TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #484: Bitcoin And The Long March with Ben Hart
Episode Date: March 1, 2024Marty sits down with Ben Hart to discuss his recent viral popularity, victim culture, and the hope Bitcoin brings for the future. Ben on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BenHart_Freedom 0:00 - Intro 6:21 ...- Ben’s daughter 16:46 - Discovering Bitcoin 19:36 - Dartmouth Review 24:38 - Big tech and intelligence agencies 33:22 - College brainwashing 44:23 - Victim narrative and immigration 52:25 - Fiat culture 56:06 - Energy, mining and decentralization 1:01:11 - Sound money and military industrial complex 1:08:39 - Optics and adoption 1:27:18 - Wrapping up Shoutout to our sponsors: River Unchained Zaprite 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
Transcript
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what's up freaks it's your boy marty bent here to introduce this rip of tftc i sat down with ben
hart very interesting story founded the dartmouth review back in the 80s very successful advertising
campaign found bitcoin cropped bitcoin pretty quickly understands it is advocating for it
recently blew up in the social media sphere due to uh back and forth with his daughter
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you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free
If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts.
So it's all acting like safe haven.
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins.
In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
Well, we can't include it because we weren't recording.
Ben Hart, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Marty.
You were just having a pre-year.
It's great to have you.
I mean, I'm sure it's been an insane couple of weeks for you.
It has.
Yeah.
Yep.
Getting Elon.
Elon is a mainstay in your replies now.
Right.
He seems to reply to two of my posts on this whole dust up with my daughter.
I don't know if you want me to go into that,
but is that something you want me to go into a little bit?
Well, if you don't, it depends if you're comfortable or not.
I don't want you to feel forced to talk about it.
Yeah, I'm going to go.
So what happened was I woke up at 6 a.m., as I usually do,
pour myself a cup of coffee, get ready to do some work, some writing.
Because I actually, I'm in the advertising business.
That's my profession.
And so I open up my laptop computer and I go online
and I'm just greeted with an avalanche of just really negative comments about me.
You're a deadbeat dad.
you knew you abandoned your family and all this stuff and and actually those are the best comments
that kind of went down from there and it was thousands of these comments and i'm wondering
what the heck is going on here and so after a few minutes of uh investigation i find out that
my daughter who is a writer out in hollywood she uh she's writing a show for p or helping to write
a show for nbc peacock streaming she graduated from college from northwestern university in
2021 and so she had posted this video on me and the first part of the video was actually very
funny she said my and it was about sort of family trauma that was a theme and her trauma was that
her dad um in his 50s abandoned the uh abandoned or in his 40s in his 50s abandoned the family to
pursue break dancing which is a kind of a funny uh storyline wasn't true but it was a funny storyline
but during the course of the video she said i wasn't paying medical bills and implied that i
was a deadbeat dad and uh and uh and so the comments she didn't actually say i was a deadbeat
dad but that's what the commenters all interpreted that way so uh and of course i wasn't a deadbeat
dad i was in the advertising business i had paid uh we got divorced i got divorced from her mom
in 2005 and i paid the uh the family millions of dollars in alimony and child support and put
$600,000 or so into a college fund. And I just lived down the street, literally just lived a
mile, mile and a half or so down the street, sidewalks all the way, easy walk or bike ride,
if they chose to do that. And I saw the kids all the time. So the video wasn't correct. So
I get in touch with Maddie and I say, look, Maddie, I did like a lot of this video. The
storyline was funny. You know how dad left my family for, to pursue break dancing. And,
But I said, you know, I don't really care about that, but I do care about the deadbeat dad implication.
So what I'd like you to do is take this video down and correct it.
You know, it can be just as funny without that.
And she refused to do that because by that time her video had gone viral.
It had gotten 7 million views on TikTok alone and was just basically all over the Internet, all over YouTube and so forth.
And so I said, OK, I'm going to have to make a response video.
said to myself i have to make a response video to this very gentle and the video i came out with was
very gentle it just corrected those few inaccuracies and it was very pro maddie and it
even said i love the video i love 98 of her video i just didn't like the implication that i was a
deadbeat dad so uh at first the video just had like a couple hundred views and i i pointed out
to maddie and maddie they actually liked the video she she she texted back haha that was funny um i
And I said, what I'd like you to do, if you're not going to take down your video and correct it, at least put my video up on your feed so that your viewers can see it, you know, because you've got millions of viewers.
And I'd like I'd like it. I'd like them to see this video.
But she declined to do that. And so then my video went viral, you know, within 12 hours.
I think it had a million views on X, then five million views and 10 million views on up to 30 million views.
And I think Elon weighed in with a comment that said, you're awesome.
And and then that was around when it had hit 10 million views, I think.
And then that propelled it, of course, to 33 million views.
And then I started getting really angry messages from her mom, from my ex-wife, just agreed to take your video down, take your video down.
And I said, well, I'll take it down if Maddie takes her video down.
um you know her video is still up so i need to have my video up which corrects the record which
at least corrects the record then she went up with a very much more negative video which was
filled with more inaccuracies and so i i came back with a follow-up video to that which just was
basically home movies videos that i had taken when they were growing up as kids where we were
going on vacations together going to the beach going to water parks skiing um you know going
to a Yellowstone park and just on and on. And just, it was kind of a, the videos were kind of
a chronicle of her life and, and the life of my kids with me. And it showed them at every different
stage of life, graduation, you know, graduation from middle school, graduation from high school,
graduation from college, fun dinners out. In fact, we, we all had a Christmas dinner together
just this last Christmas, a few weeks ago, and everybody's sitting around the table. I have
photos of that of course. And, and everybody's smiling and just very happy. So as far as I was
concerned i had a i had a tremendous relationship with with my daughter with maddie you know the
one who's who did who is working in hollywood and i'll just go uh i had to find okay so we're
texting back and forth all the time our conversations literally even though we disagree
on politics we actually had a very good relationship and um and so you know the
conversations are like this they just go and go and go and she's telling me about what's happening
her day and how she's uh her her channel is really taking off and she's she's created some merch some
t-shirts that people can buy and so on and she sends me photos of that and that's cool and i
give her video i give her tips on her videos and she's becoming she has a she has a job there at
nbc peacock screen streaming but as a side hustle she's building a kind of a social media presence
uh and she's making a little bit of money of that and she with that and she and she likes doing it
And I love the fact that she's doing it.
I think it's awesome what she's doing, even though I don't agree with the content of the videos a lot of times.
But that's basically what happened.
And so then the second video also got a couple million views, maybe 3 million views on X.
And everybody was doing podcasts on it and reacting to it on YouTube and on TikTok and everywhere.
And so basically it seemed like everybody in America was talking about this.
Meanwhile, some people questioned, well, should I have even put up a video at all?
And, you know, I'm in the advertising business.
I built an ad agency and I have clients and a lot of my clients had seen her video, her initial video.
So I did need to correct the record and say, you know, well, this is, you know, I think her video is funny and it's kind of cool, but I do need to correct these inaccuracies.
Otherwise, you know, a lot of people are going to wonder, you know, why are we doing business with this guy if he's, you know, abandoned his family for break dancing and he and he is and he's a deadbeat dad and doesn't pay these paying these bills.
And even, you know, even when she was launching off, she graduated from college in 2021, I guess, May of 2021.
And she needed kind of startup money to get out to L.A. and get an apartment out there.
And so I gave her $5,000 in kind of adulthood startup money and co-signed a lease on her apartment.
And I was paying a lot of her medical costs because she didn't have insurance.
And so I was definitely paying out a lot and also helped her buy a car, used a Ford Fiesta, gave her $2,500 for that.
Her mom also kicked in $2,500 and I think Maddie kicked in some money and so used car and so she could drive out to L.A.
And then but, you know, then there was a writer's strike.
There was the Hollywood writer's strike.
And so she was laid off temporarily for that.
Well, really for about six months.
and she needed some money weekly just so she could stay in her apartment. Otherwise she said
she was going to have to come home and live with her mom until the strike ended. So could I help
out with some money? So I gave her $250 a week, I guess for about 10 weeks. And then she got a job
at Netflix, which was not affected by the writer's strike for some reason. And then she worked there
until the writer's strike ended. And then she got her old job back at Peacock Streaming, working on
the show that she was working on. So, you know, my dad, let's see, when I graduated from college,
my dad just, he was done at that point. I didn't get a penny. And I think that's how it was for
every kid or most kids back in those days. You know, the parents just threw the kid into the
deep end of the swimming pool and see if they could make it. I mean, that was basically the
attitude. And so then I took a bus to Washington, D.C. and maybe a bus and a train and got down
there with the few dollars I had and got a job. And I think that's how most people did it. Rented
a rented room for $135 a month in the, like a really bad area of Washington, DC and just kind
of work up that way. And that's, I think how, but you know, the, the apartments today, you know,
I don't know what Maddie's paying for her place, but I think it's close to 2000 a month or 1500
a month. So, you know, that definitely wasn't my life coming out of school. And I don't think it's
most people's lives no well that's i mean there's there's many roads to go down here and i think
for the context oh yeah there's so many roads yeah around bitcoin there's two things like i'm
really interested to get your thoughts having been in the advertising industry for many decades like
the emergence of social media and the sort of influencer driven marketing and the concerted
effort to create viral videos to build an audience and then get uh brands to sponsor you so you can
make some money off of this like what are the incentives like there and has it corrupted media
and advertising at all or is it good is it a double-edged sword um well one of my mantras
one of my mantras is and i i bought a little bit of ethereum at first and and kind of on the i'm
an investor a tech investor i invest in technology and you know generally the approach is you invest
the two leaders and you see which one wins you know you invest in google and yahoo you don't
just invest in google you just see and then one emerges or you know you invest in myspace and
facebook and see which one emerges and so my approach was okay maybe do two-thirds in bitcoin
because it's the leader and maybe a third in ethereum but the more i studied it and one of
the reasons i wrote this book bitcoin a beginner's guide let me just pump my book real quick
yep bitcoin a beginner's guide is i really wanted to um say why bitcoin was different from all the
other cryptos because bitcoin was is the king kong of crypto but really it's the king kong even more
of decentralized digital money and i think as you know marty uh bitcoin is 95 percent of the
of the market of the market in the decentralized digital money space it's really the only digital
money and all the other projects are centralized uh i mean there's a few that maybe not you know
litecoin and a few other cryptos that are very small maybe monero i don't know uh but they're
very small networks and the smaller the network the more vulnerable it is to attack uh so bitcoin
the bigger it gets the more secure it gets you know china tried to outlaw bitcoin in 2021 outlawed
mining well outlawed bitcoin mining outlawed bitcoin transactions and all the miners left
china all the miners in china and at that time china was do uh 60 of the bitcoin mining was
being done in china and then it went down to zero and the hash rate the compute power the hash rate
for bit for the bitcoin network dropped a lot uh but then it came back really quite quickly as
these chinese miners miners they moved out of china they took their rigs and they reset up
their operations in places like kazakhstan and the united states and many other places afghanistan and
so on you know africa wherever uh middle east wherever they could uh find some place to do
do mining and um and so the patch rate came back and so that would told me that told me that you
know bitcoin is basically indestructible because if china with 1.2 billion people and it's a
totalitarian regime if china cannot kill bitcoin uh bitcoin can't be killed and and then mining
bitcoin mining came back in china you know i think 20 or so of the bitcoin mining in the world is
was now being done in China. So the Chinese government, the China regime, gave up on
cracking down on Bitcoin because it was just a waste of effort for the regime. So it just decided
to, OK, I guess we'll allow it. We won't crack down on it anymore. And so that was also very
persuasive to me that Bitcoin is probably indestructible at this point. And that makes
it a secure investment. But it seems like considering your history, I think maybe we
should talk about what we were discussing before we hit record is the fact that you helped
launch the Dartmouth Review back when you were in college in 1982 or 1980?
Yeah, I graduated in 1982.
Right, yeah.
Yeah, I started me and a small group of people,
and some names you might have heard of were part of this effort.
Laura Ingraham, she's the host on Fox News.
She was part of this.
She was like four or five years younger than me, so she came.
But anyway, we started this paper, a conservative right of center.
I would say conservative, libertarian, or just people interested in freedom.
We started this paper, which was kind of a right of center national lampoon.
There was a lot of humor in it.
Like half the paper was kind of humor and the other parts were investigative reporting
about what was happening on campus.
And one of my roles, I was the president and publisher of the paper.
And there were four others, five others, I think that were co-founders, is I wanted the
paper to be only about Dartmouth, what was happening on the Dartmouth campus, because
nobody cares about what uh you know a 20 year old thinks about world events but we were reporting on
what was going on on campus and we were able to get a hold of the alumni mailing list well first
we applied for funding you know to to be subsidized by the college and they turned us down even though
they're subsidizing every other group but just not us and so we got a hold of the alumni directory
and we key punched it in had it had it key punched into a computer database and of course computers
back then were very primitive, but we got it in and we, and we did a mailing out to 45,000
Dartmouth alumni and, uh, asking for, uh, you know, support for the paper. And like, uh, I think
a hundred thousand dollars came in, you know, which was a lot of money. I'd never seen that
much money before in my life. So, and that really launched the paper and we were able to buy offices
and, uh, we'd put out a few issues by then. And the college really reacted negatively. They tried
to, they really tried to crack down on the paper, tried to try to put the paper out of business.
they threatened us with lawsuits and we were in court and they tried to prevent they use the
campus police to prevent distribution of the paper on on the campus and of course that actually just
made the paper a lot more popular people wanted to get their hands on it's like i can't get i can't
didn't get my issue with the paper because the uh the police picked it up the campus police and so
you know we would slide the paper under people's we'd go around to each dorm door to each the door
of each dorm room and we slide the paper under it but sometimes you know you couldn't slide paper
under the door so you know the campus police would come along and pick it up so that and then we also
left it we also left the paper at local stores stores that supported us and we also the paper
was also supported by advertising we went around to the stores and asked for advertising and the
ones that liked us would advertise and they would also stack up the paper like at the dartmouth
bookstore the dartmouth bookstore was run was run by a conservative entrepreneur type and he loved
the dartmouth review and he always advertised and he always had the paper stacked up there
there at the Dartmouth Bookstore. So we were definitely able to get the paper out. The paper
was the first student conservative paper that, or I'd say the most successful and the first. It's
still publishing today, by the way. It's still publishing, you know, 40 years later. And so it
just became kind of a, I think maybe 150 other papers, conservative or right-leaning, freedom
leaning papers sprang up on campuses kind of in the wake of the Dartmouth Review. And so it really
became a phenomenon, like 60 Minutes did a piece on us, which actually was surprisingly positive.
I think they came in, you know, trying to present us as a bunch of racists or something like that.
But once they got talking to us, they saw, hey, that was pretty cool. And it was a pretty
balanced, that was actually a pretty balanced piece on 60 Minutes. And it was just a media
kind of sensation back then. And I then wrote a book called Poisoned Ivy, my senior year at Dartmouth,
just on this totalitarian mindset that was developing on the liberal side. You know,
liberals used to be for freedom. You had the free speech movement at the Berkeley campus during the
Vietnam War protests, you know, against the draft. So they were for free speech, you know, the ACLU,
American Civil Liberties Union, for civil liberties, for free speech. So in the 60s and the
70s, early 70s, the liberals, the left side, was all about freedom, you know, all about civil
liberties. But what I point out in my book in Poison Ivy is that when they actually get in
charge of something, they aren't for freedom anymore. They don't want to have conservative
speakers on the campus or freedom-oriented speakers on the campus. They'll be like,
they'll shout you down. And you've seen that, of course. And it's, of course, intensified a lot
more now. At Dartmouth, the student body was pretty conservative. We did a poll of students
back then, and I think 60% were for Reagan. Of course, the college professors were very much
on the left, the college professors, they had a faculty meeting and they voted, I think it was
190 to 5, you know, to condemn the election of Ronald Reagan. So there was that. But the book
points out that really the origins of this totalitarian mindset is this, what I call victims
studies departments that were rising up on the campuses, particularly the Ivy League campuses
at that time or the elite colleges like women's studies uh black studies native american studies
gay and lesbian studies and all these groups and the at that time these departments were very small
maybe a few professors but they were very vocal and uh they would be involved in organizing these
protests and so forth and and uh you know so that so i noticed that this this group this
they would they would get professors fired for saying the wrong thing uh if you had the wrong
views you know you could not be a you cannot be a woman and not be a feminist and get a job in the
women's studies department you know uh margaret thatcher would not be respected by the women's
studies department even though she was a just tremendously influential uh and tremendous leader
a tremendous in a woman female leader they should be proud of that but so i noticed that that it's
not women's studies it's just left-wing studies you know it's just left-wing indoctrination and
same with all these other, what I would call victim studies departments. And, and of course,
as time went on, they became more and more powerful and we see how powerful they are today.
You know, the, the giant corporations for Fortune 500 corporations in response to this have had to
set up entire departments, you know, divisions that do nothing but, you know, enforce this,
what is it, diversity, equity, and inclusion, this, this kind of woke ideology. And so,
So, you know, that's what's happening.
And, of course, Google and these big tech companies, Google, Microsoft, and so forth,
their biggest customer is the government.
And, yeah, the CIA was basically started by, I mean, Google was basically launched by the CIA.
Yeah, it was launched on its own with venture capital and so forth.
But the CIA was the biggest customer of Google and is the biggest customer of Microsoft and Amazon.
And so really what you have emerging now is this big tech partnership with government, with big government, and they want to put a lid on free speech because free speech is basically civilization survives when we have free speech.
And that's why they hate Elon Musk so much because what Elon Musk did was with his purchase of Twitter, now X, for $44 billion, he put his money where his mouth was.
He really believes in freedom. And he provide a rather large, a very large platform where free speech is actually allowed.
And that's why they're coming after him so hard with Biden administration, I think, has has eight investigations of Elon Musk underway now.
Some of the criminal investigations and almost all of these started as a result of his purchase of Twitter because they cannot let the truth out.
If you let the truth out, you know, they're kind of done. So so that's basically it.
So I kind of went from Dartmouth Review, and my book really is the first book to talk about this woke mind virus, which is the totalitarian mindset on the left.
They're no longer for freedom, and I called it the ethos.
That's what I called it.
I called it the ethos.
I didn't call it woke.
That wasn't a term that existed, but I developed this term, the ethos, or maybe I just thought it was kind of a cool term because it's not just about your political views.
it's not just about who you vote for, you know, whether you're for Biden or you're for Trump or
you're for RFK Jr. or somebody else. It's not about your political affiliation. So that's,
of course, part of it. You have to think exactly right, you know, and if you make even a slight
slip up, you know, you use the wrong word, you know, is it supposed to be black people? Is it
supposed to be African-American people? Is it supposed to be people of color? And of course,
these terms change all the time. So if you use an outmoded term, you know, you're a racist
or something like that and uh you know so they really enforce these speech codes uh and it's
all about it's really orwellian because when you when you control the language and when you enforce
speech codes what you're really doing is brainwashing people uh because that has an
impact on your thinking how you speak impacts how you think because if thought uh when you speak
it's really just an expression of what you're thinking and if they can just control speech
uh with these speech codes then they can really shape the country because most people they they
don't really think for themselves they're not critical thinkers they aren't they can't just
believe what the government says or they just believe what cnn says and you know and by the
way a great follow marty is uh is a guy named mike benz and he talks about how oh yeah these big media
companies are basically cia operations and i didn't fully appreciate this uh until i started
following Benz. I mean, I kind of suspected it, but that's been going on since, you know,
the 1950s or really coming out of World War II when the CIA, the intelligence agencies,
a big part of what the intelligence does is control narratives. And, you know, they're doing
this as offensive weapons against our military enemies, you know, whether it was Hitler in that
time or communism and so forth. So in some ways it was good. We kind of liked it back then that
the CIA was destabilizing regimes that we didn't like with propaganda, and by controlling the
narrative. But back then, there were only really three major TV networks, CBS, ABC, NBC. And so
they could really dictate what people were thinking. And of course, during World War II,
the media was very patriotic, right? So we don't mind that, great, you know, patriotism.
But then what's happened recently, and Mike Benz really chronicles this tremendously,
is uh they've turned the intelligence agencies against us against the american people uh and
they're trying to tamp down any kind of alternative viewpoint and uh and they are you know if there's
a reason why the talking points on the major media networks are all identical i mean every day it's
like just a set of talking points you know it's just they just repeat repeat repeat the same
talking points there's no original thought and that is the propaganda that's coming directly
from the intelligence agencies i mean it's not just not only the intelligence agencies but it's
being controlled largely by that and of course it's filtered through the political parties and
so forth so um so that's what that's what's happening and then bitcoin you know and i say
that bitcoin is really one of the off ramps from that because whoever controls your money controls
you uh and uh so bitcoin is an escape from that it's bitcoin is not governed or controlled by
humans uh humans are prone to corruption and they want power and and you know so bitcoin is your
off-ramp from that and uh you know i'm not all the way like max kaiser who thinks that bitcoin
is going to you know just collapse government collapse the need for government and you know
everything's going to be all fiat currency is going to be sucked into bitcoin i don't think
that i don't really want that to happen i want the united states to still exist i want to have
a secure border uh i want to have an honest money now i think you know fiat currency is fine for
buying your cup of coffee, your groceries, and people will probably still continue to do that.
But Bitcoin allows people to vote with their feet. Some people have called it
digital gold. So if all hell breaks loose here and we become a totalitarian dictatorship,
you can carry your wealth in your pocket and go somewhere else. You can vote with your feet.
And so that's what Bitcoin does. And I think the other pillar of the hope for freedom survival is
elon musk because you know he's the richest man in the world and he now gets it you know he voted
democrat all of his life and then he kind of woke up and and saw that this hey wait a minute these
people are not for freedom at all these people are for for totalitarianism a high-tech kind of
feudalistic totalitarianism push-button totalitarianism i think that edward snowden
i think coined that frame phrase or turnkey totalitarianism and that's what big tech is
uh they can they can they can disappear you with a push of a button in terms of social media and
your internet presence so so uh bitcoin pushes back against that but elon with his purchase of
x also pushes pushes back against that and so i feel that i have i feel like i have a lot of hope
because i didn't have much hope really before elon purchased twitter and turned it into x uh because
yeah bitcoin is cool you do need you need to sound money uh and if government controls your money
they can control you and of course you know they're coming out with programmable money right
cbdc central bank uh digital currencies uh china's rolling this out in china where they can turn off
your money or they can program your money so that you can only buy certain things uh can't buy other
things uh they could turn off your money if they don't like what you're saying uh so uh you know
bitcoin is a is is is the safeguard from that it's your it i call it the second amendment for your
money yeah it's extremely powerful and potent yeah and i completely agree mike ben's what he's
done to eliminate what's going on behind the scenes the censorship industrial complex is
incredible we had him on the show i think three months ago it was an incredible discussion and
it is crazy you go back i mean this goes all the way back into the 50s or 60s with operation
mockingbird yep where the cia was directly um embedding themselves with the media agencies to
to spread these narratives and propagandize the American people.
And it's like whether it's you writing about the ethos in the 80s,
the CIA via Operation Mockingbird sort of propagandizing everybody,
it's really metastasized to a boiling point, I think.
Yeah, and the education system.
The education system is, of course, part of that.
And it's part of the root of the conflict, I think, with my daughter,
Which I don't think I have a conflict with my daughter. I think we'll get back together and smooth things over. But I do think she was brainwashed in large part by her school, by the schools she attended, particularly Northwestern University. I saw a real kind of change there.
I went to college in Chicago, too. It was pretty prevalent throughout the whole city.
Yeah, it's just – well, a lot of this started with Bill Ayers. Bill Ayers, I don't know. Do people – I think Bill Ayers was the founder and was the founder of the Weather Underground, which was a terrorist group in the 1960s.
And Jesse Bodine was –
Yeah, all those people, Bernadette – was it Bernadette Dorn? I think his wife. And they literally bombed a police station. They bombed, I think, the CIA and some other government facilities.
No one was killed, but they were bombing things. And they were a violent group, and he didn't – he never served time in prison because he got off on a technicality because of illegal wiretaps, I guess, by the FBI or at least that's what it was ruled.
So they basically let him off in a technicality or some kind of probation or something.
So then he became a professor, you know, a university professor, this former terrorist.
I mean, and he admits all this in his book. So I'm not saying anything that would be libelous.
And then but he then started a project in Chicago to take over the public schools and to write the curriculum.
And I think he got a forty nine million dollar grant from the Annenberg Foundation.
And he was very close with Obama. There were community organizers together. And he basically set the blueprint for the Chicago public school systems. And we see how well that has worked out. That's what we have today. That's basically the Bill Ayers public school model.
So he's the architect of that. And then that, of course, became nationwide because they know that the left used to talk, talk in the 60s a lot about the long march through the institutions.
And long march refers to Mao Zedong's long march in China to take over China.
And so they wanted to do the long march through the institution.
So Bill Ayers and his people were part of that. And so he started in Chicago with Obama.
And then Obama – he launched or helped launch Obama's political career out of his living room when he put up Obama or they worked together to put Obama up for the Illinois state senate.
And then the rest is history.
Obama was a very charismatic, articulate character, became a US senator, and then president.
Yeah. So so that's it. But the focus, the point there is that Bill Ayers understood that if he could take over the education system, if he could control the curriculum, they could eventually control the country, because if they can capture the minds of young kids and brainwash them, you know, you've got the future of the country.
And that's what they mean by the long march through the institution. So it kind of started in these woke, not well, these victim studies departments and at the elite colleges in the 1970s, in the late 1970s.
And then it kind of then it spread among the universities. And then eventually it trickled down to the public school system who followed the Bill Ayers model.
So and then, of course, the teachers unions are another the teachers unions really control the public schools.
And, you know, I say in one of my videos, you know, in my dust up with my daughter there that really parents should not send their kids to school at all.
Should not certainly not send their kids to an elite college. It's a complete waste of time and money now.
Nothing of value is learned there. Of course, you know, exceptions would be for things like engineering or maybe you want to become a doctor or something like that.
But for the most part, very marketable skills can be learned, you know, just studying online, taking the courses you need at a local community college and not wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars and all this time going to school and essentially getting brainwashed and really learning nothing of value, nothing, no marketable skills that will actually help you be successful in life.
And I actually wrote another book. I'm not trying to pump my book, but I wrote another book titled Win Life, and it's aimed at kids and young adults. Success skills, schools don't teach. So basically, success skills can be learned on your own. Just go online, go take local community college courses, and homeschool your kids. Don't let your kids go to the public schools.
And Elon Musk has said this many times recently. He said that basically the schools are just a colossal waste of time and money and that you'd just be better off learning the skills on your own. Everything you need to succeed can be learned online or almost everything. And the things that can't be learned online, do it at community college.
yeah i don't want to pump my uh pump my horn too much here but i went to school in chicago
chicago was a fun city we did not have an attendance policy at depaul university and
so i would skip class and just teach myself the curriculum on con academy and go right i was
setting i was setting the curve on some of the tests in my economics classes and it was just
myself and yeah you don't need it and that's like the one thing i wonder too there's a long march
that's been decades in the making i wonder i don't wonder i'm pretty sure i'm pretty confident
because i do think the pendulum is beginning to swing back in our direction as the insanity and
the chaos of the results of the long march begin to collapse in and of themselves like
they started this long march back in the 70s 60s and 70s did not foresee the emergence of
the internet age and communications technology social media and the ability to teach yourself
and access information online and so it's sort of eroding their attempts to finish this long march
is like right towards the end it's like oh we don't need you guys anymore we don't need to go
to university to get brainwashed i can go to the university of sal con and learn all these really
absolutely all any subject i want to i mean harvard's basically become a laughingstock
right with this uh claudian gay plagiarism you know president of harvard plagiarizing and she's
clearly a affirmative action hire you know she's president of the most prestigious uh college in
the world really and uh harvard's a laughingstock i mean it's there's just no it's just a waste of
money and time to go to a place like that it's not that prestigious anymore you know it's uh
just because of all this the the education has become so corrupted uh the curriculum and so
forth now obviously you know if you go into medical school it's great to be you know go to
harvard medical school that would that would be fantastic but you know but for most students i
think harvard is a complete waste of time and money yeah yeah i think more people are starting
to realize that yeah gen z that's that's the thing too is i've noticed because i've got friends who
have younger brothers and sisters who are gen z and there seems to be um a demarcation within
that generation where some yeah realize that things are really screwed up and are sort of
rebelling against the the attempted brainwashing that they're subjected to and then the other half
has been completely co-opted and is completely woke and believes the world yeah i do see a huge
change among young people um you know these videos that i you know responding to my daughter
a lot of young people are really resonating with it and um and you can see that they have been in
away red-pilled uh to reality and a lot of them you know i think this whole inflation thing the
money printing thing and the problem that bitcoin solves which is the fiat money printing press
which is really unlimited taxation it's infinite taxation it's you know as you know uh the dollar
has lost 98.5 percent of its value since 1971 when went off the gold standard when gold was
35 an ounce back then now it's over two thousand dollars per ounce so uh you know instead of paying
$45,000 for an average car today, you should be paying $800 for the same car. And so young people
are seeing this. They can't afford to buy groceries. I mean, with the technological advances,
technology pushes prices down about 2% to 3% per year, theoretically. But of course,
they print the money, and we don't see that. It's just another theft operation by government. It's
counterfeiting uh it's illegal if you or i counterfeit money uh so um so what's happening
is their their purchasing power is being stolen now you know for for somebody like say in my
position or your position let's say we're in the top five percent or something we can afford to
buy assets that tend to appreciate in value whether it's real estate or the s&p 500 you know
or now uh bitcoin uh but the average person out there who's on a hourly pay or a fixed wage uh
they're getting killed by inflation. They're getting killed by the money printing press
because as we know, and I think as you know, Marty, the CPI, the inflation number that is
being released by government every month is a completely phony number. It's at least,
it understates inflation by, there's a debate about this, but it understates it by four to
7%, say. So if the CPI, Consumer Price Index, that's the official inflation number that's
released by the government every month, if they're telling you it's 3%, well, it's really
more like 7% inflation. And the way you know that is by looking at the price of gold and the price
of, well, by looking at the price of gold against the dollar. That's how you know that the CPI is,
the official government inflation number is phony and of course bitcoin you know is a big
improvement over gold because it's transportable you can't carry your gold bar with you uh very
easily uh it would be hard to carry a gold bar through an airport or across a border in case
all hell breaks loose here and you have to get out with your assets and bitcoin allows you to
carry your wealth in your pocket so that's uh that's a huge improvement you can carry it in
your brain if you want to if you can carry your brain if you remember a 12 or 12 words yeah yeah
oh and but the gold thing it's kind of funny uh marty that my wife she escaped from communism
when she was 13 she's laotian and uh she managed to get across the mekong river and her mom was
instrumental in kind of planning the escape from the family when the communists took over i guess
in 1975 uh and uh this is like a killing fields type story and so she uh and her mom and other
siblings managed to get across taking different routes through the jungle and so forth and
she got across the uh she and her mom got separated wanda at that point was 13 but her mom
had sewed gold into the fabric of her clothing uh so that if they get separated that she would
have a way to potentially buy her way across the border or buy her way to you know if across the
mekong river was thailand and uh so that so yeah so so wanda's very biased to gold you know so she
she says why are you buying bitcoin buy gold you know so yeah so so she wasn't but now now of
course that bitcoin's at 63 000 and you know she's happy about that but uh yeah she was she was
definitely for gold she was not not sold on bitcoin at all but uh because you know because
gold literally saved her life when her mom sewed the gold into the fibers of her clothing and
she's able to get out and she oh this is and this is kind of interesting too she so she made her way
five days uh walking by herself in the jungle found her way to a thai refugee camp in thailand
and uh stayed there with her family actually uh was there also got there found their way there
there's a refugee camp they all knew where it was sort of generally and um as they stayed there for
18 months and uh she got over here uh and then her mom died shortly after after she got here
and uh well didn't die but uh got a stroke and became an invalid and couldn't speak anymore and
and then died later but so basically Wanda had to raise herself in this country at age uh 14 I guess
by the time 14 or 15 by the time she got here and she was just plopped in the school and and she
didn't know the the language at all and um she had to learn she had to navigate school there was no
such thing as a Laotian to English dictionary. So she had to use a tied English dictionary
and she ended up getting a B average in school. And she went to community college and she learned
some skills there, learned some desktop publishing skills. And she got hired by Geico to lay out the
newsletter and to do some data entry. And then she took a course at the community college and
had to be a legal secretary. And Geico moved her into her legal department and she was employee
of the month for the whole corporation five times so that you know because she just never missed
work no matter how how and uh so she would say she would look at these wokesters you know these
people complaining about the how tough it is to be an american oh and then she she also uh was on
the side her side hustle was to buy rental properties uh little uh you know little units
and she would rent them out and so she literally was getting sort of rich doing uh rental properties
and uh you know here's this person that came over not even knowing the language escape
communism got across the mekong river you know came here when she arrived she had one dress and
a pair of sandals when she arrived in san francisco uh and then she ended up in maryland and blah blah
blah but you know the the point is that she just thinks that these people who are complaining about
life in america and how tough it is and they try to claim some sort of victim status i mean when
you look at her life i mean it it's a story her her her story is a story right out of killing
fields if you've seen the uh seen the movie yeah it's insane and like i think it's well the whole
concept of victimhood it's really corrosive to society and it's really it's racist it's sexist
it's it's all the it's prejudice it's really telling people like hey you you don't have any
ability yourself to to actually pull yourself up from your bootstraps you are being subjugated
by somebody.
Juan, this story is a complete...
It's just incredibly...
Complete...
It's a complete reputation.
This is not true at all.
Yeah.
But it's seeped into our society,
and I'm really interested
to get your perspective on this
because you've been
in the advertising industry.
Advertising is really around messaging
and connecting with people.
Yeah.
That's the one thing
the Weather Underground
and the whole Long March,
the whole movement
behind this Long March
have done really well
is the messaging.
They really know how to use victimhood and language around victimhood to really push at people's reptilian instincts to react to fear or the feeling of being oppressed.
And that's what I wonder moving forward is we can, like, how can we use messaging to poke at other reptilian sort of reactions to language that paint a more optimistic and abundant future?
Well, the victim thing, you know, it is this human instinct. Let's say if you're not being successful, it's human nature to want to blame some outside force for that, right?
So that's – they're sort of tapping into a natural human tendency to say, you know, okay, the problem, the reason I'm not successful is, you know, slavery, you know, 150, 200 years ago.
So that's the reason.
But, you know, if you look at black people who immigrate from Africa to here, they're doing extremely well.
Most of them are Republican, and they're building businesses, and they're – they basically come from a Wanda-type situation where they had nothing in Africa.
They come over here, and they're successful.
So there's – and then, of course, they'll say – the left will say, well, that's not what we mean by institutional racism.
So it's not about the – it's – racism is about discriminating against people because of their skin color.
And when you point out that people from Africa or even people from the Bahamas, you know, who come over here and they build businesses and they're very successful and they're not steeped in this woke ideology at all.
Yeah.
That's why I say, you know, sometimes I think the conservatives, obviously we want a secure border.
I'm for a lot more immigration.
I just want to make, you know, I want to screen out the cartels and the criminals and the bad people.
But but basically, you know, if you take a look at the people who are getting here from Venezuela and Central America and places that have complete collapsed economies, they're voting 78, 80 percent Republican.
You know, so it's the people who, you know, the people from Mexico, because they're right on the border, it's easier for them to get in.
And the Puerto Ricans tend to be more Democrat. But, you know, the people who are coming from Central America, they are conservative.
They are pro family. They are pro entrepreneurship. They love America. They're happy to be here.
So if we screen out the criminals and bring in the people who are going to be productive, a miracle would be good.
We need actually more people.
You know, Elon Musk has talked about this, the birth dearth, that basically we're not even at replacement level for our native population here.
It's like I think replacement level is two point something babies per couple.
And but, you know, we're down one point six.
So we're basically disappearing without an increase in population.
So we do need immigration, but it just needs to be the right people.
We need to control our border.
Yeah, I had this conversation last week with Matthew Mizzanches, which is the whole border situation, the fact that it's just been left wide open for years and millions of people have been able to stream in.
It's really muddied the water around the conversation of immigration.
There's obviously a clear distinction between illegal and legal immigration, of course.
we want to have a robust legal immigration system where we can lots of legal immigration i'm all for
especially like from india you know more computer engineers and you know yeah absolutely yeah then
go back to like the birth rate problem that we have with the incumbent population the native
population here in the united states like i think this is a combination of the money problem and
the woke ideology and the money it's very hard money's very important you know so people
Marty somebody needs to really maybe do a book on this is is when you corrupt the money you kind of
corrupt the morals you corrupt the work ethic you corrupt a lot of things that you know inflation
people say for example they say well we need a little bit of inflation we need a little bit of
money printing to kind of grease the skids of the economy to create more velocity of the money so
that people just won't want to hoard their money but I think that's wrong I mean if let's say we
have a money that is just really rock solid, you know, and maybe it's going up in value against
fiat currency. But are you really not going to buy an iPhone if you need an iPhone because you
don't want to spend your Bitcoin or spend your gold coins? Of course not. You're going to buy
the iPhone. And if you look at the 19th century, you know, we were on the gold standard for most
of the 19th century. You know, we went fiat money printing to pay down civil war debts and to pay
down revolutionary war debts but for much of the 19th century the boom times of the 19th century
we were actually on the gold standard paper money paper money paper dollars were gold certificates
you could go to a bank and cash them in for actual gold coins and it was a death penalty
offense in those days and by the way we had no we had no central bank in those days and the banks
issued the they had to have reserves gold reserves and they'd issue their gold certificates and so
you'd get a certificate from like the bank of Kansas city or the bank of New York or whatever.
And you could, you could redeem these certificates for gold. And, and if anybody was caught
counterfeiting, printing up fake gold certificates, it was a death penalty offense. Counterfeiting was
a death penalty offense. That's how serious it was. And, you know, and there were some problems
with the whole free banking system, but that was a boom. I mean, no one can ever argue that the
19th century wasn't a tremendous economic explosion going on in America. Alexis Tocqueville came over
here in, I guess, 1830. And to chronicle America's just stunning economic success, wrote Democracy
in America, because he wanted to find out what was going on here. What was making America so
successful? Well, what was making America so successful was freedom. People were free. And
banks could issue their currencies, their gold certificates. It had to be backed by actual gold.
Otherwise, that would be fraud and death penalty offense. So, yeah. So, no, I don't think we need
to have inflation to have a robust economy no it's insane it's going back to going back to
language it's double speak like the fed's dual mandate is one full employment and two price
stability and they achieve price stability by targeting a two percent inflation rate so they
literally they target double speak they double speak in their mandate which is like price
stability but we're going to target prices going up and even if they do achieve the two to three
percent let's say true inflation you know true money printing you're still they're still stealing
the two to three percent of what technological progress allows everything to get cheaper because
farming gets cheaper because you know farming is much more efficient today than it was like 30
years ago they've got robotic tractors and ai and it's just mass farming but um so a grocery
should be getting cheaper but they keep getting more expensive because not only is the fiat money
printing not only is the official inflation rate a phony number by you know four to six to seven
percent not only is that phony uh but you also have that extra two to three percent price decline
that should be happening because of technological progress yeah and it's like we should it's and
the government what i'm most passionate about these days is the energy sector because i think
energy alongside money these are the two most important tools that we leverage every day we
cannot do this podcast right now without energy i have a bunch of lights i can see you have lights
behind you we're using the internet and people take for granted and again i hope um this is
going back to education this is one thing that i think don't send your kids to the school but
you should have like a curriculum if you do send them to school make sure that they're teaching
kids about finance money and energy systems um and what we're doing here in the united states
to completely degrade the reliability of our energy systems with this woke movement towards
net zero carbon emissions is completely asinine it's if these people these zealots are successful
and quote-unquote transitioning us to a green energy grid they're going to kill more people
than the climate ever could well i can refute the climate uh climate crisis hoax what i call it
with just one fact okay today uh the atmosphere uh co2 in the atmosphere is about 200 parts per
million 220 parts per million in the age of the dinosaurs it was over 2 000 parts per million so
literally five times more co2 in the atmosphere was present during the age of the dinosaurs because
all the volcanic activity we have less volcanic activity today because i guess the the earth's
core is cooling slightly plus their cycles with the sun and the orbit and all this stuff but they
had literally five times more there was five times more co2 in the atmosphere during the age of the
dinosaurs than there is today and there was plenty of life on the planet during the age of the
dinosaurs a little too much life actually but uh yeah so i don't think in fact you know plants need
up need us need a minimum level of co2 in the atmosphere to survive and i believe it's 150
parts per million or something like that it's right around there so if if co2 in the atmosphere
dips below that all plant life dies right so then we die right and we're actually pretty close to
that you know we're at like 220 parts per million co2 in the atmosphere so we actually need more co2
in the atmosphere i'm a co2 maximalist myself yeah again language co2 pollution emissions that's
that's what they're doing they're conflating pollution and language of course we want clean
water and clean air but co2 is not has it has nothing to do with that yeah that's another
another beauty of the bitcoin network particularly bitcoin mining is it affords us this ability to
be as efficient as possible like i think i'm i like to consider myself an environmentalist i'm
a surfer i go to the beach i like to clean up the beach i don't like dirty beaches i will
clean up the trash and make sure i leave the beach uh as good or if not better than when i
when i got there um and that's the other thing they conflate like if you don't believe in this
climate hysteria you're anti-environment it's like no that's not true mining provides us the
opportunity to like there's literally an ironclad argument it's like no we're human we're humans
there's eight billion people on the planet we all need energy if we want to flourish we're going to
create more energy but while doing that we'll be as efficient as possible by soaking up all the
Excess natural gas on upstream oil and gas fields and stranded wells and all the excess electricity capacity on grids with Bitcoin mining.
Exactly. So excess on the grids, but also the Bitcoin mining incentivizes the dispersal of people to where they can get free energy, very cheap energy, free energy.
So you're going to get you get solar power, you know, as the mining as the source of the energy for the Bitcoin mining, because that's free.
or they're at the bottom of a glacier or some kind of stream and they're mining it that way.
So what Bitcoin actually incentivizes is the dispersal of the population.
We really no longer need to be in these densely populated population centers
because people can now just spread out.
They can have a Bitcoin mining operation and they can provide their own electricity
and they're not putting pressure on the grid.
And as you say, Bitcoin miners are using excess power from the grid
That would otherwise be wasted because the power companies have to produce more electricity than they'll actually use in order to insure against blackouts and brownouts.
So, yeah, but basically I think it incentivizes further decentralization.
That's what I love about – another thing I love about Bitcoin is it incentivizes the spreading out of people.
We don't have to live in these population centers.
And, you know, I say sometimes – I say that Bitcoin is an extension of the American idea.
And the brilliance of America is that it's decentralized government.
Now it's much more centralized now, but really America was mostly, you know, 97, 98 percent of the governing was happening at the state and local level in America until basically World War II, World War I.
Well, Civil War kind of – whenever you have a war, everything centralizes, right?
So – but through the 19th century, it was very decentralized, and nobody really had a kind of identity of being an American.
They were more loyal to their local community, and that's where the governing was happening.
But Thomas Jefferson said the big regret he had about the Constitution is it didn't really address the money problem.
Yes, there is a – in the Constitution, it says that – I think it's Article 1, Section 10 says all debts can be satisfied with gold or silver coins.
So really, in the Constitution, we are on the gold standard.
But there was a lot of corruption in the banking system even in the 19th century.
And Jefferson said his biggest regret was not really – the Constitution did not really fix the money, did not really fix the – money could still be dishonest with the – so – but Jefferson is interesting, though.
Jefferson was very aware of that, and of course there was a debate, a big debate between Jefferson and Hamilton.
Hamilton wanted more centralized power, including centralization over the economy.
I love Hamilton in many ways, but I think there were some problems there.
He actually created the first national bank, but then that got disbanded later.
So he created a national bank.
Basically, they had to pay off the Civil War debt.
I mean that's the debts from the American Revolution.
So that created centralization.
It created government control over the money.
But Jefferson saw a big problem with that, and I think Jefferson is right.
I mean, yeah, I think so.
Yeah, well, not only Jefferson, but it's hilarious to think back throughout history.
We've been warned.
I believe it was Aristotle or Socrates who said, don't mess up the money.
Money is very important.
Then in the Bible, Jesus said, don't mess up the money.
Honest in weights and measures in the Bible, right?
Then you have Thomas Jefferson and others saying, don't mess up the money.
And we've had to learn this lesson time and time again throughout history.
Well, the government goes all the way back to the Roman Empire and every empire that's ever existed, right?
So the Roman Empire, it was – the currency was based on gold and silver and I think copper.
But because they had to fund the expansion of the empire and their military machine, and you can only mine so much gold and copper, they had to dilute the gold and the copper and the silver.
And so the soldiers are getting – this is toward the end of the Roman Empire.
The soldiers are getting paid in these basically very diluted coins.
They started diluting the coins, and the soldiers could rub the finish off the coin, and they see that, wait a second, this is not a silver coin.
And so then a lot of the Roman Empire soldiers defected over to the barbarians, to the people who were coming in.
So the corruption of the money was a big part of the fall of the Roman Empire.
Yeah. And we see similar things happening now. I'm not sure if you've seen this TikTok trend, but there's literally active duty American military members on duty in other parts of the world, and they're on TikTok sending videos like, don't join the army. The pay is not worth it. Inflation is too high. I can't even afford my life.
It's very similar.
So I have four kids, but we also have two kids on Wanda's side from her previous marriage.
And one of her sons did one tour in Iraq and two tours in Afghanistan.
So he unfortunately has PTSD, so he sacrificed a lot for the country.
But yeah, I wish he had not gone in the military.
I mean Wanda was crying when he signed up, but he went to Citadel.
She didn't want him to go to Citadel.
South Carolina?
yeah in south carolina uh and uh he did and then he went to iraq and uh she's just very
she's very upset about it yeah no it's great and
that's yeah and how we treat veterans is so awful how we treat yeah veterans are just discarded and
nothing real and they do get some in the va but it's a bad it's a bad health care system and
they get nothing basically and the saddest thing is is most military members i believe
that they believe that they're truly fighting to protect our freedoms at the end oh they absolutely
do they absolutely do the blob as mike benz calls it has gotten so big and so corrupt that
in reality today if you're in the military you're really fighting on behalf of the whims of the deep
state the intelligence agencies and what they want to do in terms of control um yeah all over
the world we saw that with the russia hoax which is totally a cia nsa fbi operation you know against
trump you know um and then we had but then the covid thing i think the pandemic opened people's
eyes a lot because uh that turned out to be mostly a hoax you know in terms of its deadliness and so
forth and they shut down the economy and i do think that that was a trial run to see you know
what ridiculous things can we force the population to do can we persuade the population to do and
unfortunately we can they can persuade them to do a lot unfortunately but uh yeah so then i and
that even opened my eyes i mean i had i was somewhat up to speed on that but uh you know
i started to really appreciate the that big pharma and government are basically in partnership
together right and now we have this military industrial complex that uh the eisenhower
warned about he said beware of the military industrial compact complex coming out of world
war ii and i never really fully appreciated that until recently you know more recently i was aware
of it but it wasn't a prime concern but the more i think about it especially with the iraq war um
that was a lot that george w bush launched you know by mistake was that the you know and he i
don't think he did that on purpose you know he i think he just was told this by the cia by the
by the deep state and and of course the the entire business model of the weapons manufacturers uh
lockheed martin you know northrop grumman you know they their profit depends on a war going on so
they can make more weapons uh and so there is a big profit motive to keep these wars going and
if a war ends you've got to find another war to have and we have like 800 800 military bases
around the world i think china has like two or something you know so the so it's really insane
just like how big our military is and and uh and i didn't fully appreciate that until sort of
recently you know and the covid thing woke me up a little bit i mean i was vaguely aware of it i
was focused on other things the attack on free speech freedom of thought that kind of thing but
boy this military industrial complex you know the politicians are bought by these companies these
giant corporations whether it's bowen lockheed martin so on uh you know in both parties it's
not just uh democrats it's not just it's both parties are just totally bought uh and so that's
why we're going to have perpetual war that's another reason for bitcoin you know and i think
max kaiser talks about this a lot that fiat money uh money printing by government is what finances
war and if you cut that off you're going to have a lot less war i mean people are not going to spend
their gold to finance war if they don't absolutely have to right uh they're good but if they can just
print up money and kind of steal it little by little from everybody else you know makes it a
a lot easier to finance a war you know that's how the romans financed it they got off the gold
standard they got off still stop print stop producing real gold real silver real copper
coins and and just print uh uh made diluted coins so so we got the tendency of government
is always to print the money so they can conquer more territory um and so on so yeah and as a 32
year old it was 10 when 9-11 happened watched all of the iraq and afghanistan war unfold through my
teenage years and had the 2008 financial crisis happening during that and shortly after that you
get the wikileaks dumps uh which julian assange is being essentially murdered for himself yeah
Yeah, he is being literally murdered, yes.
Absolutely.
Edward Snowden.
Edward Snowden.
Syria, now Ukraine, Russia, we're saber-rattling around Taiwan.
It's just exhausting.
It's exhausting.
Two-thirds of the world.
Yeah, I was really disappointed when Donald Trump did not pardon Assange and Snowden.
And I think he will, Nick.
If he's re-elected, I think he will.
And I was really glad to hear Trump saying sort of good things about Bitcoin because, you know, he used to really trash Bitcoin as, you know, it's a vehicle for money launderers and criminals.
And now it seems like he says, well, you know, a lot of people like Bitcoin.
I see no reason why people shouldn't be able to buy it if they want to.
You know, I'm for the dollar, beating him.
I'm for the dollar, and I think we should have a strong dollar.
But if people want to buy Bitcoin, yeah, I mean, do it.
Yeah, I said a lot of people are doing it.
A lot of people, yeah.
I can't do the Trump thing.
A lot of people doing it.
Yeah.
a lot of you know i like the dollar but a lot of people are doing bitcoin i hear more people
are accepting it yeah that's certainly um a a massive shift in his messaging toward bitcoin
i mean when he was president yeah steve mnuchin was his treasury secretary he was like no this
is terrible we need the dollar to be strong this is a step in the right direction still
leaning on the dollar but i think more importantly that town hall meeting was that with laura ingram
too or yeah because i guess laura's interested in it yeah it sounds like i mean dinesha this
was on a podcast with Dinesh D'Souza so it sounds like you know my Dartmouth little mafia there
is uh is waking up to Bitcoin a little bit yeah well that that was the beauty of the question it
was the fact that the question was asked in the first place leading up to a massive presidential
election it's not uh Trump's Trump's response while it was good and better than it has been
in the past the fact that he is forced and others will be forced to ask questions about Bitcoin it's
Right. You do have to study Bitcoin, you know, and of course he hasn't studied it. And, you know, I always say, you know, you really have to put about 100 hours of study. I think Michael Saylor says that you have to put 100 hours of study into it.
And the reason I wrote my book on Bitcoin in part was I just really wanted to study it and make sure I understand it.
And there's no really better way to study something than to have to teach it, right?
You have to – or to write a book about it because you begin to see a lot of holes in your thinking or lack of understanding if you haven't kind of really done the study on it.
And because Bitcoin, I tell people – I don't like to tell people what to buy, not investment advice, right?
I don't give investment advice because you do get these 75% drops.
And if you buy at $60 and it crashes to $16, it's going to shake you up if you don't really understand the asset.
Now, when Bitcoin dropped to $15,000 or $16,000 in, I think it was, what, November of 2022, I wasn't bothered at all because I understood the asset.
I understood that it was a mathematical certainty that when you have a scarce asset, 21 million Bitcoins, there'll never be more than 21 million Bitcoins for 8 billion people.
mathematically, and because Bitcoin now has a huge network, I don't know, 400 million users
or something. I don't know what the number is, but it's something like that. Willie Wu probably,
I think he tracks this pretty carefully. You know, the network is so big now that Bitcoin can't be
killed. We found that in China when China tried to outlaw Bitcoin in 2021 and couldn't do it. So
the network is big enough that it can't be killed at this point. And so it'll just keep going up.
It'll have these price drops and it'll be very volatile as people try to understand it
As any emerging technology is, you know, you had the dot-com bubble, the tech bubble in 2000 where the NASDAQ dropped like 80% because people are trying to figure out this internet thing.
You know, what is this internet thing all about?
So that's happening with Bitcoin now, and I think it will stabilize more as we move forward.
You know, we have these 11 new ETFs, so Wall Street is now in the game, and I think that's going to stabilize Bitcoin's price a lot.
Yeah. And not only stabilize it, but for the masses who don't think critically and look for an authority figure to tell them what to do, having a black rock or fidelity, whether or not I think that's the best way to hold Bitcoin is irrelevant to the fact that people are going to be more receptive to Bitcoin just because these institutions are selling it.
Exactly. It's kind of the rubber stamp. It's the good seal, you know, good housekeeping seal of approval. You know, the SEC's kind of approved it, though Gensler came out and said some, but that's okay.
sec approved it it's kind of the okay i guess it's okay now uh but you know and i tell people you
know the easiest way to buy bitcoin if you're a beginner is just buy one of the etfs because at
least if you do that that will protect you from the fiat money printer right it'll protect you
from that you won't be able to carry your wealth with you if all hell breaks loose you won't be
you know it's still feasible it's still confiscatable because if you get a civil lawsuit
you know you're going to want bitcoin on your private keys you're going to be your own bank
you're going to want unconfiscated money donald trump right now just got a 450 million dollar
judgment against him against by some maniac manhattan judge you know he probably wishes
he had a lot of that in bitcoin right now um and that might you know so so you know if you if you
have the etf it's not unconfiscatable money but it will protect you from the fiat money printer
yes and that's i i think there's a culmination of events happening at this period of time which is
is really interesting um obviously the etfs inflation is still high you have confidence
in institutions at all-time lows people yeah people are fed up with what's going on at the
federal government level you know people in iowa um clamoring to secure the border they're
thousand a thousand miles away isn't that amazing that you know people in the interior of the
country is like wait a second what's going on you know with this border thing so i think this
culmination of events right now we're at 63 000 we're less than 10 below the previous all-time
high leading up to a halving event which historically we've been 40 to 60 below the
all-time high heading into the halving it's with wall street behind it yeah it's just a very unique
environment where you have the capital coming in and then on the social side i think people
are more receptive than ever to ideas outside of what's being done to them by the government
Yeah. What do you think, Marty, about – BlackRock, of course, is kind of a boogeyman to pro-freedom people. What do you think about this – do you think BlackRock wants to just take over Bitcoin, co-opt it? Probably does, but – or will they be able to? I don't think they'll be able to, but –
If China can, I don't think BlackRock will be able to.
I don't think so, but yeah.
I don't know. I think that they may certainly have those intentions.
I don't think they'll be able to do anything at the end of the day because, yes, these ETFs are accumulating a large supply.
But at the end of the day, the people buying these ETFs are RIAs, hedge funds, individual investors.
And so to think people are like, oh, they're going to get all this Bitcoin and then dump it right away.
It's like, well, they actually don't have the power to make those decisions.
They just take the order and people buy it. Yeah, that's exactly.
Yeah, I think that's right. And the other thing, too, is the distinction I really want to make to everybody I talk to about Bitcoin is it's Bitcoin, not crypto.
Bitcoin is the only successful, truly decentralized money, meaning that it's the only asset that there are some other decentralization attempts, but Bitcoin has actually achieved true decentralization, which can never be achieved in this space again because Bitcoin was the first.
And so when the technology is first, it's really hard to overcome that, especially once it develops this network effect, the 400 million users.
And so it's kind of like Facebook.
Yeah, I could copy Facebook, but I don't have the 3 billion users.
What makes Facebook valuable is the network of 3 billion users.
So that's what makes Bitcoin really – it can't be replicated.
the whole i call it the uh immaculate um uh the immaculate inception not the immaculate conception
the the the circumstances around bitcoin's founding or start can't be replicated um
and so you have these 30 000 other crypto assets that are out there but they're all centralized
projects they're all owned or controlled by someone or some small group they're basically
unregistered securities and they're just trying to surf on the wake of bitcoin's success so i
And I try to tell people, okay, you're not too late to be in Bitcoin.
So a lot of people buy these other crypto – I think almost all of them are scams.
They buy them because they think they're too late.
They're too late for Bitcoin, so they have to get on the thing that's just starting.
And, of course, they get wrecked because when Bitcoin gets a cold, they get pneumonia.
They die.
And so that's – so I just try to steer people away from these other crypto assets.
And Ethereum is number two, of course.
You know, they're about a third the size of Bitcoin in terms of market cap, but, you know, they are a centralized – they're trying to be a decentralized internet or something.
They keep changing the narrative of what they want to be, but they are controlled by a couple of people, Vitalik Buterin and Joe Lubin.
I mean, they basically – Vitalik can reverse transactions anytime he wants.
He's done it before.
They constantly change the number of coins that are out there.
It's not really trying to be money. It's trying to be a decentralized Internet, which I don't think works very well on a blockchain because it's too slow and clunky.
But, you know, it's a centralized. Number two is centralized. You know, that's that's Ethereum.
Now you have a Solana, which some people say is better and faster than Ethereum, but it's also centralized.
It's also owned and run by some people. And, you know, all these and everything else is tiny.
everything else tiny in uh bitcoin is just the the idea that i don't think anything else can
possibly come along and of course bitcoin right now is 95 of the market in terms of trying to be
honest money decentralized honest money there's a few others like litecoin monero and a few others
but you know dogecoin which only only pumped up a little bit because elon liked it it's interesting
about elon i think he was responding to kathy wood the other day kathy wood noted that more
compute powers being used by the bitcoin network you know to secure the to secure the network
then the combined cloud compute power of google amazon microsoft and apple you know so and that's
the secure that that's one pillar of bitcoin security structure that's just one pillar that
then there's the cryptography and everything else um so and elon was very surprised by that he said
wow i did not know that and and uh which tells me that when he kind of endorsed boat uh go dogecoin
more as a joke i think because he liked the fact that it started as a joke it basically a
copy and paste of bitcoin and uh he didn't really understand that yeah no bitcoin is really
something i mean in terms of the compute power in terms of the asset he hadn't really studied it you
know you could tell and he he and tesla still owns a lot of bitcoin i don't know how much uh he they
sold they bought a bunch and they they own 10 000 coins or something like that so he still likes it
he likes bitcoin but he didn't really fully understand it and uh hadn't studied it and
And, you know, so he pumped Doge instead.
Now Doge, I think, has just kind of collapsed, I guess.
But, you know, anybody can cut and paste the Bitcoin code.
It's open source, right?
So anybody can cut and paste and make a few tweaks and try to improve it.
It's open source.
But what makes Bitcoin valuable is the network.
It's the network of users.
And that's what's really hard to replicate.
And also, as an advertising person, someone in advertising, there are a few assets that are more valuable than a brand.
one of the most valuable brands of course is coca-cola another one mcdonald's you know if
you tried to start uh there's room for two cola drinks you know coca-cola and uh pepsi and pepsi
is like way behind coca-cola and then you have like rc cola you know number three and then if
you tried to start a competitor you just wouldn't be able to do it because of the brand and bitcoin
has a very strong brand uh most people could not name any other crypto besides bitcoin so that's
another you know valuable asset frankly that that bitcoin has yeah the brand is pervasive at this
point it's global it's recognizable it's not going away no i think i think too like another event
happening right now is the maturation of the stack being built on top of bitcoin bitcoin's
protocol level you have lightning you have things like fediments yeah coming to market liquid other
second layer solutions and i mean i see we're sending this podcast out over rss i have a
lightning i have a bitcoin address in my rss feed and people they're going to listen to us talk and
they're going to send us bitcoin over the lightning network i'd like to learn how to do that uh you're
you're more technologically advanced than i am i'm really not a techie i'm more of a yeah i was
an english major in college yeah it's very easy you go down if you have a podcast you download
the fountain app you claim your podcast in the fountain app and boom
address in there yeah oh that's cool and then what now you can just then send it out to like
youtube and so forth uh not via rss but when we send a vrss against apple spotify um all the
podcasting platforms okay then we will go to youtube it'll go up on youtube yes so all the
platforms basically and then x and so forth yes no that that's great all right wow yeah
we're trying to get trying to get the message out there and i appreciate you joining us
you know i do think you know i don't look too much i mean obviously everybody looks at the price but
that's not and obviously the price has to go up uh for it to be adopted right so we want the price
to go up but i'm really attracted you know when my son first talked about bitcoin when he was i
guess maybe 16 or something and talked to me about it it was just very interesting intellectually
just fascinating and then the only question was would it work and it worked it's still working
it's i mean it's it's like this it's like a snowball it like it's like this uh it's like
this snowball that just you know it gets bigger you know it starts off small it's like this and
then it's like it's great yeah there's no stopping this show i was tweeting it last
or talking with somebody about this yesterday where now we have black rock fidelity all these
etfs out there institutional stamp of approval i would not be surprised if in the back half of
this year it goes further up the stack and you have more sovereign nations join the ranks of
el salvador and others that have embraced bitcoin oh yeah i hope so that's and i would think yeah
The Saudis, of course, the sovereign wealth funds, I'm sure they'll buy, you know, they'll get into it.
I mean, you know, people go where the money is, right?
And that's part of the brilliance of Bitcoin.
It was started by people who were steeped in Austrian economics, Austrian free market economics, Frederick Hayek, Ludwig von Mises.
And, of course, Anne Rand also with Atlas Shrugged and her books.
And they understood the profit motive and that people are motivated by money.
And so the brilliance, I mean, there's so many rabbit holes, right, with Bitcoin going down.
You could go down the political rabbit hole, the economics rabbit hole, the technology rabbit hole.
But the structure of it where it really incentivizes all the right things.
You know, so the miners are the guardians of the network.
They process the transactions and mine, and they're rewarded for that by winning the race to mine the next block.
And so they don't want to do anything screwy with the network because that would wreck their own Bitcoin.
So everybody's incentivized to protect the network.
And I think Michael Saylor said it best.
I don't have the quote exactly, but he said Bitcoin is like a nest, a swimming, a growing nest of cyber hornets that the bigger it gets, the more secure it gets, the more difficult it becomes to attack.
So, you know, when it was when the network was small, yeah, government could take it out, could have taken it out if it understood what was going on.
But I think it can't right now. And because so many people hold Bitcoin worldwide, but also in the United States, maybe there's 40 million, 50 million people who hold some Bitcoin, it becomes politically impossible for these politicians to really go after it.
And Elizabeth Warren, you know, who's been a big a big denigrator of Bitcoin, it seems like even she has changed her tune recently because now she's making the distinction between Bitcoin and these other crypto currencies, you know, and she's saying, well, you know, there is something to Bitcoin.
So I'm really not talking about that.
I'm more talking about the exchanges and some of these other sketchy crypto assets.
And OK, good.
You know.
Yeah.
And she's got somebody who's trying to primary right now running.
Yeah.
On that.
Yeah, maybe her staff. Maybe her side will say, hey, we own Bitcoin, and here's why. Maybe that could be happening.
Yeah, I hope she gets primaried out. She's pretty annoying.
She is very annoying, yeah.
And a shameless politician.
Yeah, but I'm happy to have anybody on board.
And in some ways, I don't like to politicize Bitcoin because there are a lot of liberals who are pro-civil liberties who are for Bitcoin.
Like Jack Dorsey is a left-leaning libertarian, right?
And I think one of the reasons he left Twitter is because he didn't like the totalitarian direction.
He didn't really have control over the company.
Probably didn't – and I'm just guessing.
I'm kind of mind reading here, but I'm just kind of reading the tea leaves.
I think he left because it was becoming this totalitarian woke thing, and he wanted to go off and do Bitcoin and make Bitcoin available to the people in Africa and the third world and the people who don't have access to banking and the US dollar.
And so he's motivated more by his liberal concerns, but he's a – I think he's a civil libertarian.
And we want those people on board. We really want anybody on board because I think Max Keiser always says, you don't change Bitcoin. Bitcoin changes you. The more people who get involved in Bitcoin, they start learning about economics. They start learning about freedom. They start learning about energy.
If you were to tell me eight years ago that I wouldn't know as much about energy as I do today, I would be like, wow, what the hell happened?
So I love that, what he says, you know, you don't change Bitcoin, Bitcoin changes you.
So the more people can get involved in Bitcoin, even at a small level, you know, I think it just changes people.
Yeah, I completely agree.
It's changed me, certainly, over the last 11 years.
I learned a lot about issues I didn't really know about, just getting involved in Bitcoin.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I've learned a lot from this conversation.
I really, this was an incredibly fun conversation.
I really appreciate you joining me on such short notice.
Oh, thank you.
Oh, I do have one request. I'm a huge fan of Whitney Webb. I know that you had her on several times. I would love to have her on a podcast or just – because I've read her book, One Nation on a Blackmail. I just think she's awesome.
And I understand she comes actually kind of from the left, but she's against this, which I think is awesome. So I'd just like to talk to her and maybe have her on a podcast if she'd love to do it because I'm like her biggest fan.
I'll hit her up. I'll ask her.
she's she she goes on a lot of podcasts so i wouldn't be surprised if you two end up talking
and i'm sort of small you know i'm just i'm just kind of getting i i had no desire to be involved
in social media i have my business and you know advertising agency i sort of got plopped into it
a couple weeks ago or last week and said oh okay i got people watching let's teach them about
bitcoin and some of these subjects and when life hands you lemons you make lemonade seems like
you're doing just that so thank you for joining us this was fascinating we'll have to do it at
some point great to be on all right that's all we got today freaks peace and love
