TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #145: Roy Sebag

Episode Date: March 30, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with Roy Sebag, Founder of Goldmoney and Menē, to discuss: - The mechanics of paper and physical bullion markets - The history of paper gold being used to suppress the price of physical gold - The Fed has man-in-the-middle attacked US citizens - Why the Internet isn't decentralized - Why Sound Money is so important and why bitcoiners and gold holders need to join forces - The reaction to COVID19. Are we being put in our pods? - Political framing and mental pods - The common man - The importance of unplugging - What Gen Z thinks - much more Follow Roy on Twitter Check out Goldmoney Check out Menē 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. I have the immense pleasure of sitting down with Roy Sabag, founder of Gold Bunny and Mene, which is a gold jewelry dealer, really cool company if you're looking to get your girlfriend or significant other some jewelry. Really beautiful stuff on that site. Roy and I sat down to talk about what's going on currently in the gold markets, the mechanics of the gold markets how everything works between the paper claims markets and the physical bullion markets why physical bullion dealers are having problems getting the gold physically delivered the suppression of precious metal prices via the paper claims markets the

history of central banking and the fed as a man in the middle attack against citizens around the global citizens fed has man in the middle attacked our money and we need to end this attack and maybe this is the best opportunity to do so with this crisis that's currently laying bare the systemic problems that exist with our fiat monetary system we also talk about the philosophy of living in pods are these forced quarantines uh the first the first experiment with us being forced into our pods uh mental pods the the framing that is put forth or put forth to us from the political class is a very big mental pod and then we also talked about the the very pressing need for gold bugs and bitcoiners all in all sound money advocates to come together at this very critical

juncture in history and get a concise message out there. Try and reach people. Try to reach the common man as he's looking for answers as to why things went so wrong. I believe you freaks are partial to this idea that sound money would alleviate a lot of the problems that exist in our financial system. We need to revert to a sound money system to get a better pricing mechanism in the world and right now is the perfect opportunity as people are wondering sitting at home wondering how things got this bad to get a concise and clear message out there that sound money may be the answer and gold bugs and bitcoiners need to put down their swords stop fighting each other and fight alongside it's time freaks this episode of tales from the crypt was

brought to you by the cash app you freaks know all about them already uh they're doing incredible things including letting you stack sats all right so you can stack sats send sats receive sats sell sats if you so please and then on top of that they're making sats a standard only for android right now hopefully we'll get ios soon had another big tease sent to my inbox this morning i don't know if i can mention it so i'm not going to but let me just say this it seems like more people are going to be allowed to stack sats using the cash app at some point in the new future near future soon trademark and on top of that i believe they're also adding the auto buy function so you can easily dca into bitcoin that's coming soon trademark too top of that they have cash app

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You've had a dynamic where money become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all 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 Marty Bent here on a Sunday morning, recording a podcast off hours here, but very excited to be doing so, considering who I'm sitting down with. There's a lot going on in the gold markets. We've been

covering it in the last couple of weeks, particularly, and very excited to hop into this conversation because we've learned a lot about the history of the gold markets and what's going on with the dislocation in price between the paper claims markets and the physical bullion markets. I'd like to introduce you freaks to Roy Sabag, founder of Gold Money and Mene. Roy, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me, Marty. It's a pleasure to be here. Well, I'm very fortunate to have some of your time today considering the atmosphere in the gold markets and what's going on. You've been buying up a lot of physical bullion

over the last few days and again you mentioned before we hit record that you read my newsletter last week in which I cited some of your tweets where you were talking about dislocation in price between the paper claim markets and the bullion markets the impetus for that diversion or excuse me the discrepancy in price a lot of people are saying it's the inability for these banks to actually get the bullion to the buyers at the end of the day because coronavirus has caused a slowdown in which the people actually can't get to work to do their jobs. There's some other theories behind it, but I think before we jump into exactly what's going on right now, we should provide some context to the gold markets in general, how the paper

claims market works and how the bullion market works and a little bit of the history about the LLBMA and futures paper markets and whatnot? Sure. So ultimately, you have a very large, sophisticated, decentralized gold market, which is caused by a desire to extract gold from the earth by means of negotiation with nature. and then you have various forms of demand for the finished product for the metal there are monetary sources of demand which stem from people seeing gold as a store of value but there are also industrial forms of demand

everything from semiconductor chips technology manufacturers aerospace developers jewelry and the way that the demand side of the gold market functions is large sources of demand will generally acquire their precious metals through a bank a division of a bank that's known as a bullion bank now the history of banks actually in most cases is rooted in the formation of a bullion bank first. So in many cases, a lot of the banks that we know about today were founded initially as bullion banks. And even someone like Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs started his career at Goldman Sachs bullion bank, which was called J. Aaron and Company. And so at some point,

when you reach a certain threshold of demand for precious metals, you'll develop a relationship with a bullion bank. This goes back hundreds and hundreds of years. And what you will do with that bullion bank is if you're a manufacturer or if you need the end product, you'll start to acquire metal from the bullion bank, which you need. It's a physical product. It's an input good in whatever productive process you're doing. And so the bullion bank will essentially sell you physical metal and deliver it to wherever you need. Now, on the other hand, there's monetary demand for metal. And that demand stems from investors. And those investors say essentially the same thing. I want to own the physical metal, but I need to buy it in this many increments.

And with those purchasers, the bank has a lot more flexibility and has become very sophisticated in terms of payment versus delivery so a transaction may seem to be settled or may seem to be satisfied when in fact it hasn't been settled it's just nearly been deferred and of course fiat money is is really the perfect exemplification of how that works where no transaction is really settled there's always a liability but in the gold market this was something that has been mastered with increasing skill over the last 40 or 50 years. And so if we look at what's happened specifically in the last few weeks or months, we've seen certain clues or hints that the way the bullion banks treat their clients when it comes to monetary gold is in fact

a double standard relative to how they treat their clients for manufactured and industrial demand for gold. And fortunately, it was the latter, the manufacturer industrial demand, which unveiled the problem. And so what happens is you have the London bullion market, which is known as essentially the most important price discovery market for gold. It goes back hundreds of years. It's basically a collective of member banks that get to decide a daily spot price. But it also includes a collection of vaults, the biggest of which are under the streets of London. And in those vaults, you have a standard form of precious metal, normally 400 ounce, what's known as a good delivery bar, the kind that you would see in the movie, The Italian

job. And those bars are standardized. And so mints, refiners, and miners will produce gold according to that standard and generally sell that supply out into the future, just like you see with any commodity to the bullion banks, who normally will even finance that supply ahead of time. That flow of supply allows the bullion banks to start managing the demand, the demand for manufacture and end use and the demand for monetary gold. Now, what has happened is over the last 20 years, really, a U.S. market for physical gold futures developed, which is known as the COMEX. And that market establishes a futures contract that provides delivery for physical metal in a different denomination from the 400 ounce good delivery bar this is called the comex

bar or sometimes kilo bars so one kilo bars or 100 ounce bars but importantly this metal is delivered into new york this is the key is you take delivery into new york and so if you're a jewelry manufacturer like tiffany's uh if you're a company like apple needs gold for your iphones or if you're a semiconductor company like Intel or NVIDIA, you are generally taking delivery of your gold in New York. And then from there, you're going to do what you need to do with that product to produce your good. What happened in the last few weeks is that

there were futures contracts outstanding that were ostensibly to be delivered in physical form. And when counterparties began to ask for that physical metal, the bullion banks started to claim that because of the coronavirus and because of the supply chain issues with regards to miners, mints, refiners, and airlines being shut off, they had the metal that they claimed to have. So their position in the futures market was not a naked short. It was hedged by some physical allocation. But the metal itself was in London. It wasn't in New York. And so they tried to escape their requirement under the contract from delivering that metal

into New York. And so that was a surprise because all they had to do was just cover their short position. And indeed, some of the smaller banks were forced to do that and incurred massive losses. The estimated losses that I'm hearing are in the billions of dollars, one, two, three billion dollars. In fact, ABN Ambro exited the market. I know of other banks that will be exiting the market because of it. But behind this official story, we saw two very suspicious events take place. The first is that the CME, which essentially represents the COMEX in this case, decided to introduce a new contract for delivery, which is an LBMA contract.

and that was done because the banks were saying we can't deliver these comex bars we simply don't have them in new york we have them in london but we can deliver lbma bars in london and so that was that was the first event but the second event which essentially predates that is that as all this was happening, at one point, there stopped being any metal for delivery in London and in New York. And so at one point, there was a bid for metal in New York. I was bid for metal at this price of $100 over spot. And on the offer, there was no metal. There was no metal for delivery in New York. And so I have never seen anything like that before. I'm inclined to think that some of it has to do with coronavirus. Certainly supply chains are shut down. Certainly air travel

is restricted. But at the same time, we have to ask ourselves, why are banks short so much metal that is due for delivery within a few days or weeks, even when they know they can't deliver it? And why do they prefer to change the rules to break the promises and the contracts, rather than just cover their position in the open market? And so I think these are the two mysteries that we have to focus on as gold investors. Because from where I sit as one of the largest custodians of private non-bank precious metals, we can no longer buy any metal right now, new metal. And the story you always hear is, yeah, it's because the refiners and the miners and the mints are shut down. But gold is a stock commodity that has trillions of dollars

of mine supply, supposedly sitting in vaults, but also sitting in different forms like your jewelry, which can be melted back to scrap. And so the idea that the bullion banks need the mine supply as the only source of flow is also very problematic. It highlights that a lot of the metal that's claimed to be in vaults and accessible, in the best case, doesn't want to sell, so they're holding on to that metal. But in the worst case, as a lot of people speculate,

may have been rehypothecated many, many times, and in fact, can't be sold. And so when you hear these big figures from some of the LBMA people, or the World Gold Council, that there's 8200 tons of metal in London, we don't believe that gold money that any more than 2000 tons of those 8200 tons is is really available for sale we think that winning re-hypothecation central bank metal metal that's been recirculated and there are some some other interesting ways to prove that just by virtue of the backward ation in precious metal prices so so that's essentially the the big picture of gold press mills trading and hopefully I've covered some of the some of the specific

issues that that arose this week that was extremely thorough thank you for that and so i have a couple things here so did lbma essentially bail out comex temporarily at least and then is there really a mad dash for physical by the individual consumer and then even central banks i know russia and china have been adding to their their bullion stashes pretty aggressively as well So are we seeing an inflection point in psychology in which people are just like, okay, it seems that the fiat monetary system is in such a precarious situation that I really do want to call on that physical and more and more people are demanding it? Is that the case as well? There's definitely an increase in demand, no doubt about that. But I think that it wasn't the LBMA that bailed out the banks.

It was the CME, which is more insidious because they put out a press release, which was total spin. And I actually broke this information to Twitter. And within a few minutes, there was official news crossed the wires. And I have to be careful as well because I'm skating a bit of a dangerous path because I am a counterparty of a lot of these banks and need to continue to do business with them. But the bailout was between the big banks, who you have yet to hear of their losses, and the CME acquiesced to their demands and introduced this new contract.

So it came from there. But the LBMA plays a recurring role always in claiming that whenever there is a deficiency a physical metal, it's just a function of time and place. It's not a function of deceit and manipulation. And so the LBMA can always be counted on to say, yes, we have tons and tons of gold here and we just can't really get it to you right now. And this leads to a lot of people in the gold industry to essentially own metal that's called allocated lbma metal and that's not the kind of metal that we we own a gold money we we would never ever own that kind of metal that means that you own metal in in an lbma vault in what's called allocated storage but the reality is you've

never taken that metal out of that vault and so we operate our own vaults that are non-bank vaults where we literally have private security companies secure them, we have an insurance company insure them, and we physically move metal out of LBMA vaults into our own cages in our own vaults. And that's the same approach that high net worth investors and sophisticated investors take at some of the private banks, where they physically move metal out of the vaults. But every time the LBMA comes and says, well, we have a lot of metal, it's just here, and you can take delivery here, What they're really trying to do is just quash the speculative demand for gold, get those contracts to be closed out, and buy enough time for new mine supply to satisfy the end product demand. So I know jewelry manufacturers right now in the East Coast of the United States that we deal with that basically are being forced into bankruptcy because metal they paid for hasn't been delivered.

And so jobs are at stake. Their working capital is completely screwed up. And under various contracts, the banks can claim force majeure and say, well, we have the medal. It's just in London. So we'll get it to you after coronavirus. And you even have the price you paid. It's the same price you paid. But that was not what they originally needed. And so it's a very sad outcome, and I hope that this event will be the unwinding of this whole complex of COMEX futures that are ostensibly physical contracts. They're just not. They're binary, speculative contracts, and true price discovery always takes place in the physical market, the kind of market we're a participant in. and so you mentioned uh that these banks are naturally short these contracts as they're selling is there and why would they be short if there's a shortage of physical that would that

would sort of allude that there's far more demand and there is supply so price should rise there so so are you alluding that there may be uh ulterior intentions to to shorting that and mainly to keep the legitimacy of the fiat system sort of intact? Yeah. I mean, there are declassified files that show that the United States has taken an approach to price suppression of precious metals under the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, which was amended in 1973, I believe, after the U.S. temporarily suspended the convertibility of dollars to gold, the Treasury is allowed to engage in exchange stabilization functions with regards to gold.

And so this is where the LBMA plays an important role. It's not that the banks are sitting there saying we enjoy fixing the price of gold. There's obviously the manipulative function in the same way we saw with LIBOR fixing in gold, in the sense that you're trying to extract spreads and rents from the system of physical demand. That's happening, absolutely, but that happens in every kind of market. The issue is that the reason the banks are always naturally short gold is the LBMA always says we have unlimited gold to provide you. And the LBMA is the backstop. And so whether it's saying that that metal is coming from central banks and in many cases it does central banks are always willing to lend their metal whenever a counterparty or a bullion bank asks for it

or whether it's because the lbma is somehow involved in the exchange stable stabilization function that the u.s treasury is allowed to engage in now there's something very important that comes up here because if you've read the news over the last few days there's been an important development with regards to how this fiscal stimulus that has been passed will be actuated in the markets. And the way that they're proposing to do this, which is now law, is they're actually going to be using the exchange stabilization function that the Treasury has been given under the Gold Reserve Act. And so what they're doing is they take $10 billion from the treasury and they deposit it at the Fed. And by virtue of them doing that, the Fed can take that

$10 billion, lever it up, and then allow the treasury to influence the markets they want to influence, whether it's bond markets, municipal bond markets, interest rates, and even equities. And so that's the program you've been hearing about where the treasury is going to hire Black Rock, Fed and the Treasury, and also some of these more insidious ideas that really the Treasury has just taken control of the Fed. So the original separation that was meant to hold since the creation of the Fed in 1913 has now collapsed. You have one entity and you essentially have a new dollar. In fact, this opens a lot of potential things we could discuss because the events the last few weeks perhaps introduce a new dollar, which isn't a Fed dollar. It's a

treasury dollar because of this exchange stabilization function, which is how this whole thing is being pursued. Because otherwise, the Fed can't really do what it's claiming to be doing now. It's already violated some of what it wasn't allowed to do in 2008 and with the QE and the tarps. But this time, it's a lot more systematic in the sense that they've essentially agreed to give the Treasury control of the monetary creation powers of the Fed. Yeah, I was reading a tweet storm on this exact topic, and it does seem like this is the case, right? And you mentioned they're doing things that they weren't allowed to do in 08, mainly buying corporate debt which they just use they they create a facility to do that with sort of

a loophole that they use to enable that functionality of their purchasing potential and yeah so this is i mean this is for us sound money advocates this has been our biggest knock on on the fed throughout its history it is technically a private entity but slowly over time it's becoming more and more the the lines between the treasury and the fed be become blurred to the point where they don't exist anymore so the creation of a new type of dollar how significant is that there's a lot of a lot of people were were assuming that dollar demand was going to be driven sky high and the dollar was going to appreciate due to this crisis as people flee risk assets for better money that they can service margin positions with.

But it seems like the dollar is actually weakening in the last week. Is this a product of that or is it something sort of tangential to this particular dissolving of the Fed's independence? I certainly think the market's predicting a more rapid pace of monetary debasement when it comes to the US dollar. And that's why I think you're seeing that behavior in markets. And I think that that will continue. But again, it really is a sideshow from the more fundamental issue here, which I think is very relevant for Bitcoin people, which is if you're familiar Here in cybersecurity, there's a kind of hacking attempt called the man in the middle.

And what happened to the U.S. dollar? The constitutional dollar is defined as a weight of gold or silver. Now, the genius of the Federal Reserve Plan was it inserted a man in the middle in 1913 between the Constitution and the people in the form of the Federal Reserve. And that was the introduction of essentially what constitutional scholars call the Fed dollar. It's not the dollar that is defined by the Constitution. If you look at what it says, it's a legal, it's a note that's issued by the Federal Reserve. And so that's why wealthy people do not own Federal Reserve notes. They tend to own Treasury bills because Treasury bills and notes are an entirely different instrument,

senior debt owned by the government and defined by the constitutional dollar. And so what I'm concerned with now is they've undone the man in the middle and they've collapsed the Treasury and the Fed into one entity. But the reason this is relevant for Bitcoin as well is because the process which led to the creation of the Federal Reserve as that man in the middle could, in my opinion, be pursued if the Bitcoin community doesn't have a sound philosophy of money and begins to organize politically and academically to advance that philosophy of money. let's let's uh pull on this thread a little bit what uh what what uh particularly about a philosophy uh do you think we need to develop and sort of push forward more taking possession uh not your keys not your bitcoin type of philosophy and really driving home the the bare instrument nature of this asset or or something else so when i look at the bitcoin community having been involved for at least nine years now eight years i think it's developed into two strivings there

is the profiteers who are playing hot potato and there's the ideologues who are who recognize we're in a potato sack race so you've got people primarily in the venture capital world or people from regulatory backgrounds washington technology the revolving door who have injected themselves into the bitcoin community and all those people i group into the profiteers they're playing hot potato they are not fundamentally aligned with the ideology that satoshi nakamoto i believe laid out which is to append uproot and disrupt the fiat monetary system and and that was rooted in a philosophy that the fiat money system is uh is deleterious to the population to cooperation to the relationship between the man and nature and other men.

And it begins to assail us on our free will, on our liberties. And so all those ideas were the essential premise of Bitcoin. But today, the largest groups that operate in Bitcoin, whether it's Bitcoin miners or the centralized exchanges, and even the ones that mean well, a lot of these people are my friends, a lot of these board members are my friends. But all you have to do is look to see who else is on their board. their backgrounds, their ideology, and question whether these are the people that are going to

ultimately destroy the US dollar system and the economic order, or whether they're going to acquiesce and allow for some kind of a man in the middle attack in the future. On the other hand, you've got the people that recognize we're in a potato sack race. And those people are the ones that are advocating for the type of Bitcoin operation that you mentioned, your keys, the bearer instrument, but also those are the people that you won't find trying to draw distinctions between gold and Bitcoin, or worse, claim that Bitcoin is superior to gold. They recognize the intellectual tradition that allowed Bitcoin to develop. and you know it's like sometimes i wake up and i think to myself bitcoin's the best thing that

ever happened to central banks and then there are other days where i wake up and i think bitcoin's the best thing that ever happened to gold and it really depends on the the way this goes whether it's the profiteers playing hot potato that are going to keep controlling bitcoin or whether it's the ideologues that want to disrupt the system and recognize we're in a potato sack race. And that's the issue. That's where I think, you know, I proposed setting up some kind of a think tank or economic society, because I think now is the moment. We don't want to make the same mistakes of 2008, where all these decisions are being made behind closed doors very rapidly. And And liberty is essentially being suppressed.

And what Bitcoin and gold needs right now are academics and politicians to embrace not just this idea that gold and Bitcoin are going to rise and make people rich, but the fundamental understanding of sound money as unleashing a meritocracy and keeping us tethered to the laws of nature rather than to these uh laws of abstraction centralized abstraction i completely agree now you look at i know you probably don't want to call anybody out by name but i'm not afraid to you look at somebody like coinbase they've got uh katherine hawn on their on their board who's ex department of defense or or department of the treasury i forget which one it um the the vc so i i like to the the crypto not bitcoin contingency is very much uh the the uh

the people who would bring the man in the middle to bitcoin and they are profiteers they don't really care about uh the freedom enabling ethos that bitcoin brings with it and that has been And proven to me over the last five years, specifically with the 2017 ICO bubble, nobody really cared about creating decentralized apps or a decentralized financial system. They just wanted to get in, buy tokens, or not even buy tokens, just get handed tokens cheaply for adviserships and then dump them on retail at a later date. But I do believe and I am confident that there is that that ideologue, the ideologue side of Bitcoin is very strong and growing stronger. And there are companies like there are, I think Square is a great example of a sort of legacy company and a bigger corporation, a publicly traded corporation that is sort of helping the ideologues fight. And this is evidenced by their Square Crypto, literally funding anonymous devs in random parts of the world just to work on Bitcoin, Bitcoin's open source code and pushing that ethos. One of the companies that sponsors this podcast on Chain Capital, they focus on security and via multi-sig transactions and really want to make sure that their users have full control over the Bitcoin throughout their whole process.

And on top of that, they're writing a lot of very, very ideological blogs about why Bitcoin is important. Actually, Parker Lewis is a good friend of mine and has been on the show many times on the show with Kyle Bass that you have listened to. He wrote an incredible piece about Bitcoin is a rally cry and compared it to the Alamo in the letter that the person protecting the Alamo, I forget his name, sent to the rest of the world. Americans the world over, we need to fight for Bitcoin because it does represent freedom in the digital age, right? And we have two paths we can go on, in my opinion. I've said this many times.

We either have the full centralization of the Chinese surveillance state exported to the rest of the world, and the main way they do that is via surveillance and surveilling financial apps. And Bitcoin provides an opportunity to sort of avoid that moving forward. And yes, so I think I like to think I'm an ideologue that really wants the freedom enabling parts of Bitcoin and is fighting for that. But I do agree there are wolves in sheep clothing within the space that are really doing everybody a disservice in the quest for profit. I concur. In more ways that I'd even like to admit, a lot of the people you've mentioned

I happen to know. And I think that even the ones that are well-meaning, you still have to consider some of the board members involved and whether they really will be the vehicle that will append and uproot and face a treasury secretary who now essentially controls the Federal Reserve. And so these are the issues that are going to be facing both communities. The gold community has faced it before. In fact, the gold community was hacked. They successfully hacked gold between the creation of the Federal Reserve, between the suspension of the convertibility of the constitutional dollar, something no one's faced, no politician or economist. they're all playing a collective make a game of make believe that the constitution article one

section 10 doesn't say what it says that the coinage act of 7930 doesn't say what it says it says that it's law there are constitutional scholars at harvard that define the the money as gold or silver there's no questions about it but they can just pretend and i think this this will be an issue for bitcoin and i think how bitcoin addresses that issue will ultimately define not its value not not what it's worth but how it will impact our society in what i see is our inevitable reversion back to sound money because we will revert back to sound money um there's no question about it it's it's we can't continue doing what we're doing And our generation is going to see that come to fruition.

There will at least be one nation that recognizes this soon. But Bitcoin plays an important role because it helps prepare the market for what a world based on sound money would look like again. It's become so complex to untangle the abstract mess that economic theory has made from our system of cooperation with these nonsensical beliefs and aggregate demand and division of labor and abstract division of labor with all these abstract notions of linear growth and GDP and wealth and capital, all of which are fake. they mean nothing. Everyone is dependent on each other and everyone's dependent on energy and their time. And what we see in these days with coronavirus is how quickly something that is considered decentralized, like the internet, is in fact a tool for power and subjugation and how we're able to be manipulated into living pod lives just based on the information we're fed every single day. So the question of decentralization is a whole other one. I don't

know if you want to talk about it, but I tend to be concerned when I hear that word used too much as regards to the internet. I don't think the internet is decentralized at all. I think that it's a system of control, if anything. I think quality of information on the internet is terrible. I think the quality of research on the internet is terrible. You're better off going out into nature, doing your own observations, and coming up with a common sense understanding of how things work. And you're better off going into a library and reading an actual book, especially one published before the 19th century, to understand how things work. But the economic system today is so tangled with terminologies and half-baked theories that the only solution, the only way to revert us back to a proper relationship between ourselves

as we cooperate and between nature is sound money. And so I think Bitcoin, when I say it could be the best thing that ever happened to gold, What I'm saying is it's preparing the road for a reversion back to a gold standard. All right, so let's touch on a couple things here. So we have a big fight coming up, obviously. The incumbent system is just not going to roll over and be like, all right, you sound money advocates, take over and do your thing, make it happen. We're going to have to fight for this freedom. And so what traits do you think are needed for Bitcoiners and gold, I don't like to say gold bug, gold owners alike to actually take on this fight?

Because it is going to be a battle. And then let's jump into more about the decentralization aspect. Does your belief that the internet isn't decentralized sort of extend to Bitcoin as well? okay so on the positive side of things what we all have to do is first stop stop fighting each other and many people in the bitcoin community think that i'm anti-bitcoin they infer as much from an occasional tweet or from some of the papers that i've written but what they don't realize is that even today i'm one of the largest miners of bitcoin in north america i i i'm the largest shareholders in a company that mines about four bitcoins a day even today

and i have been involved with bitcoin mining for many many years i've been involved with bitcoin for many, many years. So I'm not against Bitcoin. The impetus for some of my comments were really when I started to see the profiteers, those that are playing hot potato, start to attack gold. And I saw a great risk for the community develop, an attack vector for a man in the middle develop because when these guys speak in the way they do that hubris and that sense of complacency introduces a risk to the whole ideology and that's that was what i was fighting i was trying to say that don't don't diminish your intellect and your reason to the point where you truly think an abstraction is the same thing as an extended object that's textured

and colored. As Thomas Reed, one of my favorite philosophers says, founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense, something which is extended and textured and colored, this I call an object, matter, not an idea. That's how the world works. That's true decentralization. You alone with nature you're negotiating with nature and by consequence of your actions your action in the external world generates some kind of a feedback but the world of abstraction is a simulacra it's a facsimile of that world it's a virtualized world and it's amazing and incredible that through the laws of cryptography and mathematics we've been able to mimic and mirror the properties of gold with Bitcoin. But don't ever go too far off that path to think that you've somehow mastered nature,

that you somehow have created an abstract version of an element that every mind since time immemorial has been trying to alchemically manipulate or produce or devalue or debase. You have to be careful. There has to be a balance there. And so my fear was that that was developing. I think it's calmed down. I think some of the people that were putting those ideas forward turned out to be completely wrong. One of them specifically comes to mind. We're not going to mention names, so we all know who it is. But I mean, it was one of the worst financial calls in history. He missed the entire move in gold. And at the same time, anyone that listened to him lost a lot of money by selling their gold and buying Bitcoin. And so this was the wrong path. But the right path

is to amalgamate the two ideas and build a sound monetary philosophy that a politician can start to talk about, and an academic can be incentivized to write research about. because that's the only way we're going to make a real difference. I completely agree. I've been one of the Bitcoiners out there saying, hey, we need to team up with gold owners because they, again, we have the same goals at the end of the day. Sound money is the most important thing here.

I actually interviewed, say, Fadina Moose for Real Vision last fall, and that was how he ended the interview was, hey, if all Bitcoin does is help us get back to a gold standard, I'll be happy. We just need sound money in the world because the fiat monetary system has really messed up the pricing mechanism. It's messed up the fundamental tool needed to actually cooperate efficiently, which is the pricing mechanism. We need to get back to a sound money system to fix that. And whether it's Bitcoin or gold, I think it could be a combination of both. It doesn't matter.

It's the concepts and philosophy of sound money that needs to be recaptured. And I, you know, I agree with you. I think Saifedean and Parker are in the right camp of this. I completely believe they're in the right camp. And so I hope that both sides can work together. In terms of decentralization, you have to really go back to the first principles of what a network is. And if you think that a network is some system that just distributes information freely, you're mistaken. You need to reacquaint yourselves with a history of networks.

And so if I go to Israel today or to Rome, and I see some of the ancient aqueducts that were built by the Romans, which were able to transmit water, which is our body solvent, our life force, all across areas that hitherto were essentially barren, and all of these communities sprung up around these aqueducts and relied on that water. every single one of these aqueducts is destroyed now no one uses it and they're basically decaying and so the question is why was that aqueduct built in the first place why is a road built in the first place why is an internet backbone and tcp ip protocol built in the first place it's not necessarily built to distribute as much as it's built to feed it's a system that feeds off of people. And so if you think that you're a node in that network, and all you're doing is being fed, and yet somehow you're not being controlled, or that somehow you could append that system, you're mistaken, because you're dependent on so many parts of that system being continuously

provided to you. And you're not in control of the network as much as much as you think. Now, when it's a small group of people, like cyber funks, or like people on 4chan exchanging memes, then you can exist in small pockets. But for you to completely uproot the network itself, you have to gain political power, and economic power. And so it doesn't matter what people try to say in response uh my favorite theory is that bitcoin doesn't need the internet networks because it can rely on satellites of course the people that tend to propose this don't know anything about low earth orbit satellites and the fact that every time you send one up they literally have five years before they start burning back down to earth and so a low earth orbit satellite

is not going to be how you exchange Bitcoin, because the cost of mining Bitcoin and of constantly shooting up satellites like Starlink satellites is never going to be borne by an accounting ledger, by a system that's just meant to enforce cooperation and meritocracy. What's more likely is that people exchange Bitcoins in some physical way, according to person-to-person exchanges using radio signals or electromagnetism. But what we tend to see is that brings you back to a barter economy. So you get the coincidence of once again. The value of Bitcoin was that someone had already built the network. The network was already built. It was already feeding on the population. And so you could inject a virus, a good virus,

And people would embrace it. But so there's nothing that's decentralized about the Internet. The Internet is a project of control. And I think, again, everything I've just said, which I've been saying for many years, no one would have ever believed. But now with the coronavirus, we can see how our minds and our actions can be controlled centrally and globally by virtue of the internet. I have friends that are farmers in Scotland. They don't have internet. They don't even know about the coronavirus. They're far away from towns. They're still doing everything they were doing every single day.

It doesn't mean that self-isolation is bad. it doesn't mean the coronavirus is not a really scary plague that we're all facing. But it does mean that anyone that's relying on the internet to then conduct their daily lives and actions is not decentralized the way a sheep farmer is in Scotland, that's only negotiating with nature and with the external world, with something corporeal. i agree it's the the amount of fear in the air just simply because of the way information is spreading on the internet is is pretty insane you compare it to to viruses of years past like the swine flu uh h1n1 which i think it wound up infecting a billion people and uh we did not

have this much fear in the air when that was going around there was certainly some fear but it wasn't as loud as it is now and you said yesterday president trump sent a tweet out and just posturing like he may quarantine new york connecticut and new jersey and yet people freak out flee those states um just because of a tweet and he wound up actually uh stepping back from those comments and saying hey i'm gonna let the governors decide and they wouldn't do it has there ever been a time in history where three billion people are locked in their homes like this i don't think so this is it's insane this is this is a bib this is a plague of biblical proportions and i think it's quite scary i believe it's real i'm not a skeptic about the plague i think it's

a plague um but i also think that the fact that we don't have sound money here's a great example actually. I'm writing a paper about this that may be published in one of the magazines. But if we had sound money, the political decisions to shut down the economy, our entire supply chain, force us into a pod life and essentially decide what constitutes an essential business would be predicated, most importantly, on the production of food and then the production of energy fuels, and then from there, all the ancillary services. Now, what would immediately result is the government would be working to establish these green zones. James Poulos wrote a great article about this in American Mind. What these green

zones are are areas of the country where people either don't have the virus or have built up an immunity to the virus, and they provide essential value to the supply chain, which can be measured naturally in the form of food, crop yields, harvests. All of these aspects of the natural order can't be manipulated with time. We can't just hide in our homes, print money, and hope that this season's harvest is just going to be fine. We can't do that. We need someone out there toiling right now with nature so that we don't starve in six to 12 months. And there's no policy like that because economists and politicians genuinely believe that the Federal Reserve printing money will solve all these problems. And for the same reason, they force us into the

pod life, but they don't shut down the distribution systems for non-essential services and goods. So take Amazon. This virus is known to be transmitted through fomites and through foods. And if you look at air traffic right now in the United States today, it's almost as high as what it was before the virus. Now, what those planes are transporting are amazon packages and there was a kind of a very sad event the tmz report i'm not sure if you saw it but you know one of these amazon uh shippers was spitting on the packages someone caught it on camera but even if they're not a bad actor like that and pure evil the idea that people are getting these packages being transported all across the united states the virus can live on

this package and even in a place like italy where they've been on lockdown for a month now and the virus numbers haven't abated. And so we would never consider shutting that down because we've become so dependent on getting our food from areas that are so far from where it's demanded, from getting our energy from areas that are so far. And because we need to continue to live in this pod life and be numbed by all this crap that we buy, we have to keep these goods and services flowing. If they shut down the U.S. Postal Service or FedEx or UPS, I guarantee you within a few days people would seek to get out of this self-isolation, or if internet bandwidth traffic was reduced. But for now, everyone's basically living the life they live on the

weekend, but every day. But we haven't actually tried to think how to keep our society going, according to the natural order, by establishing green zones or by suspending this distribution of goods and foods that can very well transmit the virus now it's it's pure insanity and it feels like a very weird inflection point in history the fact that you have politicians and the fed thinking they can print their way out of this it doesn't make any sense like you need people to like you said toil uh and and actually farm and and be productive out there if if you print all the money in the world doesn't matter if people aren't working that's net has not computed with me at all up to this point and so makes me question their intentions like is

the system at such a precarious state in such a precarious state that they basically need to do this or is it a control grab a grab for control just to quell the masses because the system is about to implode and if that's the case uh again talking about tooth pass we either go down the completely authoritarian route or we try to revert to a sound money system so what would a reversion to a sound money system look like if the system is in a precarious situation that i i honestly believe it is in i i agree with you it's in a precarious situation um on the on the same token we don't want to be too Malthusian, because there will be a way out. And I think we will end up resolving all these matters. But the greater issue, if you're taking a longer time frame,

is they're already in control. So they're just trying to maintain their control. And the more desperate they get, these politicians and these economists, the more obvious it becomes. And so one of the things I like to do is I know my generation quite well. And I know the older generation quite well. But the younger generation, the Gen Z, are the ones that we all have to look to a little more closely. And so I've been spending the last year learning a lot about how they think, how they act, what matters to them. And I can tell you that the generation coming up is completely different from your and I generation, the Gen Xers or the Millennials. The Gen Zers are very much anti-Internet.

They're very much pro-religion. They're very much looking at this whole system and realizing that it's completely crazy. And I think that they're going to play a very important role in resolving some of the insanity that we've seen the last few decades. But the people in power, the more desperate they get, the more they use the rich and the academic system as their proxy to quash control, to maintain control. And so even in this in this last few weeks, what we saw was really the bailout of the rich right away in the form of the repos and all the Fed's extraordinary policies. And then the thing the thing no one realizes is when you hear these congressmen and women and senators with their crocodile tears, you have to go to this Web site. It's called OpenSecrets.org, where you can see how much money they have and what they're invested in. It's very important to see what they're invested in.

And even the ones that you think are looking out for the average person, like a Nancy Pelosi, her husband's like a Wall Street trader, and they have $100 million in stocks and mutual funds and hedge funds. And so these people, that's why their stimulus bill, which is supposed to be a fiscal stimulus for the people, is still geared towards bailing out the corporations that allow them to maintain control. It's because they're all exposed to the same exact system. They all have come to appreciate that monetary debasement is the only policy. And as a result, they go long assets and they generate all the rents first. So that's the control function and the manipulative function. The way a reversion back to a sound money system will take place, unfortunately, is going to be with a hyperinflation in the sense that once all the money that they've printed begins to finally make its way to the things that we need,

to the goods and services and commodities that we consume and we require every day, at that point, they'll first try to implement price controls, which is what every banana republic does. But after that doesn't work, they'll have to reinstitute a new unit of account, medium of exchange, store of value, new money, some monetary unit. And I think we're the closest we've ever been to seeing hyperinflation materialize. Now, hyperinflation is a technical term that economists get to decide and say, well, this country went into hyperinflation here. And this is kind of like the way they get to decide when a recession takes place. There's a whole committee, I think, at the NBER that gets to date recessions. I would argue that an objective

historian from 100 years, 100 years from now, looking back, will have said that the hyper inflation in the United States and the West began when we stopped having toilet paper available in supermarkets. Because it's just like the gold story. They tell you there isn't physical gold in New York because of the supply chains. There's no toilet paper because of the supply chains. But the reality is that we've suffered from 20 years of this just-in-time inventory nonsense and the hollowing out of our self-reliant manufacturing bases. So all the stuff is made overseas. By the time we get it, it takes too long. Any increase in the tenor of demand means you deplete the just-in-time supply. And when you try to make something locally again, like the way GM is trying to make ventilators, you can't even do it. All of a sudden, you find out it costs you $15,000 per ventilator. So there's latent inflation in the system because of all the money that they printed to bail out the rich and to keep control of the system, the corporations.

But there's also, I think, a moment where we have to start thinking about hyperinflation, not in terms of the price of toilet paper goes to $1,000, but rather there is no toilet paper and there are no products to be consumed when we want to consume them and when you when you combine that with the notion of shrinkflation which is that the quality of the products is is is being diminished or the weight of the product per value is being diminished i think you can argue that we've we've already we've already hit that initial hyperinflation phase. And so if it continues, we will have to adopt, we will have to arrest the hyperinflation. Now, the tool of choice, the dual mandate of the Federal Reserve, the reason the Federal Reserve was created ostensibly, is that they can raise interest

rates. They can arrest inflation, but they can't do that now because the Federal Reserve owns the economy. And so any increase in interest rates would essentially impede on the counterparty risk of treasury bills, the dollar. And so Josh Crum, who's a co-founder of Bitgold, the former company I founded, he has some great thoughts about this, the technical issues for why they can't ever raise interest rates again and what they would have to do with their interest on nexus reserves but i i think it's just going to go the way that any other banana republic went uh for thousands of years which is they're going to have to introduce a new a new unit of account a new medium of exchange a new store of value and that will be how we at least maintain our liberty

but that's going to require powerful people in politics people that can understand the problem diagnose it and offer the right solution there are people in the bitcoin community that can definitely serve as those philosophers of our time and thinkers of our time. And that's what we need to see more of. But I don't trust the profiteers. The profiteers are the ones that are going to sell Bitcoin to buy another yacht, another house, another painting. That's what truly drives those kinds of people.

I know them. It's the people that are going to see the hyperinflation and say, no, you're not going to introduce a digital Fed dollar. We're going to remove taxation from Bitcoin and gold. We're going to allow people to hold gold and Bitcoin and pay it as legal tender. We're going to propose an amendment to the Coinage Act and the Constitution, which says that anything can be money, not just gold and silver, any commodity. So those are the ideas that we need to see at precisely this time before the hyperinflation hits, because otherwise, the system of control and, quote, decentralized internet can be a tool to convince us that the new money they introduce

is going to arrest the hyperinflation and is better than the old dollar. Now, I do agree that time is of the essence here. If you're just looking at the Fed monetary base Over the last couple weeks alone, they've increased the monetary base by 25%, maybe even more, from around $4.2 trillion to $5.254 trillion, which is pretty insane to think that the monetary base was only $800 billion in 2008 before we got into this. And it has since then 6x, more than 6x, 6.5x at this point is pretty insane. So I would agree that with what you said earlier, the hyperinflation, as already said, and shrinkflation is actually a very interesting concept that many people don't even realize, but it is pervasive throughout our society, particularly in the grocery stores. And so how I guess so what is the best action we can take from here, like just pushing sound money advocates into the political realm? Like, do we need Rand Paul to tap his dad back on the shoulder and say, hey, Ron, we need you now more than ever? Well, you know, people like me stand on the shoulders of a Ron Paul.

Right. When I was young and I was learning all about this stuff, they were the right right mentors. but you need far more people than than just one ron paul or rand paul or one peter schiff peter schiff tried to run for senate in connecticut but you need a lot more than that um but you also need see without getting too philosophical on you guys um there's always this class struggle you can get philosophical that's totally fine well well there's always is this class struggle in societies? You know, it's been a symptom of cooperation for thousands of years in oriental societies, in ancient Rome, in ancient Greece, even in biblical times. And often historians will paint the lowest classes, the common folk, commoner, as just the

plato that can be manipulated by the aristocracy and the the middle class is kind of normally the just just the aspiring uh as they like to say in the south the uppity folk who just want to try to reach the aristocratic class so that's your media and that's your uh academics and the kind of uh the the the intellectual nerd uh like a well i won't mention the name but you know the the guys that are just using these nonsensical terms and all the latest terms and paradigms and AI and robotics and automation, they're just feeding the system, the aristocracy. But the commoner is being manipulated by both. And I've always felt, perhaps it's because I grew up as a commoner, I'm a farmer's son, grandson, that the common folk are a lot more powerful if they can just escape this constant bombardment of the manipulative function and that they could organize themselves and disrupt or revolt.

I mean, that's literally what a revolution is, a breaking down of the power structure. You're degenerating the power structure. so and now now the control function and the manipulative function always sees the common folk that risk and hearing allow it to have an outlet so they create other outlets for it there's there's a lot of outlets that can never find a common voice but what i think is clear to me from Knowing a lot of common people, my whole family, they all understand this notion that the work that they put in every day in their labor, the time and the energy should be worth the same. If they expended time and energy and generated a surplus, they spent less than they earned, that delta, that savings should last forever in terms of what it can buy, the purchasing power. I have never met anyone that's common that disagree with that. I meet aristocrats, and I meet intellectuals that all have their nonsense arguments for why that shouldn't be true, why money should be self-deleting, and why it's just an idea and a concept, and it's always been that way. And those are the same people that believe in the philosopher kings or some kind of a military top-down control of society. But the common person understands that. I work, I clock in, I generate a surplus.

and moreover the average person if if they can understand that's all that sound money means sound money just means that doesn't mean that you get rich by owning this money and someone gets poor it doesn't mean you get you know the myth of hoarding that you hoard on to money and it appreciates it just means that the more meritorious you are the more you work harder fail less best adapt to change work up wake up earlier than your peers the more you provide a function for society in achieving prosperity. And so the philosophy of money and the ideologues in both communities have to start focused on the common person, but with the right message, not buy Bitcoin to get rich, not buy gold to get rich, but start earning Bitcoin, start earning

gold. And if that happens, I think those commoners will start to elect the right political officials and once enough uh people that are meritorious accumulate enough of the assets and stop converting them to fiat money nonsense but start affecting institutions academic institutions and doing philanthropy as well which is very important at that point you can see that shift uh return and and i'm optimistic about it i think that's what's going to end up happening i am too and i'm actually very excited for a particular book that a friend of mine is about to release called this book will save you time and it basically gets into the the explanation you just laid out like you work your time should be conserved in that in value

over time your purchasing power should be conserved over time and this is a short i believe its 35-page book that really drives that home, gets into shrinkflation, gets into how people's time and value has been inflated away due to the fiat monetary system. So I'm very excited for that to come out. And again, shifting back to narratives, and that's sort of what really bums me out about our current condition with media and the internet and our current political system is the framing is people are you talk about living in a pod people are also in a an intellectual pod of framing that is put forth by the media and politics where it's red versus blue um left versus right and really both politically at least here in the states and our

two two uh party system they really the two parties want the same at the end of the day and that's core to serve their corporate interests they don't really care about the common man but they pretend they do and the common man sort of feeds into that that pod framing and so we need we need to break people out of that frame like the wwe i mean you know remember when we were kids we used to watch wwf or wcw well what we live in is wwe and we're getting entertained but everything is ultimately geared towards the stakeholders of of the company of wwe and uh i i agree with you But I still feel that both on the left – see, what's funny about me is it's obvious that I'm a fiscal conservative. But socially, there's a lot of issues where I'm a progressive.

And so I see people on the left and on the right that could eventually come to this solution and come to recognize. So I don't think that even if you still have the two party system in the United States, this can resolve itself. And in Europe, actually, it may resolve itself sooner. That's kind of my new idea now, that I think that Europe may be more advanced than the United States in this process. And Brexit is a great example of that. What's going on in Italy. What's going on in Brazil is very interesting, actually, too. Bolsonaro. But also what's going on in France. The Gilets Jaunes and Marie Le Pen. Very interesting trends. I'm not saying I support Marie Le Pen. I'm just saying that we see on the left and on the right ideas which are geared towards restoring this liberty and this nobility of toil, the nobility of toil, of labor. It really has become clear to everyone that does actual labor that their quality of life isn't better than in the past. One of my favorite things is I get to engage a lot of professors sometimes, some of these universities, and the one argument they always used to have when I would say, you know, how can you be sure that we live in the most advanced times, the best times, the highest quality of life, the most intelligent? They said, well, here's a great example. They used to have plagues. Now our medical system is so good. And I never really bought that argument, but I spoke to a few of them recently, and it's clear that there's nothing new under the sun. And history is cyclical. It's not linear. It's not necessarily linear. And so all of these ideas that they had about capital growing infinitely, about productivity being the sole lodestar of cooperation, they're all falling.

You know, Neil deGrasse Tyson had a great line the other day. He said, you know, it's interesting, all these stocks are down so much value, but yet all the equipment is still there. the planes, the machinery, the real estate, it really makes you wonder if labor isn't the driving force of cooperation rather than capital. And of course, there needs to be a balance, right? You don't need to go, but that balance is money. Money is what adjudicates that balance between capital and labor. And that's an understanding that I think is going to be better understood in the next few years it's it may very well come from the right or the left or both and i think bitcoin's role and and let me compliment bitcoin actually in this regard

bitcoin did way better than gold in proselytizing the message of sound money way better the gold it back before i got into the gold community it's still somewhat that way but i think what josh and i were doing in the and the messaging the narrative we had was a disruptive element to the gold community the gold community before our our basically involvement with it was very much of the opinion that gresham's law is the guiding force and so essentially that you know, bad money drives out the good. And so the ones that got it were just retreating into their own pods, where they just owned a lot of gold, they let society inflate away, and they waited for the quote, reset or some kind of an event. And we thought that was the wrong approach. This

every man looking out for himself. You know, I've never been too much of a Randian. I think i think there's a there's an aspect of society which is cooperative and uh and which is uh predicated on kindness and altruism and i think that you can't just think well i know i have this information i'm gonna go long gold and wait for everything to collapse you have to constantly be out there reminding people why gold why every founding document of every country mentions gold Why every ancient philosopher meditates on the question of money and arrives at precious metals. Why every economist, every economic paper, every book that we worship, whether it's Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, whether it's David Ricardo, all of these people were predicated on specie, that is gold and silver, being the money. Their observations are only true if gold and silver are money. If gold and silver isn't money, nothing that Adam Smith says is relevant. Not the division of labor, not the pin factory, nothing. It's just conjecture. and unfortunately a lot of these old economists that people worship today weren't clear about that

in their writings they didn't explicitly say hey by the way disclaimer if we stop using precious metals as money all this stuff all this theory doesn't hold and those are a lot of the debates that i'm having these days with economists that you have to go back you have to be humble enough to reappraise the ancient wisdom what is money what is time what is cooperation and if you're humble enough to do that you can go back to that original axiom and say well this is this only holds true economically speaking if the money is sound otherwise it's just a feudalistic system it's just a modern modern slavery really is what it is and these are the ideas again i hope the the crypto community and the gold community will will start to realize our

our shield this is our shield this is how we can get together and and fight through this uh this this terrible terrible system which which is on its on its last legs clearly no i completely agree and thank you for all the work that you've done to to bring this philosophy to the mindset it is and it has been lost it's it's the hubris of man is at an all-time high right now we think we can we can build our way out of problems we think we're going to replicate human life and intellect with artificial intelligence which i'm highly skeptical of and i do believe humans are inherently good and altruistic at the end of the day and we are just lost right now and it's it's weird being born at this point in time

this is a subject i bring up a lot on the podcast there's we were born in this weird inflection point where we've where we've lost touch with history and how we got here and we we are at a point in history where we don't realize that we're living within a complex system and we we have structures in place that try to enforce top-down control of complex systems and that just does not work it does not compute and hopefully uh this latest hiccup in the markets and in our global economy again like you shut down for two weeks and everything has gone to shit and that is because people don't have savings they don't have a good money to actually store their value over time and and we've we've let the base protocol of the pricing mechanism and cooperation between

humans basically become bastardized over would you argue more more acutely over the last 50 years or a slow drip over the last 107 years since the federal reserve was created was that a question did you say would i argue it happened over 100 years or was that a state oh um yeah i mean the seeds of our the seeds of our destruction are clearly with the man in the attack with the Federal Reserve. But I meditate on this question a lot. I think when you have genuine prosperity and enough generations are born in the comfort of living in a service economy and not appreciating the event. I mean, one thing I like about the one positive outcome of coronavirus, is people are recognizing again, just how dependent they were on the most menial

of tasks, cooking, cleaning, washing. And it's forcing people to appreciate just how much labor goes into cooking three meals a day, how much labor goes into cleaning your house and washing your clothes and recognizing that any decrease in your physical function i mean in in some countries you're only allowed to go out for an hour a day and all of a sudden people realize like wow an hour a day really is nothing i feel suffocated in my house and so why is that why is it that people are people really believe that the future is going to be one where we're you know Our brains are connected to computers, and we live in a virtualized world all day, and some robot out there will harvest food and distribute it to us and fly it to us on a drone. Or worse, I think even worse, getting a bit off topic here, but the worst of all is the space worship, which is we're going to go out into space and live in Mars.

And again, if you're a student of history, or if you have some basic understanding of religion, you know that that's just a classic, you know, paganist ritual of worshipping the stars, worshipping the stars, worshipping astrological symbols, and thinking escaping. it's a form of hedonism it's i'm going to escape the suffering on this world because it's so bad because the world is so bad this is always the initial action the world is evil so i'm going to escape it by annihilating myself and pretend that somewhere out there um in the future it'll all be resolved but of course the world isn't bad it's perfectly good but you just have to go out there and the more you toil with nature the more effort you put into the most menial of tasks the more you appreciate your day and the healthier you are as an individual and the healthier your mind becomes because you now have a reference. You're not just memorizing information. You can

take information in and analogize it to some event that took place in nature in your life. And so I think some of the benefits of coronavirus are this could be the moment that people realize that whole paradigm that was put forward by the computer nerds again you know i run a technology company two technology companies uh we you know i have engineers we write code i i i see the value of that system for hacking the network that's been built as we discussed earlier but i don't spend my time on the computer the way i used to every now and then i get caught up in a twitter debate I need to stop. I spend most of my time off the computer and I spend most of my time learning about things in nature and in the real world. And I love seeing people work with nature

physically. I love seeing a jeweler take a precious element and turn it into a ring. And I could watch that happening all day. And I love seeing, even in Bitcoin mining, how a computer can be built and how power can be transferred from a hydroelectric dam and how this supercomputer is solving a puzzle. That's a real activity. I enjoy going out there and seeing that. But I don't like this world of virtualized abstraction where you sit at home all day, you just get fed information, and you're just a meme. You're just a node in the distribution of memes either the good memes or the bad memes but you have no no critical thinking no common sense no i'm certainly guilty of falling into that uh that world and is something i'm actively

trying to get out of as well is getting away from the computer i sit way too much in front of this laptop spend way too much time in front of this laptop and it is i i envy your mental state uh it's got to be much clearer much uh much cleaner than than those of us who are who are stuck on twitter all day and that's it's it's weird though it's a it's an addiction right you get those dopamine hits and it's but it's a cheap addiction right you're like you said you're you're just getting uh you're on one side of the meme war and and you're getting these weird virtual dopamine hits as you sit in one place sedentary as the world happens outside of you and you know one hint of that is look at the aristocrats that actually control these systems

they're not sitting there on these systems all day they're on yachts and planes and living their best life all over the world and essentially getting to do what you know most hitchhikers and students used to do when they do a tour of Rome or visit hostels in Latin America and Asia. It's the rich people that control this system of decentralized internet that end up living a completely different life than the people that are the cogs in that system. And so, yeah, it doesn't have to be a conspiracy. It's not some great master plan, but it's the way this complex system developed. And I think that it's a farce. It's something, and again, I see the young generation, the Gen Z, are not into this. They have no online footprint. They only

believe in ephemeral messaging, if and when they do it. And they're starting to hate their phones. They hate their phones. They stay away from their phones. And I think that's going to save us because we've reached this peak rate where we all are sitting here now for four weeks around the world and we think it's totally normal to be locked in our homes and it's only because we have the internet we have amazon and not no one's questioning this there's no one questioning this philosophically hey uh maybe it's worth dying to live one day out in nature you know you're not even allowed to say that you get in trouble if you think that way yeah the thought police come after you pretty pretty heavily on twitter i said well that's like i'm in a small beach town

on the east coast right now and the officials in our county came out and said they're closing down the beaches and i tweeted out saturday night i think i'm going to break the law and take a walk on the beach on sunday which i'm going to do after we we stop recording here and the amount of people that hopped in my mentions like you're gonna kill somebody what are you doing you're not doing your part it was actually pretty disheartening but again it shows and is exemplifies the the mental state of the world driven by media dominated internet i think they are controlling people's minds and how to think and what to think when to think it which is crazy yep and they can weaponize some group to virtue signal to the other group and so yeah now you're being you know you you're

being called out morally and ethically for just expressing your free will. So these limits are being enforced all the time. And yeah, it's again, I think that Trump is looking at green zones. I know this for a fact. I have relationships with some people that are in his administration. And I think that he will hopefully turn back on the economy soon and allow people to get back to living their lives. But the crypto community and the gold community need to pounce on what just happened to our liberties and put together a sound philosophy and a sound movement. Movies, videos, podcasts, articles. I'm sick and tired of meeting economists at these Ivy League schools who are young, who own Bitcoin at Coinbase, and then write papers about Keynesian monetary policy. they need to start writing papers about austrian economics or read or something new you know

they're better off reading das kapital even but it's this it's this duplicity like i'm gonna play the bitcoin for profit but i still have to listen to this bs academic economic theory and push that forward while I'm doing it. And so I hope that everything that's taken place will cause people to realize why they own gold, why they own Bitcoin, what we're all fighting for. We're not fighting for the fact that when we die, we have a bunch of gold stored somewhere or a bunch of Bitcoin on a cold storage drive. This all started, you know, gold really does nothing. There's nothing special about gold just like there's nothing special about bitcoin it's it's the it's the people through their cooperative system that achieve prosperity they just require an unchanging

measure and reward of that cooperation so that you incentivize a meritocracy so you don't have one class of society subjugating the other class but gold happens to do that really well because of its natural properties and you've heard me talk about that bitcoin is being proposed as an alternative. It's certainly a better alternative than fiat if indeed it's sustainable. But none of this ever had to do with gold or with Bitcoin. It had to do with an ideology of we want to cooperate, we want to prosper, we're a collective society, but we don't want these central actors in there manipulating, controlling, and lying to us about false prosperity. We think there's a better world out there we can we can envision it we can read about it from history but we can also

idealize about it today and so that's what i hope is going to happen is we we get back to thinking that way and there's a huge opportunity because god knows there's so many people that own bitcoin so many yeah millions thousands yeah these these sound money tools are means to an end for for inherent liberty um which is which is important liberty is the most important thing why be a human if you're not free um roy thank you for your time i know we have to wrap up here uh very much thoroughly enjoy this conversation thank you for doing what you do uh and putting these these thoughts out there because they are important and i do think we are going to win this battle i do think the uh the foot soldiers in the battle for a reversion to sound money are

gathering the the education is ramping up and people are uh becoming less afraid to speak out on these topics particularly and i actually maybe ended on this i wouldn't be surprised if trump's an accelerationist uh because he has talked about a gold standard in the past himself and i think all him screaming at at powell to go negative maybe just be an accelerationist move to get us there quicker. I hope you're right. And it's been a pleasure to be on this show. And I'm glad we had a chance to talk about all these topics. Yeah, I can't wait to do it again. If you would come back on at some point in the future. Well, as long as I don't get lynched after this one, we'll see. I don't think you will. I think this is going to be very well received.

Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you. Enjoy the rest of your day. I'm going to go take a walk on the Beach. Exercise by Liberty. Thank you very much. Have a good day and stay safe. You too.