TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #590: Why Gen Z Understands Freedom Tech with Ian Carroll

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

Marty sits down with Ian Carroll to discuss the Argentinian crypto scam, Trump's second term, open source AI, and more. Ian on Twitter: https://x.com/Cancelcloco_ Ian on Nostr: https://primal.net/IanCarroll 0:00 - Intro 0:36 - FTX and Milei's scam 11:45 - Crypto's rep is now clear 18:49 - Fold & Bitkey 20:32 - How Bitcoin and Nostr change you 30:13 - What's happening with gold 36:54 - Unchained 37:55 - Trump's 2nd term and disentangling the US 45:35 - New generations bring better understanding 50:48- Open source AI and immutable code 58:49 - Tech oligarchy 1:03:56 - McKernan and Japanese jab deaths 1:08:28 - The challenge of digital ID 1:18:19 - Moving to Austin 1:21:42 - InfoWars 1:28:22 - In person maximalism Shoutout to our sponsors: Fold https://tftc.io/fold Bitkey https://bitkey.world/ Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean And that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. You mentioned FTX right before we hit record, but that was something I was like, if you paid attention to the space, the way Sam Bankman Freed came out of nowhere,

the kimchi trade. Yeah. We knew it in the Bitcoin space is there that are between the United States, Korea and some other parts of Southeast Asia always existed for a while. And a lot of Bitcoiners were like, all right, there's an hour period to take advantage of it. And even individuals who had family and connections, maybe even second passports in Korea, couldn't set up bank accounts. Like the whole lore behind Sam Bankman Freed and him getting rich on the kimchi trade just didn't pass the sniff test with many Bitcoiners who thought of that before and tried. I mean, basically everything about Sam Bankman Freed didn't pass the sniff test, right up to him being the exact kind of personality.

that you like an intelligence agency or like a subversion operation would look for to kind of make a patsy out of. It's like a young kid with lots of like lust, greed and pride that you can, you don't even need to tell him that he's a part of something. You can just give him money and opportunity and women and like bullshit and then just lead him around by, by the,

the, the nose by the sin, so to speak. Yeah. I can't forget the amphetamines either. That's an important part. The amphetamines. it's yeah you get them well said and then you just give them the dream and just like oh man

everything's just working out so good i'm a genius pop yeah so is that and then when he was on cnbc i had a tweet out in july 21 the year before everything failed and i got lambasted by the solana people because he was on squawk box with joe kernan and andrew sorkin and those guys and the getting his big media hits getting his big media hits but he was like they were asking him about the difference between proof of work and proof of state consensus mechanisms and having been in the space for almost a decade at that point i was like this guy has no idea what he's talking about and to think that he can actually operate a company in this space without any fundamental understanding of the assets that he's supposed to be securing and enabling trade

around is, is risky. Yeah. Just to keep a company afloat in the space, let alone to be like the market leader, like making all the big deals and going to Congress and like being the voice of crypto regulation all of a sudden out of nowhere. Yeah. That all screamed central banker to me. And the timing was really, really important too, is it was a clearly built up with the bubble at this moment when central banks were realizing that they were behind on the digital currency train and they were starting to talk about their plans, but they clearly needed years to catch up. And I mean, Bitcoin and crypto in general was just like charging has been for like a decade now at this point towards alternative solutions. And this again feels like right now, once again,

with Trump coming in, with Elon coming in, with RFK, all of these people have spoken pro-Bitcoin and pro crypto in various ways um sec reform is on the table and like all those things just line up with like kill it kill it as fast as we can like rug all that momentum as quickly as possible so that we can just keep people in the sort of centralized mindset of like no we need centralized because this is what happens yeah the i mean the ftx run up there like the mainstream would be like oh bitcoin went higher than it was supposed to because ftx was manipulating the markets but they were actually taking people's bitcoin and market selling it to give to all these things so that yeah if you actually look at the charge not that ta is um ironclad or anything but it's a good

argument to be made that bitcoin probably should have gone to like the hundred thousand dollar range in 2021 i mean it's similar to like gold and silver markets it's like a lot of people make these arguments that i find kind of weird that it's like you can't manipulate precious metals markets there that's why i buy gold i'm like bro have you looked at the precious metals market at all like do you know about jp morgan and precious metals um and i don't know that much about it but i i know it's manipulated but it's at least it has it's only manipulated within a certain like range of fundamental principles whereas the crypto market bitcoin excluded crypto like all these shit coins and stuff like that's it's not only manipulated but it's manipulated within a

space that has no guardrails against manipulation whatsoever yeah and it's so trivial to spin up a market to manipulate. And what we've discovered, it sounds like, correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like what we're learning from this exposure of this, specifically this crew that was involved in the Melania coin and now in malaise coins in a, what was it called? Libra? Libra. It sounds like what's integral to the shit coin market is you have to have a purse of several million dollars coming into a project with you to artificially pump it so that when you rug it, you sort of are like doing this rinse and repeat of this massive pool of capital designed to manipulate your coins um and in the in the shit coin market i know a bunch of people that are like really down

with the dj and gambling in the solana markets and that have tried to spin up coins and they real and they were realizing over the last like year or two that oh our coins don't move like everyone else's coins because we don't have a treasury of five million dollars designed to manipulate our coin yeah and they're like man that's i mean that's what hayden was basically incriminating himself talking about sniping and all that and that i think that yeah i haven't actually watched his interviews yet but what i've heard of them is like mine the fact that he would even just willingly go on coffeezilla i really want to watch that coffeezilla episode because it's like i can only imagine how taken

aback coffeezilla was to be like bro we're we're not filming a confession like yeah you don't have to admit to everything well that's it's like somebody who stumbled into a quote-unquote success but just stumbled into some sort of position where it's like oh these people want to give me money to pull these coins i set up these back channel um out of band sort of communications networks to all right here's what we're attacking now here's what we're going to blah blah blah he was literally describing this and i guess one one like i would not be surprised if it's um intel psyop to degregate anybody's confidence in i mean i think uh crypto but also it is the ultimate end state of where all this has been moving for the last 13 years since the

first all coins emerged and so i think whether it's a psyop or not i think one thing that's certainly a fact is that every other scam going back to history so it started in like 2012 2013 where you would have uh what were called fair proof of work launches uh those were like the first ones where it's like somebody would go on bitcoin talk.org and they'd be like all right we're going to launch this proof of work coin with this scripting algorithm and we're going to launch it at this time on this day so for it to be a fair launch make sure you have your computer set up running the scripting algorithm and then as soon as the clock hits 11 a.m point your hash at this network and we'll begin the fair distribution of the coins via the block subsidy schedule set out

by the uh certain the particular dev team and then that evolved to like proof of stake coins like proof of works like dumb and energy intensive like here's proof of stake and then icos and then uh nfts defy and now meme coins is the ultimate end state of this where it's just like all right we're not even going to pretend like we're trying to do something legitimate here we're going to open up the casino and like it's funny comparing this like the 2017 cycle where there was this facade of projected legitimacy about the sort of operations behind the tokens that were being spun up and the businesses behind them and what people are finding is that these are not tech protocols they certainly are to an extent but they're in a open

monetary competition with bitcoin nothing we're gonna be able to beat it yeah the way you just describe that progression is is such a good like tinfoil-y space or like rather it's such a good space to start to speculate on comparisons to other phenomenon like the one that comes to my mind is uh degeneracy in our in our media and movie spaces where like at first it's like oh we'll just like show a little bikini and then we'll just like oh we'll just show a little this then we'll show a little this and then pretty soon we're like like having sex on stage in front of children and that's like what our pop music is and it's uh and it's always a slow walk towards like any any uh sort of like system that's based upon catering towards our lesser tendencies in

this case greed and gambling um and in that case like sin and sloth and such like they inherently will slow walk you towards the most the most egregious outcome right whereas bitcoin is built on, on principles of integrity. And so in some ways it's like this complete divergent train for this, what is really a banking revolution. I mean, like in the same way that, and maybe this is the way I look at it, but I look at the history of the United States and how we were really founded as an exit from the central bankers of Europe, um, as much as taxes or tea or whatever else the story was, it's like we were breaking free of central banking and these monarchies and these sort of like just ultra oligarchs continental dollar right like when it first yeah when we

first had the revolutionary war it was like we're getting away from that exactly and during that first several hundred years of our nation there was just like currencies being spun up all over the place every state had a ton of different papers and it wasn't there was all these problems and a lot of those projects were like scam coins just like today um or they were you know high integrity projects that like had poor fundamental values and fortunately we arrived at the federal reserve system which is like the best system ever and it could never go wrong so yeah you know i'm optimistic that this this cycle will have learned more and bitcoin is obviously like an infinitely better solution than the solutions we've arrived at before so yeah and that's one thing i mean you

were asking before we sat down like there's no shit coiners on this floor is everybody is anybody but her crying like no everybody's actually uh breathing a sigh of relief because it has been exhausting having been public in this quote unquote industry um being bundled in with the crypto bros for the last eight years as i've been public and i think many bitcoiners many in this building and um who run in the same circles and have the same view of what's happening have been screaming from the rooftops for the better part of 12 years this is all scam it's all going to end well and literally predicted the end state of meme coins which was none of this is going to work and you're just going to end up at a spot where it's just a pure casino and people do

like the casino but that's what i think most like fair if you want to gamble go gamble but like don't pretend like it's going to be some financial revolution or something no it's it's gambling yeah and we're beginning but we're beginning i mean you're seeing it in the market caps of bitcoin every other crypto is they're diverging very uh very um very clearly on the chart the market dominance chart for the first time in in the history of bitcoin's existence alongside shit coins which is yeah i'm really curious what happens to the the broader sort of like ethereum spaces and stuff where like like because the ones that even the ones that aren't like overtly meme coins that like you know portent to have value or utility even they are sort of seriously tainted

by this whole thing because the same mechanics that allowed for meme coins to become what they are are latent in a lot of those other projects i mean ethereum had a 70 percent pre-mine itself like that's what all these meme coins are not to mention all the like the ethgate stuff and sort of like who really is actually owning all that who's behind vitality like there's all these questions that, you know, you can go deep on and get tinfoil-y, but you don't have to get that tinfoil-y to just recognize the difference. It's not a very well-kept secret in the industry. Joe Lubin owns most of the ether. And I think his network of people from, I forget it was Goldman or JP Morgan, they're, they're sort of backing it. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I'm, I'm getting really

curious and I expect we're going to get answers within the next couple of months of like, what is the government and regulatory response to this going to be? Because Trump really got, whether he knew it or not, he really got drug into the mud, um, with the Trump coin and the Melania coin. And that's a serious reputation hit in general. Um, and I, I can't wonder, can't help but wonder if that's not like sort of their ultimate targeted hit is if you can kill Trump's administration's willingness to engage with Bitcoin or with like, with that conversation at all just because of the solana scams that are going on that really sets like jp morgan up in a great position to go cbdc's yeah to get his ear and if i were donald trump i'd be

screaming at don jr and eric trump because it seems like they're really the ones who've been driving this world liberty fight and that's the other like the other thing too is these crypto scammers for uh for i think you have to give them credit in the sense that they network well and they have the ability to get next to oh yeah these people in the vicinity of power to convince them to do objectively retarded things it's it's an interesting space because the reality of how these things actually work is extremely complicated the mechanics the the actual tokenomics um whether you're talking from a dev standpoint or just from a monetary standpoint it's actually quite complicated to really understand what's going on but there's this layer of excellent like

of surface layer surface level explanation that can be given that feels like encompassing and is so obvious and like oh my gosh it's free value there's like so much here like look at what these other ones and so it's so easy to convince people at the surface level that this might be a great idea um and man it's just so obvious how many people that have the right intentions maybe have been swept into the wrong place in a huge way and i'm worried that that happened to a lot of the trump team and a lot of the rfk team on this yeah well i think i've said this publicly on the podcast before but fuck it like i mean it exists like rfk's team in the lead up to the collection and it wasn't his team it was some like pack associated yeah like um i believe um

they reached out to me and they're like oh and they just sent me a link to the rfk solana coin and we're like will you share this was it maha i don't think it was maha no yeah so i'm i have this had this really interesting podcast with my homies in this maha space last night and these are two guys that are like pretty deep in the like shit coin world and they totally own that they're like for it um and this is dustin stockton and kyle kemper and they launched this maha coin that was using the tax on the on the on all the transactions in the first i think like six or nine months or something like that to fund like political campaigning to fund like this bus tour to fund all this media to fund all this merch and it was like actually incredible it's how i met both of

them by chance is because they were there. And, and so they, they had like, they were like kind of two high integrity people that were in the space that were very optimistic and saw, I mean, they saw the shit coins, like the shit coin nature, but they also saw the potential for, if you had all high integrity people with purpose, you could do something cool, but we live in a world full of people. And we had this really cool kind of come to Jesus conversation like four or five days ago where I was like, guys, I can't do a podcast that's associated with the shit coin. Like I can't, even if it's an idealistic shit coin, like I can't be associated with that and I'm not going to be, and I want to keep, you know, hanging with you guys and talking with you guys,

but we've got to confront this. And Kyle, I didn't know the extent of the drama and Kyle's like, yeah, I'm fucking over this. I'm so done. Got Dustin on the phone and Dustin's like the shit coin or a shit coin or you could ever shit coin. And he's like, yeah, I'm fucking over this. Like I am done. This is not the path. Like, like it doesn't matter how optimistic you are. You have to at a certain point just like admit that you are barking up the wrong tree and so we officially split it and was like this is not we have to focus on the real like yeah it is what it is well that's i mean and that's whether it's trump coin melania maha rfk took and i mean that's the advice i've given when people have come to me like i'm launching like the same advice i would

give dave portnoy he may be in trouble now but should have called me dave um is like think about what is it called a meme coin what are memes they're these ideas that uh are succinctly articulated whether it's via an image or uh saying like maha uh that really connect with people but as we the internet things come and go trends coming cultural concepts exactly and um when like the political class would come to me and ask about um politician focused meme coins it was like no this is a terrible idea because you're gonna have like hardcore supporters that are gonna buy into this the price may go up temporarily but they believe in the politician that this coin is supposed to be representing and what happens if he drops out of the election what happens if

he doesn't get elected what happens if something happens like or if there's just manipulation you're gonna have a bunch of supporters holding it yeah and then you've just undermined specifically the people that support you the most you've just fucked them exactly it's like what's up freaks do you have a credit card are you getting cash back or airline points or points for some other service guess what those are shit coins you want to be stacking bitcoin i have some groundbreaking news for you the team at fold has finally released the bitcoin rewards credit card they have a wait list i'm going to be distributing the cards later this year so you want to get on the wait list. Fold Plus members are going to get unlimited 2% Bitcoin back on this credit card. If you get

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from the start yeah like just proof of work baby and it is cool to see sort of the evolution of people's thinking in the space into what like myself being sort of like a i mean kind of like an outsider like orange pillar um but knowing a fair number of people in the bitcoin space and also knowing a lot of people in the more general crypto space especially novices that are slowly getting orange pilled because of the progression of the meme coin trajectory has been really cool to watch because there's no better uh proof of proof of work than watching all the other you know modalities just burn yeah as bitcoin's only getting stronger and and that there i do have a grace for the archetype of the individual who thought bitcoin was too hard to build on and

they wanted to build these cool financial products or social interaction um applications whatever it may be and going back to prove work it's going to take time lower your time preference like i think the timing of this meme coin shit show that's happening and the maturation of the stack being built on bitcoin is perfect because you recently joined noster and i think noster is a perfect example of the manifestation of a meme that was big last cycle which was web 3.0 which was this idea that you'd spin up a utility token for different use cases whether it's a podcast you you want a token associated with the show and people can accumulate it and send it back to you like doesn't make economic sense at all but what we're seeing on noster podcasting 2.0 which we

talked about last summer when you're on is like this you just combine these open source protocols communication protocol and noster rss open content distribution with bitcoin and it plays nice bingo yeah it's like the i was i was really taken in by the ethereum crowds arguments for utility-based coins really of like like blockchain-based stock markets and blockchain-based this and that and It's like, it there there's, it's, it's very enticing those arguments because there is logic within them, but it, I think it's taken a long time for people to start to real for the masses to start to realize that the point of that is that it's not a currency. Those are not monies. Like what, for example, it would be great for a public, uh, good, like public shares of public

companies, put it on a blockchain, nothing wrong with having a public share being on a public blockchain if it's because we don't want counterfeit shares like we want them to be immutable and currently they don't seem to be immutable so that's great but it's not a currency it's not like you don't need to have like monetary mechanisms built into it and so what nostra is doing where they're combining the the positive elements of decentralized technologies that make sense in this use case and then just combine it with the bitcoin currency system yeah you don't need to reinvent a new currency that's built in this uh in in a way that is not optimized for currency you know use the technology elements for what they're good for um exactly when it comes to

whether it's the the big and this is where i think a lot of money is going to be burned particularly from tradfi this cycle is the meme around real world assets rwas uh tokenizing real world assets stocks being one of the top priorities and you nailed it um and you don't even need it on the block just like this is already possible on a side chain of bitcoin liquid which is a federated side chain has its own blockchain but yeah you can issue tokens that have no monetary value and so if you were a company issuing shares of stock you could do that on the liquid network today some people have already i believe yeah uh but yeah the whole point is like you really honed in on is like it's not like you don't invest in that like you would invest in like an ethereum or

solana like exactly it's literally just a changing of the form of the representative value of the underlying stock and the rails it runs on and so like to think that you're going to invest in a real world asset and it's going to it's going to increase the volatility of the underlying stock like that's not conceptually what's going to happen you're just going to change the form of how you buy and sell make it harder to counterfeit it yeah or impossible to counterfeit it yeah you can still manipulate all these systems just like you can manipulate any system like saying bitcoin is manipulable, but it's manipulable on the rails that are the way you want a currency to work. The point is, because I think that there's this novice perception that the right currency

wouldn't be... People point at Bitcoin and they're like, it's just a gambling asset. Look at its crazy thing. The dollar doesn't do that. So why would Bitcoin... It's like, yeah, the dollar kind of does do that. But beside from that, it's like, you don't want to build in control mechanisms that prevent manipulation that are part of a free market because then you're inherently undermining the actual nature of your currency you have to deal with the free market if you're going to build a real free market currency and unfortunately free market is a pretty messed up place these days yeah well and once you introduce the free market like anything could be manipulation is me going to the strike up right now and selling some of my bitcoin manipulation technically does affect the

order book in one way or another but um the uh the and the volatility does really throw people off and it's not surprising that it does because it is a bit jarring if you're getting into it you're like oh i'm gonna put my savings in this and that's why you have to like really drive home this is a long-term thing make sure you're willing to hold it for multiple years but then also like take a step back you have a new monetary asset monetizing in real time and people are becoming confident and less confident based off of information that is coming out every day and therefore you're not going to have this new monetary asset just fully monetized overnight it's going to be filled with volatility that's what i love about it man that's my favorite part about

Bitcoin being at being like entering kind of financial literacy in general from a GameStop investor perspective, I'm down with volatility. Like I'm super into that and I'm down with holding forever. Like I got that. And so when I look at Bitcoin, it's just such a no brainer of, yeah, I'll put my, cause I think a lot of Americans genuinely don't have the ability to really make savings right now. And so, yeah, it's not, it, that makes it impossible to look at. Because if you need your money today, you know, it's not the asset for you. But when you're trying to like, when you are taking your finances responsibly and doing something like, like the old adage of put 10% of all you earn away forever as you're growing wealth, like that is just so clearly

a Bitcoin, uh, position as in so many people are looking at their IRAs now and they're like investment portfolios that are being managed at like, you know, three to 5%. It's like, why would I keep that? Like a lot of people are starting to realize, and I'm not telling people to do this is like people are realizing like i should just take the tax hit of withdrawing all my money from my retirement account right now and put it all into bitcoin right now because even if i were to give away half of that money to taxes i would still make it all back and then some in the next bitcoin cycle yeah total no-brainer yeah and that like whether it's liquidating your ira or 401k or simply just buying like yes most americans cannot afford like a four hundred dollar american

uh or emergency expense excuse me but if you have the ability to squirrel like even if it's 50 with paycheck 50 a month just start slow and build that nest egg yeah i mean i didn't seriously start accumulating bitcoin until like less than a year ago now because i was just living kind of on fumes and reinvesting everything back into what i was building in my media space and once i did start seriously. Like I had enough extra capital to start putting away like a hundred, 500 there, a thousand there. I like, it was an immediate, I think it said it like up 10%, 20% just on this little cycle here. And it's like, fine if it goes back down, but it's just crazy how, uh, how scary it is from the outside. But once you're inside, it's like so refreshing and relaxing

to know that. And this is the thing that all Bitcoiners know. And this is why Bitcoiners They're such fun people. Cause, and you're a great example of this is that I've noticed that when I meet Bitcoiners, they're just calmer, they're just chill. And they're not stressed like regular Americans, because I think most of us don't even realize how much of our daily like stress and tension is coming from financial instability. And this sort of subtle knowledge that I'm, the system is constantly got me on this. And most people don't realize they're on this treadmill of like why is it that i can never afford anything why is it that i'm always trying to make rent and i'm always trying to pay my bills and like and the moment you start to put more and more

of your assets into bitcoin you don't even notice it at first maybe if you're not paying attention to the tokenomics of why this is happening but it's like oh i'm gonna be it's like it's gonna be fine yeah because as this all gets harder my number is going up in the background and i'm just chilling then you have the the peace of mind that you're actually contributing to something worthwhile and that is separate and that and that i mean i just had peruvian bull on and we were going over peruvian he's the man he is and we were going over like that's the other thing most americans don't know like number one they're on the hamster wheel and all those feelings of financial stress are because we are printing so much money but then on the other side we have all

this debt that's being uh being accrued that is enabled by the fact that the fed will always come in print money and buy the debt but it's gonna get hairy here particularly this year i mean the big meme at the end of last year was the interest expense on the debt surpassed military spending but that that's going to increase i believe like 10 to 20 percent in the first six months of this year just that interest expense and doge is doing great work but you're kind of like running up a mountain like like you're you know interest expenses on debt growing the debt like you have to shave so much off of our like off of our budgets in order to even catch up to the growing rate of how fast we're falling behind that um i'm glad that we're cutting all this like total

bullshit out of our out of our tax dollars but it's like man it just feels like we're definitely too little too late and the american dollar is just it's gonna die yeah well and that's the thing with doge too is if they were and it looks like they are having a material effect on how much taxpayer money is being wasted but it could take the market six to twelve months to realize that and like the problem with the debt and the rollover the debt right now is that the treasury yields are so high and so you're rolling that over and like i wrote a piece about it last week at 66 billion dollars of 10-year treasuries that rolled over last saturday and when they were issued 10 years ago is at 2% and rolling over at four and a half percent. And so that alone added

like $20 billion a month in interest expense payments. Yeah. Yeah. I'm really, right. I'm really curious. Like there's been talking of auditing the fed right now. There's talk of visiting Fort Knox. Like there's talk of them actually examining the fundamental pieces of the, the fiat scam i've got a fort knox tinfoil out there yeah you want to go into it yeah the gold's going to be there you think so yeah because are you paying attention what's going on with the gold markets right now no no what's going on well so i've heard about gold moving from london from europe and london right and uh moving out of london to the u.s and singapore but that it seems like that's what's happening right now is a combination of tariffs and

an implementation of reserve rules that goes live later this summer from basel 3 regulations so backing up from latter to former basel 3 this new um reserve ratio not requirement but something that's going to become acceptable is using gold as a reserve uh as a fully reserved asset on a bank's balance sheet uh and so many are surmising that people are like okay i'd rather use gold as a treasury asset compared to these compared to u.s treasuries which are mostly the reserve assets in the banking system right now and then tariffs as well the question is if trump's going to go and all these tariffs we need to get our gold in u.s borders before that that tariff begin to begins to hinder our um uh our payback on that gold or how much we pay

uh for for having that gold outside the u.s um and so it's all been coming from uh the lmba and that there was a complete run on that bullion deposit and they've had to go to the bank of england be like can we borrow some of your gold to uh facilitate these withdrawals that are happening and then similarly here in the u.s you have people who have uh gold futures contracts on the cme you can call those in kind and as this is all going on people in the u.s with these futures contracts are calling it in kind and the comex is having to facilitate the delivery of that gold and the underlying assumption around all this is that because of state of u.s treasury markets to dollar and the geopolitical shit show that the world is in is that you're going to have

this reversion to a hard asset um whether it's a global monetary system or bifurcated global monetary system um and so i think the gold's going to be there when they go to fort knox whether whether it's been there the whole time i don't think it's been there the whole time but i would not be surprised like think of donald trump he's not about right to me yeah he's not going to want to he's not going to signal weakness no like he's going to get a fort knox i'm like oh look we have gold you know what we actually have a little bit more than we thought to send a signal to the rest of the world the u.s is is strong right now i mean i don't know how to i'm not smart enough or connected enough to know how to verify this or not but i've been

hearing and seeing a lot of stuff about china on a similar trajectory of just hoarding gold right now too china's been buying mass for 20 years yeah and it feels like there's a certain element like this is i'm kind of just piecing this together right now but when when the world went onto the US dollar as the global reserve currency, it was after a state of extreme turmoil and warfare all around the world. And so there was this wide open playing field for manipulation of political spaces for intelligence agencies to kind of like consolidate. I mean, I guess they weren't exactly intelligence agencies at the time for the most part, but just consolidation of power by the powerful to sort of put the federal reserve system and the dollar supremacy into place

in a very orchestrated way. And now we're really going through a currency reset without so much of a, I mean, COVID was a bit of a global catastrophe, but it didn't, it didn't exactly feel like it put one group of very powerful men into a position to control the entire rollout of the next system in any way. Right. And so it kind of feels like a whole different version of history repeating itself where people are fighting for, like, we're realizing that the Fiat experiment is failing and it's all going to burn sooner or later. And, uh, everyone is kind of running for the Hills to the next best, to like whatever currency system makes sense to them. And I mean, I'm very stoked that countries seem to be going, going gold, but, uh, I think I'm probably

personally going to go Bitcoin for the most part. And I think they will too, eventually as well. This rep was brought to you by our great friends at Unchained. As Bitcoin's role in the global financial landscape evolves, understanding its potential impact on your wealth becomes increasingly crucial. Whether we see measured adoption or accelerated hyper-Bitcoinization, being prepared for various scenarios can make the difference between merely participating and truly optimizing your position. This is important, freaks. This is why Unchained developed the Bitcoin Calculator, a sophisticated modeling tool that helps you visualize and prepare for multiple Bitcoin futures. Beyond traditional retirement planning, it offers deep insights

into how different adoption scenarios could transform your wealth trajectory. What sets this tool apart is the integration with the Unchained IRA, the only solution that combines the tax advantages of a retirement account with the security of self-custody. In any future state, maintaining direct control of your keys remains fundamental to your Bitcoin strategy. Go explore the potential futures at unchained.com slash TFTC. Bitcoin is going up. Make sure you're protecting it the right way. Make sure you have a good partner that is Unchained. Go to unchained.com slash tftc yeah it's uh it's hard to know exactly what's going on there's so much like i i had a the there's so much particularly with this new trump administration like doge

it's like yes go in there fire the irs agents uh thank you for finally letting the world know that usaid is a front for laundering money on behalf of whatever political party is in power in the u.s um but then you have things like larry ellison and sam altman being like we're going to deliver you mrna specific vaccines for cancers you have howard lutnick like we're going to buy equity in these mrna pharmaceutical companies it's like what yeah i uh i had pretty low hopes for trump coming in despite voting for him just because like we've i've never in my lifetime had a politician enter the oval office and do like a single effing thing they said they would do. And almost every time they do the exact opposite of what they said they would do. Like

Obama is a great example with the 08 banking collapse. And so I really had relatively low hopes for Trump. And I was going to be happy if he even just appointed RFK to where he said he would appoint him at all. And so I'm almost more confused by it looking like he's delivering on a lot of his promises, especially with these other really weird curve balls like that Larry Ellison conference you're talking about it's like like it's very hard to figure out what to trust and what is a play and what is not and especially because trump plays dumb so often and even when he understands something he often says things in ways that sound really retarded that's like but he's not always actually as dumb as he sounds and so i'm very confused by what the play is

and there was i forget exactly what it was this was a couple weeks ago but he did something and the media was like oh my god look at it it's like you you haven't learned you've watched this guy for 10 years now in the political realm obviously four he was out of office four he was in and then two leading up to that like he has a strategy which is like i'm gonna say something completely insane i'm gonna anchor like so far on this end of the spectrum yeah see how people react and the gaza thing he said was a good example of that that's what i was talking about where he started talking about and that one started a lot of a shit storm in my world too where it's like he starts talking about occupying gaza and at first it's like yeah it's

kind of retarded bro why would you even say that but then overnight within three days we had three of the most powerful middle eastern nations come out against that plan and say no we will do it which has always been the best option is that like you need them to take like you can't you know terrorism is bred in poverty and and just like you know if you leave that destruction there you're never going to solve that problem you need to rebuild and create prosperity for everybody so that way you like there's you're not incentivizing more conflict and the only way you do that is with insane amounts of investment and we don't want it to come from us no it's inherently got to come from them although i did make a joke that like all right and then in 30 years we have global

jihad because they all are like hey we really still hate those guys because they bombed all of us and now we're strong well then we know that if the cia gets disbanded they they figured out a way to uh to keep the the charade going yeah exactly it's gonna i mean i'm super not optimistic about what happens over in the middle east but i'm also like i don't i i care but i don't really care that much anymore it's like we have so many problems here that we need to be focusing on taking care of our own. And my perspective on that whole stuff is basically just how can we get it out of our stuff? Because there's so much money being sent to Israel and some money being sent to Ukraine. And that's based on lobbying. That's based on corruption coming in. It's not like

we're doing it because all of our politicians woke up and were like, I want to do this. They were incentivized. They were lobbied. They were blackmailed. They were coerced with access and all these other things. And so I talk about that stuff a lot in the Middle East, but it's mostly at this point coming from this perspective of like get get us unentangled yeah like let us be sovereign it's very the whole point of america washingtonian of yes like george washington's parting thing it was like just stay focused on what's happening here don't worry about international i mean be diplomatic but don't worry about getting entangled in other people's matters yeah i mean i'm sure we'll never go back to that once you become the global empire you know you're

always destined to be on that storyline. But I really see us as America being in this trajectory now of we are an empire unwinding. The question is, how do we want to unwind? Like, do we want to unwind like in a blaze of glory and fire and like, and just screaming and kicking all the way down? Or do we want to try to be as graceful as possible and like roll back our global control and bring that prosperity back in? And because inherently, I think when you lose dollar supremacy, when you lose global domination of the oil markets, when you lose global supremacy in the intelligence services spaces, like not only do you have all these enemies that have kind of been latent and waiting and like under your thumb for so long, but you also have

all of these policies that have sort of been propping up our American monetary and like society in general. And, and so I think we kind of need all hands on deck here as the empire kind of like collapses or unwinds or whatever you want to call it we need as much positive growth and movement here in order to sort of fend off the inherent you know instability we're gonna face yeah and i'm very optimistic but i mean obviously a bit biased considering the nature of my professional life and career but i think bitcoin like no i'm with you i'm totally with you yeah but if you get to like history and like all the dominant global reserve currencies that have risen and fallen like it's

been hand the baton's been handed um from one country to another with periods of gold sort of playing this apolitical reserve currency status or for most of history it did but like from the last since paper yeah but like the last 100 150 years um maybe 200 years it's been passed the baton's been passed from a country to country but like the u.s if there was ever a time to have sort of destabilization of the empire and a need to really get back into the hole and focus on rebuilding the homeland and making sure American citizens are, um,

have dignity and, uh, the actual ability to pull themselves up from their bootstraps and, um, live a relatively high quality of life. It's now because I believe this is still true. Like per capita, Americans have the most Bitcoin.

Um, the, the most more than el salvador huh i guess it makes sense because el salvador is so poor yeah yeah yeah and like the other thing is like industry like despite yeah the um the fact that the u.s has expanded its empire and gotten pretty uh weak lazy and uh drunk on power abroad i do still think the inherent fire that lives in the bellies of individual americans that american spirit of fuck you i'm gonna go build this yeah still exists and i think it's personified in the industry yes there's a lot of shit coins but when it comes to like bitcoin

companies they're actually building the infrastructure that people use globally i think it's safe to say a lot of that's happening here um so we have a strategic advantage from an industry perspective we have a lot of bitcoin in uh the borders of the united states and in the balance sheets of individuals and um if they just embrace bitcoin i think it'll be fine yeah i mean i also something we haven't really mentioned yet is this i'm really optimistic about this shift that's about to happen between the the old guard and the young uh intelligent like rising kind of gen x gen and kind of millennial class where it didn't really like i think it didn't really dawn on most americans for the last 12 15 years whatever just how

geriatric our leadership is and just how out of touch with our reality. Exactly. Right. And he just announced that he's not running for term again. And I mean, and I think that if, if what we hope is happening with Trump and this doge and this purge and everything happens, I'm, I'm of the perspective that that is going to basically force a lot of resignations and, and sever a lot of the sort of incentives that have been keeping those people in place. And I think that there's a swelling, rising class. All these technologies, be it social media in the information space or Bitcoin and crypto in the currency spaces, all these different technologies, they incentivize people to learn the actual fundamentals of these principles that we've taken for granted for so

long. And so it's now incumbent upon every American to understand how currency works because there's no central bank doing it for us or we don't trust them. It's incumbent upon all us to understand the nature of uh how information spreads how disinformation spreads how propaganda spreads because now all of our twitter feeds all of our instagram feeds are like in just overtly propagandized like battle spaces whereas it used to be oh just trust the news and i'll just watch the news and so there's like this rising generation of like gen x and down mostly are people that are suddenly way more in tune with the like it's like we've leveled up in an understanding of what it means to be a civilization because everyone has been forced to be a part of understanding the

solutions as they decentralize more and more and more. And I think as those people get into positions politically, we sort of wind up in a future that's like one step further towards utopia, the, you know, impossible utopia theoretical. No, I think the, like we're millennials i remember taking the aol cd out of the uh out of the case and putting it into my my gateway and downloading the internet for the first time and uh interacting with a very cucked internet and then the progression of the open web the web browser napster things like that point being like 30 years of literally getting introduced to the internet at consumer scale and again similar to bitcoin where it's not going to monetize overnight i think uh people's understanding

of the internet and how to properly use it wasn't going to happen overnight too and i think we're at a point where uh the internet is certainly a double-edged sword it is a deluge of data and noise that you have to learn how to filter through but i think over decades people like yourself i'd like to think myself i've learned how to filter um and at least decide which information is even worth um sort of taking in and digesting to to make a decision based off of yeah yeah it's such a double-edged sword like in the sense that now everyone is like it used to be that you wouldn't fall into that wrong click like you wouldn't fall into that wrong like druggy click at school unless they were around you. And that metaphorically applies to all the kind of

like things you can find on the internet that are bad for us, whether it's like pornography or like gambling addictions or like radical, just retarded ideas. Now it's like everything is in front of all of us. So there is this element of, in some ways we're have to take a few steps backwards to take more steps forwards because now we're all stuck in all of the potential permutations of information and outlet and such but that's like forcing growth in all people and lots of people are falling into all these traps and and kind of like falling victim to the internet in a lot of ways but man is it sparking a lot of growth amongst the people that are sort of like leveling up on it and i i'm hoping and i'm optimistic that that is

that that is laying the groundwork for kids right now for like gen alpha and below watching their parents' generation and seeing who fell into the traps and how do we avoid them and how do we... I think that as we watch the generational gap between our generation's leaders that have learned to overcome these problems and the generation below us looking up to our leaders, I think that that's going to be an amazing gap because those are going to be kids that grow up with all the access, with role models that show them how to navigate the second edge of that sword and i'm optimistic that there will be some really incredible leaders coming out of the next generations below us yeah no this is something i think about a lot i've got two young boys and

especially with the emergence of ai yeah at first it was very scary and still is scary to an extent if open source ai doesn't win but i think open source ai is going to win but i've become particularly in the last six months incredibly uh excited about the prospect of leveraging open llms and open ai and maybe not self-hosting but um there's actually a company out here open secret they just released um a a private ai chat bot um called maple.ai and try maple.ai if you want to go to the website but they've essentially created a way where you can use secure enclaves in the cloud even like on an aws gpu a gpu hosted on aws and you can interact with an llm but it's end-to-end encrypted in transit and then the data is computed on the

secure enclave which the server can't see the person running the server can't see and maple can't see so you can create this extremely private connection with these llms and you can imagine a scenario where you can like i when i think about my boys i'm thinking about like what curriculum i want to create like a roman tutor like ai that my boys interact with so they can just ask questions about anything they're curious about yeah it opens up so many possibilities not have sam altman spying on them while they're doing it bingo or jeff bezos yeah whoever it is because i think that that is getting to the fight of our generation and of our time is data privacy and, um, what is the constitution of the web, which for some reason we still don't

have, um, long overdue some form of just, uh, and it's a touchy subject because like the constitution, a good constitution of web of rights for citizens on the web is just one small step away from regulating the internet and controlling everybody. Um, and I think we have all know that there's plenty of people that would love to regulate the internet and control everybody but this the these sort of like bottom-up solutions for privacy rather than top down is are so exciting because at every single time that one of these bottom-up solutions like bitcoin for example is invented it just you never go back behind that threshold like once open source llms are out there you can't like what are you going to do like take over the whole world and

destroy every computer running an open source llm like it's never going to happen so that genie's out of the bag and as more and more of these genies that empower regular people and protect regular people are let out of the bag technologically speaking i'd get more and more optimistic that we're not though you know we should always be vigilant about sort of the technocratic uh worst case scenario that a lot of people are vying for i'm getting more and more optimistic that we're gonna you know graze right past it and wind up somewhere somewhere in the middle won't be utopia but it will certainly be better than there's a lot of doomers online right now um i interact with a lot of doomers in the kind of conspiracy space that are like it's they're

just gonna like they're gonna have your ai they're gonna have your prints and they're gonna have your biometrics and they're gonna like have brain chips in you and they're gonna control everything and they'll know everything it's like yeah that's what they want but will they get it yeah i don't think that's another question and again if you zoom out and look at the progression of the internet i think when you mentioned like a constitution of the internet i think the cypherpunks yeah had it right which is like you don't need a constitution it's like we are cypherpunks we write code we're going to plant our flag uh in some uncharted territory in the digital landscape and make technologies that are so good and are so powerful equally as powerful for the individual

and the nation state that it's going to be impossible to grow we had this in the 90s with the pgp wars we had to go through a war to uh that went all the way to the supreme court about the legitimacy of individuals access to pgp pretty good privacy technology um similarly like we've seen it like and that's the beauty of it too like if you don't have privacy on the web um the individuals obviously at a disadvantage but so are the large nation states and large corporations like they don't want their data um getting access and hacked as well yeah well said and so we've seen this progression from http to https where uh in transit everything's encrypted and that i just recorded with these guys so it's top of mind um the next progression is we've the

the data that's not encrypted is the data sitting on all these cloud servers across the world and now with the progression of secure enclave technology like we can begin to move to a standard where you can have the cloud servers with secure enclaves and the server simply just run the compute but they can't see they they put the firmware or the software in the chip it does a certain thing people can access that software but they can't see what people are doing with it they just know the computations are happening yeah it's you actually put it really well in the context from the start here talking about digital constitutions. And that is why I love Bitcoin so much is because there's this sort of old mentality, which I kind of slipped into

again. There's this old mentality of like, we need an arbitrary solution to our problems. Like write down on this piece of paper, our arbitrary solutions, these rules we're going to follow so that everyone is taken care of. But the beauty of technology is that code is immutable. And so you don't need to write down an arbitrary solution on paper when we have the ability to encode a real solution that is immutable and bitcoin is like the perfect example of like don't ask the government for a currency that will not be the dollar just go build it with technology code it in and then everyone has trust because that's the nature of math like math is math and we're getting and it's cool to watch like kind of the whatever like i mean they're not really cypherpunks anymore but

like though the evolution of the cypherpunks like the communities that have spawned out of the early days and how all these different communities are working on all these different solutions that slowly are encoding more and more of the things we needed solutions for finding ways to put them straight into code and skip this layer of like we need an intermediary to hold the rules down yeah i mean to the point that the corporations need it as well like that i there's a new vpn that launched called obscura and they've created a new way uh new architecture so we download a vpn typically you turn on your vpn and you go to a website and you send that information to the vpn then it goes to the website the vpn knows your ip obviously and you're trusting that they're not

doxing your information they weren't founded by the cia yeah that yeah i don't trust that um obscura what they've basically created is almost like a tor like hop system with two nodes you send it to the first node it knows your ip but not the information you're trying to access and then that sends to the second node it knows what you're trying to access but doesn't know your ip and uh sends it off to the web and this was actually a design architecture that apple open source for their iCloud secure iCloud architecture and actually got

adopted and the reason I trust it is because it got adapted by the IEFT or IETF which is like people literally working on like the HTTPS layer of the internet like they adopted it into their protocol because it's so secure and Apple made it that way so that

they could secure their users data I mean love them or hate them Apple's done a good job of actually like leading the way insecurity in a lot of ways yeah they were the first of the secure enclave on the phone i believe exactly um but we're getting uh too optimistic and too uh too uh not vigilant enough what do you think we have to look out for with this administration points dude um i'm actually intending to make a lot of content about this in the coming months um because a lot of like i'm in

like the journalism space kind of the conspiracy theory space um more so than any other like individual niche and um and in my world there's an awful lot of people that are saying the same things as me today but they are just like trump fans they're just on team this team um and that's not really journalism and that's not what journalism is for and that's not what like that's just partisan hype um and the whole point of journalism is to hold the powerful to account And no matter how idealistic Trump or RFK or Elon or any of them really are in their hearts, they represent a nexus of power so vast that there's just going to be infinite vultures and interests and people coming in trying to do all sorts of things that we do not want. And, um, and so regardless of how optimistic someone is about Trump or Elon or whatever the plan is, or, you know, you should, we should be vigilant because the plan can be subverted, even if all the people enacting the plan are truly perfect, which they're not. Um, as you know, the whole Ashley St. Clair drama clearly helped remind us of, um, and his video gaming scandal and all these other scandals. Um, and so I think, I mean, I re I defer to people like Whitney Webb on this one. the sense that she's been to her guns for a long time about the technocratic sort of like

oligarch class and how they're walking us further and further towards uh sort of the digital version of you'll own nothing and be happy that did like the the not the not like in terms of our assets but in terms of our digital lives and um and there's an awful lot of money and projects swirling around in sort of like the peter teal palantir uh military surveillance systems world that trump is very taken in by he's very very with elon just tweeted yesterday about how palantir had integrated grok 3 into it and was like great palantir's the shit and it's like no they're not dude no they're not they're not and uh all of there's there's a common thread that ties a lot of these uh problem companies or problem visions together and it's the concept of pre-crime um and

palantir is a big player in pre-crime and so are a lot of israeli tech firms for a long time and it's it's this push towards and the problem just like a lot of what took liberalism off the rails in the last 10 years is that pre-crime conceptually is built on a great concept like yeah ideally if like the elevator pitch of what if you could stop all crime before it happened? Like what if you could stop bad things from happening? That'd be amazing. Like, duh, but at what cost? And there's never a way to predictively police that is not based upon mass surveillance and control. That's like the most deeply Orwellian thing in the world. And it's the most anti-American thing you could ever conceive of. But because Americans are so cluttered with information, so bogged down by

debt and fear and stress, so distracted by sports and entertainment and music and such that we're not noticing that it's actually already being implemented in places like our schools. Like there are already school like shooter alert systems that are getting integrated into our public schools that ostensibly are to prevent mass shootings, but they actually are allowing backdoor access to these same companies, to all sorts of data, all sorts of surveillance that no one ever consented to same thing is happening with our emergency response systems um carbine 911 is a company that is actually jeffrey epstein affiliated yeah whitney's talked about this on the show before yeah yeah whitney's really like i mean like whitney is my primary source on this

stuff and if it weren't for whitney's reporting i would hardly even know where to start in digging into this stuff and she's a great lead generator for how to start to learn about this whole scope of companies that are basically trying to create minority report in real life. And that's deeply troubling. And I'm, I'm far more optimistic than like the Whitney webs and Derek roses of this world. And we've, you know, fought online about it a lot because I just, I feel like though that is a serious risk, I feel like the American and the human spirit is greater in the exact same way that COVID I feel pretty strongly that COVID was supposed to be much worse. It was supposed to be much more profitable for those that profited it was supposed to be much more totalitarian for

those that were instating totalitarian policies and i think it was supposed to last much longer um with more effect in the most like evil little pockets of conspiratorial people like their minds i'm not trying to say that like the whole world was in on it um that's that's one thing i'm looking for in terms of validation one way or the other like all right are they actually here to help is like if they go because we had kevin mccernan on um who's been doing a lot of research into the jabs and particularly um turbo cancers and it leaking into dna and we discussed a study that came out of japan earlier this week or last week that basically highlighted excess deaths in japan um wasn't only post-covid actually in 2020 excess deaths went down uh and it wasn't

until the jabs started getting rolled out that they went up significantly higher than it was when they had the tsunami in 2011 and if you look at the cumulative deaths of people who died from covid but could likely attribute to uh the jab taking them out early with the people who died of cancer uh bigger than hiroshima uh loss of life and i think the signal the smoking gun that really connects the jab as the main cause of this increase in cancers particularly is that the distribution of cancers that existed pre-jab versus post-jab completely changed and the post-jab cancer distribution is in areas of the body where the vaccine was congregating exactly after it got injected yeah uh and i think to me they they ripped the paper off the the peer review server

that i was sitting on and i don't know if it was because we released the episode yesterday logan but they're gonna do everything they can to try to fight for their last breath that's like and there was a lead up to um with maha like that was a big thing um and that's again trying to validate one way or the other was was rfk's change in framing of maha as a movement of like preventative health let's get all the shit out of the food let's get kids working out let's take out all these um bad prescriptions uh and he really didn't talk about it played really coy around his vaccine stance yeah during the media craze like was that like a hey shut up we'll let you get in if you don't talk about this or is that like a strategic i'm not gonna

kick the hornet's nest until i get in and then go after them and his very first speech just like entering into hhs just a couple of like maybe almost a week now um was i've made me very optimistic like he he didn't come in and kind of like tread lightly he came in and i mean he was very pro-science he was very he wasn't like my way or the highway i'm firing all of you if you don't agree with what i say but he was very we're gonna study it all and we're gonna find the truth of it all and we are gonna actually go there and it sounds like i don't think it's coming from rfk i haven't seen him talk about it but it sounds like there's many states going after fauci at least um but i'm with you it's like we are far from having enough evidence to be sure that they are

delivering on those promises but uh i'm optimistic based upon what i've seen so far but the thing that i the fundamental difference of opinion i think between someone like myself and whitney webb um in terms of technology applies here as well in that we are not powerless actors we are the American public. And we have more voice now than we've ever had in all of our history. And we've seen on this campaign trail in multiple cases, how our loud voices can shift their political decision-making in real time very quickly, because there's never been a campaign more tuned in to public sentiment than this one. And if we all just black pill on like, no one's ever going to go to jail from the vaccines, they're not even going to hold anyone accountable. We are allowing

them to get away with not holding anyone accountable. You're just manifesting it. Exactly. Whereas if we are loud and we're unwavering and we are calling for a full investigation and full trials and full punishment for everything that if we accept nothing less than that, I feel very strongly that we're in a position to actually get it from this administration during these four years. But even if, even if they don't deliver on all those promises, that is no reason for us to stop. Then we just vote them all out and vote in someone that'll do better the next time like i think that we're at this phase where we have as much power as we take which i mean that's kind of a ridiculous thing to say but it's a good heuristic to live by

right now because if you don't take the opportunity it'll pass you right by i mean that's my co-host on the show that i'll be recording after this matadog i mean that's one of the lines he's been trying to beat in the people's heads for the seven years they've been doing the show is that freedom isn't given it's taken and defended so you literally have to go take it and defend it and the hope is that in the digital age double-edged sword you have closed sourced pre-crime ai whatever it may be financial surveillance or you have the open source option that allows you to actually defend these digital rights of freedom security privacy all that yeah and i i wonder a lot if like i i assume that in a lot of those debates we're eventually going to have to wind up in some sort

of uncomfortable middle compromise for some of them um though i'd maybe i'm just naive and there actually are digital solutions that can essentially code beyond the the uh intricacies and actually encode best possible solutions that don't require us to compromise but the example that i'm always rolling over in my head. That's really unpopular to talk about online is digital ID. Um, because for example, just this last week, the exposure of, uh, multiple Twitter accounts that were seemed like subversive actors, like intentional plants within the conservative movement, this patriarchal Hannah, patriarchal Hannah account. That's like a fake trad wife. You heard about her at all. This is a, she's a account that was faceless and had posted a few photos

occasionally that are turning out to be random facebook photos and she presented as like this trad wife with 12 kids that was like like women should be subservient to men like women are belonging the home and like like very super trad conservative but then it came out little by little by little by little and then it broke all at once that actually she has no she doesn't have kids she's not married she is 400 pounds and she does uh like fat kink porn and she's like simultaneously running this dual life and is clearly a subversive actor that has been infiltrating the conservative movement so the raw alerts guy too right yeah raw alerts is another good example um and that one's a little murky in terms of like like i guess no so it's coming out that i believe that raws alerts

i don't really give a shit what you do with your sex life in your personal time if you're not hurting kids if you're like consenting adults doing random weird shit i probably won't subscribe to your news channel if that's the kind of brain you have because i don't want my news coming from that but i don't care i don't have any judgment for him in a personal way but i think it came out that he was running a bunch of antifa accounts and that is like political subversion straight up yeah um and all of that comes from the fact that they are anonymous but i don't want to i'm not advocating for no anonymity online it's just this like questioning balance of like how do you know what's real and that's not even to mention ai video at this point and the way that we're very

quickly going to have like AI. I mean, AI influencers already exist and AI porn already exists and AI politicians are already popping up and running scam coins on like YouTube every day. And so there's this element of digital ID that we're going to need a solution for it, but we have to be so careful about what those solutions are and what are the long-term complex implications. Once you take the first solution and you walk it down through three iterations of like subversion and control and, you know, trying to vie for power on it. It's like, how is that going to play out? And that's where I get concerned. And I think that's where like, like a person like Whitney is rightly very concerned is that there's so many opportunities for us to get fooled into

thinking we've got a solution. That's actually just a slippery slope into totalitarianism. Um, but I'm optimistic that the human spirit will, will win out in the end. It's just gonna be a crazy wild ride on the way there yeah and as it and the whole so a couple things in this first i think digital id that issue is going to be forced at the border if we're going to get rugged by the trump administration's like we need to secure the border we need this digital id that's where i think it's going to come in and then to the whole the whole i think framing is important that's what bitcoin has really been focusing on for the last 15 years is like how do you frame bitcoin and you need to own the frame to ultimately win the battle you're trying to fight and i think

people who are worried about the digital id battle that is upon us whether you recognize it or not we need to own the frame of a digital id like what is it an identity is your your like an identity is very personal it's like literally down to your soul like i am me and you can't tell me that i'm not who i am like this is my identity i own it so i think the frame should be and there are protocols nosters pseudonymous um but there was a protocol that got built they didn't they stopped working on it internally but a block web 5 i've talked to one of the lead developers there his name is daniel but uh point being setting the frame of if it is deemed necessary to have some form of digital id individuals should be able to create the idea it should not be issued to them

by a government like you should be able to tap into a protocol uh like web five's one of them nosters and i guess that's the whole debate like do we actually need like digital id where you know my full name my address all that and i think what noster is experimenting with is this pseudonymous online identity um with web of trust social credit scores if you will like what's going to win out in the long run is it something where you actually have to tie your name address social security number to the internet i don't like that idea and i think it's going to be the onus is going to be on the people building out protocols like noster maybe web 5 something else to really build the tools to give people certainty that you can trust this web of trust and this

this this score on this identity system and it should be um it should be valid enough in meat space to give people comfortability if you're interacting with somebody like hey look at my my noster web of trust social score yeah choice is so important there in the sense that um the dystopian view of digital id is this um forced digital id that is issued to you by the government And then is you are forced to use for everything. And that obviously is like the worst case scenario. And, but, but there's a very, there's definitely like a gray area of very workable versions of that, where as long as I have the choice to like, I create my Twitter account, that is a digital ID and I own that, you know, digital identity. And it's only valid because of the web of trust that you're referring to. But as some sort of official digital ID system is enacted, whether it's through social media situations or through our banking, whatever it is, as long as I'm not forced to use it where I don't want to use it, I think those are workable solutions probably. But the thing is that when I picture a digital ID system rolling out, whether it's from our government, our banking system, whatever it is, they're going to try to get us to use it for

everything. So our government gives me a digital ID. The bank is going to try to link my bank account to it. The school system is going to try to link my school system to it. The HOA is going to try to get my digital ID linked to my housing situation. And the only thing that could stop that power creep of everyone want it because like more data is more power like if if you could get access to everyone's digital id even if you're like you know a little organization a business a coffee shop whatever that's value add if i can get your digital id at my coffee shop then i have more data with which to like sell your data do whatever you know and and i think the onus at a certain point has to fall to us to say no and like if if a bank starts to say i'll only give you a bank account if

you give me your digital ID is to say, no, I'm not going to use your bank, right? I'll go use Bitcoin or I'll go use this other bank. And so I'm hoping that we're all like aware of the complexity and problems enough that by the time these systems start being put in front of us and they start trying to link us into all of their little webs of, uh, of identification that we have enough, uh, awareness of the market of ideas to say, no, if we demand a bank that won't link our digital ID, someone will create that in the free market, right? Or whatever. Bitcoin already exists. Exactly. Right.

Just send me a Bitcoin address. Perfect example of it. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, we already had a, I guess a trial run with the vaccine passport. Exactly. That didn't go too well. Yeah. And it was, that was exactly, I mean, such a good example. The perfect training is there's an awful lot of people that were, I'm not going to get vaccinated. And then when they started to give out the vaccine cards and the vaccine passports, you had three classes of

people. You had people that said, okay, fine, I'll get it. Don't be that guy. Then we had the class of people that were like, all right, I'll game this system. I know someone that can give me a fake passport. I like those guys. Those guys are fun. Then there's the people, this is what I was, that are just conscientious objectors that are like, no, I'm not going into your store. Where I was living at the time was a super liberal town. I basically didn't go anywhere for two years because I couldn't. And it was just a form of protest. It's like, cool. I won't feature. I won't go to any of your businesses. I will just go to the gym that lets me go in because they're awesome. And I'll give them all my patronage and I'll love them forever. And I'll go to the

one grocery store where they're okay with me going in with that. And it's like, that's all I need. And then I remembered all the businesses that were super like heavy on the vaccine passports during COVID. And I never went to them again, ever. Part of the reason I'm in Texas. Bingo. I was in an area where. uh then vax like we we left new york to the jersey shore early in covid like march 6 i believe 2020 we evacuated brooklyn we ended up in cape may county new jersey which is pretty based um we were living on this island town it was fine like like the restaurants didn't even have like uh

mask mandates or anything but got to the point where we thought we were there for two weeks to flattened the curve it turned into uh the better part of two years and at the end we had a son i had a career that i was like i can't live in this beach house yeah do everything yeah and uh not many young people on the island outside of the summer months and philadelphia where i'm from like the the passports were a big thing and i was like i don't know if i can do it so yeah we're gonna go to texas for a few years yeah i was just thinking about it driving through austin here too how there's this sentiment in texas in general and in the austin area too especially of like like all you all you people coming in here it's getting all big it's getting it's growing it's

crazy it's like it's out of control like just leave texas texas and and yeah i totally get it and i hear you and um don't worry i'll be leaving in a couple months but um i think that all the people coming to austin are actually making it more and more and more based and red and i think that all the texans that have this issue with non-texans moving here it's like californians don't move here. I think that actually you want more of them moving to Austin because Austin before this, this exodus from all these other places, Austin was the weirdest place in Texas because of the university largely. And because of the culture that had kind of grown up in Austin is my impression of what it is. And now there's this exodus of people that are extremely based

from all around the country that are fed up with everywhere else that know it's important to fight for our freedoms and fight for what's right and Liberty. And like, like Bitcoiners like yourself that are flooding to Austin because it's a hub of, of this kind of new media markets of all these great, great things happening. And I think it's probably a serious net red for Austin. Ironically to this sort of like Texan sentiment, I think the rest of Texas, maybe not, but to Austin for sure. I mean, excuse me, I'm sure you felt it with the energy in the city is it's palpable. Yeah. It's electric. I love it. It's going on here in Bitcoin. We've got Rogan's, uh, comedy. I went down there the other, like a week ago for the first time. It was great.

yeah you've got that like cultural side of things really building up and then you obviously you've got like the tech sector more broadly like tesla spacex x is now moving i mean in the media space too like in in my world in the podcasting world specifically it's been i have done more podcasts since i've been in austin than i have in all of my journeys so far around the country in the like so far this year and half of last year it's just it's unreal how many great people i'm meeting and how many awesome projects there are and a lot of them are interconnected and know each other in great ways and a lot of them are also just like there's just all these different bubbles of cool people here doing cool things it's so fun and before maha was even a thing that was one of

the first things i noticed when i moved down here i was like everybody's healthy yes it's uh it's a very health conscious city as well there's ranches there's raw milk yep yeah i haven't found my raw milk connection yet but i will what uh you've been doing a lot on info wars yeah yeah no i just i just love those guys they're so much fun and um when i i'm not like um none of it's paid it's just like podcast appearances essentially but they're just such homies like i'm gonna go hang out with them later today actually um i really just enjoyed i got to know chase and harrison especially i've done chase harrison and owens shows at this point um and met alex a number of times but i just like immediately jive with their personalities and their perspective on the world in general their

fun people um and so when i got here they i think it was chase first invited me on his show and then harris invited me on his show and then as i was filming on harrison's show uh alex's producer popped in and one of the breaks was like hey do you want to like take alex's desk in the fourth hour i was like what did you just say like what it's like yeah it's in like three hours could you do that what was that like it was awesome it was so much fun did they give you like a list of topics zero zero like they they were like i i mean it was a trial run i'm not naive like they were basically like does ian have the chops to be a fill-in if we need him to be or and and maybe they're like i don't know if they want to ask me to do more in the future but like i'm staying

independent i'm not trying to do that but but uh no they daria basically was like like what like do you feel like you've got a topic like could you fill an hour and stuff like oh yeah no problem. Like it's, it's my hot day. Kennedy's just got confirmed. Like I'll talk about Kennedy. Um, and then when I did get in there, Alex, as Alex is, he was kind of trying to be like, all right, so you could like talk about this news if you want it to. And like, and I don't, I don't care, like do whatever you want, but like, if you need, just as like, it's his baby and he's like giving his desk over to a dude who he like hardly knows, um, which is kind of mind blowing on the first place. And so he was kind of doing like the dad thing for a second of

like, you got what you need, right? Like you got what you need. I was like, dude, I got it. No problem, man. I appreciate it. And then, yeah, he bounced out. He had a meeting and I had zero direction. I just said, whatever I wanted, I could have literally, and I intentionally didn't, but I literally could have just done a whole hour section or just shitting on Israel if I wanted to. Um, and I, I don't think they would have cared one bit because they're like, they, they all have their own belief systems and they're all pretty fricking based on everything. And, um, and when I finished, I was just like, how'd I do? And they were stoked. They were like, yeah, awesome, man. That was great. So what's, I can't imagine having to go for an hour straight. Just it's bizarre,

dude. It was, I mean, I really replaying clips where you had taken calls or no, I had a clip at the beginning and a clip at the end. And then there was one ad break. So it was a 20 minute monologue, no, no breaks live with everything with no notes or anything. And then an ad break and then a 20 minute monologue. Um, and I really love the art form of this job and the art of communication, be it through a Tik TOK video or a YouTube video or a podcast, or in that case, that i see that like that live uh monologuing um as the like one of the highest skill art forms in this industry and anyone that doesn't realize how much goes into keeping a cohesive train of thought that is informative and factual a because it's so easy i mean it's easy to ramble if you're not

trying to be factual um or you're not trying to be informative if you're just spouting opinions that's one thing. But if you're trying to be informative and factual and like thread together a narrative for like 20 minutes of talking without stumbling over your words or forgetting something or like misspeaking or getting lost in your own like head and not remembering where you're trying to go. There's so many ways that you can just wind up kind of like blubbering on camera. So I have tons of respect for people that do that on a daily basis. It's, it's unreal. I can't, that is a medium that I don't think I would thrive in. Like I, i did before tucker left fox i did a literally a two-minute spot with him right after the canadian

trucker stuff talking about bitcoin like it was a friday night live on fox news and like i was in a production van yeah in the drive i was on a family vacation with my wife's family and i got the call out there they were like i'm gonna talk about the truckers and bitcoin i'm talking i was like yeah let's go and uh it was he asked me two questions it was two minutes but it felt like an eternity. And like, I wasn't even in the studio, but like in that little production van lights were on the red light was on all the little elements you have to kind of, you don't have to pay attention to, but they're kind of inherently taking up attention space. Yeah. Yeah. And in the info war studio, there's like multiple boom cameras and there's timers and there's like

count ins outs. And it's like, and I thought I, so I totally nailed it actually is that they have a countdown to the next ad break. And the last one we had planned, it's like, Nicole had this great video she she had just posted that day for bobby that was like seven minutes or something like that and so we kind of planned it out of like if i could end right at 22 33 or whatever it is that's when we roll the clip and it'll take us right to the end of the show and i i didn't there's a lot of things about that monologue that i did that i would love to have done better but that ending i like walked it right to the end and just like nailed it right on like the perfect kind of sentence to summarize everything i was like we're gonna make america healthy again together and it

was like right on my second and i was like nailed it and i just i like that art form of sort of like orating and and being an effective orator that also is doing the all the other elements of like because it's not just being able to talk it's also being able to coordinate to the timing work with your team bring in the clips um so i have so much respect and that team like harris and chase owen and alex that do all that is like man what a hard job yeah it is a a skill that yeah uh many like you said many people don't realize how hard it is plus alex's desk is badass the info war studio i re-watched my section on it like two or three times just because like looking at the map behind it with like it looks like there's like global warf it's

like a very like alex jones background he's got in there and this giant desk and stuff it's just like a sick way to produce a piece of media it really got me thinking of like manny and you should get serious about this business thing so you can save up and buy your own studio and just like have a sick ass studio too because it's pretty cool it is it's we've got a nice humble studio here but it's a great nice having a home base but yeah i think yeah having a place you can go sit down and press play that's like high quality um makes a world of difference yeah though i do love my freedom of like having my i've got like the kind of studio that i can pack up into like two bags throw it in my van drive across the country with my dog and pop into an

airbnb and i've got a new studio so i do love that freedom but you know settle down before too long probably that's why i was happy to find out you're in austin because i think we had a great conversation last summer totally yeah in person just so much so much better yeah i'm a big believer of movie i'm actually i'm about to announce i'm planning an event um in june that's like an in person meetup kind of like a like a truth seeker um kind of like middle of the road like and the corruption event that's focused specifically on like amazing things happen when you get high quality people in a room together to meet face to face in a way that you just can't do over the internet or over Twitter space or something. That's what I think, um, has led to a lot of

Bitcoin success. That's a hundred percent. Uh, like tonight we have bit devs here in Austin and that's sort of this meetup tonight has been going on for four years now, five years now, I believe, I believe it started in 2020 and they didn't stop doing it. That's part of the reason many bitcoiners uh moved to austin's because during covid during the lockdowns the austin meetup kept they were like they put the flag out they're like we're going to keep meeting then you travel to come attended and then you like see how great it is here and you're like oh shit that's what happened people were flying from all over the country once a month just to go to bit devs meetups yeah that's funny the before this one even started there was one in

new york that i started going to in 2015 we go to every month when i live there and these organic meetups whether it's bit devs which is highly focused on the technical details of the protocol and what's happening but then you have social meetups and educational meetups and this sort of meetup culture has really really began like a decade ago on bitcoin and has expanded i think that has led to a lot of bitcoin success as people bitcoiners all around the world congregating wherever they are to talk about what they need to work on it's a very it's just so paired with the decentralized mindset too it's like a very burning man mindset of before this decentralization it's like the mindset is generally who's throwing the event like are you going to put on an event do

i buy a ticket how do i like i'll show up and this decentralization makes us realize that that's not the way like no what are you going to contribute we're all part of the system we're all part of the event like you don't need a big organization to throw an event necessarily although those events are super fun it's also just possible to just post like hey i'm in this town and i want to go get coffee with a bunch of people that are into bitcoin y'all want to meet up and so just like allowing for the organic uh the community to build its own organic meetings events whatever it is without having to sort of have like in the political space it's like turning point has to organize an event if you want to go to a right-wing event

um it's just such a natural and intelligent way to structure it where everyone takes ownership and then everyone learns to contribute and then everyone gets the benefit and it all ties ties us all together so much better yeah go meet people in meat space about these ideas and it's been great likewise glad to be here man you should stay in austin for a while i probably will i gotta go away for a few months but i'll probably i haven't found a better place to base up yet so i'll probably be back oh yeah for the long term well glad to have you here yeah thanks boss all right peace and love freaks