TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #418: A First Principles Breakdown of the Monetary Crisis with Peter St Onge

Episode Date: May 10, 2023

Marty sits down with Peter St Onge to discuss the all aspects of the impending economic strife and why there's plenty of hope on the other end. Peter on Twitter: https://twitter.com/profstonge Peter's Substack: https://stonge.substack.com/ Heritage Foundation: https://www.heritage.org/ Mises Institue: https://mises.org/ 9:27 - Starting with Modern Monetary Theory 14:54 - Fed policy heading off a cliff 24:39 - Approaching the debt ceiling and unemployment 33:28 - A whitepilled take on imminent collapse 39:57 - They pushed too far too early 44:53 - Hidden purpose behind the lies 55:45 - What happens without the state 59:43 - What the state has devoured and destroyed 1:09:29 - BS Environment policy and cronyism 1:14:45 - Bitcoin adoption and the convolution if banks 1:26:00 - Full/fractional reserve banking 1:35:48 - When will the US default? 1:42:44 - Energy nonsense and mocking the rulers 1:55:28 - Wrapping up Shoutout to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Unchained⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠River⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠CrowdHealth⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bitcoin Talent Co⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TFTC Merch is Available: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Shop Now⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the TFTC Movement: Main ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Clips ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Marty Bent: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Podcast⁠⁠⁠

whoo-hoo sup freaks it's your boy marty here to introduce this rip of tftc great episode first principles thinking about what's going on in the world with peter saint ange from heritage and misis it's uh back to basics on this rip this is rip 418 i've got to read the top four boosts from rip 416 and 417 here they are for 416 the scramble to push a cbdc future with whitney webb that one's going viral right now at eric 99 50 000 sats be aware freaks you should be aware thank you eric for supporting this show and rabbit hole recap and every show that you support means a lot to us at garth 15 000 sats logan definitely shit coining do you want to defend yourself logan fuck you no all right that was not a very convincing defense

so garth you may be on to something here at blockchain bug 5000 sats fire emoji fire emoji i agree it was fire emoji and at george underscore x underscore mckeat 2100 sats how the heck is whitney webb not being more censored my guess is she's too easily labeled a conspiracy nutter and therefore not a threat hope to zapper on noster soon thank you gentlemen or everybody i don't know some of your names i'm assuming you're gentlemen looking at the demographics breakdown of this podcast it's most likely that you are so thank you gentlemen for the top four boost from rip 416 uh we dropped 417 this morning don't have four boosts yet but uh we do have three boost uh and i'm just going to read them uh 417x intelligence officers view on ukraine

with lee slusher very good rip again i think you guys should uh listen to it very important details on u.s geopolitical strategy right now at eric99 50 000 sats beware freaks thank you eric beware beware of what whitney was saying and what lee was saying at lone star 2000 sats another great show marty thank you lone star net user three five four four one two one eight six seven five five seven five six listeners beware this guy is mega vatnik all caps please bring him to the show after six months for update uh don't know what vatnik is v-a-t-n-i-k any idea logan logan shaking his head no those are the top four boosts from 416 and 417

top 3 from 417 it's only been out for 2 hours I already got 3 boosts that's actually pretty high amount of boosts for that short amount of timing out there thank you freaks for supporting the show via podcasting 2.0 value for value really gives me a lot of joy

knowing that you're getting value feeling compelled to send it back via sats over podcasting 2.0 if you can't contribute via sats via podcasting 2.0 you can give us small contributions by liking subscribing uh rating reviewing the show wherever you listen to it whether it be on your podcast feed or on youtube wherever it may be please uh give us some support that way great way to give value back to the show this rip was brought to

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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 and we're live peter st on welcome to the show thanks for having me on marty thank you for coming on i was just explaining i've been a big fan of the content you've been putting out your weekly roundup podcast you're only three episodes in i believe yes from sharing that publicly but I wanted to get you on because I think you're covering a lot of the stories in the news as it pertains to the banking crisis, the debt ceiling, just the overall monetary and fiscal situation here in the United States from a very clear point of view, which is getting everybody back, thinking about first principles of what's actually going on in the world, which I think is extremely useful right now. Cause I think people deep down have this, this uneasy feeling of something seems terribly

wrong. I'm not exactly sure what is wrong. And thank God we have people like you trying to help people understand. So we were talking in DMS last week. You're like, what do you want to talk about? Anything specific or the whole enchilada? We're going to talk about the whole enchilada today. Cause there's a lot going on and people need this information.

So I don't know where we should start. Obviously, debt ceilings in the news, the banking crisis is going on. But just riffing off of the weekly roundup that you posted today, I think it'd be good to start. Towards the end, you talked about MMT and this whole concept of central planning, which I think is the crux of the issue of what started all of the problems we're seeing today, whether it be the banking crisis or the debt ceiling. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. MMT kind of kicked all this off. MMT itself has only existed for, what, 25 years or something. And MMT is really just sort of a custom version of Keynesian economics, which I think absolutely destroyed the world starting about 100 years ago.

And, you know, the essence of Keynesianism is it's sort of built on the presumption that central planners can do economy better than the rest of us. And, you know, we've known for a long time, for at least 500 years since Adam Smith, that that is completely false, that, you know, central planners, they are able to do one thing, which is just screw everything up that they touch. We have a natural experiment in the Soviet Union. For some reason, you know, the optimism, you know, is always there for them. I guess the idea is, you know, sure, we've tried socialism a thousand times. we have merely discovered a thousand ways it doesn't work. Perhaps someday we'll stumble across the one that does. But, you know, the issue, Keynesianism was really kind of part of this revolution in the country that shifted power towards the bureaucrats. And, you know,

sort of the first, it wasn't called Keynesian yet, but sort of the first instance of that was the effectively socialist economy that was imposed during World War I. And that had been deeply, deeply unconstitutional on every element of it. And of course, they used the war as an excuse to impose near total government control. They literally had a bureaucrat. If you wanted to come up with a new kind of shovel, for example, you had to get approval. There was a department where they would look over your design and they would say, well, there's already a lot of shovels in the market and it would be wasteful to have too many. So let's just go ahead and make sure that your shovel is actually sufficiently different. You know, resources were allocated

according to which industry is important for the wartime effort. So this is kind of the carbon footprint permission economy that we're duplicating at the moment, but of course on steroids. I mean, just across the board, you had absolute government control. The jerks who installed that thing, they got this taste of power that was just intoxicating. I mean, running the world is very, very intoxicating, I'm sure. And they really spent the rest of their careers trying to recapture that. And unfortunately, they saw their next opportunity, which was the Great Depression. So they did it again. That was the New Deal, carried that all the way through World War II. And unfortunately, Dwight Eisenhower was, you know, he was the president after the FDR

Truman combination. And Eisenhower had an opportunity to take us back to normalcy, back before the government took everything over. But by all accounts, he was just not that interested in politics. He didn't change much. And so now here we are, what, 90 years later, we are still living with the essentially fascist economy that FDR imposed on the country. So, you know, just bit by bit, we've been sort of, they've been running it along with bubblegum and bailing wire. And I think all of us feel that at this point, it's accelerating the, you know, contradictions in the system, the banking system, the monetary system, the centralization of decision making on social policies, on economic policies. It really feels like these are coming

to a head. It really does. All at once, too. I mean, you mentioned the Hemingway quote, gradually then suddenly, in this weekly roundup. And it does feel like we're hitting the suddenly part of this saga, particularly when you juxtapose the banking crisis that's unfolding right now with the debt ceiling. It seems like the timing is not as opportune as the central planners would like with all this going on all at once. There was this great quote out of the 2008 crisis from Jon Stewart. And he said, you know, we keep having these storms,

these events that are supposed to only happen like once every hundred years or once every, you know, 3,000 Earth creations. And yet these things keep happening every week. So he's like, I'm starting to think these are not perfect storms. I'm starting to think these are regular storms and we have a shitty boat.

And I think that perfectly captures exactly what's happening now. So we have all of these crises coming together. We've got the banks collapse. We've got the inflation out of control. You know, we've got the economy now turning south. We have this crisis after crisis, the dollar plunging. And it's tempting to look at it all and say, well, boy, this is just the perfect storm. And the thing is, we our system is, you know, it's like they drive as close as possible to the edge of the cliff all the time. And so any slightest breeze will turn it all into a perfect storm. And, you know, their solution in the past had been throw a crap load of money at it in 2008 when we hit that perfect storm. And I mean, that was all over the airwaves back then. Those, you know, who have the scars of that crisis, you know, that was like the mantra is the perfect storm. So that took four trillion to dig out of that hole, four trillion of credit extended.

And at this point, you know, we've now screwed that pooch where, you know, when you're bumping up against 10 percent inflation, that's no longer a choice. And so the one out that the system had to all this stuff they were breaking, which was, you know, shoot trillions of dollars at it, that is now in question, at which point the emperor has no clothes. Yeah. I mean, that's the big question right now. Does the Fed have another arrow in its quiver to paper over this again? it was like john stewart mentioned that was in 2008 even since then it seems like the the time scale of these hiccups is beginning becoming more and more compressed i mean we can go right 2008 then you had the european banking crisis and then you fast forward to september 2019 when you had the repo market spasm and then obviously we had the economic lockdowns and the trillions injected in 2020 and then we fast forward to this year and we have a proper banking

crisis on on our hands and that's another thing there you can tell that the central planners particularly jerome powell janet yellen the biden administration and even some in the banking sector excuse me like jamie diamond are trying to quell fears strong and resilient is the line i think they've been given in the back, in the back of the stage, which is like, all right, just go tell everybody you're strong and resilient. But one thing they're saying is that this banking crisis is not like 2008. It won't be anything like that. But if you look at the magnitude of the banks that have failed in the last two months, it looks like it could be a much larger banking crisis than we saw in 2008. It honestly is looking like it could be a lot bigger. In 2008, you had almost no bank

runs. You had banks that went insolvent because they had, you know, crap assets, but you didn't actually have people lining up outside of banks, pulling their money out, not in mass. You know, if you look at the total deposits, you know, you had relatively little change in 2008. And part of the reason for that was that, you know, what we have right now is this massive systemic stress being put on banks because of where interest rates are. And that did not happen in 2008, right? Generally, as soon as a crisis hits, the first thing the Fed does is panic, crashes interest rates and brings them as close to possible to zero. And it does that because it knows that, you know, that's going to give the banks a nice fat cushion. This time, the Fed

cannot do that because it knows that, you know, if you yank rates down, sure, it takes the pressure up the banks, but it also drives inflation. And the singular goal in life for the Fed is to not lose its independence. To hell with the economy, to hell with jobs. They have a political goal. We are but means to an end. And so they know that inflation is how they get graded. If they let inflation get out of control, that's how they lose their independence. So they cannot use the tool that they usually use to paper over any sort of crisis. Not only can they not flush money in there, they can't yank rates down,

which, you know, again, that's the standard tool to fix the banks. You shouldn't have to use that tool. You know, it'd be super if your banks were actually sound and didn't need you to distort the entire economy to bail them out every so often. But at any rate, that's the system we have, and that's the only tool that the Fed has to rescue the banks.

And right now it is afraid to use both, capital injections and lowering interest rates. So that puts us in a much dicier situation in 2008, which, yes, it was a crisis, but the Fed felt like it had a full quiver of arrows that it could use against us. At this point, I think, honestly, the Fed does feel like it's backed up against a wall. It really doesn't know what to do. It's kind of deer in the headlights. and that's another big question out there is does raising interest rates the way the fed has over the last year and a half or year plus whatever it is actually curb inflation because they focus on demand destruction that's what they and they can't say it explicitly it's implied to

a certain extent fed speaks a very um weird science that nobody outside of the federal reserve halls has perfected but i mean without saying it explicitly they want to destroy demand by destroying the the jobs market uh to lower wages uh but they're not really focused on the supply side of things which is where if you jack up the cost of capital uh very high very quickly like that increases the cost for people to actually bring goods and services to the market So does it have this sort of counterbalancing effect on inflation with the rapidness by which they've, excuse me, raised rates? Yeah, exactly. And it kind of sets up a foot race where on the one hand, the higher rates are, you know, crushing the economy. So you're not producing as much. On the other hand, the higher rates presumably are also lowering the creation of new money via loans.

And it's really a race between those two. And, you know, if the economy crashes really hard because of the higher rates, then the higher rates may actually end up not fighting inflation. In other words, they're shrinking the economy faster than they're stopping the money growth. And of course, what's frustrating is that there was a very, very easy solution staring the Fed right in the face. It's kind of popular now for people to say, well, Jerome Powell, he had a bad hand dealt to him. What was he going to do? He was really between a rock and a hard place. That's absolutely false. It would have been extremely easy to end this inflation. He would have had to stand up to Congress and say, no, I will not buy your garbage bonds. I will not enable your addiction to creating money, right? There are about $7 trillion in deficit spending that was pushed out to buy lockdowns and Jerome Powell obediently played his part. There was a hearing

maybe about six weeks ago where a Republican asked Jerome Powell whether government spending had been part of the cause of inflation, which obviously any economist, no matter your stripe, obviously. If you spend $7 trillion into an economy, obviously that's going to increase inflation. And Jerome Powell, boy, he got indignant. You may as well have insulted his wife. He was like, no, no, no, we don't get involved in that. He serves Congress because he knows that Congress alone can clip his wings. They could pass a bill to audit the Fed. They could put it under more government oversight. They could put it directly into the Treasury. There's all kinds of ways that Congress can trim his wings. On the other hand, we the people cannot

do crap. And especially if they cover it all up with the jargon and the big word and they've got the BTF and they just keep on with the QE, always with this language that's disguising what they're doing. If they do that, then they think they are protected against we, the suckers. And then they just keep on playing their part for Congress, enabling the spending. So faced with the choice between reining in what was causing the inflation, which was the historic increase in spending by the federal government, he instead chose to crush us, crush our jobs, crush our businesses. So I have absolutely zero sympathy for him. He could have fought for the people. Instead, he chose politics. He chose to appeal, you know, sort of play inside baseball with the court.

Yeah. And here we are with the banking crisis. And well, now let's get to the fiscal side of things. Like with this debt ceiling that we're rapidly approaching, they just expedited the timeline to when we'll hit that to within a month. And that is because tax receipts are coming in well below expectations. And so, again, more central planning, creating these negative externalities throughout the economy on the federal government side of the ledger. They messed up the economy so much that people aren't making enough money to send the government back taxes to then support the programs that the government's putting all these budgets forth to spend on. That's exactly I've got this.

one of my favorite theories on why fiat is bad, why central banking is bad, which is that it divorces, in normal times, it divorces government from the economy, right? So like in the state of nature, government is a parasite, right? We do useful things, we create businesses, we engage in commerce, and then government can swoop in and steal little bits of it for itself. And while that's disgusting, on the bright side, it does mean the government has an interest in us being prosperous, right? So the government of Singapore has a much better lifestyle than, you know, the government of Cambodia, right? Because Singapore, they can expropriate so many taxes as a parasite that, you know, governments generally prefer to do that. And one of my areas of interest has been economic history. And, you know, China, for most of history, has been the dominant, really the richest country in the world. You know, if you sort of pick one region that hit the lottery the maximum number of times, it would be China. And throughout history, that sort of notion was very, very well understood there, where the job of the government was to keep the economy going, to keep the people prosperous, rich, poor, everybody alike, because only then are you going to have lots and lots of tax revenue and you're not going to have peasant revolts. So there's a number of reasons why you might want to do that.

And indeed, that's what Singapore does. Now, where are we at the moment? once you bring central banking and fiat money into it, now the government doesn't need us anymore. It doesn't care if the economy's crashing because it just calls up the Federal Reserve. It spends whatever it wants, and then the Fed goes ahead and buys it up. That's pretty much been the pattern since 2008. So at that point, the government can turn from a parasite into a predator, right? No longer does it care if we're eating because it eats just fine, thanks much. And in fact, if there's some kind of a crisis where the government can grow, even though it is destroying us, that is actually, that's fantastic for a government like that, right?

Because it can use the crisis to print up an enormous amount of money, let's say $7 trillion, and it really doesn't matter whether any of us even have jobs. Perhaps we're sitting at home voting for lockdowns. So COVID has been, you know, just the sort of culmination of this horrific perverted incentive built into fiat where the economy is almost the enemy of the government. And they went to town on that for what, going on three years now. And so now we're bumping up against it where, you know, sort of the the merchant of death who's been fueling that whole thing, the Federal Reserve. they're saying we got to get out of this because we're afraid what's going to happen to us next so they're now out of that and now we've got a government that has spent three years predating upon the people and it's it's surveying the wreckage of what's left you know we've got this

economy that's hobbling along a lot of the numbers that look good once you dig into the numbers it's just rotten all through you know for what we've got three and a half million people who have exited the labor market. That's the only reason that jobs are quote unquote plentiful. We've got three and a half million Americans sitting on the couch instead of working. This is not a healthy economy. There was just a number out today that Tyson food dropped 16% because they missed earnings because Americans aren't buying meat. That is something that happens to like Venezuela. Okay. When a country starts getting really poor, really fast, you know, the first thing people do is buy everything on credit cards.

They use consumer credit. That's sort of the credit of last resort for people. We're seeing what there was a survey by LendingTree a couple of weeks ago that one out of 10 Americans are now buying groceries on installment. And now we've got people who are going off meat as if we're going down a third world hole here. This is not a healthy economy.

And given the administration, given the Fed, none of them have the vaguest idea how to get us back to something sustainable yeah it's very disconcerting and that's the other thing too you mentioned like the labor market the jobs unemployment came in at what 3.4 percent lowest it's been yeah right this century and it's like yeah like you mentioned the participation rate is probably something you want to mention when you're putting those unemployment numbers out shift to cpi uh we know with hedonic adjustments and um yeah the base effect it's a bit under reported like inflation's coming down via cpi but is it actually coming down in your opinion

that is the big question you know there have been a lot of adjustments to unemployment or to uh to to CPI numbers since the 1970s. And even just last year, you know, if we used some of the 1970s methodology, we were definitely over 10%. We may have been above 15% year on year. If you, you know, people were sharing all kinds of receipts online or talking about the things they were buying that had gone up 20, 30, 40%. And, you know, whenever they would do that, others would come in and say, ah, you idiot here, look at the CPI numbers. But I think there's a lot of doubt on that. So they've absolutely been playing with the numbers there. This is a long tradition of governments. They constantly play with numbers. They play with the unemployment numbers,

taking people out. They have a special definition where in many cities in America now, we have sort of these tent cities springing up. Some people call them Biden-villes. And, you know, all of those people who are just kind of, you know, bent over on the fentanyl and whatnot, they are not counted as unemployed. I mean, unless they got up in the morning and went out and looked for a job and then perhaps got into the fentanyl later on in the day, those people are not counted as unemployed. And the reason is because the quote unquote official unemployment number, it only counts you if you're looking. So statistically, somebody who is literally spending all day, you know, baked out on fentanyl, you know, waiting for somebody to deliver a sandwich,

that person is retired. Statistically, they are not unemployed. That is insane. So when we look around our, you know, I was, about a year ago, I moved down from a former sort of Rust Belt town in northern New Hampshire, been a paper town. And, you know, there are people all over town who they don't seem to be doing anything. And, but, you know, you look at the unemployment numbers, my gosh, what it was like 2.2%, boy, oh boy, you know, people are being paid to exit the labor force. A lot of that is you've got, you know, extremely generous unemployment benefits that paid a lot of people more to sit on the couch than to actually go and work. The disability benefits now, there are a lot of states that are intentionally trying to push

people onto disability because the feds pay disability, but the state has to pay welfare. There are all kinds of sort of games going on in there. And then there's the separate question of whether it's long COVID or something else, whether people actually, like the bona fide number of permanently disabled people may have also risen. You've got all of these undercurrents that are very concerning and when you put them together you know just when you've got a two mile stretch of campers uh in california of you know people uh essentially living out in the open this does not look like an economy that is uh strong as hell no no it doesn't and where does it how does this end like are we in the end game we talk about like gradually

than suddenly when you take in the inflation numbers fed policy the banking crisis and this debt ceiling situation we find ourselves in like what do you think happens a month from now do you think they're able to solve that debt ceiling crisis if it doesn't go solved what happens another thing i think about too obviously we have the baby boomers all retiring now So that adds an exasperate exacerbating effect to the sell off in assets. It does not seem like we're in a position of power right now. Yeah, I think the, you know, sort of the smart money on the debt ceiling, I think, is that they're going to kick it. They're going to kick the can down the road again.

They have done that so many times. I think I think they've raised the debt ceiling more than once a year going on like 50 years. It's completely obscene. And it is a farce every time. One can always dream that Republicans grow a spine. You know, I wouldn't count on it. So my guess is they get some face saving cuts. There are a couple of things in the Republican offer that are sort of gaming the numbers a bit. Things like unspent covid funds that shouldn't really be counted as as a spending cut that should just be refunded as is. So there are a couple of games in there where they've got room for negotiation without really making an impact.

So, you know, if I had to guess, the can gets kicked down the road. There's some kind of cosmetic reductions in the not reductions in spending, but reductions in the imaginary future spending. This is the game they play. So I do not think much is going to change there. And, you know, certainly the regulators, whether it's the banks or sort of the economic policymakers, I think they're about as dumb as we've had in that office for a long time. And so they are not going to come up with any clever solution there. The question is just, you know, do they break it really fast or do they break it slowly like they used to? Now, on the other hand, I'm maybe surprisingly, I'm extremely optimistic.

You know, one of the comments that I get online is, you know, people are like, you're talking about the world being destroyed. Why are you so happy? I mean, partly, you know, Gallo's humor is the only humor we have left. So what are you gonna do? But honestly, I am extremely optimistic in the long run, for the reason that, you know, one of the sort of basic concepts in Austrian economics, or really in economics, broadly speaking, is that if you leave the people alone, they will fix it. All right. And so when people talk about the whole thing collapsing, for me, I don't translate that into, you know, we're all going to be eating the pets and then we're going to eat each other. I translate that into the cavalry is coming. All right. When the system collapses, the people take it over. The people take care of violent criminals in their midst. We don't have to get into how that happens, but they do. The people take care of the economy. They start businesses. They, you know, no longer have this gauntlet of gatekeepers and regulators and tax men. You know, Porkfest is an annual libertarian festival up in New Hampshire.

And one of the things I love about going there is that there's businesses all over, man. This is like a campground, right? It was just a standard campground last week. But now this week, it's got little cafes with the Christmas lights. It's got, you know, kids selling ammunition. Well, I don't know about that. But anyway, kids selling things that kids don't normally sell. It's got all kinds of cool businesses going now that just sprang out of nowhere. Why? Because it's an unregulated environment. Right. You know, the the local man kind of turns a blind eye because you're going to run a cafe for two days, whatever. That's cool. So for me, when I hear the system collapses, that makes me very, very happy. Um, you know, thanks to the second amendment, uh, I believe that people are going to be able

to defend themselves, uh, if, and when that time comes and beyond that, I look forward to a very, very exciting rejuvenation and revitalization of the nation that gets us back to what our roots are, which is we fix it. We don't wait for some schmuck up above to fix it. We ourselves take it in our own hands. Yeah. That's, that is the most optimistic view of the future I've heard on this show in quite some time and that's i mean that's the reason why i focus on bitcoin i view bitcoin as this tool that you don't have to wait for permission to work on or leverage or educate people about you can look at what's going on in the traditional financial system and monetary system and say hey this looks like it's going to run into a wall i'm going to begin building this

thing over here which i think is an extremely resilient alternative to uh the the cloud show that is uh modern monetary theory and uh the federal government getting so large that it is probably the largest evil force on the planet that's ever existed and that's the other thing too with americans particularly it's it's always baffled me that most americans don't realize that the government is causing all these problems and yet they they go running to the government anytime a banking crisis pops up or uh covid pops up and say hey fix this for us and they inevitably make the problem a hundred times worse in very short order right yeah public education works it does exactly what it's intended to do which is brainwash the population and keep them

intentionally stupid so um i mean i think the shocking part for me anyway is how many americans don't believe the narrative anymore right given something like 96 percent of americans have been through the you know 12-year madrasa that is um public education you know they've been non-stop brainwashed a lot of them have gone on to college for an extra um paid bout of brainwashing and yet Yet, you know, we can debate the specific numbers, but roughly half the population twice now voted for a man who promised to bring the whole thing down. For me, that's the exciting part. And that's also, I think, why as horrible as COVID, setting aside COVID, as the political reaction to COVID has been for many of us, you know, the censorship, the violation of our rights, including religious rights, as horrible as all of those things have been, In a way, I'm very pleased that it happened when it did, because I feel like the government, the sort of socialist totalitarian forces, they've been taking over more and more of our society.

They've been brainwashing more and more people. You know, you can look on a variety of topics where public opinion is generally not on almost any topic. It's moving towards the sort of state favored opinion. And I feel like they sort of panicked after Trump and Brexit that made them start thinking that, you know, they had been assuming for 100 years that they were going to win, you know, that victory is inevitable. You plebs should just lie down and take it like a man. And I think that Trump and Brexit kind of scared them. It made them start thinking, wait a minute. No, wait, we might actually lose here.

We're starting to lose ground. And so they started sort of casting around, panicked, looking for some way to basically recapture the World War I magic. They didn't think about it that way, but basically to, you know, launch their revolution. And when COVID came, they jumped at the chance. And what thrills me there is that I don't think they were ready, right? I think they were planning that this long march through the institution, they were going to keep going. They would continue brainwashing. they were going to get us to the point where we're like Canada, where like 15 or 20% of people are

skeptics. And given another generation or two, I think they would have managed it. So in a sense, as horrible as the COVID political reaction has been for many of us, I'm very thrilled that they basically launched their invasion too early. Yeah, that's a silver lining. And the theme that's been picking up, which is extremely encouraging, is probably why you're in Florida and I'm in texas is that states are beginning to reassert their autonomy from the federal government which is something that i really hope continues and gets stronger as we move through this decade because i think it's going to be particularly important especially for for bitcoin uh obviously the biden administration and many democratic uh officials do not like bitcoin uh because they

can't control it and they're they're moving pretty aggressively to stop its growth in the united states uh whether it be stifling banking relationships with companies in the space or going on this energy fear-mongering campaign with the the mining industry and so i think as a bitcoiner it's going to be really important for states to stand up and say hey federal government uh thanks but no thanks we're going to let our citizens here play around with this. Absolutely. And that's how the country is set up, right? We're supposed to be a laboratory of democracy. The states are supposed to be sovereign. The feds pretty early on cleverly got a hold of taxing power. So, you know, ideally I would go back to the Articles

of Confederation where they didn't have that. But absolutely. And, you know, what I think is interesting about the sort of anti-Bitcoin Democrats is that, you know, most Bitcoiners are, they do actually vote Democrat because they're young and young people tend to vote Democrat. You know, there's a very strong age stratification in Bitcoin simply because it's harder for, I think, older people to understand it. And so, you know, if you sort of go with the textbook politics 101 theories, then you would imagine that the Democratic Party would be very, very pro-Bitcoin because that's what their voters want. And that's how democracy works, right? And in fact, what I think we've seen is the exact opposite, where I think what's happened to a

certain extent in both parties is that given a choice between control and making the voters happy, the voters really don't matter, right? It's how do we get more control? And to the extent the voters come in, the question is, how do we get away with it, right? How do we bamboozle the voters? How do we, you know, talk up the boiling oceans with the Bitcoins? And, you know, how do we sort of spin this narrative and, you know, give our marching orders over to our media friends in order to sell some narrative. And, you know, I think that's happening in both parties. I think that's certainly happening on a national level.

You know, a lot of the things that are being pushed from the center at this point, I mean, they pull like 20%. CBDCs, for example, you know, government surveillance coins, when those are actually pulled, they score like 15, 20%. I mean, nobody wants this garbage. And so you might ask, well, given this is democracy, uh you would think they would stop pushing it but they don't they are serving some higher purpose than we the voters yeah do you have any ideas of what that higher purpose is

that's one of the mysteries with a lot of these things it's like you know when they discover a hidden planet not by seeing the planet but by noticing the gravity okay and they say wait there's this really weird gravity anomaly here and then that may you know it makes them go and look for something that might have the kind of mass that would do that and on a lot of these topics you look at it and you're like who the heck is pushing this garbage you know who um i don't want to get you in trouble but anyway there's a number of social issues that i'm sure listeners can imagine i'm not worried about getting in trouble so sorry i'm not worried about getting in trouble so you can feel free to okay all right there we go so you know stuff like gender i mean

you've got to be kidding right like you know where is this garbage coming from what is the hidden planet on CBDCs, or I mean, who is into this stuff, sort of this, these redefinitions of, you know, core values in society. This is not the voters who are asking for this stuff. So where is it coming from? And throughout, you know, it's a challenge to discover kind of the hidden planet that is exerting these forces. And, you know, I think, you know, if we sort of gather it and sum it up all in one, the left has morphed from a pro-freedom party that prioritized the little guy. There are still particular politicians who I think see their job that way, but I think that it is largely morphed into serving money, right? This sort of Potemkin, you know, astroturfed

billion dollar agenda. And that agenda is largely driven by which special interests are getting a cut. And, you know, traditionally, I think there was a lot of that in the Republican Party. They were not very good at it. So I think those special interests changed horses. They basically upgraded to a faster horse, which the Democratic Party obviously is. It's much, much better at what it does. Now, of course, both political parties want to share in that. They're both perfectly happy to eat at that trough. So, you know, neither of us are our friends. You know, I think throughout history, there's always been a tension where the voters want one thing and both political parties are trying to give the voters the absolute minimum possible so that they can

maximize their take from donors. So, you know, in each case, I think the donors are a different gang. They're pushing whatever crap the donors particularly want. It has little to do with what the voters want. And I think that people like you or I, I think our job, um, is to sort of survey things. We, we are not beholden. Um, you know, we, we don't have special interests who donate even, even though my day job is heritage, we take 1% of our money from corporations. We do not even know who they are. We have strict rules. We must like, I mean, they have no contact, we have nothing um and so that to me is much much healthier and our job is to you know serve as a counterweight uh sort of saying the emperor has no clothes you know pointing out a lot of this stuff

is basically astroturf that's billionaires pushing in you know green energy or whatever they're making money on this week yeah it almost seems like a form of maoism has taken over the united I'd say it's like we're caught up in this revolution where the powers that be the influence, the donors, whoever's behind it, they're trying to disassociate the American populace from the truth, whether it be the transgender stuff going on. It's like you're trying to make us believe like there isn't an XX and an XY chromosome in biology that defines a man and a woman.

Whether it just be like disinformation, believe the expert, like you have to listen to these people like and if you say anything out of line we're gonna we're gonna kick you off the internet i mean we've been kicked off of youtube a couple times in the last year for talking about the vaccine particularly but everywhere you look and then if you know history particularly if you study how mal came up and what they did during that color revolution there's a lot of parallels going on now which is disconcerting and um it feels like something that we need to get ahead of and say hey people you're being emotionally manipulated to be cattle herded into this orwellian future built on a digital panopticon yeah i think that's that's very well

put it and you know that's that's exactly what we're going through um was the culture revolution you know they they wanted to destroy everything old the goal was to deracinate people by cutting them off with their history uh there's a you know concept for example um which i'm i'm like 50 so you know this is all fascinating to me but apparently there's a concept among younger people of the film bro and what the film bro does is he goes and watches like pulp fiction or Fight Club or, you know, American Psycho. He watches older movies that are apparently not approved and he's like into that and it makes him kind of weird.

And, you know, point being that there's this sort of clear lining up of, you know, what is the approved media and then what is the sort of verboten. And, you know, I think their goal here is to keep going and basically put a line about around that So that any of that unapproved material, to try to keep that away from people, you know, because it's problematic. And I mean, just in every single detail, that is precisely what was done in the Cultural Revolution in China. You know, they burned all the old temples. They, you know, were very aggressive about pushing back against your parents because your parents would have these old fashioned points of view that were left over from the feudal evil society. yeah, they are absolutely implementing that. Now, I think the good news, again, is that they launched their revolution too early, right? The ground was not fertile for such things, and I don't think

they'll take root. And the evidence is that, if anything, we are gaining converts on the skeptic side. So there are people like Jordan Peterson or Elon Musk who, they did not think of themselves themselves as, you know, counter-mainstream. I mean, Jordan Peterson was a psychology professor. Generally, you don't get there, but he was religious, yes. So, you know, that did set him apart. But they did not see themselves as sort of torchbearers for the, to fight against the elite. And yet, you know, the elite, it sort of feels like they're moving the goalposts so quickly that you are getting a lot of people who are coming over, I think, to the side of the skeptics. So in that sense, I am very optimistic, you know, again, on gender issues, on a lot of social issues. There seem to be more people who are willing to express alternative viewpoints. In other words, the trend is moving, I think, in our direction, towards the direction of skeptics.

if they had launched their revolution 30 years later like canada i'm not sure that's the case uh you know canada uh i think that the people who complain in canada to a substantial degree they complain alone or certainly among bitcoin or canadians a large number of them have left um so i think that's where we would be if they had sort of chosen their timing uh on their own schedule yeah then you have bobby kennedy he's pulling at what above 20 right now a couple months into his campaign it's very he's he's really exciting i mean he's got you know there's a perfect moment for him biden is so useless um the question at this point is now we test the hypothesis whether does the media carry water for you know say the democrat party or does the

democrat party carry water for media right in other words has the media actually taken the country over in a coup and they can ultimately decide. So I think it'll be fascinating. If one wanted, like the Democratic Party itself, I would think might want to go with Bobby Kennedy because, you know, he's a centrist. He's a heck of a lot closer to Bill Clinton, which was kind of a winning coalition. You know, I don't think either Kennedy or Biden have quite the charisma or the interesting resume of Obama. So, you know, I don't think that's within their reach, but certainly if we look at the Clinton model,

they should go with Kennedy. On the other hand, you know, Kennedy's got a lot of points of view that the media does not like, for example, alternative energy or vaccines, things like this. So I think it'll be fascinating over the next year. So far, and correct me if I'm wrong,

but so far it seems like the media is sticking with Biden and they're not interested in this sort of Clintonian reaching out across the aisle. No, I mean, they've gone as far. I don't think they plan on having any primary debates, which I think, I don't know. That's a very pro-Biden position, yeah. Yeah, I don't know if they're afraid of Biden speaking

or they genuinely just don't want outsiders getting in. Yeah, all of us are afraid of Biden speaking to a certain degree, but yeah, I can sympathize. I mean, he's emblematic of the state of the country. like an old senile man can't string together a coherent sentence yes how far we have fallen it's uh but again i'm optimistic like you are but it is unnerving everything that's going on i got two young boys trying to navigate the world that they're growing up in it's like what is this country going to look like uh when you're 18 15 years from now like can we fix things by

the time you're becoming an adult something that's in my mind constantly and again why i focus on bitcoin because i think that's a big tool to do that um but again if we're reaching the then suddenly part and the federal government as we know it fails to maintain their grasp of control how quickly do you think american citizens working within a truly free market could turn things around? Oh, instantly. I think absolutely instantly. Hollywood for forever has sold this narrative that whenever there's a major crisis, you got to wait for the policemen to show up because everybody's at each other's throats. When you look at actual humans and actual crisis, that is goofy. That is not at all what humans do. Humans organize. They are

so impressive. You take something like a plane crash, if you have survivors, like in the Andes, and just, I mean, people come together, they fix crap immediately. So I think the danger in a crisis is not from the government collapsing and the people taking over. The problem is that you have this sort of transition period in the middle where the government is sort of there, but it's not entirely there, right? So for example, would vigilantes feel emboldened to defend their property? Well, there's a certain stage that government gets to where the risk to being a vigilante is still very high, right? So when the government is functioning, and I mean, this is across the board of many countries, it will go after vigilantes far, far more aggressively than

it will go after criminals. Why? Because the vigilantes are the competition. The vigilantes show up how you know lousy um government's policing powers are and you know the if you've got like a vigilante um justice somewhere in america the fbi they'll fly down like a dozen agents they'll set up a field office they'll requisition but gotta catch this guy on the other hand you know some random dude just goes around and shoots kids and you know that's a random day in Chicago. So there's this very, very differential treatment towards people solving their own problems. And there comes a stage in every collapse where it's kind of twilight. It's not quite, or I guess dawn would be the better image. It's still kind of dark, but it's not quite

daytime yet. And that dawn is the dangerous part because people are still afraid to defend themselves. But the government has gotten even worse than normal at maintaining public safety. So without a doubt, if it comes to that, then there will be a lot of victims. It will be very, very tragic. And I do hope that Americans confidently self-organize quickly. But, you know, if we do look back through history, there have been many, many times that societies collapsed. Japan after World War II, for example, the government was, I mean, it was prostate. You know, there was effectively no government. You know, people say, well, that's Japanese. But I mean, you get that in countries where people can actually self-defend. You know, throughout

American history, there have been many periods where out West, for example, the government was either temporarily or permanently out of commission, perhaps it was distracted or a natural disaster. There are a number of reasons. And people do not, you know, suddenly start stealing their neighbor's silver. They get together, they organize, they, you know, if they're worried about public safety, they put up roadblocks in their neighborhood, they, you know, trade off who mans it. I mean, there's, people are astounding. They're very, very impressive. And indeed, that's the entire premise of our system, right? The reason why we trust voters, because voters are amazing. People in government are not amazing. They are to be

controlled by the real, you know, impressive leaders of our country, which are the people. We forget that because so much power has been taken away from us, you know, because government schools sort of try to indoctrinate us into thinking that we serve the government. No, the government serves us. Why? Because we are better than them. Yeah. And to paint the picture, like how how big is our government gotten in the context of history? Yeah, I mean, it spends at the federal level about a third of what we take. So in other words, if you work a five, well, and then you add state and local and, you know, that brings up well past 40%. So, you know, if you wake up five days of work, five days a week and go to work, two of those days are for the government. You are working for the government.

Everything you earn that day is going directly to the government. You get none of it. That's quite astounding. At the time that we got independence from Britain, it was more like five or 10%. I think it actually would have been substantially lower. They were trying to bump it towards a couple of percent. That's what set us off. So, I mean, it's really been impressive. You know, I have to give credit to the socialist long marks to the institution that, you know, put us into a world where almost half of what Americans produce now in places like Canada or Europe, of course, even higher can be 50, 60 percent. But I mean, those are Europeans and Canadians. We're Americans. So it is pretty shocking what they've achieved. If you go on to look through just all of the economic choices we make, the social choices, how we live our lives, there are an increasing number of areas where you have to ask a bureaucrat for permission. And one of my favorite examples, just kind of paint a picture of what things looked like

before, you know, I mentioned earlier that there was kind of an economic revolution in the country where the government took over around World War I. And if we look, you know, if we ask what did life look like before that, one of my favorite examples is that Yankee Stadium used to be built in a way that you could see the games from the houses around the park. And so what people would do is they would reinforce their porches and they would put railings up and you know benchers uh and uh sorry beachers is that it yes uh anyway they would put seating up there uh and and then you know people could come into the house and climb up and they

could sit there and watch the game and you know mom would would be cooking something downstairs and uh you'd have beers of course you know and so i mean just kind of get an idea of how the country worked before the government took over, you could do any kind of commerce you wanted. If you wanted to start a business, if you wanted to sell something, now you were still subject to common law, right? So, you know, if your product was unsafe, there was a reason they were reinforcing their porches. They didn't want to hurt anybody because the legal system was very, very strict with you if you actually hurt somebody. But that was just common law. That was not some bureaucrat deciding this. That was just, you know, longstanding negligence rules

that have been around for thousands of years. You did not have this regulatory gauntlet, this bureaucracy where you had to ask them for permission. And getting back to that, sort of back of envelope, if I had to guess how much that government bureaucracy, that sort of permissioned economy has taken from us, back of envelope,

I guess we'd be about seven times richer today, which a seven time difference in wealth is roughly the United States versus Bolivia. Okay. I mean, we have lost a ton to this bureaucratic super state, and that's not even getting into the inventions that we don't have, right? I mean, almost everything that we call technology today was invented over a hundred years ago in the late 19th century. Every single thing that Elon Musk deals with, and by all accounts, Elon is dealing with the cuttingest edge of technologies, all of those were born in the late 19th century. We are coasting on fumes. Let's see,

electricity, magnetism, rockets, computers, cell phones, via transmission of data. Every single thing that we call technology was born in basically between 1870 and 1910, and then it had gone through little tweaks along the way. To give an example, we had all of the ingredients for the internet by the 1950s, something called Ethernet. And, you know, they were using it to route around offices. The government actually banned any commerce on it because they had funded it. They had funded it by pouring so much money in it that it stole people off of the projects that were actually trying to commercialize them and put that on the government projects that were explicitly banned from you. Just across the board, like once you start going back through history

and recognizing all that we have lost, how much poorer we are, how, you know, we don't have immortality. We still have people dying of cancer. I mean, you know, and you go back to that period of optimism before the government took over. And I mean, you can see it, you know, if you read science fiction like Jules Verne, you've got all these images of the future where everybody lives forever. They're forever young. You've got the flying cars, you got the robots, you got the whole thing. And people laugh at that today. They say, oh, they were so naive. They thought we would have all these things. No, they weren't naive. We killed it. We half killed it and we have been coasting on fumes. So, I mean, honestly, when you look out to, you know, the next generation,

what kind of world we're going to build for our children, I would absolutely love for it to come to a head. I would love for, you know, to give the people a chance. There's a reason that the people are sovereign in this country. That may have seemed insane, but our founding fathers made that decision. I would love to find out or to re-experience the wisdom of that decision and get back to rebuilding the country minus this bloated overlord that has turned from a parasite into a predator. Yeah. And it's extremely frustrating. Obviously, tax season was upon us a couple of weeks ago. And you pay your taxes and you see that two days of your five-day work week just going straight to this behemoth predator and the return on that investment

i think that's another i mean less charged way to approach this is just simply ask people like do you feel like you're getting value out of the money you're sending to this predator and when you look at the state of the health care system all the wars that we're engaged in all this idiotic energy policy it is criminal like having to send the government our money and then they literally light it on fire literally in a war or with yeah terrible programs yeah i was gonna say i would literally prefer that they light it on fire you know um the issue with um starting a war part of it is the cost part of it is you know of course the lives the um what that does to our political system i mean universally um you know certainly during the cold war whenever we go to war with

somebody we import their system we don't spread freedom we import authoritarianism you know this was true our our response uh to the soviet threat uh we're now seeing it with this uh so-called tick-tock ban patriot act 2.0 uh so we we import the authoritarianism so honestly if it was just a question of taking the money and lighting on fire i would take that in a heartbeat by the way it would then of course cause deflation which would make all the rest of us richer um but you know it's it's not just that the government wastes the money it's that the government actively uses the money to destroy us and that's not even getting into you know if you're paying a bureaucrat salary like an epa guy to go out and try to find random species that nobody's ever heard of or

or they actually invent species. They'll take a species that exists in a lot of places and they'll call that, no, no, no, this is a Southern Kansas grouse you see, and this is endangered and so we must protect this. I mean, there are games that they play in order to get control. So the issue is not just that we're paying that guy's

100,000 salary to go and invent new species in order to close down businesses. It's not the salary. In fact, I would pay the guy the salary to stay at home. If he would just get out of there, like quit, go home, that's fine. You can be retired for the rest of your life, and we will pay your salary. Just get out of the EPA and stop destroying the economy. Yeah.

I mean, with energy policy too, particularly, energy is the base layer of the modern economy, of life, energy. I mean, you go back to cavemen, like, literally eating meat to energize yourself to go figure out how to mend the wheel. Like, it is the most important part, and we seem dead set on destroying our energy infrastructure in some weird way to appease this idea of a cataclysmic climate crisis that I earnestly don't believe is actually real. Yeah. and again we look over to germany you look over to europe and we can see exactly what's going to happen here a decade from now because they started this at the turn of the century and like when it comes to bitcoin mining like i'm part of a company and we're going up we're finding

stranded natural gas wells that aren't being maintained they're leaking methane with the atmosphere or putting a generator on them mining bitcoin with them like that is a free market solution to the stranded well problem that exists throughout the country um yet the government doesn't want us to be able to do that yeah and and that's what's so funny really across the board is that what they claim to be fighting for is not actually what they fight for right so you know if you take um i mean you see a lot of it in energy but the stranded uh production you're talking about flaring right so if you're just letting things flare out that is very very bad for people who live nearby. It's bad, you know, if you accept that CO2 is a pollutant, then

obviously it's bad for that. So even under their own premises, they should be doing everything possible to try to get Bitcoiners in there to capture that. You've, I mean, of course, you know, you know, it's a similar issue across all of renewable energy, where a lot of these things are built basically as boondoggles or as, you know, political payback for donations. And so they're built in the middle of nowhere. Or, you know, they're built incompetently, like, yeah, the wind is great here, but nobody lives there, you know, in which case you're going to lose a crap load of it through the transmission lines. I mean, they're just built in a very sort of central planner way. But the thing is that Bitcoin can actually take advantage of that,

like can turn that frown upside down, right? They can actually take all of those useless boondoggles and do something good with it, which is maintain the monetary system. So, you know, there are tons of opportunities. And I think it's sort of a tell from the allegedly pro-environment policymakers where when you present them a solution to their problem, right, they're concerned about CO2 or they're concerned about, you know, breathable emissions from flares. Okay. They claim to be concerned about those things. I believe they're concerned about those things. And yet when you come in with a solution, as soon as you say Bitcoin, they just, it's weird. It's like they have this phobia, you know, perhaps because the issue for them, yes,

they care about whatever topic they're selling at the moment. But the sort of bigger issue for them is almost this religious belief that the only way to save the world is to centralize power in the government, you know, that that the world is like a classroom of juvenile delinquents, where, you know, if you let the kids, if you leave them alone, they're going to burn the place down and, you know, kill each other. And so you've got to have the teacher in there. You got to have a strict teacher in there to straighten them out. And I mean, I think honestly, they see the world that way. Perhaps they're trained that way because of public schooling. And so when you come in and you say, okay, you've got these goals, here's a solution. And they say, no, no, no, no, that

involves the juvenile delinquents my god no yeah no they and like the adults in the room the politicians are partying on all this and really trying to centrally plan the economy that's the other thing too that most of them never actually worked a day in their life and they don't know how they wouldn't know how to solve these problems right like even if they weren't in the government they've never actually that's the other thing when you get to like information theory and you have all these people in dc making these broad brush decisions for the whole country like they're literally removed from the source of information that would allow you to make positive economic decisions like where they need to be made like just from that like hierarchy and that topology

of how information is controlled centrally in DC where they make controlled decisions off of this data that they're completely dislocated from. It's very frustrating. It is, and in theory, the solution would be for them to reach out to business people and get input from business people. Of course, that relationship takes about five minutes

to turn into a crony relationship, You know, business people are no dummies. So they'll say, oh, wait, I got a senator calling me for advice. How could I possibly take advantage of this situation? You know, so if we take financial regulation, for example, I mean, politicians are very open about, you know, say, well, you know, we're not bankers. So we got to listen to the bankers and see what could possibly go wrong, my man. And, you know, it's it's an impossible problem. I mean, once you have power, there are only two ways to wield it, either ignorantly or corruptly. There is no other way.

And therefore, the solution, the, you know, thousands of years old solution is don't have power. Leave it to the people. So rather than, you know, making regulations on finance, you let entrepreneurs create products. You let the tort system handle any kind of deception or fraud or violence or anything like that. and other than that you let consumers who are not juvenile delinquents they are the sovereigns of the republic they are the ones who the government works for you let them choose what they want regulation you know what they want regulation to look like what they want the economy to look like by making their own choices not by having some overlord coming in and telling them choosing

what's best for them yeah how do you how do you see bitcoin playing into all this do you see playing at all uh i think in the near term it is i think mostly a lifeboat uh partly you know just because um it does take time to learn about it i think i don't want to sort of overplay the bitcoin is hard to understand because i think honestly bitcoin is a lot easier to understand than the financial system like if you make a decision that you want to figure out how central banking works or you want to figure out how like credit card systems work. That is not easy. OK, honestly, that is harder than Bitcoin. And, you know, big reasons because it's intentionally hard. A lot of these things are very intentionally made to be difficult. Bitcoin is as simple as it

can possibly be. But, you know, because it's because it has its own built in incentives and because it's frankly perfect, that does make it a little bit complex because it works. But I don't actually think it's that complex. I think that we get to some tipping point where there are a sufficient number of people in society who understand it that the rest of them just kind of take it on faith. That's how credit cards work, right? Like when you tell a kid, you know, you give him a credit card for his 16th birthday and he's not like, I don't know, man. It doesn't look like money to me. Is my money really there?

No, because everybody else uses credit cards. And at some point the kid says, well, if everybody uses credit cards, they're probably legit. it. So, you know, I don't think we have to convince every last grandmother or grandmother in America. But, you know, I do think there's some point and I have no idea, maybe it's 20%, 30% who understand it well enough that, you know, when other people say, is my money really there? Is there really anything backing it? That these people can sort of explain it or, you know, ideally that we get to the point where people don't even ask that anymore than they ask that about a credit card. So I don't know how long that process takes. And depending on how long it takes,

think that's what defines whether bitcoin is going to be more of a lifeboat in the early stage of that or more of our savior in the late stage of that um but i do think you know if we look far enough out whether it's 30 years 50 100 um i think that bitcoin ultimately saves humanity um which is going to sound ridiculous if you're not already a bitcoiner so i encourage you to just learn more and it'll make sense over time trust me um but that you know bitcoin does for us what gold has always done which is that it safeguards uh in enormous part of our freedom against um you know would be control gold i think turned out to have a very fatal flaw which is that uh it's physical and you know in a sense that's its selling point you know it's it's backed i mean that is the

the selling point. But the problem is that it also introduces a fatal vulnerability, which is that once it's physical, it has to be located somewhere. It has to be centralized somewhere. And it's got to have a wall around it. It's got to have armed guards and, you know, a moat with crocodiles with lasers on their head. And governments know how to exploit those. And they did. You know, so I think one of the questions on gold, people might say, well, if gold is so amazing, then how come no country today uses gold? Which is correct. And the answer is because governments are very, very good at violence. It's their core, it's really their only competency. And so governments have over the course of, you know, largely the past century, they have seized gold. Now, eventually they're

going to screw up. We know this because that's the story of history. Governments seize the money and then they screw it up. Eventually they'll screw it up. And if they screw it up, you know, pretty quickly, then I think we probably go back to essentially gold, some kind of gold-backed system just because people are more familiar with gold. I mean, some people will go to Bitcoin, some will go to gold, but I imagine the majority would go to gold. If it takes them a long time to screw up, then I think instead enough people will know Bitcoin that we just go directly to Bitcoin. And I should note that even if the sort of collapse, I prefer to say screw up because collapse sort of plays into that whole Hollywood disaster thing. I don't think it's a collapse. I

think it's a renaissance. But anyway, if that renaissance occurs the next 10 years, you know, I imagine people go to gold and then Bitcoin keeps doing what it's doing, which is convince people conversation by conversation. And I would imagine that either way, in 50 or 70 years, we have a Bitcoin based economy, which means that government is out of the business of printing money. It would be much, much smaller than it is today. We would not have the boom bust cycles. We would not know what a recession is. You wouldn't have a quote unquote business cycle, which is entirely a creation of government. And, you know, of course, you also wouldn't have institutionalized inflation.

You would probably have mild deflation that would go at the pace that the economy is growing, I think would be much more prosperous. So personally, I very much look forward to it with those caveats, right, that, you know, we don't know what path it's going to take to get there. But I think we don't know how each chapter ends, but I think we do know how that book ends, which is Bitcoin is world money. yeah no i really like explaining bitcoin is complex because especially when you juxtapose it with the incumbent monetary system like systems can be complex or they can be complicated

and actually right you want them to be complex and complex um is systems that are complex usually are emergent systems that you have this incentive structure that the system uh grows up within and then it turns into a complex system like bitcoin with 21 million cap miners produce the blocks nodes run the consensus rules you have a difficulty adjustment you know what's coming when it's very simple to understand but it is a complex system whereas the federal reserve system is extremely complicated you have all these new debt facilities and only certain privileged entities or individuals can get access to particular parts of the system we were joking before we hit record about krugman coming out and saying hey it's really good that people don't understand this

because we don't have to explain it to them they're just taking a face value we can do what we want right um so when it comes like bitcoin it's not really learning what bitcoin is it's more unlearning that you took for granted that money just worked a certain way and you actually never took the time to properly understand it and the government money quote-unquote money you've been using your whole life isn't actually money and even on sort of the retail day-to-day level so like um you know bitcoin fundamentally is what people think money is okay if you own a bitcoin it is your bitcoin and it is not you know rehypothecated it is not it is not an imaginary back uh bitcoin that is uh fractional reserve uh if it's yours it's yours it is exactly what

grandma thinks her bank account is right now on the other hand what is a bank account holy moly right you put a hundred dollars in the bank they xerox your hundred dollars and put a little picture of it there and then your money is out the back door it's out being lent in argentina or or you know whatever whatever yield the bank can chase uh if they lose it then you know you're out of luck you got to go to the government and try to beg for insurance you know a a bank account is nothing like what people think. Like if you've got $100 in the bank, no, you don't. You have a relationship with a bank to which you have lent your money. There's actually a professor a couple years ago out of Switzerland. He literally, let's see, he borrowed $250,000 from his bank

in Switzerland. And he sat down with him, he's a PhD professor. He sat down with him and he said, okay can you write out exactly every step along the way because i want to know i i want to understand how money is created because apparently there is a massive debate among phd monetary economists how money is created they don't exactly know and what he concluded is that so like if if if you borrow money from a bank you um they won't lend you money unless you have an account at the bank you may have noticed and that's not just because they want you to like you know be a customer and you know you know give us some of your business no there's a very specific reason for that which is that they don't have the money and they can't you know they can't just write 250

000 and put it on a piece of paper uh for you to take somewhere else because they don't have it they're not creating like they they create a debit in your account which they can do in-house because they match it up with a new asset that they just pulled out of their butt which is called a loan from you i mean it's it's quite astounding um but the moral of the story is that grandma thinks she has a hundred dollars and she went to the bank and she thinks the bank put it in the vault and maybe lent some of it out maybe didn't but like that's that's what grandma thinks a dollar is when you actually dig into this phd economists don't know what a dollar is like i mean to actually go to a bank and be like help me understand this let me let me just follow along

step by step it's insane nobody knows what the fiat system is so given that you know i would argue bitcoin is one hell of a lot simpler than fiat money and fiat money is largely it shouldn't be complicated it should be what people imagine which is how you take your money to the bank they put it in the back vault maybe they lend it out maybe they don't we can you know we have to get in the full reserve banking, of which I'm a huge advocate. But the point is that it's much worse than that. You know, it's not just that they reland your money. It's that, I mean, literally the whole dynamics, you've got like little money printers, little counterfeiting machines in every bank, in every country in the world, in addition to the central banks. And, you know, through all

of this, grandma has no idea what's happening. And so when her bank collapses, she's like, where did that come from? My money was just sitting there. So, you know, I would argue that by that Byzantine design, fiat, it's effectively a fraud on the people. A fraud because it is intentionally designed to be difficult to understand. You know, if people actually understood what fiat money was, how it was created at the central bank level, how it's created at the Commercial bank level, I think people do feel like they're in the process of being defrauded. Bitcoin, on the other hand, does not do that. Bitcoin is exactly what you think money is.

If you own a Bitcoin, you own a Bitcoin. That's that. You can verify it yourself, too. Yeah. Relatively cheap. You don't have to assay it like gold. You don't have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to assay your Bitcoin. You just type a prompt into your CLI, your private command.

and say, hey, what's the supply of Bitcoin right now and where are mine held? Here it is. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, you mentioned full reserve banking. You said you didn't want to jump into it, but I think that would be worthwhile to jump into because that's a big debate even within Bitcoin

is let's assume we get on a Bitcoin standard. Are we just going to recreate the banking system that has been erected over the last century after the Federal Reserve became a thing? Or will we do full reserve banking and you're not going to lend out money, but you do like equity investments and companies to get dividends on that?

Yeah, I think either can be done with Bitcoin, just like, you know, you can have gold fractional reserve banking, right? I mean, you know, during the gold standard, I believe all banks in America, generally throughout the, you know, 150 years before the Federal Reserve and, you know, the 200 years before Nixon, the vast majority of banks were fractional reserve, even though we had a gold standard. So you could do either fractional or full reserve. I think that whether that will be

done in under a Bitcoin standard, I think really has to do a lot more with politics. And, you know, fractional reserve banking is extraordinarily profitable for the banks that engage in it because they can basically Xerox your money and they can pretend to have it sitting there and then they go lend it and make a bunch of money off it. So it's extremely profitable. They can essentially print money. And so they are going to exert political pressure on it. At that point, the question simply becomes, do politicians play ball? They give them this exorbitant privilege of pretending that a dollar is actually $2 or that a dollar is in more than one place. And that, I mean, it would really be a question of what the political

incentives are at that time, to what degree has Bitcoin sort of rebalanced the amount of power that cronies have to defraud the people at large. But I think it's useful to sort of sketch out what full reserve banking would look like, because I know that the other side sort of screams that it'll be the end of the world. And in a full reserve banking system, the idea is that money cannot be in two places at once. And if you're pretending that money is in two places at once, then you're introducing risk into the banking system. For example, bank runs when people discover that their money is not actually in two places at once. So the way that it would most likely work in full reserve banking is that, you know, today in the U.S., something like 20%

of savings are of money that people put in the bank are checking, or historically, this is how it's worked, about 20% is checking, 80% is savings, meaning that 20% is money that people are going to need to use in the next couple of months. The other 80% is longer term savings, okay? And under a full reserve system, what would happen is for that 20% checking, because you don't know when you're going to get that money, you would want that on what's known as a demand deposit, meaning that anytime you want, you can walk in the bank and they have to give you your money. And for that demand deposit part of it, that would have to be in the vault, right? If the bank is telling you that your money is immediately there, then your money has to be immediately there. Otherwise it's

fraud. They are lying to you. They are telling you something that is not true. On the other hand, in full reserve, that other 80% that Americans are generally saving for longer term, well, there, the bank would try to offer you attractive interest rates. So they might pay you 4% or 5% in order to keep your money in a time deposit. So most Americans don't know that as a CD, a certificate of deposit. So in full banking, you still have the lending, right? 80% of people's bank savings would still be lent out. You would still have entrepreneurs, you would have business loans, car loans, mortgages. You would have all that good stuff. You would have 80% of it. The final 20% would actually be sitting there in bank vaults as backing so that if people did

want their money out, they'd come and take it. And historically, when you have full reserve banking, in fact, nobody does take their money out. You don't get bank runs. Why? Because it's easier to you know uh carry your money around in in little bits of paper than it is in in gold coins for example so you know i mean the reason people use banks in the first place because they were doing a saving or a a service of storing their savings maybe you don't want to walk around town with 20 of your life savings in your pocket you might get pickpocketed for whatever reason the point is that if people are not afraid that banks will collapse then the system is perfectly stable why Why would you take your money out?

Your money's doing just fine. The instability comes from, right, in the fractional bank system, so contrasting with that full reserve system, in that system, banks get to pretend that all of your money can be withdrawn immediately. It is not on time deposits, not on CDs. You know, you don't have to wait a month to get your money. Your money can all be withdrawn immediately. But of course, this is a fiction because banks have lent out your money.

It's off in Argentina or it's with some Silicon Valley startup or something. Your money is not there. And Americans empirically don't understand this. They don't know it. And we know that from opinion surveys. We also know that just from behavior. You know, like if you go to Walmart and they're out of eggs, right, you don't like call your wife, you know, oh my God, cash in all the Walmart gift cards.

Walmart is done. We got to get our money out of there, right? You don't do that. Why? Because you're confident that Walmart is going to have eggs tomorrow, right? Now, the exact equivalent is that when you go to the bank and you say, hey, let me get my money, if the bank told you, we're out of cash, but we'll have some cash tomorrow, people would flip, right? Why do they flip on that? Because they don't understand that's how a bank works.

It is how a bank works. Banks have a little bit of cash coming in here and there. They're basically a conduit. But the point is that the banks deceive people by claiming that their money is available on demand. And the reason they do that is so that they can lend the entire 100%. And once you multiply that through the entire banking system, through the magic of reserve – what's the term? I'm forgetting the term now. Anyway, through the magic of fractional reserve banking, they can then multiply that money 10 times or more.

Currently, reserve requirements – Which are zero right now. Yeah, right, exactly. So like traditionally, you know, they could effectively multiply that money five or 10 times by basically passing it around and all having a turn with it, pretending that it's all there in their bank. You know, each of them put up a Xerox of your dollar in their window. And so that would traditionally that would lead into a five or 10x increase in the money in practice, something like a 4x. But nowadays, of course, statutorily, ever since COVID started, there is no reserve requirements whatsoever. So in theory, a bank could just keep going and going.

Like they don't have to put any of that money in the vault. And so if you take that among multiple banks, you basically get one over reserve requirement, which is zero, which is infinite. All right. So we're in a very dangerous place. But sort of the moral of the story for me anyway, is that, you know, the instability of our banking system, a large part of the boom-bust cycle, because banks create most of the inflation, the economy via fractional reserve, the boom-bust cycle, the recessions, the inflation, almost all of this is coming not even from the Fed. The Fed's doing a fifth of it, but most of it is coming from the commercial banks. Why? So that they can pretend that grandma's money is there when it's not. That strikes me as an insane policy. You know, it's well accepted in whether you're, you know, free market, you know, sort of one of the oppositions to full reserve banking

is people say, well, yeah, but the government shouldn't tell you what to do. Now, this is not telling you what to do. This is, you know, it's long understood under common law that if one party to a contract does not understand that contract, then it is null. It's not a legitimate contract. If I contract with a sleeping person or with a child, that is not a legitimate contract. If I persist, right, you know, if the other party persists in conducting contracts with people who they know don't understand. For example, if a banker goes to an old folks home and tries to sell complex derivative products to people who have dementia, that is considered fraud. They will be in prison for that. And so similarly, the fact that people do not understand how fracture

reserve works, they don't understand that their money is not actually there. The bank is pretending to have it there. That makes it an unconscionable contract. And the fact that banks continue to offer these products, and in fact, politically lobby. In some countries, it is illegal to question whether a bank has the reserves that it, by all accounts, does not have. In other words, to tell the truth about a bank. So that, to me, is enough evidence that they are, not only are they deceiving people, they are very intentionally deceiving people. So I would call fractional reserve a crime. Yeah. When you bring in the current banking crisis, and you have J.P. Morgan absorbing a lot of these regional banks right now.

Again, going to the point that people really don't understand what this is, a lot of Americans see J.P. Morgan scooping up First Republic and any other of the banks that fail. I'm like, oh, all right, it's in safer hands now. But all that fractional reserve risk is just being more concentrated in fewer parties, which is mind-blowing. Yeah. Safer in the sense that JP Morgan has better lobbyists, yes. It is more assured that it's going to be bailed out. And in a sense, they set that in motion intentionally with the too big

to fail. Once you draw a line in the financial system where you've got the guys who we're going to save no matter what and the guys who we might let die, you have set in motion. I mean, at that point it's just a matter of time until the entire system is going to concentrate on the side that has the uh the immunity well and then you find out they're actually not too big to fail like something that is seeped in uh no sense of logic will fail eventually so that's a another part of it that whether you call them too big to fail or now they're calling them systemically sci-fi systemically important financial institutions like they're getting slapped with that label making people complacent and feel like, all right, that's good.

Everything concentrates here. The government will bail it out. But the government's not going to be able to keep doing this in the perpetuity. And that's exactly the risk is that you sort of tie all the banks together into a convoy to the point where nobody goes down until everybody goes down. And when everybody goes down, there's absolutely nothing

that you can do to save the system. And because, I mean, of course, as you say, the banks themselves are perfectly capable of failing. And in fact, they seem to be getting very good at it. You know, this has been essentially twice now in 15 years. So the banks absolutely fail. What they mean by too big to fail is that we, the taxpayers, are going to foot the bill for now and ever. We, the livestock. And there's a point where, you know, we can't bail them out. But I think what's interesting is that there's actually a much, much earlier point where the livestock say no thanks. You know, we saw that in Greece, for example, and it's been coming up in

the debt ceiling discussions, whether there's a point that America might default. And a lot of the emphasis there has been on, well, is the debt sustainable? Can we handle it? What percent of GDP? No, that's not the question. The question is, at what point do voters decide that they would like the government to default? Because there is a $31.5 trillion gem lying there for the voters to pick up. It's about $250,000 per household in America, just lying there for them, like a freebie if they simply say, let's default. And we saw that in Greece during the sovereign crisis in Europe in, what was it, 2010, 2011, where at that time, so Greece defaulted on its debts and it crushed the economy partly because Greece was in that twilight where the government was just functional

enough to stop growth. And during that period, what's interesting is that Greece had been handing out a smaller amount as a percent of its economy in debt service to foreigners than the US does all the time. In other words, Greece did not default because it had to. It defaulted because it was tempting. A political entrepreneur saw an opportunity and he got up and talked about you know, the greedy Germans and enough Greek people liked that narrative. And, you know, they eyed all of that sweet, sweet default cash because, I mean, it's very attractive to default, particularly if the U.S., who's going to make you pay? You know, if the U.S. wakes up one morning and defaults on all its bonds to China, you and what army, pal? So, you know, that I think is

kind of an interesting question. I think that we're going to get there a lot earlier than people imagine because the conversation is focused on can America pay its debts? That's not the question. The question is, do American voters want to pay that debt? Do American voters, you know, if you break down the debt by the source, right, a certain amount of it was the war in Afghanistan, a certain amount of it was, you know, handouts for, you know, to buy votes or for, you know, environmental policy or whatever, you know, you can sort of dig in and break up each of those trillions and see exactly what it bought us. And I think for a lot of Americans, they might regard that as not a legitimate purchase, that that was not something that they actually wanted to buy. I mean, I think

you and I probably would feel that the entirety of the debt, those are not things I actually wanted. And so I think a debt crisis, I don't think it's going to come this time because I don't think people are angry enough. Going by the last midterms, I think definitely Americans aren't of angry enough. There are a lot of angry Americans, but not enough. But I do think that sometime over the next 10 years, we could see some kind of repudiation of the national debt. Yeah. It seems like we need to remind people that the US has defaulted on its debt many times in the past, no matter what. Tons of times. FDR, Nixon. In a sense, inflation is a soft default. So we just defaulted on, what, 7%, 8% of it last year.

we're fresh off of default uh so you know and the only silver lining to that inflation was that it peeled two and a half trillion off the in purchasing power off of the uh national debt yeah no that's i mean i'm i'm sure you are too a big fan let's just rip the band-aid band-aid off always over default because like you mentioned the money printing you increase debt it's just a soft default. It takes a lot longer and arguably has more dire consequences in the long run. I think absolutely it does. You know, if we zoom out, because the big question here isn't a trillion here, a trillion there. The big question here is the straitjacket that the economy has on it. And, you know, it has that because of the mega state that is funded by all those

trillions. So all those trillions, they're like the deer on the wall that the government can celebrate all the things it's taken from us. But those deer heads are not the real danger. The real danger is that they are still taking it from us, right? So going back to, you know, would we be seven times richer if we didn't have this massive bureaucracy, this parasitic bureaucracy trying to command our economy? So, I mean, to me, that's the prize. Dad Schmidt, I'm interested in like that prize, getting them off our backs. If we did, I imagine we'd be looking at an increase of GDP of something like 1%, 1.5% a year. That has a net present value on the order of $20 trillion a year, even at 5% rates. So screw the debt. The debt is noise. I'm interested in how do we get

back to the kind of economy where entrepreneurs are in charge, not bureaucrats. If we can get back to that we will be so rich we will laugh at 31 trillion yeah just let us run yeah just run exactly yep then go is he i mean go back to energy is like the the one sector where i just really hone in on where it's like it's all right there we can build the news we can build the pipelines we can work on wind and solar if you want to um would be very interested to see if it's actually profitable if it wasn't being so subsidized to the point that it is today but yeah just thinking about what can be done in the energy sector alone if all the red tape was just released we can go build that's amazing and you know if things get bad enough then reality does

start to uh intrude i think in i think it was germany that they decided that uh wood pellets are green which is like literally cutting trees down here this is like north carolina they're cutting the forest they're deforesting north carolina right now this is like the least green fuel you could possibly imagine right because you know fossil fuels right so you know if we take the life cycle of uh coal or oil okay so you have a toxic substance that's sitting in the earth uh poisoning people by the way of course if you touch petroleum you'll get a rash if you touch for a while, you'll get cancer. And so you have this industry that sucks up, cleans up all of this environmental waste, and it turns into tree food. I mean, what could be greener than fossil

fuels? It's really quite impressive. So, you know, I mean, to be, you know, I'm with you, like the whole thing is just an absolute joke. You know, fossil fuel energy is honestly the cleanest energy for that reason. It literally plants forests automatically for free. It's astounding. CO2, it's a heck of a thing. If entrepreneurs actually think they can make money off wind and solar, I guess there are certain applications. If you've got a compost toilet in the middle of Yellowstone, I suppose you need solar because you don't want to run a line for seven miles. I mean, there are applications where I'm sure solar does its thing, but broadly speaking let the market decide uh get the government out of it and you know if if entrepreneurs can

make money on it like tesla then more power to them uh but i think that a lot of the government funded projects are probably actually not sustainable those are just tax fleecing taxpayers yeah and you reminded me of something i didn't want to mention but i think you do a great job of um that more people need to do is make fun of these people i think that's the way to get through to a silent majority, if you will, or like, what the hell is going on? It's like, all right, we just need to point out how laughable the situation is and who got us here.

We literally just have to ridicule these people publicly. I ridicule them every opportunity I get. They are unserious people. They are screwing things. They're screwing up serious things, without a doubt. That's why I bother. you know if they were if they were screwing up uh i don't know my crochet hobbies over the weekend that would be one thing but you know they they are destroying very important things um but

absolutely i think it's very important they get away with getting up there with suits and they've got the official this and and you know they've got the eagle and the whole thing uh i think that's you know they should be meeting in um hawaiian shirts in a strip mall in new jersey i mean they should be treated with all the respect they deserve, which is zero. These guys are absolute clowns. They work for us. They should be treated like that. Maybe they should, you know, at least wear blue overalls. I don't want to insult blue collar workers and implying, but nonetheless, they should, you know, they have no right to get up there with suits and act like they actually know anything. And they certainly have no right to have any authority over we, the sovereign

people who we make the laws we vote this is our country uh so yeah without a doubt um you know every chance i get i ridicule them yeah it's astonishing to think what you just said is somewhat of a revolutionary act these days is reminding people like you are in control they're supposed to work for you yeah yeah right this is your country they are your employee and in fact if you you know communicate you know if you run for office you know if you if you advocate to get a law passed that you know they have to go into congress and uh in uh hawaiian shirts they have to do it i mean they are your play thing play with them that would be the ultimate troll if we actually got that through and they were forced to

i mean you know they're they're free to quit by all means yes right yeah i wish they would amass that's why that's why whenever the debt ceiling uh debate comes up i'm like i hope they hit it because when they shut it down under obama they shut it down for like six weeks it was like man doesn't seem like we're missing anything here yeah well you know they they have this game they play um they actually have a name for it they call it washington monument strategy or sometimes it's called fireman first where they will cut the most um popular spending possible right so they always close the washington monument uh they'll they'll take money away from the firemen and the police and the school lunches

and social security and meals for wheels, right? So like the tiny, you know, 2% of the budget that is totally popular, they'll be like, that's all we can cut, man. No, seriously, you know, we can't cut the government pensions, the federal worker benefits where, you know, they can retire at 42,

can't stop the war is totally impossible, not gonna happen. You know, so all of the other trillions of spending, absolutely impossible to cut. and instead you know they use the kids and grandma as human shields to protect the rest of the budget so they can keep feeding their activists and cronies it's absolutely disgusting and you know i think it's partly why i'm a little sympathetic for the spineless republicans because i do understand you know they do that they use the human shields the media is in the tank so they

always amplify this look at these heartless republicans with the school lunches what's what's wrong with you people? So I do sympathize. Fortunately, there are people like you and me and millions and millions of us on Twitter and across the rest of the internet who are actually able to call out these, you know, cynical tactics and call them for what they are. So I am hopeful that over time, you know, skeptics can grow a backbone. Yeah. And I think now's the most opportune time to do that i mean you mentioned twitter that's a very interesting variable that's been thrown into the mix of these conversations whether it be monetary policy fiscal policy the trajectory of where we're going as a society is that we do have these avenues to get better information out there

the gatekeepers don't have as much control over the gates as they used to they certainly do if you're watching um news media on tv but outside of that we have developed these avenues that get better information to people and that's always in my mind is like how does this new variable change the speed at which these things unfold um and i think when it comes to the banking crisis with svb particularly i mean you had that leaked email from peter teal to founder fund companies get out and then started a bank run on SVB within 36 hours. Now, with these other bank runs, excuse me, other bank failures that have happened,

it's still on top of people's minds, even though they don't want to mention it. In mainstream media, there's people still on Twitter talking about it, saying, hey, your bank could be next. That's throwing a very interesting variable into the mix. And yeah, you're absolutely right. And it's been fascinating. We've really seen that on a lot of topics here where the, you know, in the old days, if the mainstream media wanted to suppress it, it was dead, right? They could cover a story with a pillow till it stopped breathing. And for a minute there on the internet, we could speak freely, right? Up until, I guess, about 2015 or 16, which is when I think they started panicking with the Trump and the Brexit thing. And so they started censoring everybody. but but up until then we had a moment there i remember when my kids were uh i want to say six

six and eight and they told me that we didn't talk politics with them because we figured there's plenty of time to for that tawdry world uh and they came to me and said did you know global warming is a hoax i said well that's quite interesting where did you hear that guys and apparently it was youtube because everybody knew that on youtube and you know what is that you know, whatever, 2011 or whatever it is, because you had free speech. And, you know, I think the elite panicked. They, you know, hit the big red censorship button. God bless Elon for doing what he did and suffering these slings and arrows. He did what, I mean, I'm embarrassed as an American that the rest of our political class couldn't manage.

Some of them did try to be fair. I've talked to congressmen who were incredibly frustrated, But, you know, if you're one Congress thing out of 400 and X, you can't really get it done. But nonetheless, thank God, Elon, I think he has turned the tide here. Even YouTube is allowing stuff that it never would have, like Scott Adams' commentary the other week there. I was amazed that they left that up. I felt like they really wouldn't have before Elon opened things up again. So I'm very, very enthusiastic. enthusiastic. I feel like because of social media, fundamentally, we were winning the debate

really since the beginning of social media. As goofy as social media is, the point is that it routes around the gatekeeper. And we were absolutely winning. We were gaining converts. We were winning the debate. And that's why they went for the censorship. At this point, thanks to Elon, principally, it looks like we've not broken through that and we can get back to winning. So that is one more reason that I'm extremely optimistic. I think that we are actually winning the conversation. We are winning converts on top of the fact that if we don't win, if they completely get everything that they want in life, then they'll screw it up so badly that they'll lose it in a matter of months. And then we get what we always get, which is the state of nature,

which means free market, humans cooperating with one another. So, you know, whether we win or we lose we're gonna win it's just a question of you know there's this painful period in the middle as the band-aid comes off so by all means tear that sucker off yeah yeah how long is it going to take and how much pain do we have to suffer hopefully not too long not too much is is the most optimistic we could be no but like with austrian economics too like i feel like it's had a renaissance over the last decade because of social media where you guys are doing in heritage misis just individuals is talking about it more, I feel like Austrian economics is in its heyday right now. Austrian economics, Bitcoin itself, really without social media, neither of those would

have ever spread beyond a tiny, tiny little group. I think Rothbard said that you could get the entirety of the libertarian movement, which is broader than Austrian economics, you get the entirety of the libertarian movement in the 1970s in a single living room. And those were hundreds of years old ideas. I mean, it's not like libertarianism was invented, right? Libertarianism is classical liberalism. That's 1648, depending on how you define it. A living room in New York and only in New York, right? If you try to gather a bunch of classical liberals in a normal city like Dallas or something, good luck finding another one. So people, I think, really don't understand how revolutionary it is what the internet and very, very specifically social

media because of the network effects right because it's so easy to find new ideas um so i'm i'm you know beside myself uh happy that elon chose to fight that battle uh and i do think that you know at this point i mean a lot can happen between now and then the other side does have a lot of budget uh to use against us but um broadly speaking i'm very optimistic yeah but they're destroying their purchasing power as they increase that budget too so it's a it's beautiful yeah yeah whatever they diminishing return marginal utility for that uh for that budget for sure yeah absolutely yeah yep well peter i know you got a run here um but again i want to thank you i think uh your ability to express first principle ideas as it pertains to economics and everything going on

in the world today is extremely impressive and valuable so any of you freaks out there who have not found Peter's content, highly recommend you go follow him and subscribe to his podcast. What else should I point people to that you're working on? Generally, I hang out on Twitter. That's where I do most of my thinking. It's actually where I get most of my ideas because there are so many freaking smart people on Twitter. So that's mostly where I hang out. I got a podcast, got a sub stack, and that's pretty much all I can do at the moment. And then, of course, my day job over at Heritage. Heritage Foundation has changed a lot since the last bailout. We are a heck of a lot better. We have a really, really solid economics

team. So I do hope that you'll come over and check out some of the stuff that we're fighting for. And then, of course, Mises. So Mises Institute, if you're interested in economics, if you're interested in freedom, they have tons of books there. All of it's free. They literally buy up the copyright and just give it away for free uh so you know and get your rothbard your misis uh your hobby over there yeah go check it out freaks peter thank you very much it's been an absolute pleasure marty thank you for having me you're one of my heroes so i love what you're doing keep on doing it man all right well thank you peace and love freaks