TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #602: How USAID Funds Fake Protests with Peter St. Onge

Episode Date: April 2, 2025

Marty sits down with Peter St Onge to discuss USAID astroturfing. Peter St Onge on Twitter: https://x.com/profstonge 0:00 - Intro0:36 - Elon and Austrian econ6:25 - Paid protestors14:28 - Woke companies exist because intimidation16:54 - Fold & Coinkite18:32 - Uni endowments and money printer26:47 - Unchained27:12 - Trump’s policy choices32:48 - Media and Trump changing precedent45:18 - Convictions win51:35 - Trump admin & bitcoin58:36 - Bitcoinization of finance1:10:20 - DOGE Can't Fix The Dollar Shoutout to our sponsors: Fold https://tftc.io/fold Coinkite https://coinkite.com 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. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be professional conversation haver i guess that's what you can call me otherwise known as a podcaster you are x's economics professor i've said this many times

throughout the years throughout the many conversations we have but now i think it's official you officially have elon musk uh retweeting your videos pretty consistently these days. How's that feel, sir? Elon has been astounding. All right. So when I came on, when I started posting daily videos, my goal was to get an Austrian economics perspective, but really a Rothbard. OK, more than anybody, I love Murray Rothbard. Anytime I see some economic event, my first question is, what would Rothbard say? How would he see this? How would he analyze it? And I wanted to get a basically Rothbardian perspective out there. We can get a little bit into what Austrian economics is, but basically it's what economics

would be if government was not corrupting it. So now I want to get that message out. It's contrary because, of course, most economic commentators, whether they're on the left or the right, they're Keynesian. They're fundamentally pro-government. They think that the stuff the government does is useful. Austrian or classical economics disagrees. That's why it was called the dismal science, because the politicians would come to the

economists and say, hey, I got this great idea. And the economists would say, no, it's not going to work. And they would say that so regularly that politicians complained, well, you guys, you don't have any creativity. So I wanted to get that message out there. And Elon, I've been absolutely shocked. Like his economics are impeccable. He is spot on. So like, I don't know if it was from watching my videos, if he's familiar with Austrian economics, if he figured it out independently. But either way, he understands exactly what central banking is, exactly how inflation is created. It's not animal spirits. It's not people being too enthusiastic. It's government. It's printing. He understands how to fix the economy. He understands the risks.

He understands the sort of cynicism with which we look at the state. So when you grow up, you go to school and they tell you how activists look out upon the world and they notice problems. And so they get the government involved and they raise awareness and then the government passes a new rule or a new law and then things get better. And, of course, this is BS. This is propaganda. Right. What's really happening is a field of economics that deals with this called public choice. And what's really happening, of course, is that the people in government are just as greedy and venal, as corrupt as the worst businessman in the world. They're all humans. Like, you know, you don't go through some purifying process as you enter government where all of your self-interest is purged and you're now an angel. they are corrupt bastards and the only difference between you know a government bureaucrat and

walmart is that walmart can't force you to buy the product the government bureaucrat most definitely can they can put you in jail if you don't do what they say and so this magnifies the corruption it makes it much more threatening and so elon understands this right he does not have um uh you know the sort of illusion that government is sort of this collective it's the things we all do together. So I don't know how he got that. Maybe part of that was growing up in South Africa and seeing what happened to that after the ANC took over, which is a communist organization, and it implemented policies consistent with that. But either way, his eyes are wide open. So I think that, you know, not only has he been great for getting sort of the Austrian

economics Rothbardian message out, I think that he on some level has influence with people like J.D. Vance and Trump, who, again, their economics are exceptional. For a national politician, their economics are just outstanding. Almost on every single issue, they are spot on the Austrian or the Rothbardian message. Excuse me. As it pertains to Elon, it seems that's sort of just observing everything that's happened from the lead up to the election last november to the inauguration to the first couple of months and a couple of weeks of the second trump admin it seems like elon specifically has been more and more radicalized as he's getting into the halls of dc of the federal government of the many different agencies and actually diving in

to the data and uncovering the breadth and the depth of the grift and overt fraud that exists within the government. So it seems like his Rothbardian radicalization is accelerating every day. He finds a new agency to look into. And he's a fascinating case study because he's a former Democrat, right? He was a lifelong Democrat. A lot of the people in the Trump administration are former Democrats, including Donald Trump. You know, that was one of the memes after he won. They had, you know, RFK, Tulsi, Elon, Trump, and they said the Democrats won the election. And there's a lot of truth to that where sane Democrats did win the election. It's kind of a separate question. What the heck happened to the Democrat Party? And this is part

of the reason why the Republican Party has been fighting it, because they have been taken over by Democrats, by saying Democrats. So it's kind of fun to watch. But I think that radicalization process that you're talking about, I think that's happening to millions of Americans. You know, even people who were small, small government or, you know, sort of instinctively hostile to the government. I don't think people like me, I don't think we understood just how deep the corruption is. You know, when we talk about waste and, you know, something like USAID I think their budget was 50 or 80 billion or something. Just all of it, pure fraud.

And it raises, I think, a fascinating question, which is, is there actually an organized left? Like during Trump's first term. Now, I remember any time that he would say something outrageous, he would have this instant mob of people out in the street. And, you know, for example, when he called countries, you know, he said they're these shithole countries. And poof, you had like 200 people at JFK, at, you know, LAX, at Chicago, at all the major airports who were out there demonstrating, saying terrible things. And the question of the time was, why don't we have that? Right. Why don't you have hundreds of Republicans or small government people going out and doing that? And the standard joke was that our people have jobs.

But we're now realizing that it's not that it's that these people are paid to do this. And in fact, we saw that during the BLM riots where, you know, they had mugshots of of some of these people and and their names. And I went and looked up some of these names and these people to the man they were working for government funded NGOs. So like there was one guy who was a famous communist because he was he would just walk up to everybody and spit in everybody's face. Right. Any kind of protester. And it turns out that he was working for this NGO that did like banking equity to explain finances to poor people or something. In other words, it didn't have to do with spitting in people's faces at immigration protests. But, you know, sort of I think one of the lessons or one of the takeaways here is that it's possible that there is no mob out in the streets.

There is nobody who cares about any of this stuff unless they're literally paid to. If you look at the Doge protests right now, so these people are fascinating, right? They're in their 50s. They are pretty obviously government workers. I mean, just they look like government workers, you know, a 54-year-old mild-mannered man. These are not green-haired police station burners like in Portland, right? This is a whole different crop here. And I think the reason is because fundamentally, they're not protesting because they care about

the future of the country, right? These are not like MAGA protesters who go out there with the Trump flag. They're not being paid to do that. Right. They're not being funded by the government. They are literally interested in the future of the country. There's a very deep difference in the movements between the MAGA who are driven by passion and these sort of left wing agitators who are, it appears, completely being paid to do it. In fact, we saw just the other day there was a report. They dug in and found 24 organizations that are funding the so-called Tesla takedown attacks. And they're all like one of the biggest ones. Let's see. It does AIDS care for homeless people. What does it have to do with Tesla? Well, of course, what they're protesting is cuts to their budget. right because that charity they're probably paying their executives two three hundred thousand a year to sit around and do nothing and then they channel some of that money into basically uh bribes so

they can keep the money flowing and what elon is doing or what doge is doing is that they're coming in and saying no we're going to cut that off now from their perspective they paid for that money that's their money they bribed it fair and square and yes i can completely understand why they're angry enough to burn a tesla but i think that a lot of americans now are just being absolutely shocked at how corrupt the system is. Now, of course, that depends which media you listen to. Because if you watch CNN or you read the New York Times, you have no idea any of this is happening. My brother, who, you know, he went partway through a Ph.D. program. He's a smart guy. He's concerned that his his Social Security is going to go away. Like what? What planet are you

living? Like this is not, you know, Elon is not sitting there stealing your Social Security. So, you know so he can buy another house he's literally going through and eliminating corruption which by the way strengthens the system but the point is that depending which media you want you are living in a completely different world right now utterly distinct realities it's it's fascinating because i mean going back to like blm and the mechanism it's like the usa funnels money to the ngos they are fat and happy and then they funnel the money to these quote-unquote protesters these paid protesters to manufacture public sentiment that is picked up by media companies that may also be funded by the same grift funnel and just going back to blm not only were these protesters

paid you could tell anybody was paying attention i believe it was in dallas specifically when they had the the rally or the rallies the protest up there they had the pallets of the bricks just sitting there on the side of the street it was like exactly what what is it there's nobody doing construction it's covid they're not they never deemed non-essential workers and why are these bricks sitting here so it was like obviously anybody with more than two brain cells that is sort of awake and paying attention is like those were set there by somebody to incite violence of some kind to project this sentiment that everybody in the country feels this way and that's what i think uh going back to the point of radicalization as many people who are collecting information

the right way or in ways that are um more beneficial to your mental health and a well-rounded picture of what's actually going on compared to mainstream media are waking up to the fact of oh wow a lot of this social strife that has been spoon-fed to me over the course of many decades Now, at this point is completely manufactured sentiment. 100 percent. And you're right. This has been going on a very long time, depending when you start the clock. You know, in the 1960s, we had the exact same things. You had these nationwide riots. Generally, their demand was money. They the the rioters wanted to get paid one way or the other.

And then that, you know, sort of created this race hustling industry in every major city in America. And that was the same deal, right? They were burning down their own neighborhoods. It continued in the 1990s. We had a bunch of NAFTA and WTO protests where they got really violent. They would burn out banks. You can go all the way back to the union movement, really, in the 1890s, 1900s. My wife's grandfather was a policeman in West Virginia, and he was literally wounded by union rioters who were shooting at police. And throughout the deal was the same, which is that they use violence to intimidate companies and then the companies become woke. The companies fund or at least they fail to fight against, you know, this sort of state takeover. And then the state takes a portion of that and it pays the protesters or the rioters. So this game has been going on a long time. I think what's exciting about it is that we have identified it.

Right. We knew that the house was falling down and we didn't know why. And now we found the termites. Now we understand exactly what what what they're doing. Now, in the short term, they're trying to block them with these district judges, and that's probably going to get to the Supreme Court. But the long run, sort of the big picture here, which I think is really great news, is that we don't actually have a significant radical left movement in this country. It is entirely astroturfed. The, you know, cutting off USAID money, it hasn't hit yet, because remember, these guys have a lot of money in the bank. Those district judges have been forcing some of the payments through. So we haven't seen the whole thing get fully defunded yet. But it's sort of like we can see the light at the end of the tunnel now. We know exactly who's causing the problem. They're not a significant part of the population. And I

think if you cut off those power bases, first of all, the radical left, the sort of, you know, communist revolution, permanent revolution vanishes. And point two, if you very specifically focus on that corporate intimidation, I think even companies don't actually support any of this stuff. You know, traditionally in America, big companies need to keep their mouth shut on topics that have nothing to do with it. Like McDonald's should not have an abortion or an opinion on abortion. It's not worth it, right? You're going to alienate half the country either way. Why would McDonald's possibly open their mouth on abortion? Why would Disney open their mouth on, you know, transgender stuff. And this all got intimidated. This got pushed on partly by the violence,

partly by proxy shareholders, which is where you have organizations on Wall Street who vote your 401k shares to basically control these companies. There's all these little mechanisms that have been operating under the shadows to create the illusion that there's this mass movement in the country towards this communist revolution. And we saw that during COVID, right? So during the BLM riots, for example. They were explicitly communist. They were, of course, violent. They were burning down black neighborhoods above all. So these were terrible ideas. That's right. And, you know, historically, various surveys of Fortune 500 CEOs, about 60 or 70 percent of them are Republican, yet not one single CEO, forget endorsing Trump, not one single CEO even criticized BLM.

So statistically, 70 percent plus disagreed with BLM. Why do they keep their mouth shut? And that's the reason. It's an intimidation racket. They would have gotten their employees beat up. They would have gotten their headquarters burned down. The Soros prosecutors in somewhere like New York would not have done anything about it. The rioters know this. People who fund the rioters know this. So there have been no consequences to it. meanwhile you would have gotten on the wrong side of the deep state regulators so these you know if you're a bank or a media company there's number of licenses you need and if those licenses are revoked you are out of business right you are trillions trillions vanished overnight so you put it together and these guys have to be this way right when people complain about disney disney has to do this they're in a hostage situation now of course they bear blame you know uh somebody could stood up and grown a spine. There were a few CEOs that did, generally

private companies, not publicly listed. But the point is that if we can cut off that intimidation, industrial complex, I think that, you know, it's like what looks like this massive danger on the left, I think, isn't actually there. The whole thing evaporates. And the key is, yeah, cutting off the money and the control from government. 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

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and highlight the corrupt and federal government is only one part of solving this issue because going back to like the tesla riots of today it is really a re-emergence of the weather underground of the 60s and 70s and yuri bezmanoff warned us like right around that time that you're going to have um sort of ideological subversion through the university system that's what many people need to know the history of the weather underground the people involved and where they ended up Because a lot of them ended up in the university system where a lot of this ideology that introduces malware into people's brains and makes them more susceptible to getting paid to go to these protests starts at the university. So you have this federal government issue, you have this private sector intimidation issue, and then you have this university issue. And it all is oiled by easy money.

And I think that is when you get to the core of the problem, the ability for all this stuff to get funded at the end of the day, whether it's at the federal government via just overtly stealing money from taxpayers and funding USAID at the public company level using shareholder proxy votes to push certain policies on publicly traded companies. And then in the university system where you sort of the breeding ground for all these ideologies, I think we need to really thread the needle of painting that full picture, highlighting that the money printer really enables all of these things. And you simply need to take the ability to print money away from these people. I saw you were tweeting about it this morning, the university endowment system, which which funds a lot of this as well. Yeah. So universities get about 200 billion a year, 220 from the federal government. they're sitting on about $1 trillion in endowment, which is quite a lot of money. And, you know, what happened there, I mean, fundamentally, they've spent a long time building the universities as effectively the state religion. They are the apologists,

what Murray Rothbard called the intellectual bodyguards of the state. So they're state funded, and their job is to justify state action. And you see this in Congress, right? You'll see, for example uh take trans issues they will cite academic studies proving that or allegedly proving that you know if people cut off their genitals then they're less likely to commit suicide which is which seems hard to believe but there you go you've got the academic studies for it and the studies are paid for right so if you are in gender studies and you have a divergent point of view you're not going to get funding if you don't get funding a university is going to fire you you're to be an adjunct hell where, you know, you you you have like a regular job. You're more or less

a public school teacher. So they won't do that. They're not dummies. And, you know, you see this in global warming. You see it in every major left wing issue where you've got to toe the party line. And as you say, the money fundamentally comes it comes from government, something like 80 or 90 percent of university economists who deal with macro macro is, you know, unemployment, inflation, GDP, something like 80 or 90 percent of them are paid by the Federal Reserve. So what's going to happen to these people if they say we need to end the Fed? Well, they're not going to say it. They're not that dumb.

And, you know, the kind of rule of thumb in life is people who are corrupt don't think they're corrupt, right? Nobody wants to think they're a bad person. So they'll come up with, no, no, no. Well, you know, the Fed really is important because, look, we had we had instability before the Fed. We had wildcat banking in the 19th century. They come up with all these reasons why they have to convince themselves first.

And so the end result is that the university becomes the state religion. It is very generously funded. As you say, the core problem here is that government has unlimited money, right? It can print as much as it wants. This creates two dynamics. So one of them is that any kind of sort of internal impetus in the government, for example, corruption, it will grow, right? it doesn't have to fight with other departments. So if you take, you know, like in normal times,

if you'd like to spend 200 billion on universities, you have to go to battle with the military guys or the infrastructure guys, or, you know, there are competing priorities in government. But once you can print the money, eh, sure. You know, if you make yourself annoying enough, sure, here's 200 billion, go away, right? It funds everything. Probably the most dangerous thing that it funds, And my favorite metaphor here is that the Federal Reserve is the venture capitalist of crisis, the crisis industrial complex. Whenever you have some sort of, you know, whether it's a war or a respiratory illness that spreads rapidly or global warming, which is kind of a fake war, whenever you have these crises, these can be funded by unlimited money printing. You know, we saw it during COVID where we just sort of do a thought experiment. So during COVID, they shut down roughly half the economy and they substituted in all of these payments.

Right. So in the US, you had PPP in Canada. You literally had a universal basic income where I was at the time. So they substituted in all these payments. Now, if you shut down half the GDP, how can you afford the payments? Ha ha. The magic of money printing. So if you imagine a counterfactual where you did not have a Federal Reserve or Bank of Canada, then some junior bureaucrat were walked in at the beginning of COVID and he would have said okay guys we need to stop the spread and bend the curve so we're going to shut everything down I know it's going to cut tax revenue by half but that's okay we're just going to lay off half of the government workers right he would have been out of there that would have been the end of his career what in fact happened is they had an unlimited money print in the U.S. I think it was seven

trillion at one point increase in M2 the deficit spending was something like six trillion of that so if you have that any crisis that comes along you can essentially float the crisis until it metastasizes that is especially true of war right so the afghan war i think it ended up costing us something like three trillion dollars for what and if you had sat down with the american people early on and said okay look we can do this two ways we can either assassinate eight guys and make sure it doesn't happen again or we can occupy afghanistan for 25 years however long it was but it'll cost you $3 trillion. So let me tally up the numbers for you. Whatever those, I don't know, $30,000 or whatever it is. If you actually said that to the American people here, here's the

deal for the low, low price of 30 grand, we can occupy Afghanistan for 25 years. They would have said, get out of here. Right. But with the fed voters never have to make a choice. And people on the right complain about this all the time. They say, why don't voters care about the, the deficit is $200 billion. Nobody's seen or whatever, 2 trillion. Nobody cares about it. Well, know. They don't care about it because there's a money printer. Everybody knows. Standard voters know. They don't understand what the Fed is. But in the back of their mind, they know that we apparently spend unlimited amount of money and apparently nothing really happens. And this is all because of the Federal Reserve. Get rid of the Federal Reserve and government actually has

to make choices. It either has to go to the people and say, hey, we're going to have to raise your taxes for this next war or the money that goes for the war is going to have to come out of something else. And they're going to actually have to sit there and say, well, now we, the warmongering Democrats have to defund the Department of Education or whatever. Now, of course, they're never going to do that because that's their power base. So the end result is that all of these Ukraine flags disappear, right? The left does not want war because it'll drain resources from their power base. The right doesn't want war because it'll raise taxes.

So, you know, we can go through all of these different topics, whether it's the activist industrial complex, the wars, you know, of course, direct costs like inflation. And at the source of a lot of these is the Federal Reserve, the ability to print unlimited amounts of money, which, of course, the U.S. has more than anybody in the world because of reserve currency status, because of the fact that the U.S. is such a dominant currency in the world. The new administration is pushing hard for government efficiency, but can Elon Musk and Doge fix the dollar? On April 16th, PhD economist Peter St. Onge explains why Bitcoin is the most important tool for government efficiency and how the principles underlying the global shift towards sound money can help you protect and grow your generational wealth. Register now at unchained.com slash TFTC. That's unchained.com slash TFTC.

And from nothing ever happens to you can just do things. That's sort of the transition that is happened in the last year and on that note like let's get into like the blocking and tackling of the policy decisions that have been made and that are being floated by the trump administration to begin to peel back the layers of the onion then hopefully remove them from the system do you have any hope that they are actually making material progress or can make enough progress to make a dent in this deficit spending or this problem that has arisen over the course of decades? Yeah. So like one of the running jokes in Bitcoin is that no matter what the problem is, a Bitcoiner parachutes in and says, Bitcoin fixes this. And it's a funny joke because it's true,

right? No matter what the issue is, right? So Bitcoin was born from bank bailouts, and then we had the inflation, and then we had the Canadian truckers, right? Which illustrated that Bitcoin, you need Bitcoin to escape from a totalitarian financial system. That's going to be coming in Europe. They're talking about mobilizing 10 trillion euro of savings of the European people. So whatever it is, Bitcoin fixes it because it turns out that hard money is such an important sort of tool. You can fix all of these social problems with it. Now, for me, doge has kind of gone through that same journey where when doge first came out i looked at it and said okay cool maybe we can maybe we can't reduce government spending significantly but at least we

can you know bend the curve and you know that'll that'll bring down inflation or at least end the biden inflation so that was step one cool we can reduce inflation a little bit uh and then step two was regulation where as he started talking about it and trump also in in interviews was talking about, you know, how exactly do we get rid of government spending? Will we identify which regulations are useless or were never authorized? And then we get rid of the regulation, we get rid of the regulation, we can fire the people. And at that point, I got excited. I said, whoa, whoa, hey, wait, forget about, you know, knocking 0.2% off inflation. This is exciting because if you get rid of deregulation, I mean, deregulation is really like a nuclear bomb. It just wipes out

economic growth. There was a study by Mercatus that every single regulator... Regulation does, not deregulation. Yeah, sorry. So every single regulator wipes out one hundred and thirty eight jobs. I mean, it's absolutely blunt, like mind numbing. So at that point, I got excited. All right. Maybe the real power of Doge here is to identify these regulations and get rid of them lock, stock and barrel, which, of course, is pro liberty. You know, people should be able to run a company the way they want if they cause problems for others. We have a very, very efficient legal system for dealing with that lawsuits tort uh but then then once he started on it you know once he got big balls up in there and we started to see just this industrial scale corruption at that

point i was like yeah no regulations are cool but holy crap the entire left could be defunded like this this beast i've been fighting my entire life maybe the windmill isn't real like you look behind it and all it is is government funding there's actually nobody here there is no opposition So for me, it's been like three stages where each new thing it finds, it's exciting in terms of what kind of changes we can make to the country in terms of the economy, but now in terms of actual freedom. Yeah. And bringing it back to social security, your brother worried about Elon taking a social

security check. And I think that was driven by the interview that Chamath and David Freeberg had with Howard lutnick and i believe the mainstream media took a lot of what he said out of context but as we've learned in the last two days that they went into the social security system and found that during the biden administration they were issuing social security numbers to four million illegal immigrants that were just immediately taking from that program which is like this is actually how you save your social security if and i believe long-term social security is ponzi scheme but we don't have to get into that if we're talking about who's actually stealing from you directly

right now it's not elon and doge yeah i mean it was set up as a ponzi scheme um you can rescue it elon is trying to rescue it by making it sustainable in the sense that it can pay off the people who've paid in uh i mean sooner or later we're gonna have to change over to a system where you allow people to opt out in which case young people would opt out and then you know the system eventually winds up. You've got several tens of trillions that are owed because it was set up as a Ponzi scheme. But the point is that, exactly, Elon is trying to save it. He is trying to make it sustainable enough that it can take care of the low-income people who have paid into it and do deserve their money back by all accounts. But mainstream media, they have a point of view to

sell. And they're really not interested in what the truth is. They're interested in sort of the most extreme negative take they can possibly put on it. And it's an interesting question why they keep up with it. You know, the the like what's in it for them. And you could model it as they're afraid of regulators. So they're sort of instinctively pro-state. They also get benefits from government access. They can sit down with, you know, government representatives. Although, you know, the secretary of commerce is historically he would be interviewing with NBC anyway, because there's like 12 million viewers there. So it's kind of an interesting question, like why is why does the media persist in being so left wing? You know, Fox, in a sense, they they sort

of sucker punched the media because ABC, NBC, CBS, they controlled the entirety of public opinion. Newspapers were like five percent of the discourse. You know, if we go back to the 1980s and Fox News came in and said, hey, wait a minute, half the country is not being served. I'm going to go ahead and cater to them. And then lo and behold, Fox News becomes, you know, bigger than certainly on cable, bigger than anybody else. They haven't been able to get a terrestrial license. But that that that sort of showed the path. Right. Like, in other words, if the media has gotten together and sort of colluded to exclude half the country from the discussion, it's really, really easy to make money. You just take the other point of view.

that's what i do that's why it's so easy for me it's not me it's because nobody else is doing this and i'm constantly sitting here like what's wrong with you people there's obviously people you know who want to hear uh you know the other perspective and yet they never take it so you know maybe it's lock-in like once you're left wing long enough your audience is now left wing and so you're sort of stuck uh there's this concept i really like it's called local peaks from evolution right which is the idea that like a mosquito is really good at being a mosquito but if a mosquito had half a brain it would look around and be like you know what though humans really have it good man you know they eat whenever they want they you know they can watch tv and watch the game uh and so

a mosquito might try to evolve a new human but of course from current mosquito hood towards humanity it would have to become a less perfect mosquito on the way it'd have to get fatter and have a bigger brain. It wouldn't be able to fly. So it can't do that, right? It's stuck on this local peak. Even though it sees that there's a taller mountain, it cannot go into the valley and go up that mountain because it would die. Natural selection would wipe it out. And so in that sense, it's possible that this legacy media, which is almost bizarre the extent to which they're trapped in this anti-Trump narrative. They can see half the country is pro-Trump. Like if CBS woke up and said, hey, you know what? Screw it. I'm just going to go pro-Trump. They would pick

up twice the share of the other two you know because the other two would be splitting half the country cba and yet they don't do this and maybe that's why maybe they you know maybe they are corrupt maybe the payments are much bigger uh than we've seen so far maybe there's some economic or some financial reason why media is staying so biased yeah they're getting out competed though individuals like yourself shows like this many others they're yeah very obviously falling to the wayside of at least the younger generations i don't know anybody in my age cohort who watches cnn msnbc fox news even for that matter um it's uh it's going to be a process it's going to take time for that demo to age out and for uh our generations to to come in

to be like the the meaningful voting block of of the country which i think that transition already started in earnest but it is crazy and like we were saying before we hit record there it is a real shame that the media introduces this malware into the people that they've they still have captured because before we hit record you're saying it's literally the best time to be alive in human history and there's no reason to be out there burning teslas and acting like the world is coming to an end because we have an administration that seems pretty committed to reducing the size of the federal government and its effect on the american people um there's so much to be optimistic about and that's if anybody out there who is for some reason or another

turned off cnn and joined this show there's there's so much winning ahead of us if you just embrace it. Yeah, you're absolutely right. This really is the golden age. If you look back at any period in history, the ability of dissidents to communicate, to organize, the ability to change the world, the mere fact that Trump won two times, he ran against the entire establishment. It is very, very rare in history that you have a system where you can actually achieve that without massive bloodshed. I think that people do need to take a step back. Things are incredible. The only way that we lose is if we lose hope.

And, you know, even I know that a lot of your listeners are going to be from Canada or Europe, places like these. Even in those places, we're seeing it. Yes, the sort of deep state is fighting back. In some ways, the European deep state is even worse than it is in the U.S. They're doing things like canceling elections. They jailed the main opposition in France. This is not Moldova. This is France.

They're becoming authoritarian very quickly. But the reason they're becoming authoritarian is because they know that they're slipping. And we saw this even here in the U.S. So I think two events happened in 2016, which were Brexit and Trump's first win. They weren't prepared for Trump. They didn't think he would win. They were laughing at him. So they didn't really have all of their defenses up. They regarded that as a sucker punch. But that's really when we started to see the censorship industrial complex come out. I think Alex Jones was one of the first. Alex and Milo were, you know, sort of the first generation of people who were censored.

And that, I think, really came out as a reaction to Trump and Brexit, where the establishment worldwide, and it is kind of this global cabal, they felt like, you know, for generations, they assumed they were winning, that time was on their side, that they could just sit back, cash the checks, and let the long march through the institutions take over the universities, the K-12, indoctrinate the next generation. They thought time was on their side. When they looked at Trump and Brexit, they thought, whoa, hey, we're in danger. We're not winning. Something's gone wrong. I think that's what led to COVID. You know, I think that was their opportunity where they sort of launched the revolution too early. Like they were they were kicking back. They were letting people be brainwashed generation by generation. And Trump and Brexit planted in their minds that, hey, wait a minute, time might not be on our side. Maybe we have to go ahead and cash in our chips because we're starting to lose. and then covid came and that was an opportunity it was pretty crappy opportunity because it was fundamentally you know the the death rate on covid was twice that of the flu as across the board and i was in canada at the time the average covid death was 82 which is higher than the average death of a canadian so that implies that covid makes you live four years longer the whole time i mean strictly speaking so like it was a terrible you know sort of revolution to hang your head on

But I think that's what drove them to do it is because they felt like they were losing. What's fascinating about Trump, too, now is that they weren't caught off guard. Right. They 100 percent knew that this was coming. They knew what Trump was going to do. They were fully prepared during covid. They had sort of issued very strict marching orders on every organization in society. Right. There was nobody from like the National Association of Actuaries on down. There was no sort of unpolitical organization that was pro-Trump. No major one. Only like, you know, sort of scattered politicized one. So they had done their whole of society, you know, effort against Trump and holy crap, it didn't work. So I think that at this point, you're reading a lot of stories from the left sort of worried that they're that they're losing, that they've lost touch. They think that maybe if they don't talk about tranny so much, they're going to fix it.

You know, and then, of course, the activists are, you know, bomb throwing angry over the fact that they're even having that discussion. But I think that really the left is in crisis right now. Part of it is the fact that Trump won twice. You know, the second time really seals the deal. like the first time she cheated on you because you know she didn't really know if you guys were exclusive the second time okay that's a problem uh so part of it's that and then part of it i think is just structural that they can see that they're losing the funding uh now that we've identified that threat even if district judges keep some of it it's going to be much much harder

for them to keep that pipeline flowing and then of course the third part we were talking about earlier media right so the fact that gen x is replacing boomers funeral by funeral it's a bit maudlin. Gen X is the Trump base. They are hardcore right wing. You know, I grew up in the 80s. So I am I'm exactly in the center of that. And the reason, of course, was because the 1970s were hell. And then we saw the 80s and, you know, the small government, relative small government run Reagan, sort of free markets, the optimism, the morning in America. You know, the 80s were like just this this high-tech paradise we had max headroom and you know you i don't know you look at like the video for aha um what's that song take on me a take on me and yeah it's all this high

tech with this with you know with the cars and you got the japanese robots it was a very very optimistic time compared to the 70s where you know you watch movies from the 70s and it's all like everybody's just dying you know like everybody's insane they're dying it's just dystopia everybody's sick and diseased and so anyway we're formed by that we are replacing boomers gen x very much you know we get our news from social media we get it from podcasts we get it from alternative sources on those sources the left not only do they not dominate many cases they've just completely dropped out like the left-wing podcasts i mean there's a couple of them uh the ones that do relatively well, not even explicitly political, but like call her daddy. They're very, very weak

in that space. And if you compare that to the absolute dominance they have in TV and newspapers, the bottom line is time is now on our side. And it's very exciting for us, but it's very, very scary for them. They're losing the money. They're losing the influence. They're losing the ability to shape voters. The next, the next one that I think we really have to go at is education, right? So the K to 12 indoctrination system, because really most of my life, the dynamics politically have been that kids come out of K to 12 as communists, just stamped out by the thousands. And then one by one, we have to like share Ron Paul memes and like try to try to slowly, slowly pull them out of there. If you can return control of education to parents,

it can still be a public school, but it's got to be radically decentralized so that parents actually have control over it. Parents choose the curriculum. Parents decide whether there's, you know, trans, you know, whatever in there, all the social issues. If you get that back, then at that point, I am extremely optimistic. Because remember, for all of the handicaps that we've had, you know, if you go back to, say, 1945 or to FDR, because FDR really sort of imposed this deep state, totalitarian bureaucracy, and with censorship, of course, which neutered the mass media. If we go back from then until, let's say, the beginning of the internet, so what's that, about 60 years, we had every disadvantage, right? Massive amounts of money funding the left,

total control over the media, total control over education. And yet, we didn't quite fight them to a standstill but pretty close like over those 60 years things did not get that bad that fast considering that they had every card in the deck it's pretty amazing we were still winning like 40 percent of the time so you know with a two and a three you know uh we were winning against full houses so now that we are much closer to even i think arguably we're we're pretty close to even especially for like gen z right now uh which is you know that's been a big surprise out of this recent election is that gen z is arguably more right wing than gen x was at their age uh which is freaking them out so if we could fight them to near standstill with 60 years of

crap hands i am very very excited for what's coming next yeah what does that say about the natural inclination of the human spirit it's again going up your hands tied behind your back because they had this money printer and these avenues set up to funnel the money to the people to get the message out there and despite all of that we didn't end quite in a soviet style communist hellhole we're on our way there didn't get there though yeah there's a line from i think it's john stewart milley says one man with convictions can defeat 100 with only interests And I think that's what happened is that we thought that these guys were had conviction. We thought they actually believed it.

There's no doubt weirdos who believe it, right? There's like 21-year-olds who, you know, are high on meth and bomb police stations, sure. But they're not the influential ones, right? The influential ones who determine the movement, they only have interests and they simply don't put out the effort that people do who feel passionately about this. So, you know, if you look at people like Scott Presler, right, he started out cleaning up, you know, trash dumps in Baltimore. And then he pretty close to single handedly swung Pennsylvania, which, you know, was a huge part in swinging the election. These are people who

are deeply, deeply committed. I think you and I are kind of in the media space and we talk to people all the time. Think of all the people you've interviewed, right? What percent of them were shills were, you know, just like corporate, you know, like saying it because they're paid to Like like zero. Right. I mean, people are so passionate on our side, on the side of liberty, on individual rights, especially on Bitcoin, of course. So, you know, I think that's why we could fight them to a near standstill, even when they had all the cards. And at this point, I almost feel sorry for them. I think they're going to get completely obliterated in the next 10 years. well and that's another question i wanted to ask do you worry about the right coming into power maybe getting an advantage and being overly vindictive to the point where they overcorrect

we overcorrect i guess because i would consider myself i don't worry about it um i know that the base is really pissed off uh they want a lot of people in prison uh broadly speaking the calls for a person that i've seen deserve it so i think i think at the moment um we're we're too low on the vindictive score because you know if you look at covid the authors of that whole thing right the totalitarian lockdowns you could not go to church and that was the first time that had occurred since the peace of westphalia all right you would have in any previous generation you would have had a lot of kinetic reaction to forbidding people to literally go to as shocking. It was pure totalitarianism. And nobody did time for that. It's like the 2008, you know, bank bailouts,

world ending catastrophe, my God, we all got to pull together. And you know, everybody's got to give a little and suffer a little. Nobody, nobody got punished for it. And both of them were 100% man-made. So, I mean, to be honest, I think that, you know, Bondi and Patel, they can only go, we do have a lot of legal checks and balances. They have to take things slow because they have to build cases. If you build the case wrong, then the way our system works, they throw it out. So, you know, I think if anything, they're much, much less constrained than our base wants. And personally, I think they're much less constrained than should be happening. If you look at the FDA officials for example who were uh dictating vaccines when they were literally profiting

from the alternative medicines uh i mean that's that's absolute corruption uh enron did 25 years for that uh so i think we should see a lot more of it agreed i don't want a fed post on air but uh i think i think the particularly kovid was very traumatizing and radicalizing for for for much of the country and the people that orchestrated that that response and that totalitarianism that existed over those years uh i don't think justice has been served anywhere near the the amount of justice that should be served has been um we'll see time will tell and i think covid and the bank bailouts um i think they're similar in terms of they have such a radicalizing impact. Like anybody who lived through COVID is never, ever going to forget that. Uh, you know,

they, I mean, what we were about a week away from, I worked for a large company, Heritage Foundation, and you know, I was a week away from, uh, losing my job because I wasn't vaxxed and Heritage Foundation actually sued specifically their lawsuit stopped that vaccine mandate. Uh, we forget that. That was in early, what was it? Oh, 22. So they literally stopped it. They did not want to fire me, but they would have had to. At which point, I can't work at Walmart, you know, this large company. I mean, they were literally trying to starve us to death. I think none of us will ever forget that. I think that there were a lot of Americans who were kind of in the center where they were sort of skeptical of government. Everybody knew government is kind of corrupt.

This isn't really good at the stuff it does. Going to DMV is a pain in the butt. But they didn't necessarily understand like they had never really seen the killer app like what is what is the killer case for why you cannot have a big government and i think covid just showed that right that that uh sort of blackpilled millions of people and once you see that right once you realize that a big government is literally going to force your kids to take experimental vaccines and throw you in jail if you protest and try to start you that once you see that you can't unsee that you see that the entire rest of your life so this is one more reason i'm excited for the future gen z was watching man like my kids are uh 14 and 16 they saw all that that was pretty

shocking they're never ever gonna forget that for the rest of their life no especially the kids who were juniors seniors in high school that weren't able to enjoy the last couple years of of their youth in peace instead we're forced to go to class on zoom wearing a mask that it would be incredibly radicalizing and so with this in mind shifting gears a little bit towards bitcoin obviously the administration has been very um i don't want to say accommodative but uh less uh less combative less combative with our industry um than the biden administration it seems like we are not only in a period of time where the regulatory backdrop is much more relaxed and people that i work with on an everyday basis feel comfortable building products that that um

only a year ago they were asking questions like am i going to get shut down for doing this a year a year from now if this if this continues but bitcoin is also becoming a strategic asset for the federal government the treasury specifically and there have been many conversations about the executive order that trump signed a few weeks ago separating bitcoin from crypto saying we're going to keep all the bitcoin all the crypto we'll manage the crypto portfolio how we see fit probably selling them off opportunistically as it goes when it comes of bitcoin we want to accumulate more and that is the big question right now do you think the federal government is going to accumulate more bitcoin is it advantageous for them to do so um

and how do you think is the best way to go about it yeah so my sense of it this is this is purely intuitive i have no proof but my sense of it is that trump is not so much a dedicated bitcoiner as he feels that he owes Bitcoiners. He does this across the board. If he feels like you helped him, he helps you. And, you know, this is very confusing, I think, to most voters who are used to seeing Washington politicians who don't pay you back. But Trump feels like he owes Bitcoiners.

We helped him. And so I think that's where the regulatory, the strategic Bitcoin reserve. of. So point being, I don't necessarily think his heart is in it in the sense that he's going to look for opportunities to expand these. I think his heart is in it in the sense that he feels like he owes us and he must take care of us. It's very, very important to this administration. They have people who have like a long list of promises Trump makes. And Trump makes a lot of promises. You think all the stuff he talks about, right? We're going to get Greenland. We're going to, I mean, just there's a lot of promises. And he's got people who keep lists of these and they want

to put checkboxes on them. It's very, very important to him. So I think that we're safe in terms of he's not going to turn on us. But I don't think that he's necessarily going to look for novel opportunities to build up Bitcoin reserves. I think so, for example, at one point, they had floated putting some tariff revenue in the Bitcoin reserve. It'd be nice if he did. I imagine he's just going to book that as regular spending and maybe use it for mass deportations on the wall because Congress is probably going to foot drag. So I don't see him pushing a lot on the strategic Bitcoin reserve. He'll probably continue amassing whatever the federal government seizes, which often seizes them legitimately from scammers and things like this, just like it seizes

cash. But having said, I think that really more than the Bitcoin strategic reserve, that's a nice vote of confidence. But I think in terms of the future of Bitcoin, the regulatory stuff is much, much more important. Right. If you look at so like 20 years ago when marijuana was completely illegal, the average marijuana dealer. OK, so kind of take a snapshot of what he looked like and now talk about like the average vintner running a vineyard in California. Right. Very, very different kinds of people. Why? Because one of those industries is at regulatory risk. There's legal risks involved in it. The other one is not. And so I think that, you know, that started with the ETFs. The ETFs had this sort of guardrail on them. They weren't

quite all the way. And to be fair, that was under Biden. But now that, you know, Trump has both taken out regulatory risks and, you know, that's something that I expect to continue. I'm actually going to be on a panel next week with Hester Paris on the, you know, Bitcoin, the pro Bitcoin member of the SEC talking about some of these. But I think that that deregulation is going to continue. As it does, I think the most exciting part is that increasing amounts of our financial system, the banking system, start to shift over to Bitcoin. So it becomes less politically risky, less regulatory risky for banks to provide Bitcoin accounts. There are millions of Americans who want Bitcoin accounts. I know, hold your own keys, but in terms of practicality, you know, a world where

rather than people parking assets in their Schwab account or 401k, where they are parking it in Bitcoin, even if it's custodial at somebody like Unchained, I think that that is a much, much better world. And it spreads uptake of Bitcoin so much that I think that that actually ends up having a much bigger impact on price. So if we look at gold, for example, so gold, even to this day, the market cap on gold, it's been going up, but the market cap on gold is, I don't know, six or so times that of Bitcoin. I think if you sort of zoom out and ask why do either of these assets have value, and for me as an economist, anyway, the reason is because they're shadow replacements for fiat currency. And, you know, if that day comes that the US dollar

collapses in the hyperinflation, it doesn't look likely now. But, you know, remember, we were 2% away from President Kamala. If that day comes, then people go, what's the most likely asset that people go to instead? And historically, gold, of course, is the top contender. I would argue that Bitcoin is technologically much superior to gold, the transaction costs, the speed, the security, so on. If you want to move like a billion gold, a billion dollars worth of gold, I mean, it'll take you like three months and it'll take you several million dollars. You got to more or less create like an LLC fully staffed to move the gold. It's insane how expensive, how difficult it is to actually work with gold in a financial system that's connected to the internet. So I think that

Bitcoin shouldn't be one sixth the price of gold. It should be probably two or three times the market cap of gold. So that right there implies what, you know, 10x or so increase, which gets us close to a million. So I think that that uptake, you know, has been the main thing that's been crippling that that's made it hard for Bitcoin to catch up to gold. I think that's going to be the biggest driver in the next couple of years, the deregulation. And then how does the existing banking industry respond to that and open up to Bitcoin? But how do new companies come into the space and make it easier, more attractive, less risky for normies to hold Bitcoin? yeah i agree the strategic bitcoin reserve isn't nice to have that we have it adding to that isn't

even better to have and i thought the idea that the bitcoin policy institute put out yesterday about bit bonds that's interesting um if you're thinking long term if you're thinking about a creative way to manage the debt situation but everything we know from dc's things are hard to pass uh it's hard to work these types of things through the proper channels to actually get them into law and so i'm completely with you like the private market solving a lot of these problems and when you think of the immense amount of debt that exists in private markets whether that's single family home commercial real estate just corporate bonds all that that needs to be essentially re-collateralized that's the i'm sure anybody is listening to this right now it's like

i'm already at it again but i'm at it again because i think this is the real way that you manufacture a long-term soft landing the economy is that you open up the ability for banks and other financial services companies to to play with bitcoin first it's custody offer buy sell to the customers but then introducing bitcoin as this collateral asset in credit markets to begin to allow a lot of the the assets that are being underwritten for these loans to introduce bitcoin as an equity part of it so you think of the monetary premium that exists in real estate alone i read a newsletter about it last night that went out this morning it is immense your single family home market in the united states is 49.6 trillion dollars a lot of which a lot of that

value is earmarked essentially as monetary premium that people are stuffing value into houses as a savings vehicle that value arguably is much better suited sitting in bitcoin which is a better long-term store value digital liquid fungible divisible um that cannot be debased and i can hear people screeching too well the banking system's coming to take over bitcoin It's like, no, you mentioned Unchained earlier. Unchained's collaborative custody model, that could easily become a standard where the market could demand, hey, if you're going to be holding Bitcoin for me, I'd prefer it to be in a multi-sig wallet. Maybe it's multi-institutional.

If you would allow me, I would prefer to be able to have a key in the quorum so that I can audit the address to make sure you're not re-hypothecating. You can begin to squint and see the Bitcoinization of finance is how I like to frame it. A lot of people are saying the financialization of Bitcoin, but I think the correct framing is the Bitcoinization of finance, just introducing this technology and this collateral asset into the banking system to slowly but surely recollateralize the credit markets with better collateral in the form of Bitcoin. Yeah. And it sort of gives you a shortcut to full reserve banking, right?

So full reserve is where the bank actually has the assets that it claims to have, right? it's never going to need a bailout. And organizations like Unchained, Caitlin Long, of course, was trying to stand up a four reserve bank out in Wyoming. These are now, I think, the regulatory climate is much better for these. And when we talk about the Fed, the Fed creates something like a quarter of inflation through money printing. But the other three quarters of inflation is created by commercial banks who take that base money and pyramid on it. essentially you deposit your money there they set aside whatever five ten percent of it and then they lend the rest on well now it's 1.9 dollars right and then becomes 2.8 dollars and so on right

so it filters through the system so most of inflation is actually coming from fractional reserve banking and that inflation then gives us business cycles it gives us permanent inflation it gives us the boom bust the boom bust is interesting because every bust historically In other words, every recession tends to give us this big growth in government. There's a book by Bob Higgs called Crisis and Leviathan that talks about these. So whether it was the Great Depression, whether it was the 1970s, every episode of growth in government and erosion and freedoms comes from one of these boom bust growths fueled by inflation.

So I think that one of the most significant effects of Bitcoin is the fact that it doesn't affect or it doesn't attack reserve uh fractional reserve banking head-on it just kind of goes around it right this is the frederick hayek just just kind of sneak right around it and poof somebody like unchained is a full reserve bank you park your money there and just as grandma thinks the money is actually there effectively it's not because it's ones and zeros but it's effectively there as opposed to if grandma puts her money in that nice safe bank down the street that bank actually lent it out to argentinian hedge funds like literally not a joke the money is not there and then if the hedge funds run into trouble then it's gonna have to go to washington

and try to get a bailout right bitcoin and of course that's why it was created right literally the reason why bitcoin was originally created by satoshi was to head off that uh to implement full reserve banking that chokes off the entire beast not only the federal reserve but the little franchised money printers that the federal reserve sticks into every single bank in america yeah and when you think about practical ways in which to bring this about i think introducing it to these financial products is and these institutions is the only way because you imagine you again going back to that number 49.6 trillion in single-family homes in the united states alone and a lot of people's what they would view to be a predominant portion of the retirement savings sits in that

home so they have this they have this quandrum at their end where it's maybe i like bitcoin but i've got this home and i've really invested a lot into it over the last couple of decades i'm really banking on it being worth significantly more when i go to retire so introducing like dual collateralized products as a bridge product to basically give these people the ability to have a loan that has the house as part of the equity in the loan and bitcoin as part of the equity of the loan and as you pay off your your mortgage you're buying into more of that equity um and you could basically see a scenario which somebody would begin to be like all right as long as bitcoin's going up at the historical kegger or somewhere near there um over the next 10 years

i really don't care about the the equity value of the home as much and so you basically have this ability to deflate the monetary premium that exists in housing into bitcoin by dual collateralizing these yeah because the system that we have today is that so most americans have an enormous amount of equity in their house. I think equity is something like a third of home values taken across the board. There's a lot of people who have literally paid off their house. Now, if you have a lot of equity in your house, if you have $200,000 equity in your house, you're effectively, because you can change that for cash and put it into something else, okay, that $200,000 is effectively cash. And cash, of course, melts away with inflation.

Now, why don't people do that? Because if you sell, you know, if you if you if you cash out the equity and then you put that into something else, well, where are you going to put it? Right. And put it in stocks, which go up and down. This freaks out a lot of people, especially older people who do have home equity. You put in the bonds, which are traditionally thought of as safe. But what we saw over the past couple of years with the banks getting bailouts for their

bond portfolios, bonds are not actually that safe. So a lot of people don't want to take the cash out of their house, which means that in a sense, functionally, they're leaving it in cash because the house is measured in cash. Not because they want to, but because we live in a system where if you take that out and put it into money, that money is then at risk, right? It's either permanently inflated or you have something that has money less, like, you know, S&P ETF or something that is going to fluctuate a lot. And so giving them an option where they can actually take it out, put in the money and the money grows, that is going to be very attractive to people. And as you say, that'll activate a lot of equity.

The reason that matters is that if Bitcoin is running at $2 trillion market cap, and if that kind of activation puts another trillion over into Bitcoin, then poof, price goes up 50%. It can have a huge impact on the price simply because for all we talk about Bitcoin, we are very early, right? The market cap on Bitcoin compared to those sort of fundamentals, you know the probability of replacing fiat which is what gives gold its price anyway uh those are still very very low yeah and if gold is the leading indicator to bitcoin that many people think that it may be uh it's pretty early if if bitcoin has a gold-like move or uh a leverage gold-like move later this year things could get really interesting yeah i think that's exactly it so

So Bitcoin works like levered gold. So normally when you see something happening in gold, it tends to happen much, much stronger in Bitcoin. However, it's also paired. It's like it's mommy is gold and his daddy is .com or maybe the other way around. There's a certain .com aspect to it simply because it's like a new asset, right? People are learning about it. Any asset that has high price movement is going to pick up a growth stock dynamic to

it. uh you know we saw this i cut my teeth in the dot-com era and you had some companies where they would flirt like i remember ktel which if you're if you grew up in the 80s ktel uh they you had like a monthly service where they would send you uh cds okay and um anyway they announced that they were going to open a uh internet store and like the stock just took off it was like amc with the you know it was like a meme stock and it went all over the place and temporarily ktel rather than trading as a you know subscription cd service it was trading like uh an exciting growth stock which meant that back then whenever the market went up ktel went up a lot whenever

the market went down it went down a lot so there's a certain aspect to that in bitcoin simply because it's new it's still spreading uh we evangelize person by person and so it has this sort of dotcom aspect to it. But fundamentally, because it's structured to function like gold, you have a little bit of both. Right. So sometimes they reinforce. So we saw during early covid, for example, and Bitcoin just absolutely exploded in value along with gold. But then sometimes they work on opposites where like right now, for example, stocks are generally down because of fears that tariffs are going to screw up the global supply chains. They're going to hit corporate profits in the u.s uh and so stocks are down and so at the moment bitcoin is is sort of

sideways because like on the one hand it's got it's called the gold move gold has been going up 40 percent uh so far this uh last year uh whereas on the other hand it's got this kind of dot-com element to it where when stocks are down it also goes down yeah it'll be fun to watch we need to touch on tariffs this episode we covered it the last time you were on when they were being floated on the campaign trail i don't think we have enough time to cover them in depth but luckily you were doing a webinar with unchained in a couple weeks right uh yeah april 16th at noon eastern uh it's called uh what is it doge for the dollar can doge fix the dollar i think that's it yes thank you yeah can doge fix the dollar and we're basically hooking it on the idea that so

So Doge is making all these reforms in the federal government with spread freedom and spread prosperity. And, of course, it's not doing a whole lot on the dollar, at least not yet. And so Bitcoin has that built in. Right. There's a number of aspects of Bitcoin that naturally restrain the state. They restrain, of course, inflation, boost growth and the business cycle. There's all these other benefits to them, but very specifically the ways that hard money restricts the growth of the state and returns freedoms to people. very important topic um and it seems like it could be happening in real time it's not counter chickens before they hatch but things look like they're trending in the right direction obviously

not everybody's going to agree with everything that's going on i certainly have my qualms with some things though the warmongering the tremoring of warmongering uh is making me a bit uneasy but i think uh it is also important to show some grace these are massive problems and they are multivariate and there are many of them and on the economic side at least cutting ways cutting fraud out of the federal government and bringing reciprocity to tariffs i think that's one thing that the mainstream media is doing that the broader public and mass disservice around is the the narrative around tariffs and thinking like we're we're just doing this to be bullies when it's like no we're actually just trying to negotiate to get things to even so that the

the american producer um gets their fair shake on on the global in the global markets um and the u.s economy benefits from that so yeah he's trying to do that and i think what's interesting is that trump i think early on everybody expected that it was just gonna be tactical right he was gonna threaten canada canada will get rid of some tariffs and then we'd be able to trade again uh i think that they're sort of surprising people that they they actually want to re-industrialize the country like they actually want to bring things back uh you can do that you know there are countries with very very sort of an assumption runs that americans make too much money so we can't make things because chinese are cheap but there are countries like switzerland for example

has about twice the manufacturing that the u.s does as a share of the economy okay and and wages are very very high in switzerland probably about 50 higher than they are here uh so you absolutely can do this you at some point need congress so you would need to you know lower business taxes you would need to get rid of some of the stupid red tape a lot of the environmental stuff sort of activists bought and paid for the crony regulations which almost all regulations are actually paid for by big business regulate me harder and they do this to restrict trade but anyway if you can get rid of those two things taxes and regulations you can literally bring stuff back here uh chinese companies they don't care whether they manufacture in china they care

whether they make money and if it's more attractive to produce here they will move here you know people forget companies are psychopaths that's sometimes that's annoying but sometimes it's quite good they they they really don't care they don't have any loyalty to anybody uh they will move here so it'll be interesting to see first off if congress pays ball to the point where we can actually make it attractive to manufacture in america uh if so it's going to be a very very good four years for blue collar workers between mass deportations and reindustrialization uh we could literally see a revitalization of the rust belt which i think would be trump would regard that as his greatest promise fulfilled but it'd be fun if it happened yeah and we have a very

recent example to confirm something you just said which is that even the chinese if given the choice will come to make money we see this in bitcoin mining bitcoin china china bitcoin mining bam in 21 yeah the chinese miners were some of the most industrious people i've ever met in my life just coming into contact with them in the mining industry quickly unplugged and relocated their machines all over the world many came to the united states as well and then having worked with chinese entrepreneurs that's their number one thing on the top of their mind is how can i make as much money as possible. Yeah. I used to work in the toy industry for a big Japanese company, Takara, maker of the Transformers. And we compete against the Chinese. And it's not just the wages.

I mean, they are sharp as hell. Americans who dismiss them and say, ah, you know, it's all fake. It's got no, no. Chinese are freaking on the ball. But the beautiful thing is just like that. They don't care whether they make it. They will very happily come here, stand up a factory, hire thousands of americans for decent wages they're in it for the money they're not in it for nationalism yeah peter it's always a pleasure sir thank you it's great to see you marty appreciate being on thank you um that's all we got today freaks peace and love