of homes across the country and then renting them out. That's how you make real money, right? Because you're using a huge amount of leverage and you're speculating on assets. And so people need to understand

that is essentially the economic model of the United States and the oligarchy. Yeah. Warren Buffett, that's one of his plays too. Berkshire Hathaway has that huge real estate business as well um and i want to go back to uh the sort of black box nature of uh the system and bring bitcoin into because i was talking about this the the other week or the other day excuse me on twitter like my favorite bitcoin meme of all time is bitcoin sign guy because he's holding up by bitcoin behind janet yellen while the the headline under her is uh you cannot we will not have the fed audited or something like that the fed cannot be audited just the juxtaposition of buy bitcoin which is audited every 10 minutes if you're running a node running a full node you

can audit it from your computer from from the comfort of your own home and i think that's very important to help people sort of wake up to the fact that hey we can have a better system that is more transparent and you can participate in but i think it's how people are so confused right now like like you mentioned they don't even understand uh what the federal reserve is or how it operates what do you think we need to do just do you think and that's something you were tweeting yesterday too you need to speak to the people who are open to these ideas and that's i think that's something that's frustrating for me is that you just want to shake people but uh people just seem to not want to understand yeah exactly and and you know so this sort of plays into my series on

spiral dynamics and human consciousness and how important that is to actually uh building a better world what why i think this moment is so crucial and why i'm actually optimistic this time um you know not three months from now right but like three years from now is that i know these moments are the moments where you can expand consciousness you can also go the other way right but these are the great moments where you know you you're shaking to your core right or a lot of people are right? Because everyday life has been suspended, okay? So, people are at home, right? People have extra time to read. People are wondering, wait a minute, like, should the healthcare system work this way? Like, what's going to happen to me if I get COVID, right? Things like that with money,

like, wait, $2 trillion? Wait, what? I get a $1,000 check? You know, so this is the time where people like us, okay, are going to be really important, not as beating people over the head with you know don't be a sheep but instead which is why i'm really trying hard to be more sort of like um encouraging in in my in my tweets in my writing because i don't want you know to to make people fearful i want i want to make people realize that and i truly believe this um i think it's clear that it's the case humanity in general is completely shackled okay intentionally uh systemically, okay? The systems we have in place are designed to keep humans outside of their potential, outside of their capacity, via debt, via propaganda, okay? The

whole thing is set up to keep people working the plantation, essentially, and not thinking too much. So what I think is going to happen now is this is an opportunity for hundreds of millions, if not billions, potentially, of people to open their minds. And I think their minds are open right now. And they are and they are looking for answers. And or they are looking for people that are asking the right questions. And so we write our job is to be there for them, right? In as a optimistic, I think way as possible, you know, saying, Listen, there's no reason we have to live this way. There really isn't, you know, there's no reason we have to live under a system like this. and i do fundamentally believe that the only reason the system sustains itself it's not because

look empires always come and go governments always come and go nothing lasts forever right you always think it's gonna right but it doesn't you know like the worst the most totalitarian regimes end at some point right they always do so this is going to end the key is to is to is to create what's next in a good way right in a better way and the only way we're going to do that is if we're not operating out of fear, but we're operating out of sort of optimism. And also there's a reason to be optimistic. It's not crazy, again, because there's no reason we have to live this way. So I think for us to be able to explain to people, hey, this is essentially how the system works. There are alternatives. Bitcoin was created in a very thoughtful,

conscious way, not just to fight back against the system, but in the right way, right? And I always like to say with Bitcoin, you know, it's not, I know a lot of people say Bitcoin solves this because, you know, that's not really my thing. I think Bitcoin is more of the teacher, right? I think it's a teacher. It can teach us how to apply, right? So if you take the lessons of Bitcoin and apply, you can apply them to everything, okay? Everything in society, okay? Nobody is in charge. nobody is in control it's for the people um the persons right or people whatever satoshi who created gifted it to mankind and in the process you know has has a lot of bitcoin worth a lot of money but that's not been moved or sold if i if i if that's still correct um still correct

right so still correct so so look look at that right that was that was that was a gift to to to mankind and it shows us that it can be done right not everything needs to be patented right and controlled and you know it's people and the other thing i want to mention um you know which which a lot of people don't and this is where i i actually have a big issue and i haven't written this post yet but i'm gonna about individualism and this is where i think libertarians a lot of i mean i'm not one right because for a lot of reasons um i mean i people tend to think i am but they're just i think libertarians have lost the plot in so many ways and one of the ways that they've lost is with this idea of individualism i'll give you my definition i'll give you what i

how i think libertarians seem to see it a lot of libertarians seem to think like individualism means i right or someone else has the right to just or the destiny to just use my talents to make as much money and power as i can and nobody no government nothing else should be able to stop me i'm going to be i'm so smart and so gifted that i'm going to be king of the world okay and we shouldn't try to restrain that at all. It's all going to work out. I don't buy that. I don't think history proves that's correct. My definition of individualism is empowering, sort of like the Thomas Jefferson ideal of the yeoman farmer, a nation of yeoman farmers. The idea behind that was just like independent people, independent Americans, for the most part. Not because you

don't rely on a community of course community is huge but be but because if you're if you're empowered right if you're not a debt slave if you have the capacity to survive or or the financial resources to be okay um you're a benefit to everybody else okay because because because you are not um uh you're not as easily manipulated okay and so for me the the goal is to get as many people right not to have a few handful of talented people with all the money but get as many people as we can to be empowered individuals be empowered people because then they will empower their communities and then they will empower the world you know and that's and that's one of the key things for me um of my mission i guess you could say uh is to is to empower people right uh yeah

no and i think bitcoin's an incredible tool to do that right it helps us get away from that mindset of conspicuous consumption and having to chase for yield in the stock market and other investment vehicles that it allows us to basically save money and accumulate capital and find that independence that you just described and yeah i tend to agree as well that's one thing that the last 50 years has really destroyed is communities all the way down to the family the nuclear family level and this is tearing society apart at its seams and we need to reverse the trend like you mentioned, pretty sure after we hit record, birth rates down, opiate addiction up, suicides up, average American can't afford a $400 emergency expense. This is not what strong societies

look like. And Bitcoin can really help reverse that trend. That's why I focus on it. Yeah. And as you mentioned, right, I mean, and as I was talking about earlier, if you are in a precarious life situation, right, if you're in a ton of debt, you can't afford the next bill without your employee, if you can't get healthcare, for example, like linking healthcare to an employer, right? So you have to have a job to get healthcare that's somewhat affordable. Again, it's all designed to disempower the individual, right? To attach you to a system that is pernicious. And I believe, you know, this is 100% intentional, you know, it's not an accident, it's intentional, which is, again, why, whenever there's a crisis, the number one

priority is not to help people it's to maintain the structure right that that's the only thing that this um you know coup i'm calling it a coup corporate coup uh bill that they just passed is intended to do it's intended to prop up the system because the system is a system of control and essentially of debt slavery or financial feudalism right so that's all they're trying to do they're not trying to do anything else other than prop this thing up and how it was so evil how they sold it they were saying they're gonna get every american who lost their job under a certain tax bracket was gonna get two thousand dollars a month plus one thousand per child that's how it was sold last week and now we find out if this bill passes and gets signed into law twelve hundred dollars

once in may and the banks are getting a two trillion dollar bailout paid for by the taxpayer yeah yeah exactly it's just this gigantic con you know like i said when you have a senate bill passes 96 to zero it's you're you're being conned you know what i mean like every single senator has has made sure to insert their their their favorite lobbyists provision that's that's why it passed 96 to zero right they don't they don't work for you obviously um you know so so again you know look we we don't we don't need to live under this okay to my point before um things always change you know the systems change monetary systems change empires change so there's no reason to think this is not going to happen now too we just need to make sure that that the change

we'll get is a change for the better you know and i think that's what everyone involved in bitcoin wants um particularly those right who who have been around you know of course we all care about price right but i mean if that's your whole you know i mean if that's your whole thing um then you know i don't think you get it no this is not about price at all and i'm pulling a tweet up that you tweeted out earlier this week. Cause I want to talk about this, uh, basically what we need to move forward. And you listed out a bunch of things you've been tweeting out a bunch this week. So it's hard to find about localism. We need it. We need to strive towards localism, uh, growing our own food. Yeah. I mean, I can, while you look for it, I can, I can sort of

summarize it cause I know what you're talking about. So what I said is, okay, this is what we need. We need more empowered individuals, less oligarchs. Okay. We need more decentralization, less centralization and empire. You know, we need strong communities, you know, less central, you know, less power in DC. And the big thing here is, right, so let me try to frame this in a way that I think is really helpful. Right now, we're at what I hope is the pinnacle of big versus small, right? Big business versus small business. Organized oligarchy versus empowered individuals, okay, where it's such an extreme, right? Like the wealth of a small amount because of bubbly asset prices versus the debt of others, right? So for example, I'm sure you saw

this, but I wrote about in a recent piece, the sugar babies, right? These college, poor college girls that are in debt, right? And there are these services that are essentially prostituting them out to old men with money, right? Who own the assets. They know that these college girls are broke and it even like there's even a bonus that they right if you sign up with a dot edu get some sort of a bonus from these sites right i mean which which which tells you sickening right and so you know but this is but this is the problem right like how do we accept this right how do we accept our our young daughters being prostituted to old men in a systemic way because they have debt and one and one group has assets you know it's it's just it's repulsive right and it just

shows you how fallen we are as a society and so you know we need to restore this balance okay like at the very least we need to take the pendulum from over here which is big giant megacorps right um oligarchy imperial ambition and swing it as far the other way as we can okay and this applies to all aspects of life okay and so obviously yes the ethos of bitcoin is precisely designed to do that right i mean it's it's still small i mean that's the beauty of it right it's still small enough that people with real money right they want to put real money to work almost can't because you're going to move the price too much you know so it gives us it actually gives the the public an asymmetric advantage our advantage is we don't have that

much money so like as a percentage of our money we can put a decent amount if we wanted to in it you know just as a flyer even and and hope for you know hope for the best but but a big you know someone can't just you can't just put in you know if you're worth bloomberg money 60 billion you what are you going to do how much of your wealth can you put in you can't right so it's brilliant in that way um and so it fits into the whole ethos of this and you know people talk about oh yeah well bitcoin ownership is very concentrated and all that but okay but listen right like i just said it's one of these rare markets where you can you can having less money to put to work is actually to your advantage in bitcoin at this point because it's still small enough yeah even

the playing field and it is crazy to think how early we are and so what how fast do you think a transition to a bitcoin world would happen if people do wake up do you think bitcoin is ready for the for the mainstream um if if it were to be called upon okay so here's how i see it um first of all i know there's a lot of people pointing out we're at a monumental moment, right? Because the halving is, what, a month away, month and a half away. And if you look back at prior cycles, you know, I've been involved in it for several of them, two of them, two of the halvings now. And it does a similar thing, or it's done a similar thing, right? Like the price starts to get better, right? Bottoms before, well before, price starts to

get better during, you know, the halving, but then the real move is the next year, right? So like the giant move was 2017 one year after the halving in 2016 same thing into i think it was the same thing in 2013 right i think i think that was a giant spike after the 2012 right okay so so as of now i mean everyone got so freaked out bitcoin has died i couldn't believe how much of that i was seeing in the 4000s right like the 3000s like all these people all of a sudden were like it's going to zero it's dead i'm like you you people need to like meditate or something What are you talking about? It was really weird. But anyway, I saw that from a lot of people like big accounts too, you know, and I, that was just a sign to me. Like so many people were telling me

Bitcoin was dead right at the low. And, and, and so, but, but as far as I'm concerned, the cycle looks pretty much in place that we've seen, you know, next year would be the, it would be a giant move, which starts this year. You know, of course it could, it could, it could be front end loaded. we could get it this year because of the circumstances of the macro environment but i do think um this ties into what i said earlier which is that we're we're in a red we're in a potential red pill moment for the masses okay for for those that are are not looked into bitcoin let's say right but but might all of a sudden because they're just like wait what the you know what is going on here right um you know and so what really surprised me actually okay because i you know as

you know i've been in bitcoin for a while was i actually didn't really see 2017 coming i mean i i i'm a hodler of course but i didn't you know what i mean i hadn't been paying so much close attention and it took took me off guard in a good way that all of a sudden right we're like there's this giant you know there's all these people in bitcoin i never even heard of right and they've got these big platforms now and people are coming in and right there's this whole wave and i was just sort of just like whoa you know where did this come from right but it just came right and into 2017 i think that's gonna gonna happen again okay i think i think we're gonna see a whole nother wave of people adopters thinkers bitcoin philosophers whatever coming in

in the next year or two and is bitcoin ready i think so i mean i think it's ready for that um you know i don't know that it's going to necessarily you know a lot of people think um everyone's going to just be using bitcoin for everything because the lightning and all that i That I don't see, you know, in the near term, you know, maybe in the future. But what I do see potentially is it competing globally as some sort of a reserve asset because, you know, I've actually, quite frankly, I've been surprised. And maybe it's happened that we don't know about it, but I've been surprised that some of these sanctioned countries haven't used Bitcoin to settle, let's say, commodity transactions. You know, sort of why wouldn't you? Okay, if you're locked out of the USD system.

Yeah, go ahead, Martin. I was going to say, there's rumors that Venezuela and Russia have used Bitcoin to trade medical supplies and stuff like that. Okay. Interesting. Right. So I would be surprised if it didn't happen. Okay. The only reason I would guess that it wouldn't is maybe because statists are statists. And if you look at Russia and China, they've clearly made a bet on gold, right? They're trying to to use that as the asset to to increase geopolitical positioning after a reset right and they haven't done bitcoin i think partly because you know they're they're they are statists you know they are also statists but but when you think about like you just said if you're if you actually

are locked out of the usd system and you need to you know you need to sort of make a market yeah you they probably want to do their own currencies again because they're statists but but really i mean bitcoin makes sense and so i think that's gonna happen right i think it's gonna happen at some point and that'll and that'll be a huge deal because you can't do it with gold right you can't it's too hard to ship the gold from this and that i mean you could do it maybe like makes final settlements but it's but it's too hard the other thing that i want to mention just real quick while before i forget is and this is something that i've been saying for a long time like five six years but i think it's going to be an important signpost for when we know bitcoin is about to fly

and maybe it doesn't happen this cycle but when people are willing to take a big discount if you pay in bitcoin right so so for example like i mentioned before when i made t-shirts in 2013 um to sell them in bitcoin right i didn't make any profit off of the shirt right like my cost to make the shirt is basically what i sold the short shirt for okay but i just wanted the bitcoin which turned out to be a smart idea so that's when i think you're gonna that's when you think you're going to know that some sort of a turning point is coming. If someone says, okay, here's my apartment. If you pay in dollars, it's a million. If you pay in Bitcoin, it's 900,000, right? That tells you that person wants your Bitcoin, right? Because you make an upside bet and saying, I want

real money. And he's also saying, hey, this is easier maybe than putting $900,000 into crack energy right or or coinbase and buying it right just exactly so i think that's something to look out for you'll you'll know that right no definitely look out for that and then actually outside the podcast and the newsletter i'm involved with some mining operations on oil fields and that's actually something that's making me incredibly bullish is uh the oil and gas industry waking up to the fact that they can actually they can actually use bitcoin uh to become more efficient so especially with climate uh craziness going on and the emissions laws in place these oil and gas companies are highly incentivized to be as efficient as possible

with their vented and flared gas which prohibits them from uh producing oil at the end of the day if they vent or flare too much at the shutdown production bitcoin allows them to consume that gas and not waste it and lower their emissions uh and basically profit in many ways they're able to sell that gas. And they're not at this point yet, but I think they will eventually get to the point where in America, at least, oil and gas companies will be the biggest miners as well, because it will be a supplementary revenue stream for them on top of their oil sales. So is this related? So that's interesting. I hadn't heard that aspect. Is this related to the, I heard the power plant thing, right? Where the power plant is mining Bitcoin. Is this sort

of related to that? Like you'd sell the excess gas to a gas fired power plant that's then mining Bitcoin? Or are you saying that the oil and gas producers themselves are somehow monetizing directly? Yeah. So it's a bit different. The upstate New York power plant that you're thinking of, they're on the grid and they're basically using the gas that isn't being sold to the grid in off-peak seasons to mine Bitcoin so they can keep their plant open. But during peak seasons when people need that energy, they're going to sell it to the grid and they'll shut down the miners. What I'm talking about is actually on the oil fields by the production

where you're not on the grid. And so there's no competition with the grid for Bitcoin miners. And again, there's so many... No, I was just going to ask, how is an E&P company, an oil and gas company, processing the gas, the non-flared gas, to actually generate the electricity to mine the Bitcoin? Who's doing that for them? How does that work? So that's where we come in.

We market ourselves as a flare mitigation service. So the big problem they have with the gas, particularly, is they can't transport it to cities. it's too it's not economical to build the pipes and like you just alluded to there the gas isn't clean enough to consume uh at the uh at the consumer level and so we show up and basically say hey instead of building a pipe that's hundreds of miles long we'll build one that's a dozen feet long we'll run it to this generator depending on the quality of the gas being produced at a certain well pad we'll we'll adjust our generator accordingly and then turn that on

and plug binders into that that's a great idea wow i like that that's smart yeah really good it's not it makes me bullish on bitcoin because then you get the oil companies having an aha moment and then they go to bat for bitcoin um exactly exactly that's look that's the thing right i mean it's not it's not you don't want to get you can't bitcoins for everybody right like you say you know it's it's it's for anybody it's not we can't control like who gets involved or that's just not what it's about so you know having a big tent isn't a bad thing like you said i mean if you if you get right it's it's almost a way of lobbying without lobbying okay if you if you get people that are entrenched interests realizing the economic value of bitcoin to themselves

that creates a constituency of support you know which is one of those things where i just never really take seriously the whole oh they're just going to ban bitcoin right or they're going to just you know because it would be such a such a stupid thing to do it would be such a it would be such a ridiculous um uh it would wake up more people than it would you know what i mean scare uh you know it would just be the final fu to millennials right like the one thing that you found that you like that may have made you a little bit of money yeah we're gonna shut that down you know what i mean you stupid peasants so yeah no that would be uh it would be interesting right because like just to see i don't want it to happen because it would be it would be really

disruptive and ugly but part of me is sort of like it'd be interesting if they tried because i don't think it would work out right the way uh people think it would work out um no it would completely vid out it would completely validate the whole value prop and then then they're trying to push like the they're trying to push like that yeah it would and they're trying to push like the digital government coin on people and they don't understand that it does not compete at all and they're they're completely out of their depth yeah i think this bill originally i don't think they it was in the final version but i'm sure you saw it the digital dollar they're talking about and all that like it's like the fed is going to run this digital

dollar and be throwing money into your digital wallet that the fed i mean whoa like this is some dystopian stuff, right? Like you can keep your $1,200 check. I'll pass, you know, if those are the strings attached. Yeah. Well, it seems like they scrape that for, instead of the Fed following you, the CDC is going to be able to track your metadata and let people know if you've been vaccinated or not for this virus. I saw something like that. Yeah, it's funny. I mean, well, this is one of the things that also, I mean, I've seen a lot of people mention, there are two things, I know you didn't ask about this, but I think your listeners might find it interesting. I mean, And I think what we need to be thinking about even beyond Bitcoin right here, because issues of being free, which I know are very important to both of us, extend beyond Bitcoin, of course.

That's the monetary realm. There's all sorts of ways you can be more free besides that. And two of the things that I think are going to come out of this coronavirus crisis when it's over is, one, I think big cities are going to lose people in a big way. and it's not gonna happen overnight but over five or ten years okay and so you know i'm someone right i'm a new york city guy i live in colorado now i live in a city of a hundred thousand love it best choice i ever made in my life um you know and but i think the sort of process that i went through and i went through that in the last crisis that's why i got out i think a lot of people are going to come out of this just being like uh you know particularly if they're young people that are

like 32 maybe like you know first kid second kids like wait a minute like what's the upside right when you have a little, when you have a little, when you have a baby, right. Or a couple, you know, and you're living in New York city, you realize real quick that all the advantages of kind of living there go away fast. You know, you're not, you're not, you know, not staying out to the bar at 2am. You're not going out to restaurants that much. It's just not that kid friendly of a situation. And so, you know, you're going to go, you're going to want to go. So I think that's one of the big things that are going to come out of this. And I think it's great, right? Because right now we do have this concentration in a lot of ways of capital as well as ability in the big cities.

And I think that's really bad. That's centralization. Okay. So if, if we can get, and I encourage this, right, it's going to be bad for the big cities, you know, and I love, I'll love New York forever. Right. It's, it's, it's where I grew up, but, and it's going to be bad for them, but it's going to be good for the country and it's going to be good for people. And I encourage it because if we can decentralize like pods of people all over, right. Like, like Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky, you know, like Akron, Ohio, whatever, like Buffalo, New York, right? You spread out talent and capital all over the place. That's good, right? That builds a stronger country, builds stronger communities. So that's what I think is going to happen.

I think the other, right, which is a trend that's already very much in place is unschooling homeschool, okay? Because the school system, you know, I think you probably would agree, you know, it's not there to, you know, teach. It's, right, go ahead. I was going to say, before you get into this, help me give the pitch to my wife. What pitch Should I get my wife on this? I've been trying to accept this into her mind. Well, this is going to be hard because, you know, my wife was pretty much on board. She's even more, you know, sort of like, which I'm lucky, sort of counterculture than me.

And I'm pretty, pretty, pretty out there. But I would say this first, first things first, we're reading this book right now. Get it, read it with your wife together, right? It's called Unschooled by Carrie McDonald. And what I really like about it, first of all, she's a really good writer, but she's doing it right now. Right. Like, so she has little girl, you know, little kids and she's been doing it and is doing it and explains why the philosophy of it, all that stuff gives you a whole huge list of books to

read. And so, look, I mean, after that, all you have to do is like, you can't convince someone, right. To come to your position where you have to show them stuff and let them come to it on their own. That's always what works. So I think you just say, Hey, let's read this together and talk about it. Right. And, and discuss, but it's a great book. And, and, and I don't know if you know, are you familiar with the difference between unschooling and homeschooling it might be worth uh addressing real quick no okay right so unschooling is more radical than homeschooling and it's and it's the path that we're going to try to take we'll we'll see you know what happens we're open to to changing as things go right because that's what it's about but okay so

unschooling is no curriculum like at all it's it's trusting that your children you'll you'll notice um what they're into what their strengths are what they want to be doing and you encourage it you know so like with our older son like he he's been going through a ton of different phases planets okay you're into planets boom we're going to the museum right here's 10 books on planets let's watch some videos on saturn or whatever right and so he just until he gets into something else and drops that which is what happens and then it's dinosaurs boom books on dinosaurs right so it's like that's that's what we're doing it's not a set thing for us it's not like oh at three years old let's learn about planets if they come to it right they could they do they really really

do and so that's unschooling the idea is it's called the other uh way of describing self-directed education it's trusting your child to learn what what they're into at the pace they're into whereas on homeschooling is sort of trying to recreate the classroom at home right structure at home here oh your second grade this is the kind of math we're going to do oh you need to read now are you so unschooling is like it's it's it's it's it's way more radical and it's scary man like trust me like even for us like yeah it seems like the Montessori way a little bit though yeah yeah it does except you're doing a lot of it sort of outside of um you're going to a place although although a lot of unschoolers do um also incorporate right like you know resources that are

local or even you know you know and I and I so I think what's gonna happen is you're gonna have stuff pop up right like within communities that are catering to these families that are more interested in trying to do these things but i guess for me one of the one of the things what carrie mcdonald really does is is um is is described so much of the history of schooling you know and where it came from the prussia you know the this indoctrination model um you know horace man actually was a big guy with it and and the funny the ironic thing but i guess it makes sense is he was big on bringing that sort of educational system to the united states but then he didn't do it for his own kids. He taught his own kids. That's how it works, right? But it's a

great book. And one of the things that really, really hit me, I mean, as being a parent of three now, I see it, right? Like she says in the book, she's like, okay, well, look at all the things your kids learn to do without school, right? Without you doing anything, crawling, walking, talking, those are big things, right? And your kids are doing that within a couple years with no formal education and quite frankly, without you trying. So if they can do that, imagine what else they can do with the proper guidance on their own. And so that's what, I actually think the most revolutionary act I can do in this world is raise kids to be free critical thinkers. And that's what we want to do. No, I mean, you touched on it there,

a lot of people don't know the history of schooling the fact that it was uh basically exported from prussia and it the system was created in prussia so that people would just fall in the line and obey orders and basically become cogs in the machine and i think that's very obvious that that has slowly happened over time here in america um i i always hated school and i always learned more outside of school than i did inside and just all by myself and But it's hard to get people out of that Your kid needs to go to school You're going to be socially ostracized

How are they going to socialize And there's a ton of pushback in that regard Yeah I mean The thing is See I was one of these guys that was really good at school But I always knew it was BS Like I have a good memory So I can memorize

That's pretty much all it is To get good grades I played the game Some people are just and it's something to do with my disposition but some some people who i how i know you know i've a lot of friends like this who are brilliant right like brilliant people just like but just in their soul right it was so soul crushing like i could play the game you know without it crushing my soul but like it's so soul crushing to them they just fail out of school you know because

because they can't they're smart enough to do it but it's like they can't you know it's sort of like it's sort of like the the realization that i came to in 2008 it's like i was really good at wall street you know like i was i was i was like my career was booming when i quit um but it crushed was crushing my soul at that point and it was just like i couldn't do it like no amount of money could make me stay you couldn't give me any amount of money to go work on wall street period um and i think some people are like that with school but then what happens to these kids right these kids are destroyed you know a lot of times they'll commit suicide or end up right with drug problems or whatever, because you're, you're not giving them any space to be who they are. You're basically

saying, do this, do it right. Or you're a failure. And it's really terrible. And, you know, I look back and I, if I was, if I was unschooled in some way, I would be a completely different place right now. You know, I don't know what I'd be doing, but I'd probably be in like some foreign country, like studying, like, you know, dolphins or something. You know what I mean? Like I, I think I would have, I would have, I wouldn't have gone to wall street. That's for sure. You know, but, And so I want, that's what I want. You know, what I want for my children is to be a guide. You know, that's how I view my role.

It's not to tell them what is, how to see the world, how to be. They are their own souls. They're their own people. I'm here to like guide them in a way that I believe is ethical and right so that they can be the best people that they are. Not so that they can conform to what I believe is a completely twisted world. no and imagine the renaissance that could be incited if if more and more people went down this path imagine the creativity that will be unleashed and the productivity that will

be unleashed as well i think i mean to stay on the positive tone like this is these are very positive things that could be enabled if more and more people awaken to the fact that this is number one possible and two probably beneficial right so that so the big sticking point here and this is what i you know i've written about this too and tweeted about it and it's a big problem is that a lot of people would do it if they could okay so we're now in a situation where you know like we live in a pretty affluent city okay and it's been very common to see mothers right because again we've had three have new babies and not want to go back to work but have no choice okay so we see this you know the myth that we've been told is that oh it's so great that both parents are

working because everyone wants to be a cubicle slave right which is obviously not true right you know women don't have a choice men don't either okay they don't there is no choice there's no choice to stay at home right you literally pretty much can't survive in most in a lot of cities right that way you'd have to almost completely pick up and move to somewhere it's so really really cheap which again i think's gonna happen right um to do it but but we do but but i think this is a key, another fundamental thing about our society that we need to question, which is why don't, why doesn't, why don't, why don't any parents have a choice? You know, why, why are we so economically indebted, right? Or, or struggling on this hamster wheel that, that a parent should

they choose to stay home with their kids? It's, it's almost an impossible decision. So another question we need to be asking, because as you say, you know, let's say, let's say 10% of the population would want to do that, would want to unschool? What percentage of them can actually do it, right, without like being destitute? That's a problem. You know, why is that a problem? Because it stops the renaissance you just mentioned, right? Prevents it. So again, this is another cog in the machine that keeps us down. Okay, there's lots of them. You know, there's lots of them. And that's another one. We don't have communities that care for each other anymore. We don't have strong local areas. There's so many things that we need to change. But we can do it.

But you'll, we'll never do unless we start asking the big questions, you know, which is what I, I know you do and what I'm doing, you know, so. Yeah, no, I think I wholeheartedly believe that sound money and getting back to a sound monetary system is, is I think probably step one in enabling all that. You got to fix the money first before you can even enable the capital accumulation needed to, to make that possible. And I, go ahead. No, I was saying, yeah.

exactly so for example right now you need to you need to if you can save any money right the way the system's designed as you know is you have to then start chasing assets that go up right to to stay in the in the let's say socioeconomic spot you're at you know because you're intentionally not able to just and then and then you can't focus on work right and then and then and then people that do actual work and make a bit of money um lose out because they're not able to speculate in the same way they're not able to leverage in the same way and so their savings are constantly losing out so that that's to your point i mean if we had if we had a way to save right that was that would have that held value and allowed you to save a nest egg and then actually do stuff with it

without having to buy stocks on leverage that's a sane society nobody right like how can people focus right a carpenter or like a plumber or anything how can they like focus on their trade when they know that any money they get they have to like like somehow speculate on apple with it's crazy no it's insane and then again it leads to decay of the family money stress is a big stress it leads to fighting and the divorce rates at all-time highs and again it's tearing apart society and that's why i do i do have hope that the pendulum is starting to swing away from this type of thing and thank god we have bitcoin and people like you out there on the front lines trying to educate the rest of us about the possibilities and of a different world yeah so

one of the you know i mentioned it but i do want to repeat it because i do think it's important okay i think you know you probably have a lot of youngish listeners um probably a lot in their 30s young 30s um who are just starting families are thinking about it one of the things that i really want to hit home with is please consider, particularly if you are in a big city that's expensive, consider moving out, right? Because that will give you some degree of freedom. Like real estate prices are going to start dropping, right? They almost certainly will, unless they can just totally prop this thing again up real quick. Even so, you're probably going to get an opportunity to get a home in a cheaper place for a decent price. So I would encourage people to

like, look at, this is a big country and there's a lot of interesting places out there. And I would say, listen, consider doing that with you and your, your wife, your, your husband, your young family, because if you can take down your cost of living, okay. So for me moving from New York to, to, to, to Colorado, I was able to cut my rent because at that time I was renting by like 70% by just making that move. Okay. And, and, you know, if you can do that and be financially okay, whether it's remote work or whatever you're doing, I mean, a lot of Bitcoiners can do that kind of stuff based on the sort of skill sets that they have. I would encourage doing it because the moment you take your cost of living down significantly, there is freedom in that, right?

There is freedom in potentially, oh, maybe one of us can stay home with the kids now, right? Or maybe I can grow a garden for part of that, whatever it is, right? There's freedom in not chasing that carrot too much. You know, as someone who was on Wall Street, I always remember, And let me tell you almost everybody thought this everybody was like, you know who goes there in their 20s is like Oh I'm gonna retire by 35, right? I'm gonna make so much money I'm gonna be retired by 35 or i'm gonna be retired by 40. You know, how many are zero

Right almost nobody. Okay, so so it's like winning the lottery, right? It's a it's a dream. It's a it's a fantasy So I think people should stop if to the to the degree that you are caught up in that fantasy probably don't think about the world that way and it's also that that sort of mindset also encourages you to do live life in a way that you don't want to be living because you're chasing a carrot you know you should be you should be trying to make if you're in your 30s i mean you should be trying to make you know your life and your young family's life as like joy-filled and productive but but healthy as possible you know the carrot of like making 50 million dollars in retiring like

okay i mean it's like it's like one out of a million okay it's not gonna be you and then you're gonna be chasing that carrot to wake up one day and realize holy fuck i missed out on everything exactly exactly exactly like like i look at it like i mean i'm probably never gonna retire you know because i'm just doing life right like that's that look i get it not everyone can do that but i'm saying like that should be the goal that should be the goal right the goal shouldn't be like okay you have 50 million dollars and you're retired 50 and then what are you gonna do golf all day i mean that that literally sounds like torture to me no this is as i could speak from experience we are moving out of new york as soon as our

lease is up later this year to a smaller town with less expenses no i mean i'm from philadelphia we're gonna be back to the philadelphia area um that's where that's where my parents are my wife's parents are we've got big extended families so it's um then you get that whole support network and that also can help you get freed up to do stuff too you know if your parents can help out if her parents can help out yeah no it's uh yeah i've been away from philly for geez like 13 years now it's just time it feels like i've been away from home for this whole time and i'm getting sick in new york like you mentioned i don't go to the bars till 2 a.m anymore now that we have a child we're not going

out to dinner every night and the rent is exhausted yeah there's a lot of upside if you're in your like 20s right but then it's like the the value goes down fast yeah i mean i had a lot of fun in new york met a lot of great people that's one of the best one of the things i'm gonna miss most is the the uh access to intellectual capital that you have but as we're seeing now with this quarantine we can just zoom call people now so i'm not gonna miss it that much um but i did no i agree hold heartedly. There's a lot of people on the wheel, particularly in New York City, and they wake up and they're 35. Some of them have not had children yet. And they're like, what the hell am I doing? Well, it's interesting, right? Like what you said, I had this epiphany when I was, so I

left Wall Street when I was 10 years there. So I was about 31, 32. That's when I quit. I looked at my future, right? And I said, okay, if I stay here, I will be, I will be successful. I will make a lot of money. And then I'm going to be in Connecticut at a country club wanting to blow my brains out, you know? And I was like, nah. So I was like, so, so because part of that too, you know, would be, you know, it's just the way it works, right? I mean, the sorts of people that I would meet, maybe the sort of person that I would end up marrying would have certain expectations of me that I wouldn't necessarily want to fulfill because I don't want that. Okay. So it was much better for me to move to Colorado and then meet my wife later when I wasn't right. When she wasn't

marrying me from my mind, you know what I mean? Like I was living in like a, not a great apartment in Colorado with no real job. You know what I mean? So that was, that was, that was a good situation, you know? So it was like, I met the person that wanted, you know, to be with me for me and also wanted to live a life like i want to live which is not being in the suburb of new york in a country yeah it's a fight club quote you're living paycheck to paycheck to buy things you don't like to impress people to buy things you don't need to impress people you don't like um yeah seriously yeah no i i think i lucked out in that department too as well thank god um it's the most important uh it's the most important decision you'll ever make

yeah yeah it's um no it's been uh it's been a a great journey so far we've been married for shit almost three years now child uh child a month into life with a child it's going good i recommend you freaks get married out there it's uh a lot of i got married young i got married at 25 and people were making fun of me but i'm very happy i did right it's it's the thing with that it's it's so variable based on the person and circumstances you know like for me i didn't i didn't have we didn't have our first kid that was 37 okay but that's not because i wouldn't have had a kid earlier it's just you gotta have the right situation right the right circumstance the right person yeah don't i mean if they're if the right person's there and you feel like it's the right

time you go for that you know what i mean like you're you're that's you know for me i would have been a bad dad at 20 i mean i mean i would have been a bad dad in my 20s i know that for sure because i was i was ego i was an egomaniac obsessed with myself in my career you know it took it took uh like i said it took that financial crisis to sort of shake me out of my you know bullshit existence um you know and then it was ready right but but but yeah i mean i have you know i have friends that also you know had their first kid 26 and uh married with several kids and it was perfect for them it's it's like there's no people love to say like oh you know you should wait or you should earlier listen do to what's right we're all different do what's right for

you there's no like there's no freaking secret formula to this stuff like stop pretending that there is no secret formula is that you'll know when it's there just strike while the iron's hot and and i guess this has been a much more positive podcast than i was expecting i thought we're gonna get doom and gloom on the uh on the uh this bill that's getting passed and the constriction of powers but if you really take a step back take a thousand foot view uh where we are at this given point in time in history is actually pretty incredible and there's a lot of opportunity that lays before us yeah and i and i'm gonna even be more optimistic okay i i tweeted this out the other day right like so i do think 2010 to 2020 was total bullshit right like

complete like basically some innovations but for the most part it was a joke right it's a bubble total bubble like i do think once we get past this period my prediction right and we'll see if it's right is that probably really starting more towards the latter half of this decade but i think we're going to see true innovation like like in maybe energy and health care and in things that will allow us even agriculture things that will allow us to free ourselves you know 3d printing right or things like that right and um you know and i'm saying like innovation at the level of internet right at the level of railroads at the level of automobile right like this stuff sort of but we're waiting. We're just like, okay, like, are we really going to just have bubble after

bubble? Or are we going to actually like change this world? Are we going to innovate? I think it's coming, right? I think this crisis is going to be a spark for a lot of people. But I think we're going to see, we're going to have an age of inventors. I think that's coming, right? The age of invention, I think is coming. After this, we get through this period. And so, yeah, look, my message is this. We all have different circumstances. We all have different capital. we all have different abilities, whatever it is. My message is this. I don't have, I don't have, there's no one size fits all, right? Like I don't have the answers for everybody. I just have the, what I think are answers for me. But I do want everyone listening to this to think as deeply

as possible about where they are in life, what's important, and how, how can they change their world in a positive way, right? The easy one is just saying like, hey, I'm going to just have a different attitude right because if you have a different ad have you met those people right where you're out and about and they just have a thing to them right like they're just so positive and nice it makes you like happier you know be that person i'm not saying i am i'm just saying like you can do that right you can do that attitude's huge attitude's huge and that's actually one thing when i went through a pretty extended bout of unemployment uh around like 25 26 actually got married when i was unemployed which is crazy that's how you know your wife's

really ride or die uh um and i i had like a moment where i had a bad attitude or a stretch right a bad attitude and really uh had to change that and changing that led me to writing the newsletter to starting this podcast and it's just had ripple effects that have paid off for the better in the longterm. Exactly. And, and, and one of the things I want to say too, is like, know your skills, right? Know your skillset. We're all different. We all, we all have different, everyone has something that they're better than someone else at. And so, you know, do that, you know, figure that out. And yeah. And the key thing is, is, is if you can't, the world is not going to just change magically. Okay. Politicians are not going to change the world

for the better. The only thing that's going to change this world for the better is if enough people change and you can do that you can totally do that everyone can do that okay it just takes a little bit of courage it takes a little bit of thought um but the but but the key thing is and i really do believe in this um you what you put out there is going to come back to you right it's like the idea of karma and it's it's as simple as when someone is extra nice or or kind that you meet you're just like it it hits you right you almost want to be extra kind to the next person you meet and so that's it just just try to put out um it doesn't and that doesn't mean just saying everything's rosy when it's not what it means is putting out energy um from yourself that's that's

that's good energy you know that's positive energy not not trying to think of every situation of like how can i take how can i win but thinking of like how can this be a win-win you know how how how can both of us right as being married you know you you better do that right how can we uplift each other and i'm very happy you said it's a collect a collection of individual actions that's how we get through this mess it's not pointing to the fda or the federal government saying fix this right elect good people is like the worst slogan ever right elect good people i mean good people first of all don't want to be elected second of all it's a savior mentality right it's it's looking for a savior you're you're no no no freaking white knight's coming for you okay you are the

white knight and if you're not you're in trouble right i mean that's it yeah yeah it's uh again attitude and mentality it's huge michael thank you for your time thank you for all you've done the last decade again really helped help me develop a worldview and perspective and uh again a big inspiration for why i write and do this podcast so i i owe you a debt of gratitude i believe i feel and i can't wait till we're able to meet in person finally either later this year in new york before i move or i actually my sister lives in colorado so i may be out there at some point as well all right yeah very nice we'll have a beer or whiskey outside of the pandemic yeah thanks for all that you do as well like i said i mean uh we just need a lot of a lot

of people like us out there more and just doing doing our thing and inspiring others to do their thing because you know i don't want the burden you don't want the burden of like being like answers for everybody no no that's not what we're about right we're about inspiring we're about we're about getting everybody empowered okay and so yeah thanks for all your work you you put a lot of time and effort into everything you do like way more actually more than i do you know i'm i don't write as much as i used to but um i got i got a lot a little little tribe to worry about every day. I'm discovering that it is getting harder to write as well. Where can we find out more about you? Oh, thanks. Yeah. So I tweet a lot. I do most of my stuff on Twitter now. So

it's at Liberty Blitz, if you want to follow me. And then I write at libertyblitzkrieg.com. Once a week really is what I do now. I do thought pieces and I try to make them like really good and thoughtful things, but just once a week without, you know, I don't want clickbait, none of that. I used to do that, which I realized was not good for me or anyone else. And so, yeah, Liberty Blitz, Craig at Liberty Blitz on Twitter. If you like what I do, you can donate. I don't do advertisements. Everything's donations. And I do accept Bitcoin donations. I've always accepted them. But either way, just check out my stuff if you're interested. Thanks. Awesome. Michael, thank you again.

I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. Peace and love, freaks. Thank you.