The Pomp Podcast - #843 Bitcoin's Expansion Around The World w/ Nic Carter

Episode Date: March 1, 2022

Nic Carter is a Partner at Castle Island Ventures. In this conversation, we discuss Bitcoin, Mining, Mexico Senator Encouraging Bitcoin, Russia/Ukraine conflict, and Canada's financial censorship. Nic joined us in the studio as a guest host on "The Best Business Show". To see the video of this episode, head over to the "The Best Business Show: LIVE" Youtube Channel. ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp ======================= Compass Mining is the world's first online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware and hosting. Compass was founded with the goal of making it easy for everyone to mine bitcoin. Visit compassmining.io to start mining bitcoin today! ======================= The world's 2nd largest crypto exchange, OKEx, has dropped the "E" to become OKX, reflecting its evolution from a traditional crypto exchange to a comprehensive, cross-platform crypto services provider. With OKX's decentralized platform and Web3 wallet, MetaX, you have full custody over your crypto. Explore DeFi, NFTs and play-to-earning gaming with the world's most powerful crypto exchange. Visit OKX.com to learn more. =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Nick Carter is a partner at Castle Island Ventures. In this conversation, we talked about Bitcoin, mining, regulation, and market structure. I always enjoy talking to Nick, and I hope you enjoy this episode. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is LMAX Digital, the number one institutional crypto exchange. They offer clients the deepest pool of crypto liquidity on the planet, underscored by 100% uptime track record through volatility spikes. They leverage LMAX Group's liquidity

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All right, let's get into this episode. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right. I want to talk about a couple of different things. First, we're going to go around the world. I think that's the best way to do this today.

uh let's start with positive news and then we'll get into the the darker deeper stuff um mexico there's a senator in mexico who's now saying that uh she's working on um a legislative bill that they're going to put forward uh to make bitcoin legal tender and openly talking about uh making it legal tender exactly like el salvador so el salvador did it here's the playbook oh here in mexico we should do this as well i think we saw south america central american countries uh plenty of them saying like this is interesting and trying to figure this out um we've got uh two quotes uh that we can pull up uh to give you an idea of this so uh you know we need bitcoin to be legal tender if not uh then it's very difficult to like take action or do anything if it's not actually

recognized as legal tender and then she went on to say uh it's clear to me that financial exclusion is one of the public problems a few of us have addressed with alternatives uh this type of technology is allowing us to generate an alternative so that millions of people can be include in the financial system so like this is not a uh what it appears like speculating on price or anything like that it's more so just let's make a legal tender let's get more people in the financial system is this going to be the default like do you think every single country is going to eventually do this i mean this is what we expected to happen after el salvador there would be a wave of more of these uh you know in particular latin american countries that uh maybe are chafing at

the dollar-based financial system. We'll see banks getting turned on to Bitcoin as a settlement network probably sooner than you expect. But yeah, I mean, who knows if this is going to pass in Mexico? I can't tell you. I know the dynamics of their Senate down there. But we're seeing similar statements made by many blind American politicians.

I mean, even Russia, not to get ahead of ourselves, they've done in the last few weeks a favorable pivot in some respects towards Bitcoin. So everyone sees the merit of a neutral settlement network. It's just when is it actually adopted and does each country kind of take its own stance on it? You might need a catalyst, yeah. You might need to be excluded from the established network

or have something go wrong. So should these countries like Mexico, for example, when they go ahead and make a legal tender, should they do the El Salvador playbook of just, hey, let's try to acquire a bunch of Bitcoin with as much money as we can? Well, those are distinct concerns. One is acquiring a hard asset in your foreign exchange reserves

alongside gold, for instance, you might want to do that to hedge the dollar. I think you probably want to acquire an equivalent amount of Bitcoin than your fraction of gold owned so that you're fully hedged. That's sort of a monetary question. The other one is,

do you want to incorporate your financial sector into this neutral settlement network? There's a case we made for both, but one doesn't necessarily imply the other. The other piece of this too, I think, is um we see here in the united states uh lots of politicians i was saying yesterday there's maybe i don't know 20 like important elections you know or like uh battlegrounds if you will uh on uh the midterm elections i think that i've had in almost every single one of those elections one of the

candidates reach out to me or somebody i know and be like hey i'm pro bitcoin i'm pro crypto and uh you know the mayor of new york obviously saying like i'm pro bitcoin but not bitcoin mining it highlights maybe there isn't a complete understanding of like the nuances of this stuff but there is now it feels like a recognition by the politicians like if you're not pro this technology

like you are going to have a hard time with a certain subset of the population totally yeah and on both sides of the partisan divide too we have politicians in congress right now that are progressives that are pro bitcoin you'll be hearing from them soon I'm sure but yeah and all

of the congressional races, it seems to me that at least one of the candidates has a declared position. Some of the races, both candidates are pro-Bitcoin. Crazy. Are they declaring being pro-Bitcoin, you think, because they actually are? Because they know that it might get a new audience, some new voters

to back them a little bit? Because a lot of them don't really do a lot with Bitcoin. They don't hold it, whether that's for regulatory regions or whatever, but some of them just say, yeah, I'm pro-Bitcoin, and then they move on. Yeah, some of it is political hedging, for sure. why not incorporate this new demographic some of it is very sincere

you guys have talked to a lot of these people I've talked to a few of them as well there's a very sincere commitment they'll accept Bitcoin donations they learn the issues the full scope and they generally frame it as a pro-innovation stance like Tom Emmer is pro-Bitcoin

there's definitely people who understand Tom Emmer is one, Warren Davidson, Senator Lummis we can go through and we're going to leave people out So don't take any one candidate that we mentioned or don't mention it as a endorsement or not. But, um, I do think that, uh, it's going to become much harder to identify who actually understands it. Right. And so if you had asked me, uh, I don't know, four months ago or whenever,

when the New York city mayor came out and was like, Oh, I'm going to take, you know, my paychecks in, uh, in Bitcoin, uh, we're going to make it a crypto friendly city, all this stuff. It's like, okay, that all sounds great. And you really only have the talking points to judge them on. well get them on the show and quiz them on the fundamentals so so i wasn't going to go there but yes i'm gonna do a circuit a shot 256 yes like like now uh what i'm realizing is a lot of them are not exposing themselves actually to having the conversations like it's easy to say

the talking points and then kind of back away right and it's like oh okay i scored my points and you know uh i don't want to uh say something uh bad uh but also just the longer time that we have to evaluate them like they eventually will say something where you're like okay they really get it or they don't yeah and um so seeing this stuff in mexico like i don't think that's a u.s specific thing like i do think you're going to see this around the world people are going to start saying like hey i'm going to use my uh sympathetic approach or my understanding of bitcoin cryptocurrencies whatever component of the industry as a way to separate myself from my political candidates and like that's kind of the game theory bitcoin has been talking about for

you know a decade and it's not just political expediency especially abroad where crypto of penetration is higher than it is in the U.S. I think I talked about this on the show last time, too. You want to identify the jurisdictions where there's much higher structural levels of penetration. It's places like Nigeria, India, Vietnam, Southeast Asia, obviously parts of Latin America, certain African countries, Eastern Europe, no question.

All of those are probably ranking above the U.S. in terms of crypto penetration. And so there, it might just be a matter of actual necessity. Here in the U.S., we have sort of the luxury of like, well, maybe Bitcoin's an interesting technology. Let me position myself as pro-Bitcoin. In other countries, it might be a genuine necessity. Yeah, no, I completely agree.

All right, let's switch gears. We're going to talk about Russia and Ukraine. I want to separate out this conversation. First, let's talk about the Russia-Ukraine situation itself, and then we'll talk about how the media is covering it here in the United States. But when it comes to Russia and Ukraine, there's a lot of geopolitical complexity.

I don't understand all of it. I don't think most people understand all of it. But I do think that we have seen, as you mentioned earlier, maybe not a 180, but definitely a move to become much more pro Bitcoin, pro cryptocurrency, pro decentralized technology, censorship resistant technology over the last maybe four months or so from Russia. Is that directly kind of connected to sanctioned threats and all that? or is this just no, as bills got kind of to this point, it happens to be coincidence? It's definitely not a coincidence. I mean, look at the chronologist.

The Russian central bank says, we're anti-Bitcoin, we're going to ban Bitcoin usage. Then they do almost a 180, or rather they get overruled as the exclusion from SWIFT becomes a more material threat. The US is already, I believe, leveling sanctions on certain Russian banks. if Russia invades Ukraine there will likely be a full financial deplatforming

of Russian banks from the financial system how that's going to work I don't know because Russia is a huge trade partner with Europe what happens? the amount of natural gas they're piping into Turkey, Germany, Italy the EU the financial exchange has to occur there I don't know what happens in that situation

but if the US deplatforms Russia from SWIFT that's going to be the last time they're going to get a chance to do sanctions like that because Russia has prepared themselves for that eventuality I believe they built an alternative to Swift I think China built one as well Russia's increased their bilateral trade with China

it's small but growing and Russia has adopted this at the sort of federal level somewhat of a pro-Bitcoin stance they have welcomed Bitcoin mining after a few months ago making noises about being contrary to Bitcoin mining. And the ban that the central bank of Russia

was trying to promote on Bitcoin has been overruled. So this, to me, looks like an energy-rich nation with a lot of stranded energy, of course, where Bitcoin mining already occurs. And a nation facing potential exclusion from the financial system, from the US-dominated financial system, from SWIFT. in a nation that is de-dollarizing.

I mean, if you look at their U.S. treasuries held is declining, they're de-dollarizing in terms of their foreign exchange reserves. They're increasing the amount of gold they hold. So they're actively de-dollarizing. The conditions are perfect for them to embrace Bitcoin at the state level. Now, individual Russians, it might be much more questionable

and difficult in terms of them getting access to Bitcoin. It looks like legally there's going to be barriers to that. but at the state level it looks like their interests are aligned with bitcoin so there's a couple of things uh that i'm going to throw out there and then we can talk about them one russia is 12 percent of global oil production right so huge in terms of uh potentially being cut off from exporting that what is the impacts how does that play out uh what is the impact of oil prices and gasoline etc the second is uh obviously they've been de-dollarizing there's literally articles uh for example uh russia and china partners in de-dollarization and and so this isn't a new idea

they've been doing this uh for some time uh there was um a article uh let's see um in cnn yesterday it said russian banks imported five billion dollars in foreign cash in december so it's not just gold it's not just bitcoin right it's it's very obvious that they're saying hey let's get diversification here in these various currencies um and so that we can we can have that and then uh i think that um uh the other component uh of this is this uh increasing relationship with china and i was talking to a group yesterday and somebody asked me about the sanctions and i posed the question which i said i don't know what the right answer is but if you're russia over the next 10 years who would you rather have you have to pick one or other it's a binary

decision would you rather have the united states as your trade partner or china right and like just from a pure economic consumption standpoint like china has four times more people than us now that isn't the only thing that matters in terms of total people but when you start to unpack some of this like the answer isn't as clear as it used to be right and it feels like then when you layer in uh kind of this dependency on a dollar-based system where sanctions are obviously on the table at all times it's almost like they're playing defense more so than they're playing offense right yeah i mean look we've we've employed sanctions as our primary offensive weapon as a substitute for kinetic warfare in this country for i don't know 20 years now probably financial

sanctions were the first thing we used um you know instead of going to war and okay maybe that was uh you know that saved some american lives but the thing about sanctions is they grow blunt with overuse. It's like a video game where you can only swing your sword so many times before it breaks. And that's what's happening here. Russia has been preparing for this. They knew that sanctions were on the table

and they've been actively preparing themselves for a long period of time. So if we go for the nuclear option, kick them off SWIFT, kick their banks out of the financial system, at least the one we control, that weapon won't work again. At that point they'll have become anti-fragile.

they'll they'll be more resilient and we'll never be able to use it again does this um there's a couple other components here which uh again i don't know the answers i have opinions but let's kind of talk through it so uh one we obviously saw the afghanistan withdrawal happen in august september of last year uh there was a lot of talk at that point of oh this kind of got botched it didn't look so great is did the u.s lose the war in afghanistan therefore will china become much more uh kind of uh offensively postured for something like taiwan etc well actually we're seeing russia be a little bit more aggressive and and kind of posturing it in an offensive way and so like did that play into it at all or is there a change in their viewpoint uh the second

thing is obviously um you know biden uh he tweeted i believe uh when he was uh before he was elected but going into the election basically like vladimir putin won't mess with me he knows i'm tough he doesn't want me to be president he wants uh trump to be president because trump will listen to him or whatever you know now here we find ourselves of like maybe that wasn't true um how much of these like what seemingly were unconnected or unrelated situations that really rely on like who our leadership is or how our military operates in other parts of the world do you think play into these types of situations or is it just like people are pulling at straws and probably doesn't matter. No, what's happening is there is a structural long-term shift of the U.S. going

from being a global hegemon, from projecting power to every corner of the globe, to turning its focus inward. And that's where we are. That's where we find ourselves. We are withdrawing militarily from the rest of the world. And that might work out fine for the U.S., actually. It probably work out badly for everybody else, because we're not going to be protecting those trade routes, for instance. We're not going to have our blue water navy in every nook and cranny of the oceans protecting shipping lanes.

We're not going to be ensuring energy security or food security for the entire globe. We're turning our gaze inwards. We've clearly got our own issues to resolve here domestically. And there's just less of an interest in projecting power abroad. That does mean forsaking former allies. That is what's happening.

That's just me describing the situation, not saying it's good or bad. Yeah. And so we see this in Taiwan. We see this in Eastern Europe. And ultimately, the U.S. is probably going to back down in both places. And we're going to focus inward. We've been under-investing in our military.

We're saddled with debt. We can't really maintain the same level of spending. And yeah, our focus is inward now for better for us. John and I were joking a couple of weeks ago of like, oh, there's talk that the economy is going to slow down, a potential recession, interest rates, all this stuff. like what's the chess move, right? It's like, let's go to war, right? Like just crank up the economic growth, uh, by basically spending on, you know, let's go take over a country. Let's go,

whatever. I don't think anyone, uh, was like, Oh, Russia is going to be the target, right? There's a bunch of other countries that I think people would have put on that list. Uh, is, does that play into it at all of like, we need economic growth. And so like, let's fire up the war engine and, and, uh, at least the threat of it means that we can spend money without people freaking out yeah i mean if you look at uh you know the previous time um government spending as the share of gdp was this high it was in world war ii right but we've entered that level of structurally elevated spending without a war i don't know how we can layer on a war on top of that i don't know if we can afford that frankly the other thing the wars do is they make the

price of oil spike i don't know about you guys but like pumping gas is pretty expensive these days, right? If oil goes high enough, that also kind of pushes us towards a recession because energy is sort of the most fundamental commodity. That means food is more expensive, transport is more expensive, logistics, everything, supply chain. So we can't really actually afford oil to go that much higher. Europe can't afford to have Russia cut off all their gas exports. There's a lot of reasons why war wouldn't make sense here. Not to mention, obviously, to the fact that it's between two nuclear powers. Yeah. So before we talk about more on the gasoline part,

John, what do you think about the whole Russia situation in terms of what appears to be posturing and potential invasion? Like, what do you think the U.S. does? I mean, they're open about their playbook, it sounds like, right? Like, we're going to impose sanctions on you if you go ahead and invade the Ukraine.

It's now coming to fruition that I don't think Putin really cares. I think he's like, we're going to do it if we want to do it. And if not, like he's towed the line, right? He moved troops near the border. Everyone's like, oh, you're not going to invade. It's a training exercise. And then continuously has gone down the line where it looks like he's going to invade.

He has moved troops into the Ukraine with the military. So it really just depends. I think Putin and Russia would love to get off the dollar. They would love to price oil in something other than the U.S. dollar, whether that's Bitcoin, whether that's another currency, whatever it is. is just they would love to get off the dollar because it kind of straps them into, hey, you have to use this and you have to be intertwined with the United States and other foreign countries and allies with the United States. But yeah, I agree with Nick's point is we have a lot of problems on our own soil and going to war with Russia, another massive nuclear

country, that's not good for the U.S. It will increase spending. It will give the U.S. an excuse to kind of raise the debt ceiling again and everything that goes along with war. But no, I don't think we should be going to war with Russia. Unfortunately, we're kind of playing 9-1-1 for the entire world right now. But that is a catalyst of we have a massive military and everyone knows it, right? So traditionally, we've used that military

to kind of flex our muscles around the world. And I don't know if we can continuously do that with how much money we spend on our military every year. I mean, our Pentagon has never passed an audit. We don't even know the location of some buildings, right? planes we left a bunch of stuff in afghanistan um so yeah we'll see how it plays out but it's it's kind of like a gray area what russia is doing right now so here's a crazy thing for you i i couldn't find i couldn't remember if i tweeted it or wrote about it uh in november of 2018 i wrote

this after seeing a uh i think he was speaking at an event and this is vladimir putin openly talking about this he basically said that uh the days of the u.s dollars of global reserve currency are numbered and uh at the conference he basically said what everyone thought he thought right uh and he said we don't have a goal to shift away from the dollar the dollar's moving away from us the volatility of dollar transactions make many economies around the world want to find alternative reserve currencies and create payment systems that are not dependent on the dollar it's not just our problem we see what is going on in the world just look at how the gold reserves of countries are dwindling including those closely allied to the states dollar assets are decreasing

even among the largest holders of dollar assets this is the result of imposing sanctions including connected with the dollar i think this realization will come sooner or later and the world will look for alternative savings and transaction methods and so obviously in 2018 bitcoin wasn't like oh bitcoin's going to be the solution right uh i think there's people who thought hey maybe one day uh but this was noteworthy enough where i was like he's saying it out loud right and that was surprising to me um and so when you start to look at this like that's four years ago three and a half years ago right like they've been thinking about this for a while and they've been preparing for this type of stuff and so i don't think that like we're catching them by surprise right not

remotely and we've also been threatening sanctions on russian banks for years and years and years right since i think probably 2016 when you know the russia scandals were were breaking so they are aware that they're facing imminent exclusion from the dollar system, of course they've been preparing themselves for that. Now they're pretty well positioned to deal with it. They have a low debt to GDP. They have bountiful energy reserves

that the rest of the world needs. They're de-dollarizing. They have tons of gold. I'm not going to say they're ready or they want all their banks to be kicked off of SWIFT and become somewhat cut off from the rest of the world. but they've been aware that this is a possibility and this is a problem with sanctions

sanctions make the dollar network bad they put holes in the dollar network the money is the ultimate network if you want your monetary unit to be ubiquitous and work for everyone you can't put barriers inside of the network but sanctions put political gating factors in terms of who can have access to the world's reserve

so by being so aggressive with sanctions the US is accelerating the move away from the dollars of global reserve that's just a fact even the Europeans have been trying to get off it when we sanctioned Iran the Europeans went and built this instax vehicle so that they could try and

end around the sanctions those are our allies our allies got so fed up with our sanctions regime that they tried to build an alternative, didn't work it'll probably work the next time do they go back to gold or bitcoin? is that what they run to?

if they move away from the dollar? I think they'll have to, well, there's the reserve component and they're going for non-dollar assets, clearly, but there's also the transactional component and I think that's more challenging. It's unclear what they would do, but yeah, they'd have to build some sort of messaging system

for banks to communicate. So another piece of this is how it's being covered and there was obviously this tweet from CBS News that everyone's just laughing at, right? Which says, the US economy has been hit with increased gas prices, inflation, and supply chain issues, all true, due to the Ukraine crisis, not true. And so John went and pulled a bunch of information today. So this is the tweet that everyone obviously is laughing at on the internet. And if we go ahead and we look at gas prices,

obviously it's up, but you can see here on the far right that since the beginning of 2020, it's up right after that drawdown. And then if we go and we look, there's the rsm uh chief economist who basically said you know look war is uh incredibly bad from a human economic uh standpoint but the economic burden is going to fall the hardest in the middle and working class right which i agree with i think most people will agree with if we look at inflation right it's hard to claim that the ukraine crisis is the cause of inflation given that inflation has been above five percent since the middle of 2021 and then if we look at uh i think this again is gasoline prices uh there has been some impact right given kind of the russia ukraine russia and

saudi arabia uh kind of linking up rather than saudi arabia back in the u.s but the impact is like we've gone from like let's call it three dollars and forty cents to like three dollars and fifty cents right like like it's a somewhat immaterial increase when you go all the way back to uh well there's been a dollar fifty increase since the beginning of 2021 right right and so So like, is this just like a media outlet being stupid or like, should we expect more of kind of this like gaslighting and the use of current conflict to explain economic problems at home

going into like a midterm election? Like, how do you think of this? Of course, they want to explain away the fact that there's enormous inflation, the highest generational levels of inflation anyone living has seen. And they want to ascribe it to a single culprit. A few weeks ago, it was corporate greed.

um a few weeks before that it was antitrust price gouging exactly the grocery store so they make three percent profit i mean the corporate greed thing was just so preposterous it's like all right so corporations are super greedy now they were super generous in 2008 they were greedy in the 70s they were less greedy in the early 2000s like come on guys like antitrust oh it's monopolistic uh you know it's concentration of power it's like Come on, these are total pretexts. Well, Mark Zuckerberg obviously is making your food prices go up. Yeah, and it's like Kroger, they're a 4% margin business.

They're engaging in price scouting in the most competitive industry, which is groceries. I mean, it's just crazy stuff. And so now we have a new pretext for inflation domestically or energy crisis, which is preposterous. The reason that energy is expensive in this country, the reason that we're paying the highest energy prices we've paid this winter in decades

is because we've de-emphasized the extraction of hydrocarbons we've made it politically difficult and expensive to extract the core fundamental energy source we need New England, states like Massachusetts they're right next to some of the biggest natural gas deposits on the planet they're importing natural gas from places like Africa

Why are they doing that? Why is that now politically taboo subject? It's just part of the ESG conversation. Is it the environmentalist type argument? It's like, hey, we don't need to do this here, let's go take it from somewhere else, even though it costs more. There is a utopian belief that we can substitute

all hydrocarbons for wind and solar, which isn't possible on this timeline, and you can't do that in full. There is a political rejection of building pipeline infrastructure so that you can transport gas cheaply. The consequence is you have states like Massachusetts burning oil this winter,

which is the worst in terms of carbon intensity, importing gas from abroad even though there's gas right in our backyard because we do things like ban fracking, because we do things like prohibit these pipelines from getting built. That means that we now have an energy crisis brewing here at home. and America is a resource rich nation

there's no reason whatsoever for us to have an energy crisis but we've inserted political gating factors to actually extracting energy that we need and we've tried for this accelerated transition away from hydrocarbons too fast and now we're sort of bearing the brunt of that it's wild to think about how important energy, oil production, natural gas, etc. is in the world

and people who don't pay attention to that stuff are like oh yeah, I get gasoline. That's basically their interaction. It's the gasoline they put in their car or their electric bill, right? But this is probably the most geopolitically important asset or commodity in the world, which- Number one, you know what happens when energy prices get expensive? People starve because fertilizer is made from energy and fertilizer is what allows us to feed human beings, you know, 8 billion humans on the planet, high yields you know relatively scarce arable land so there's a genuine significant human cost to allowing energy prices to skyrocket like we're seeing and the thought process right now

again my uh kind of elementary understanding is uh the united states has gone to saudi arabia russia and many others and said produce more oil we we need to basically in a marketplace where there's an imbalance of supply and demand we need more supply uh coming out of the ground so we can drive these prices down and we can kind of correct the problem. Saudi Arabia and Russia a couple years ago came together and said, you know, basically we're gonna be buddies. Uh, and they've decided they're not going to do that. And that's a pretty big deal because they produce a lot of oil. And so naturally what it does, it puts a strain on us based assets, uh, or other types of allies that we have to be able to get that oil. Uh, but once those two decided they weren't

going to do this, and if you then overlay the whole idea, like maybe we're actually going to prevent Russia from exporting oil, or maybe they just decide to stop exporting oil. It feels like this is not going to be solved anytime soon. And actually, we may see higher prices before we see it correct back lower, right? Absolutely. I mean, the geopolitics of energy are just stunning. So we're now in the position where we're begging OPEC to reduce prices. You know, why the heck would you want to put yourself in that position? We used to be a net energy exporter, right? We to produce all the energy we needed and then some. And then because we de-emphasize the ability

to produce energy domestically, we're now re-dependent on foreign nations abroad. Not only that, we could be exporting plenty of liquefied natural gas to Europe so that they're not dependent on Russia. They're wholly dependent on Russia, Germany in particular. And so they are politically beholden to them because they need gas to heat their homes this winter.

and so we could be alleviating the European political crisis if we just exported more natural gas to Europe which we were totally able to do but the last decade has seen a total de-emphasizing of local energy production and so now we're in this terrible position so let's play a hypothetical situation

and the last thing we'll talk about with Russia 12% of global oil production in the country and they just decide we're not going to sell it in dollars anymore. We're going to price it in Bitcoin. What happens? Are we like literally dropping bombs in Moscow tomorrow? Like what do we do? I think Bitcoiners would become extremely reviled in this country.

More so than we are already. We'd be accused of being Russian stooges probably. I mean, and by the way, we're laughing, but literally online people who are saying, hey, hold on a second and questioning or asking for more thoughtful analysis of the situation. I've already seen people being accused of being Russian assets, et cetera.

I saw a take today saying like Bitcoin facilitates war or encourages war. It's like, what kind of world are these people living in? All right, so if that was to occur, there would obviously be some portion of the political regime in the United States who would say you're holding an asset that they're pricing their assets and their oil in.

We don't like you, fine. what's the geopolitical ramifications? I mean, all the times the U.S. has gone after some dictator militarily in the last 20, 30 years has been because they've tried to price their commodities in something other than U.S. dollars. Whether it's Saddam, whether it's Gaddafi. I always use those two as the example. There's two guys recently who tried to do it and they're dead.

Yeah, by U.S. hands. Yeah, Chavez tried, we didn't succeed there. But yeah, I mean, it's not a coincidence, right? there's no other real explanation for the Iraq war frankly is it fair to compare those three that you just

mentioned with Putin they didn't have the leverage that he has he feels like he has leverage but he also feels well he does have leverage he feels like he has more leverage but also it feels like it's a different type of country

defense mechanism of nuclear weapons It's just a very different scenario. He's more deliberate, and yeah, they are a nuclear nation. They have more nuclear warheads than the U.S. does. We don't really have an ability to interfere with them that much. I mean, we haven't for, you know, what, 70, 80 years now. Do you think it's likely they do this? I don't think so.

I think there's a lot of brinksmanship here, and I think people are addicted to the soap opera, and they just see life through as if it's like an HBO series, or something. Uh, but you know, I didn't, and maybe Putin will extract some, some territorial gains from the Ukraine, but no, I do not think we see full fledged warfare here. I'll put that on the record. Yeah. I tend to agree with you that that that's very hard. Uh, both it's hard to see from a, um, us citizens appetite for that. Right. Just in terms of like the, uh, especially again, there's an election coming up. Right. And so, uh, uh, that feels, um, in the past,

maybe going to war would provide for, uh, an ability to rally and unite citizens and use that as a leverage point for an election. It feels like it would have the opposite effect now. Um, and would almost guarantee that, uh, the, the, um, the current administration would lose control, but also it feels like, uh, Syria is always like one of my favorite ones to point out. Like, are we at war with Syria? Cause we keep dropping bombs over there and killing people and doing all stuff and like by the way there's some bad people right and like so it's not discounting what some people have done etc but like why do we do that why can we do that well it's because like what are they gonna do it's kind of the the response right there's like an american imperialism or

arrogance that comes uh with it i don't think you can do that in russia like if we go and we drop bombs in russia like i i would be worried but yeah you can't not against a nuclear you know regional power like that and a lot of people think this can be like iraq where bush's approval rating skyrocketed 95% after that. No, this is going to be like the Soviet Union invading Afghanistan to try and regain some credibility as the regime was crumbling. That's the equivalent of this. Yeah, I tend to agree.

So I think we see eye to eye. John, do you think there's going to be war? Like actual violent conflict? No, I don't think so. It's on the table for sure, but I think it's going to be a lot of bark, no bite. and if the bite is they're going to annex part of the ukraine a little bit um take some territorial stuff but i don't think they're going to like get off the u.s dollar within the next year yeah um

i think that there's a higher probability of them pricing oil in something other than not necessarily bitcoin but something other than the dollar but what i don't think is going to happen is it's going to be like a uh press a button 100 of all of our oil all in this new currency that we've chosen uh and we're never going to use dollar again i actually think what becomes it's kind of like the el salvador strategy like oh we price in dollars end right it's not either or it's an and type situation and it just normalizes and like to your point about the deliberate nature how do you get mad well it's priced in dollars and rubles yeah you want you know whatever currency bitcoin whatever um but that does feel like that would be another kind

of milestone moment of the geopolitical you know kind of chess match of like i think every political leader around the world knows like that's the thing that the that that when you poke the bear all hell comes down right and we've seen example after example of it and if you really if you really want to take a you know kind of move your chess piece forward like there's what you go into ukraine right uh you stop exporting your oil uh and kind of cause chaos around the world you price your oil in a different currency there's maybe like six or seven things we'd come up with that you could do they're already doing some of them right so like what else is left uh i don't know it's a gradual thing you don't exit um you know a global reserve currency

immediately you can't do that they are very sticky you know the for instance the uk stopped being a global power capable of projecting power and you know after world war one the british pound was a global reserve currency until around the 40s. So the currency is often the last thing that exits stage left after an empire has lost power and control. So it might be the case that the dollar outlasts the U.S. empire, right?

The dollar might be the stickiest thing. But yeah, you can't get rid of it overnight. Before we finish, we've got another 15 minutes or so, I want to make sure to talk about Canada. and uh i think the best way to summarize it is uh we went from zero to a hundred real fast in a place of the world where if you had said you know stack rank the authoritarian dictatorships uh or those likely to become one um canada's i might not even think to put them on the list right like forget where they're right like it's just like like an afterthought in any sort of

violation of democratic ideals or ethos or any of that stuff uh now all of a sudden it's like everyone pointing and being like this is the example of like what to expect in the future what's your read on it i'm shocked by it i'm shocked and scandalized honestly uh this kind of behavior we're seeing from trudeau is the kind of panicky uh you know counter to human rights counter to civil liberties behavior that we see from despots in places like venezuela uh egypt from places with no political legitimacy. I mean, you can get rid of trucks parked in the street without engaging in wholesale financial sanctions

against your own people. It's not that hard to get rid of trucks in the street. You can tow them. That's what they did, right? That quote-unquote emergency ended, right? They cleared the streets. They ended the protest. That's completely within their rights.

But then going 12 steps further and saying, we are going to enact financial sanctions against everyone that participated in this protest in every financial dimension. Banks, brokerages, securities exchanges. We're going to erase you from the financial system. We're going to cut you off from all of that. Every possible conceivable dimension of your financial life.

We're going to do that extra judicially. We're not going to get a court order. We're just going to go ahead and preemptively do that. And then we're also going to target everyone that supported you and retroactively make them effectively a criminal and treat them like some sort of hostile foreign combatant. I mean, what Canada is doing to these truckers, these protesters, is what the U.S. did to Al-Qaeda after 9-11.

It's that level of aggression in terms of financial sanctions. It's something that I would never, never have expected. They're sending tweets from the Coinbase and Kraken CEOs to have them investigated. And you had a funny tweet about you. Canada appears to be determined to become Venezuela. Yeah, I mean, and that's, you know, that might be tough on Venezuela, right?

The part to me that it just caught my, like, I don't know if it was just I hadn't thought about it or like it just all hit me yesterday. I tweeted this thing and I was like, the united states is sanctioning russia china is sanctioning u.s defense contractors for selling uh equipment to taiwan and canada sanctioning his own citizens like sanctions were to your point a tool in your toolbox reserved for enemies of war right and to do it to your own citizens i think just like one people are like wait a minute this is like insane but two is to do it

with almost spite yeah right like like it's one thing if you said hey we're going to uh you know nick you're a bad person because we disagree with you and you're funding uh this protest and that protest uh killed a police officer right and uh even in that situation i think most people would have a problem with you going after the financial assets etc but you could see how it would be easy for them to present a case of like there's money being uh used for funding of a violent situation i mean we've all seen videos like there's you know the the quintessential example is like there's a bouncy house right that the kids are jumping up and down they're handing out flowers to the police officer you know what i mean like it was disruptive for sure but it was not violent i mean you can

always like cherry pick one or two instances but yeah i mean the civil liberties being violated here. Due process, forget about it. Not imposing criminal sanctions on people on an ex-post facto basis, right? Because that's one of the most startling things is when the donations happened to these crowdfunding events. It was not illegal. It wasn't illegal.

And now retroactively, they're going back and saying, because you did this, we are going to criminalize that and target you for financial sanctions. I mean, it's absolutely preposterous. It feels like we're at a nexus of history right now.

It really feels like it. I think a lot of people that were not Bitcoiners woke up over the last week. I really think that. I think they realized, wow, this can happen in the West. And you know, I was poking fun at them a little bit because it's like, okay, so the example of Turkey

didn't compel you. Lebanon didn't compel you. Venezuela didn't compel you. You know, places where financial repression was very explicit and direct and happened in the last couple years. that didn't compel you, but Canada does. It's like, okay, it has to strike close to home. But you know, I guess that's how humans reason, right? You always put more credit and things

happen to close to home. The United States believes Canada is like its little brother, right? Like, like it's like, Oh, like one day Canada wants to be like us, which again, isn't necessarily true, but that's, I think how a lot of Americans have always looked at Canada. It's like, Oh, there are nice North neighbors. And you know, uh, basically they do what we say, they want to be like us and, uh, and we're good. And then this happens and they're like, holy shit this could happen in the united states well bitcoiners woke up to the uh to to bitcoin with inflation at first and now they're seeing the censorship and um the kind of the financial freedom that it gives you over time this has to be the biggest uh uh marketing and awareness moment

for bitcoin in years yeah um and uh i jokingly said yesterday but not really joking justin trudeau's the cmo of bitcoin right now all right percent like i mean he's just literally out here like hey this is why you guys need this and so if you go back a lot of people forget and obviously uh i've seen you talk about uh wiki leaks was one of the early kind of moments of awareness globally and it's actually uh if my memory um serves me correct uh was one of the reasons why satoshi actually walked away correct was because he uh basically said like listen we've kicked the hornet's nest uh i think it was the the terminology used and uh this is too early the infrastructure's not in place i don't want to be the person and the swarm is headed towards us yeah exactly the swarm

is upon us right now let me tell you bitcoiners this is a time to stand up and uh and stick up for for yourselves have you done anything differently after this in terms of taking bitcoin off an exchange move money or like are you doing anything from an individual basis that you're like yeah this is probably uh a good idea even if you don't feel like you personally are in the crosshairs or whatever? I think we'll all be politically exposed here. I think Bitcoiners need to prepare themselves for that. I haven't changed anything.

I did have a moment of introspection where I thought to myself, all right, I have some resources and some ability to change things in the world. Have I done enough to protect the next Canadian trucker? Have I done enough to empower these people to take financial sovereignty? And honestly, the answer I came up with was no.

And I thought to myself, okay, I need to start using my resources to actually empower people who are Bitcoiners, who are facing some sort of tyrannical panopticon surveillance state that's intent on politicizing all money. I don't think I've done enough. So yeah, I had that come to Jesus moment last week. It was a tough realization, honestly. It's one that I think is becoming more real.

And more people are realizing, like, oh, these people are literally going to push the pace of overreach as fast as they can. Yeah, and we have people that I know in the Bitcoin community that I've met, been following them on Twitter for years, literally hung out with them at conferences that are now being considered terrorists

by the country of Canada, officially. They're named in injunctions. And it's like, wow, this got real really quick. I don't know if it's going to happen to us here in the US. We're in the great state of Florida. We're doing good. we're politically you know probably a little more protected but wow this got real really quick yeah uh one of the things that we've seen in canada as well is that a number of crypto

exchanges their ceos were advocating for self-custody um and uh those people are now being looked at for potentially violating sanctions put in place to curb a trucker protest and so uh as a recap canadian police ordered all regulated financial institutions including crypto exchanges, cease trading, freeze assets of designated persons that were involved. There's these 34 wallet addresses that were identified. And so according to reports, what's happened so far is 219 financial products were frozen. 57 entities have disclosures with them. 253 Bitcoin were shared with virtual currency exchangers or addresses. And then there's proactive freezing of the account of a payment processor that had about $3 million. So this is all the stuff that's

already occurred and uh what we're starting to see now is uh we have this tweet from uh brian armstrong which basically says concern to see stuff like this happening in any country especially in an economically free place like canada self-custodial wallets are important and he puts a link to to coinbase now from there we have uh the ontario securities commission which has sent those tweets from brian armstrong and others uh to police because they believe this offered advice on how to evade the sanctions on funds uh and you as john mentioned canada appears to be determined to become venezuela um is this are we literally in a world where saying hey you should put cash in your pocket right like one of the best uh examples that i saw was somebody said

the equivalent of the government trying to tell self-custodial wallets to freeze users assets is like telling louis vuitton find all the louis bags in the world and go in those bags and and freeze the cash don't let anyone spend the cash in the bag like people are like wait what but that's the equivalent in a software standpoint to what's happening here are we now going to criminalize or attack people who are saying you should use a self-custodial wallet like what's going on? Yeah, it's a naked act of aggression against U.S. firms. I mean, Brian Armstrong, I don't believe he's Canadian. I mean, Coinbase is a U.S. firm and the government of Canada is coming in and saying it's criminal to suggest that people take ownership of their own funds,

which has been the default forever. I mean, that's almost unbelievable. And even this framing of custodial, non-custodial, non-custodial is the default. That just means having funds in your own possession. Custodial is the aberration. Non-custodial is just the normal thing. So even the linguistic reframing that's occurring is very sinister. But then literally going after Jesse Powell and Brian Armstrong here is obscene. Honestly, I think it should be treated as an international incident, the fact that Canada is investigating American companies here. they're investigating for saying self custodial wallets are important that's it he just said it's important he didn't say go ahead and get around these sanctions if you go get a wallet like

this is the kind of thing where if it was any other dictator doing this it would be like the international uh community would be condemning them and you know the UN would be passing resolutions saying this is crazy we're uh you know we're officially condemning this behavior You know, if it was, you know, the president of some oil-rich nation, you know, in the Middle East or something that was harassing dissidents like this and doing extrajudicial sanctions on them and harassing foreign companies, it would be universally condemned. Because it's Trudeau, he gets a pass, apparently. I don't think so. I don't think he deserves a pass. I'm taking a stand.

I'm not going to Canada until the situation is resolved. Same. I mean, I didn't have anything there originally to do. You guys have something to do. If anyone's going to invite us, we're not going. Well, I think it was Bukele that said, like, if I was doing this, there would literally be an all-out war. Okay, so let's talk about Bukele for a second. And if we have Bukele, the president of El Salvador, a lecturer in Canada on what it means to, you know, civil liberties.

Yeah, he's had a number of tweets where he essentially is insinuating, if I did. He never actually said, if I did this, you guys would be all over me. Yeah, but that's the point. Yeah, he's basically insinuating that you guys always are pointing and saying, I'm the dictator, I'm the bad person, you know, all this stuff. but like this is way worse and i think that that's part of this which is like again people may not like it like he's got a point he's got the moral high ground here which is the moral high ground yeah which also uh you know look he's playing with fire a little bit right of like again you can keep poking the bear poking canada's one thing i saw he was also

uh you know uh going at the united states he's going at a number of these countries and it's very clear what he's doing, what his strategy is. But it is an incredible inversion that a small country like El Salvador on the fringes of the international community is now taking the moral high ground against Canada, which is just your classic member nation

of all these international organizations. Yeah, it's crazy. He said they're directly threatening journalists with arrests talking about Canada and the Ottawa police. Aren't they the ones lecturing other countries about freedom of the press? yeah so he's had like a number of these where he's which by the way like that is a fair point right it's yeah i mean i i think the like this neoliberal institutional order that you know

canada and the u.s and like un world bank imf like this whole order that we've been promoting since world war ii since brenton woods it has ended right we we in the west don't have the moral high ground if we're going to behave this way towards protesters yeah we have no moral high ground whatsoever um all right my last question on canada uh marty bent was in here yesterday he wrote a uh an exquisite piece on the uh uh canadian nipple crisis have you heard this uh this theory oh yeah i'm quite familiar okay i buy it what you buy it yeah so you think that uh trudeau's mother has a high probability of actually having, I guess, becoming pregnant via Fidel Castro,

not via Justin Trudeau, or I'm sorry, Pierre Trudeau, who is technically. You think Justin Trudeau is the son of Castro? I'm just saying, consult the evidence for yourselves, fellas. Look at the color of the nipples. It's quite telling. Draw your own conclusions, fellas. People yesterday, we brought up the photos.

We did the whole thing, side-by-side comparison. brown nipples confirmed we saw the photos yeah brown pink i mean there's something there and it doesn't look a lot like cash it looks like him he behaves like him and and i gotta say that yesterday people the canadians loved it they were like wow not exactly the conversation that the american uh the americans have but uh uh it i mean listen i i think that uh who your father is doesn't necessarily mean that that's who you genetically are you know uh predisposed to follow from your political uh leanings but it does feel like um your mother who likely had a big part of raising you and is sympathetic to certain views just naturally it shapes she unquestionably

palled around with castro yeah and look you don't inherit the sense of your ancestors but you should probably seek to not behave like fidel castro regardless of who your father is yeah i mean that that would be a that's a good life rule don't become the the modern version um all right we'll finish up with the u.s uh what's your general take right now it feels like there's this executive order that everyone keeps talking about that is likely probably going to come at some point. My guess is that, you know, there's a couple of distractions in the administration of like, you know, Ukraine, Russia, uh, et cetera. Um, it seems like more politicians are coming out in favor of Bitcoin. We've seen, uh, what I think is, um, maybe a little bit

gimmicky at the state level in terms of this legal tender stuff, but still, you know, kind of normalizing it, pushing it forward. Um, we have, uh, Canoco, uh, Phillips, I think it's a pronounce it, uh, now being more public about the fact that they are, uh, having miners go ahead and monetize and gas flaring. It just feels like we're at a point now where this is a thing in the United States. Is that kind of your read? Yeah, the full normalization of Bitcoin

is well underway in the US. I think I talked about this last time when I came on the show. The energy sector is becoming integrated with Bitcoin mining. All of these energy firms, the super majors, are mining Bitcoin directly or indirectly. Whether they admit it is a different thing.

Canoco Phillips, I think it might have even been a leaked slide from one of their decks. I don't even know if they went out and admitted it really. So keep an eye out, right? Keep an eye out. And once it's the largest energy firms in the world that all admit that they're mining Bitcoin, the questions around Bitcoin mining kind of melt away a little bit because it's like, no, I'm a renewable energy firm and Bitcoin is helping me salvage these energy assets or it's helping me bring more renewable assets to market. Those stories are true. It's just a matter of servicing them. So the energy side, not worried

about it. Politically, we see so many candidates coming out and being pro-Bitcoin and demonstrating deep understanding. My guess is probably Congress flips in the midterms, and then we get Republicans on the Financial Services Committee in both the House and the Senate that are explicitly pro-Bitcoin, some of whom have been on this show. So a lot of the legislative losses we've taken, we'll erase them. And yeah, so I think we're seeing a full normalization. The one thing that I'm concerned about is probably stablecoins. The stablecoin discourse is very hostile in this country. There's a faction that wants to promote a CBDC

and wants to regulate away stablecoins, to force them to get banking charters, force them back into the highly regulated banking system. That can't be allowed to happen. We have to push back against that. I think it's a race against time to get the stablecoin sector sufficiently large that we can survive any of those state-level assaults on it.

What are your thoughts on CBDCs? I'm incredibly against them. I've never seen a CBDC proposal from any Western central bank which protects the right to privacy, transactional freedom, transactional autonomy. It actually takes that away. CBDCs are not going to be the digital equivalent of cash in your wallet. They won't give you the free choice of who to transact with, where and when.

The discussions are always around embedding AML, embedding surveillance, embedding control into them. and I think they are one of the most centralizing forces in world history. The great despots of history did not have access to the CBDCs. Can you imagine what they would have done if they'd had them? They would have just unpersoned millions of people at the stroke of a button.

We've seen what governments can do, including nominally liberal democracies up north. We've seen what they can do when they're vindictive and spiteful. If there had been a CBDC in Canada, they wouldn't have had to go through the motions with all these orders and injunctions they would have just turned off everyone's cash

I don't think we can allow CBDCs to happen certainly not in the US it's fascinating because I think in 2018, 2019 I went on television and they asked me if you're the United States what would you do and I said the number one thing the United States should do in terms of increasing the accessibility of the US dollar globally

is they should digitize the currency and make it so that anyone with an internet connection can immediately get dollars in a safe, secure way without having to go to a black market, without having to worry about their local bank confiscating their funds. You know, all these things that I think would be the pro-argument for accessibility on a global basis.

I think as we've seen more and more of the proposals, the pilots, the testing, all this stuff, it's like, dude, there's no positive impact that you're going to tell me now that overrides the nasty stuff and like i actually think the scariest part about it is that we only have our imaginations to fear so like if you said to me like what's the bad personalized inflation rates expiration of money financial censorship you know social credit system like all that we're already like dude we're out these people have all day for decades to think

about what to do they're gonna come up with way worse stuff and you know what's crazy is talking about exporting the dollar globally, giving regular folks access to U.S. bank system assurances, dollars, which everybody wants, especially if you have hyperinflation or currency. Stablecoins accomplish that. Of course.

Talk to any of your portfolio companies, active exchanges globally. What do people want? They want stablecoins. They want to engage in currency substitution and move from the Niger and Naira to dollars. They want to move to dollars. Stablecoins accomplish that.

The private sector accomplished that. CBDCs won't do the same. So if I look, there's $155 billion of stable coins floating around. We've looked, the private sector is normally pretty, they're more efficient and they're quicker and they're smarter about accomplishing these things than the public government. And they give you a product which is fundamentally more private

and respects individual liberty much more so than your public sector alternative to a stable coin. Yeah, I just looked and of the $155, $160 billion of stable coins, 130 of it is just in Tether and USDC, right? So about $80 billion is in Tether and $52 billion or so is in USDC. So it's very obvious people want this stuff. And yeah, I mean, you know, look at there's a Wall Street Journal article about Turks engaging in crypto dollarization.

They were, you know, buying gold and they were buying Tether, right? And a lot of people talk about Tether, like, oh, we don't trust Tether, whatever. If your alternative is holding, because you can hold dollar deposits in the Turkish banking system if you want, but that's just not a safe way to hold dollars, right? Because there's a chance that the equivalent

of the Quartalito occurs and your dollars are forcibly converted back into liras and devalued, right? So if you want genuine property rights associated with your digital dollars, you want a stable coin. And in that case, Tether was what people were going for in turkey and that's probably part of the reason turkey was so hostile on crypto because the lira was being uh de-emphasized uh and and you know people were spontaneously

moving to stablecoin so this stuff is like geopolitically incredibly significant totally overlooked i like to just throw my hands up sometimes it's like the world's gone mad and like we're not going to change anything but i think if there's one thing that we are seeing is there's an entire generation of people who really thought of themselves, let's just call it the Bitcoin community, the crypto community, however you want to label them. They're realizing technology alone

is not going to get this done. We're going to need to drive awareness. We're going to need to put the right candidates into political seats. We're going to need to make sure that elected leaders are educated on these things. We're going to need to build technology. we're going to need to make sure

that various jurisdictions understand there's a global competition underway for assets, individuals, citizenship, where businesses are domiciled, all that stuff. And so there's a light at the end of the tunnel. It's just there's a lot of work to do. Yeah, and I don't actually see this political technology distinction.

The technology is political. Bitcoin is imbued with certain political ideas. so is neutral financial infrastructure obviously I think the ideas are good but when they collide with the real world they have a political impact because the real world is premised on politicized financial infrastructure

fiat standards, constant monetary debasement debt monetization so it is political working on bitcoin or crypto technology that's a political idea but yeah we have now we need to broaden our mandate and our focus because the rest of the world is interested in us now yeah it's crazy how how far this has come yeah this week i mean you know we've been around in sort of bitcoin land for a while now this week has felt like one of the most critical in my entire sort of career in this industry i don't think i have a better way

to put it i literally think uh i've been saying it behind closed doors that um i wasn't into bitcoin when the wiki leak stuff happened so i don't know what that felt like or kind of how people thought about it it feels like the west specifically woke up and was like oh shit and the citizens woke up the politicians woke up like everyone was awoken as to what we were talking about historically around all these problems you know globally they're not just in the developed world or a developing world they're now here in the developing world yeah but how many people actually go out and educate themselves on bitcoin um and actually go buy some i've long said that people you know everyone who's in this uh industry who has any sort of

uh public facing you know under the real name has a friend a friend of a friend a family member somebody comes to them at some point is like explain bitcoin to me and frankly when i probably wasn't as experienced didn't have as much of a kind of knowledge base i would start with like bitcoin as a decentralized digital currency but whatever now somebody asked me about bitcoin i don't even talk about bitcoin i literally just explain the problem right and i explain hey did you know that that money you saved in your bank account two years ago is literally worth less now and like what and like let's just start you know what i mean like the basic understandings of like what money is how it works you know what those issues are once you explain that stuff the next

questions like what's the solution like bitcoin like why and you just say 180 degree difference like okay how do i get something and so it it's you know in some way it's like uh um uh understanding that people have to recognize the problem to get the solution but i think that that's what canada just did like canada just literally just said let's open the kimono let's bring it as close to home as possible and here is you know the financial censorship problem and i think there's a lot of people who just are like, what do you mean that I donated? The truckers is one thing

because it's like, oh, you participated? I think the actual milestone moment was going after the donators. And that felt like the overreach. Ex post facto, right? The ex post facto criminalization plus broad-based financial sanctioning of donors

to a cause. We've seen plenty of crowdsourced donations for protests in the last two years, but this is the first one where you're sanctioning more people than the U.S. sanctioned after 9-11. Right? Crazy.

It's crazy. Before we end, you guys raised a new fund. What type of founders are you guys looking for? And what can we do to help you? Where should we send people on the internet? Castleisland.vc .victorcharlie, that's our website. Same

story as the previous two funds, just bigger, more dry powder, and Seed Stage and Series A. No pre-seed? We're a little too big for that, probably. And crypto financial infrastructure, that's our number one thing. We do all kinds of stuff.

You can see our portfolio on our website. But we're also broadening our focus to decentralized internet infrastructure and applications, which I think is tremendously important, spanning the whole crypto space. Yeah, so we're ready to blast. If you have an idea, DM Nick on Twitter.

DMs are open I just dropped Nick's Twitter account make sure that you follow him you can't miss him he's Nick Cartel GM what is the give us the quick two seconds

why is your name Nick Cartel now people are making fun of me for moving to Miami and like looking Cuban or whatever and someone like made the pun that it's Nick Cartel instead of Nick Carter so gotta recognize a good pun yeah that's pretty good uh did you watch um uh the documentary on uh on the 80s in uh miami um no i gotta learn about the history what is the name of uh huh no um i watched a documentary

called miami vice the other day it's a joke it's not a documentary i know i know hold on uh what is it called uh oh yeah uh i think it's called cocaine cowboys kings of miami right yeah yeah you're right you're right i thought for some reason cocaine cowboys was like an older movie yeah there's two of them so i'm sorry there's two of them there's one in 2006 called cocaine cowboys that's not the one there's a brand new one that just came out so that's why i was confused uh and i guess technically this is all part of one series that this guy's been doing for like 15 years wow but this one is called the kings of miami and uh it's on netflix i mean just you just gotta watch it i think the third one's gonna be called blockchain cowboys

uh i'm not gonna go there so i'll just let billy corbin if you want a co-producer nick cartel will uh we'll be there ready to go all right buddy thank you so much for coming and doing this we uh we had fun thanks so much for listening to today's episode i really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to palmscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three-week time period. Go to palmscryptocourse.com to learn more

and I'll meet you guys for the next episode. Thank you.