The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin & Freedom With Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Episode Date: July 26, 2023

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Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome. First, obviously, I would like to thank Mr. Kennedy for taking the time to speak with our panel. It's an honor to be here with him and, of course, with all of them as well. Most of you probably know each of these guests. I'm joined by Natalie Brunel, the host of Coin Stories, Marty Bent, the founder of TFTC and managing partner at 1031, Robert Breedlove, host of the What Is Money podcast, and Mark Moss from The Mark Moss Show, who are obviously all passionate about both Bitcoin and freedom. Today, we have the very rare opportunity to spend 90 minutes with a presidential candidate who's captured the attention of Bitcoiners around the world and to do it on a platform that allows for open conversation and debate and promotes free speech. Now, guys,

while there's endless questions we could ask, the focus today will be on money, monetary policy, freedom, and of course, Bitcoin's place in all these key issues. Each panelist will have roughly 15 minutes to speak with Mr. Kennedy. I'm first, so let's start from the beginning. Mr. Kennedy, when did you first hear about Bitcoin, and at what point would you say you were orange-pilled? Well, I think I heard of Bitcoin, I don't know, around 2009. I can't even tell you, but I didn't pay that much attention to it. It was kind of a novelty to me. It was something my kids were very interested in.

And they have all kind of are interested in financial issues and considered it very exciting. But I didn't, you know, for me, it was, like I said, just immolality. I had my big revelation and my, you know, it was all a Damascus moment during the trucker strike. We had, my organization, Children's Health Defense, had a journalist embedded with

the truckers across Canada, and we were helping to finance the truckers on their journey, and we were supporting them. These were men and women who were just asking for things that Americans take for granted. The rights to free association, to assemble, to petition their government, to protest peacefully, and to avoid government-mandated medical interventions. And it was exemplary. It was a template for kind of a really beautiful, peaceful protest, political protest. If you see the videos of the truckers, it was like Woodstock. They appointed squadrons to pick up garbage.

They were feeding the poor. They were dancing in the streets. And it was a very racially diverse group of people from all over Canada, every race, creed, color, and religion. And when they got to Ottawa, they were treated as criminals. And this government of Canada, which I think most people like me had considered a role model for Western liberal democracy for, you know, humane, kind-hearted democracy that held freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of movement as sacred, suddenly turned into, morphed into this kind of, this monster and they did something that you know was to me unimaginable which is they use facial recognition and uh and license plate identification and a number of other

technologies to determine the identities of the truckers and then they froze their bank accounts and their credit cards oh the truckers and these people, by the way, who were not peaceful. They had broken no law. They were never accused of breaking a law. They were not charged with any crime. They certainly were not convicted of any crime. And yet the government was able to shut down their bank accounts and their credit cards. And, you know, they could not pay them.

I talked to two truckers, one trucker who was in legal trouble, literally criminal trouble, because he couldn't pay his alimony. They couldn't pay mortgages. They could not pay for food. They couldn't pay for their children's education. And it occurred to me at that point that freedom of transaction was at least as important as freedom of expression. As if the government has the capacity to starve you to death, to take away your shelter, your transportation. They couldn't

buy gas. They couldn't move their trucks, as they couldn't buy diesel with their credit cards. And if the government has the capacity to bankrupt your business, to starve you, shut down your bank accounts, to stop you from seeking food and shelter and caring for your children, it has the ultimate power to turn you into a slave. And at that point, it struck me. And, you know, only I think about a month before that, I had given a speech in Milan and I had been reading about the programmable currencies that they now, the system that they were experimenting with in China, where if people had a lower social credit score, if they were seen on facial recognition, not wearing a mask during a mass day, if they left their home during lockdowns, they were punished.

And they were punished so that their credit cards were programmed so that the credit cards would not work. It would only work, for example, to buy groceries in a grocery store that was in a certain radius of your home. It wouldn't work for anything else. You couldn't buy cash. You couldn't buy a plane ticket. You couldn't buy cash. You couldn't buy a plane ticket. You couldn't move. It was a way of locking down disobedient people and locking down people who practice political dissent.

And I was talking about that in Milan because Italy at that time was pushing a vaccine passport and digital currencies simultaneously. And I pointed out that the vaccine passport, it would have your medical information, but conceivably it could also carry other information about you, including social credit scores. And when combined with digital currencies, that's what they did in China. They made the digital currencies programmable currencies. So I was warning people in Milan and Italy at this very big demonstration that I spoke at that they needed to be wary of those so-called reforms. But I never thought that it would really

happen in Western nations. I think less a month after I made that speech, we saw what happened in Canada. And I want to point out that yesterday, Chase Manhattan Bank suspended the account of Joseph Merkula, of members of his family, of officers of his company, the CFO, the CEO, and others, and members of their families. So they banned not only their business accounts, but they banned their private accounts. And Joseph Merkula, as many of you may know, is a doctor and an osteopath who's very famous in the health and wellness space. He has one of the largest vitamin companies and nutritional supplement companies in the world. And he wrote a book with me, not the Fauci book, but another book,

criticizing the lockdowns and the medical interventions during the pandemic. And Elizabeth Warren publicly demanded that Amazon censor that book, which Amazon then did. So I'm in litigation right at this moment with Elizabeth Warren on that lawsuit. Oh, Dr. Mercola is a known dissenter, and here we have a powerful banking interest that receives all kinds of federal government support, and it's utterly dependent on its relationship with the Fed and with the federal government and with federal government

agencies or its welfare. And here it is shutting down one of its customers for political speech. So we live already in this world. And I think that incident alone should be one that all of us should be terrified about. And it makes the move toward Bitcoin all the more important. I think that your story echoes the sentiment of quite a few people whose stories we heard. And we've obviously heard many stories of the banking industry cutting off both crypto platforms and individuals who are attached to Bitcoin in various ways. So I think that that rings true with quite a lot of people. Now, moving on, you recently shared the idea that you would gradually back the U.S. dollar with a basket of hard assets, including Bitcoin. Can you expand on that concept a bit? Yeah. My proposal is, what I would say is a very modest proposal to make a small number of T-bills backed by a basket of hard assets,

including gold and silver and platinum and Bitcoin. And this is something that my uncle did, something similar to what my uncle did a few weeks actually before his death, when he ordered the printing of a small number of silverbacks, of silver certificates, which, you know, I got when I was, I saw a lot of when I was a kid and have kind of disappeared shortly after that. But, you know, we all know that the unrestrained spending by our government has created a massive risk for the global economy. And it's engendered tremendous concentrations of wealth and wealth inequality and helped

offshore our jobs and created a lot of other problems. My policy of gradually inserting a new commodity reserve, small number of commodity reserves assets at the base of the money system may be a way to discipline the Fed, to put some discipline into the marketplace, to give some consumers, Americans who would want to buy those assets, an ability to buy something that actually is commodity-based. And with all hope, and, you know, it's something that my economic, my council of economic advisors is looking at right now. My purpose is to rebuild the middle class in America. And they're looking at, we are looking at how that kind of commodity-based asset might

put a little bit of discipline into the Fed and the practice of just printing money arbitrarily with no control and no backstop at all. I don't, I think, I see zero threat to our monetary policy from this or to our financial marketplace. And, you know, my proposal is to do something very, very similar to what my uncle did with silverbacks in 1963. Hi, Mr. Kennedy. Natalie Brunel here. Thank you so much for answering our questions. And thank you to Scott and the other panelists. I recently had the chance to read your book, American Values, and I really enjoyed it.

I learned a lot about your family's backstory. And one part that resonated with me was when you wrote that your grandfather, Joe Kennedy, believed America's prosperity was its most reliable source of stability and national security and that we must choose to protect democracy over being seduced by imperialism. How would you grade us on these values? And secondly, how do we make America prosperous to protect these ideals? Well, you know, that, I mean, the grade would be a F grade. And this was a theme among our founding, you know, the framers of our Constitution is that universally they wanted to keep America out of foreign wars. John Quincy Adams spoke for the rest of the framers when he said that America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. We commend democracy in other nations. We support it morally, but we don't send our military abroad because they understood that you cannot have an imperial nation abroad and continue to have a democracy. We obviously had a bit of a technical issue there. We're going to bring him back up and we'll continue on.

I assume everybody can hear me, but that he dropped off. So we're going to send another invite there. We'll be back momentarily. Panelists, while we're bringing him back up, you guys can feel free to... Oh, here he is. I was going to say we could discuss what we've heard so far, but we're going to go ahead and invite him back up you guys can feel free to oh here he is i was gonna say we could uh discuss what we've heard so far but we're gonna go ahead uh invite him back up to co-host and uh continue on hello can you hear me we've got we've got you uh classic twitter okay sorry about that so i was saying that you know that the um our our founding fathers were unambiguous that we could not afford to turn America into an

imperium abroad because it would be inconsistent with democracy. We would turn ourselves into a garrison state, a security state, a surveillance state. My grandfather said we should arm ourselves to the teeth around our borders, create fortress of America, the real strength of America, of a country that comes not from military power, but from economic power, from financial power, building a robust middle class. And that's what we should focus on. There's a famous historian called Paul Kennedy, who has no relationship to my family, who's a professor at Yale. He's written a number of books

looking at the declines of an empire. And he's looked at the declines of every empire in the last 500 years and traced all of them to the overextension of their militaries abroad. And when I was seven years old and on my birthday on January 17th, 1961, three days before my uncle took office,

the outgoing president, Dwight Eisenhower, gave this famous speech, which today really stands as what I believe the most important speech in American history, where he warned America against the domination by a military industrial complex. And he said, by the way, a medical industrial complex driven by federal scientific bureaucracies. And people forget about that warning in his speech, but it was very prescient looking back over the COVID pandemic. But my uncle, when he came into office, President Kennedy, immediately realized that this was going to be his battle. Two months in, he had the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff lie to him about

the Bay of Pigs and, you know, get us into a, try to suck him into a U.S.-led invasion of Cuba. And he refused, but those men in the Cuban battalion, the brigade were dying on the beach. He came out of the office. He realized that the whole thing had been a trap by the CIA, by Alan Tullis, who he then fired. He hired Charles Cabello, who was the director of military operations at the CIA, and Richard Bissell, who was in charge of planticide activities, who had all lied to him. And he said, coming out of that that meeting that he wanted to take the CIA and shatter it into a thousand pieces

and scatter it to the winds. And he said that because he realized that the function of the agency was no longer to protect America's national security, but it had devolved into doing exactly what Eisenhower had warned about, of providing the military industrial complex, the military contractors, and the Pentagon with a

constant pipeline of new wars. And it was the greatest danger to the republic. And my uncle spent the next thousand days of his presidency in combat with his own military brass and intelligence apparatus. He refused to go into Laos. He wanted him to go to war. He considered war both inevitable with the Soviet Union, inevitable and desirable. He refused to go into Laos. He refused to go into Laos. He refused to go into Cuba on both occasions. He refused in 1962 to go into Berlin. And he refused to send combat troops to Vietnam

despite their pleadings that he sent 250,000 combat troops. In the end, he sent 16,000 advisors, Green Berets, who were not allowed under the terms of rules of engagement to participate in combat activities. Many of them did. And in October 1963, a month before his death, October 22nd, he heard that a Green Beret had died in Vietnam. And he asked his aide to bring him a casualty list. And the aide brought him a casualty list that showed that 75 of U.S. service and these advisors had been killed.

And he said, that's too many. And that day he signed National Security Order 263, ordering all troops, all military advisors home from Vietnam within a year, with the first 1,000 coming home beginning the next month. Well, a month later, he was killed. And a week after that, President Johnson remanded that order. Within a year, 250,000 troops, which is what they had been trying to get my Uncle Jack to do. And it became an American war, and Nixon who followed him. My father then campaigned against Johnson and the war.

In 68, was killed in that campaign. Nixon then became president. That 560,000 troops, and 56,000 never came home, including my cousin George Skako, who was killed in the Tet Offensive. And that war then, you know, led to the next war. And so we've been now, and, you know, we've had these series of traumas that have pushed us into the surveillance state. We had the Vietnam War, we had Martin Luther King's death, my father's death, my uncle's death, Malcolm X's death, and COVID-19 most recently, and the World Trade Center attack, all of which have pushed us down the road into a surveillance state. And I would say America

today is the surveillance state that Dwight Eisenhower warned us against, and that's why I would give us an F for failure. Well, I certainly think a lot of people would agree, but digging a little bit more into the idea of rebuilding America's prosperity, you have acknowledged on several shows that today in America, we don't have free markets. We have crony capitalism, this idea of brutal competition for the poor and cushy socialism for the rich. And I would extend that to say that today's oligarchs are sort of a coalition of capital comprised of Wall Street, the big banks, massive corporations and the political elites. Meanwhile, the working class, you talk about a lot, largely feels very left out, left behind. And a lot of us think Bitcoin somewhat fixes this. But how will you tame the oligarchs and reduce their power? And what does that mean for the Fed and money printing? Well, you're right about that. And, you know, and it's not a Republican or Democratic issue. Both the Biden and Trump administration essentially had the same fiscal and monetary policies and, you know, which was just printing money.

We, over the last six years, those two administrations, our national debt increased by $13 trillion. That's 40% of all the money that's ever been borrowed since George Washington. And the Fed printed $4 trillion, and that's 48% of all the money that's ever been printed by the Fed since it opened its doors in the fall of 1914. And so what has this done? I love what you said, associating that money printing with these huge concentrations of wealth and the disparities between rich and poor. The poor are suffering because of the inflation.

Energy prices are now up 37% this year. Groceries are up 27%. And the U.S. worker has not benefited from all that money pouring into the marketplace. U.S. wages, this really extraordinary, our growth rate, despite all of that money being poured in, has been only 2% per year. And it was 5% per year with virtually no money pouring in during my uncle's administration. And what's happened to wages? Wages have gone up by barely 3.5% since December of 2016. And meanwhile, this is hourly wages have gone up 3.5% since 2016. Meanwhile, the top 0.1% 30%. So the top dogs, the fat cats, have gotten 10 times richer from that huge influx of wealth into the market. And while workers, people who actually go out and work for a living, hourly wages have basically stayed the same.

So it's not helping the poor. And what do we need to do to deal with it? One is we need to bring back the Glass-Steagall Act and Glass-Steagall's entire scheme for central banking. We need, you know, the Fed is the captain of not just Wall Street, but of Washington spenders, because it erroneously attempts to manipulate the mainstream economy with low interest rates and stock market supports. We need to get the Fed out of Wall Street on a day-to-day basis, the original scheme that Glass-Steagall had was that the central bank would operate through marketplace discount windows at 12 regional banks

operating as far from Wall Street as they could possibly get. And the essential purpose of the Glass, of that central bank, was to keep commercial banking liquid. But they did so by charging market-based rates of interest and a penalty spread on the privilege of using the discount window. Oh, it didn't have, it wasn't susceptible to financial bubbles or mainstream inflation because it could only issue credit, central bank credit, which means to print money, of course, based on goods that were already produced. And therefore, it automatically kept the supply and demand in balance

because the bank credit it enabled had to be convertible into gold on demand. Of course, we've lost that. We need to bring a lot of glass to go back. And Bitcoin is part of the process because Bitcoin allows small investors to actually have an inflation-proof currency. And that is part of the freedom. I mean, because right now, anybody can use fiat currency. Is it the mercy of this system,

which is designed to strip line wealth from Main Street and from the middle class and from the poor in this country and put it in the pockets of the super rich? We need to cut costs. We need to restore fiscal balance through long-term savings. The first, most important, and obvious thing I'm going to do is cut the military budget, which is now about $1.3 trillion a year. You can't cut the $300 billion to veterans, and some of the national security is less susceptible to cuts.

But that will get better over time as we stop meddling abroad. $900 billion now goes to the military. We were told at the beginning of the Soviet Union collapse that we were going to get a peace dividend. We were told that the military budget would be cut from $600 billion to $200 billion, and that was enough to protect our country. When Eisenhower, at the height of the Cold War, when we were facing the Soviet Union, a threat that is nowhere in sight today, the Soviet Union at the apex of its power, he cut military spending to the equivalent of today's dollars of $500 billion. Well, today it's $900 billion. So at very least, we could cut it by 45% and get back to where Eisenhower was at the beginning of the Cold War. I mean, at the height of the Cold War.

And that will save us about $4 trillion over the next 10 years. If we don't do this, we're going to increase our debt projections by $20 trillion over the next decade on top of the $33 trillion we already have. And that torrent of renting is going to bury future generations in impossible debt. And that'll cause interest rates to soar. And we need to reduce that by 50 and probably 75%. We can do that by money savings and reducing chronic disease in our country. We pay more for medical care,

double, triple, or quadruple than Europeans pay, per capita. Oh, and the reason for that is chronic disease. We went from 6% of Americans having chronic disease when I was a kid to over 55% with chronic disease today and growing. And we need to cut that, and we can do that very quickly. We have to identify the cause so we know what they are, and we have to eliminate them. And right now, we spend $4.3 trillion a year on healthcare costs. It's so much more than anybody else in the world. And 80% of that goes to chronic disease. It should be 6%. And we need to, you know, when my uncle was president in 1960, we paid about one twentieth for health care of what we do today in real dollars. And a lot of that is because of the explosion of chronic disease in our country.

And that, in the long term, is probably the most important thing that we can do. And it's going to be my number one priority as president. I can tell you some other ideas for cutting. Let me just add one more. The GAO, the General Accounting Office, for the last 25 years, every year produces a report about waste in government where it identifies certain expenditures that should

have expired years ago, where people are, in many cases, literally doing nothing. And yet those expenditures just get automatically renewed every year because of some congressman's nephew has the job or whatever for political reasons, but they're not doing our country any good. So all of those reports, every year nothing is ever done about them. They sit on a shelf at the GAO. I'm going to name essentially a base closing commission, the way that we did for our military at the end of the

Cold War, to go through those lists, those 25 years of lists, and identify the ripest fruit to pick from that list, all of the worst ways in government that are indefensible. And I'm going to put all of those cuts into a single bill, and I'm going to ask Congress to do an up or down vote on them. And nobody's ever done anything like that. And I think it's the one way to really, everybody promised to cut waste, and nobody knows how to do it. And I think this is a real way that we can do this,

and that we can do it very quickly. Mr. Kennedy, Marty Beck here. Thank you for joining us for this discussion. To build on your comments about the surveillance state from earlier, I think one thing as an industry that we've really been paying attention to and worry about is the encroachment KYC AML regulation on Bitcoin companies. These KYC AML regulations seem to be pretty ineffective, yet they lost a bunch of compliance costs on individual companies, and the encroachment seems to be getting worse. As of January 1st, 2024, individuals who receive more than ten thousand dollars worth of bitcoin from another individual are going to be forced to report the personal information their counterpart in that trade to the irs so as of jan 1st 2024 the government and the irs

will be expecting individuals to collect names, addresses, and social security information on other individuals, essentially expanding the KYC AML reach from companies to individuals. And considering that these regulations seem to be wholly ineffective and completely burdensome on companies and seem to be individuals, what in your mind are things that we can do to begin to peel back these invasive uh regulations that seem to power the surveillance yeah i mean i suppose the one justification for it that's legitimate is to prevent money laundering. But what I see is that all of these things, the money laundering complaints, which by the way, I think the money laundering issue is a legitimate issue and that we need controls that are sufficient to do that. But a lot of these issues, the KYC issue, the environmental issues,

are smoke screens for just this overwhelming hostility by Mr. Gensler and the Biden administration in general toward Bitcoin and the favoritism that they are showing to BlackRock and to Goldman and to their friends on Wall Street. I think Gensler's approved over 50 ETFs for BlackRock. And those ETFs are going to be, you know, right now, that's the easiest way for, you know, Bitcoin, because people don ETFs from Bitcoin into CBDCs and trap us all in that kind of slavery. So I don't know exactly. I need to study this issue and get a lot of expert advice from people like you. What I'm going to say to you is that what I want is transparency. I want to break

the innovation ecosystems and entrepreneurial ecosystems that grow out of Bitcoin. I want to keep those in America. I want to end the barriers as much as I can to Bitcoin America. I want to do, you know what? One of the things that we do with the dot-com revolution is we suspended taxes for the first decade. And it brought all the engineers and all the, and it made Silicon Valley a safe place for the industry. And it brought

that ecosystem to our country and made us the dominant force in the dot-com boom. And we need to be doing the same thing with Bitcoin. And I don't know, I've talked about some kind of suspension of the capital gains taxes for conversion of Bitcoin. And I am, my financial team, my counsel and economic advisors looking at that, running the numbers on that right now. I mean, what do we want to avoid is creating huge windfalls for BlackRock and for Goldman. But there may be able to do that. We may be able to do that with a cap on capital gains. With a cap, for example, a million-dollar cap.

So that small investors who are into Bitcoin would not have to pay the capital gains tax. Super large holding companies like BlackRock and Goldman would. What I don't want to do right now, if you own a big chunk of Bitcoin, the best thing for you to do is if you're going to convert it, when you convert it, you're getting double tax. So if you buy a car with Bitcoin, you pay taxes twice. And if you want to convert your Bitcoin into dollars, you're going to get raped over the coals.

And what that's incentivizing is an exodus of the individuals who are the most innovative individuals, the greatest entrepreneurs in our country, some of the greatest engineers and thinkers who are being driven out of our country to Portugal, to Germany, to Puerto Rico, or whatever. And I want to keep those people here in the United States. I want a system that's there. I want a system that is transparent. I want a system that is transparent.

I want a system that is welcoming to Bitcoiners and not hostile to them. And I want a currency that is actually a currency. If you have Canadian dollars and you come to the United States and you want to make a conversion, you don't have to pay a tax on them. Even if the dollar got strong and the Canadian dollar got weak or whatever, or the Canadian dollar got strong and the U.S. dollar was weak. And so your Canadian money is more valuable now, 25% more valuable. You don't have to pay a capital gains tax on that 25%. You just do the conversion. And, you know, Bitcoin, you know,

it's troubling to me that it's treated as a commodity. And I think what will happen over time is that when more and more countries follow, El Salvador, and actually adopt and begin trading in Bitcoins, that there's going to be pressure for countries to get rid of those capital gain taxes. But in the meantime, I think that we should do it in a way that encourages the use of Bitcoin by smaller investors, by smaller holders. It does not create these massive windfalls for BlackRock and Goldman. But to lift all of the impediments that we can from transacting in Bitcoin, it really turned it into a currency. People can go out on the street, people can protect their wealth, middle class people can buy a Bitcoin, protect their wealth, and use it for transactions without getting punished for it. energy sector and how it can actually be additives and make the sector more efficient overall.

However, there do seem to be individual states like New York that are beginning to enact discriminatory laws or taxes against Bitcoin miners, signaling them out and treating them unfairly compared to other industries or individuals that are consuming electricity. If elected, would you be able to do anything to prevent that discrimination against the mining industry? Well, I don't know exactly what I can do to change New York State. I'm an environmentalist. I was a partner in the biggest green tech venture capital firm in the country, which was Vantage Point. My companies built the Ivanpah plant, which is the largest solar thermal plant in North America, one of the largest. I think the second largest, third largest plant in North America.

And another company that I was part owner of built the PVC plant at Sault Ste. Marie. So two of the biggest plants in North America that I was involved in. I've been involved in wind and all kinds of renewable energy investments. And, you know, I care about the environment. I care about efficiency. But I believe that the environmental arguments about Bitcoin are mostly smokescreens to obscure the real motives for suppressing Bitcoin. And Bitcoin threatens the monopoly on money that has allowed the U.S. and other governments to print endless money to finance endless wars and to finance nonsense gold,

giant environmentally destructive projects. That's another one of these outcomes, these terrible outcomes from fiat currency. And in truth, as most of you know as miners, you know that your profit margins are completely dependent on low-cost energy. So you have a huge incentive to chase low-cost energy. A lot of times that means chasing variable power sources. And, you know, a Bitcoin is a flexible load activity, which means it can outbalance the grid by shutting down at peak times and using up the slack when demand is low. And that actually provides a really important revenue stream that may make certain solar and wind plants largely profitable as opposed to unprofitable and therefore financeable.

Because you can move your Bitcoin to that site and you can mine there. And a lot of times that peaks when the electrons are hitting the earth, that peak, and there's a low demand. That lead is producing the power anyway, and it's holding those electrons into electricity, but it can't sell it. There's no market. And if you put Bitcoin operations at that site, you can turn that plant profitable. So it actually is, I think, a potential huge boom to the creation of renewable energy. Somebody who's tried to finance and has successfully financed renewable energy projects, I can tell you that those kind of marginal revenue streams can make a huge, can make the decisive difference as to whether or not you can or cannot get financing with that project. So I think, you know, if we do it intelligently,

and I think a lot of you guys are already doing this, it's actually a huge environmental benefit. Even when it's using carbon energy, the carbon energy it uses, for example, you know, North Carolina has the biggest coal fleet in the country. That coal fleet, the plants are 80 years old, so all the tenants are already advertised. So they're very cheap to operate and they can sell energy for 11 cents a kilowatt hour. But the coal plant has to operate all night. You can't turn it off. And so at night, that energy is dropping basically to free. People pay two cents, one cent, two cent, and they starve for that. So even when they do, when Bitcoin is using carbon-based energy, it's usually using carbon-based energy off-peak.

And the energy is going to be burned anyway. The coal is going to be burned. The carbon and the other and the mercury and the atherite and all the other bad stuff is going to go in the atmosphere anyway. You're not adding to the problem. And then, you know, there's also these opportunities that many Bitcoiners are chasing to monetize methane discharges from landfills and from gas wells and other places around the country with that gas would otherwise be flared off. And you can take it and actually turn it into energy. And that also is an environmental benefit.

So I don't, you know, I think it's a huge mistake that these states are making. And I do not think, I think that it's motivated not by, you know, maybe the legislature who's actually pushing these bills has been fooled. The people actually behind these bills are the financial power centers who are terrified of this competition for Bitcoin and for what its capacity to expose the fraud in the monetary systems. Hey, Bobby. Great to speak with you again. Who is that?

Many of us are very passionate about educating people on the nature of money. So what I'd like to ask you is, what is the economic difference, if any, between money printing, also called quantitative easing, and currency counterfeiting? It's legal. That's the big difference. That may be the only difference. So there's no economic difference, just a legal one? Yeah, I would say that's the only difference.

Thank you. Short answer. I'll ask you a longer question now. Jim Mars wrote a book called Crossfire in which he presented a theory that Kennedy was trying to rein in the power of the Treasury by replacing Federal Reserve notes with silver certificates. In your estimation, was JFK attempting to rein in the power of the Fed with Executive Order 11110? And if so, was this a factor in the assassination of John F. Kennedy? He was certainly trying to reign in the power of the Fed. My grandfather was disturbed by what had happened to the Fed. And my uncle was alarmed by it, too. And they knew enough about modern policy to see what the end game was going to be,

which is that the rich were going to get richer, that we were going to turn our country into an oligarchy, a feudal aristocracy, and away from democracy. So I have never seen any evidence that anybody involved in his assassination... Can you guys hear me? Can you hear me?

Yes, we do. I have not seen any evidence that anybody involved in his assassination was motivated by that. We know the people at this point who were involved. There's been many, many now confessions, people like E. Howard Hunt, like David Morales, like David Adlai Phillips, and many Cuban players who were involved have discussed their involvement. And there's thousands and thousands of pages of documents that we know. I've talked to people who were involved in the assassination who were there that day. And there's so much documentary evidence.

We have a very clear idea of who was involved. I think those people were mainly motivated. I withdraw from Vietnam, which was a CIA project, and most of all by my uncle's failure to invade Cuba on two occasions, when the CIA wanted him to, and then ordering the groups that were like Alpha 66 and the other groups of assassins that were harassing Cuba and Cuban commerce and Russian commerce from ports and hideaways in Miami

and on Florida from Fort Myers down. My uncle and father had the Coast Guard come and confiscate their boats and their weapons and stop the harassment. That was part of the settlement with Khrushchev after the Cuban Missile Crisis when he was moving towards peace with Russia. And part of that peace was, and with Cuba. The other day, my uncle was killed.

He had an emissary meeting with Castro to talk about ending the embargo. And Castro, you know, I've spoken to Castro about that myself at length on several occasions. And the indications are that the principal anger that the individuals from the CIA who were involved in the assassination, the principal source of their anger was about Cuba and Vietnam. Thank you. Thank you. So one last question. One of my favorite philosophical questions is what is money? Could you just speak to the fundamental nature of money as you see it and its impact on human psychology, on politics, and its role in world history? It would be much better speaking about that. I don't want to waste your time because my thoughts about that are probably very sophomoric compared to most of the, virtually everybody on this phone call, you know, who spends a lot of time studying money, reading about it.

And I just don't have, if you ask me about a subject that I, you know, have given a lot of thought, a wealth of information, but with this subject, it's never been a preoccupation for me. It literally became a preoccupation when I saw the links with freedom. I haven't done my homework on money, on really understanding it, and it's fascinating. Because that dollar, it delved into it, and it's fascinating, I know, I mean, because it's, you know, that dollar is, it has no value, the only value it has is the faith that people have in it that it will have value, and that faith is, you know, based upon a lot of precepts that

may or may not be firmly rooted in a, you know, in concrete, But I don't understand it. And as I said, my thoughts about this would be infantile compared to some of this stuff and some of the ways that you guys have of thinking about this, some of the very, very sophisticated ways that you guys have, who spend your life thinking about it. And I really, i get dragged kicking and screaming into this issue because i saw the connection with freedom and i realized that

you know i always thought freedom of speech is the most important freedom and suddenly i realized wait a minute transactional freedom is just as important because if you don't have that, you're a slave. And that's probably the most sophisticated thing, truth that I can say about it. That would be helpful to anybody. It's about freedom. You just mentioned some of these regulatory bodies that have been captured. You mentioned the SEC. You also mentioned the Fed. So speaking about the Fed, the Federal Reserve is supposed to be independent, but we can see how Trump really leaned on them. How do you see working with them moving forward? I know you talked about trying to partially back the U.S. dollar with gold or a basket of hard currencies or whatever. So how do you see working with the Fed and central banks under your administration?

Yeah, and by the way, I don't think that is going to solve the problem. That is a mechanism for testing the water and testing the atmosphere and maybe putting some discipline because it's not something I do across the board to every T-bill, but I would make an offering of T-bills that are backed by a basket of commodities like platinum, silver, gold, and Bitcoin. And I also really want to encourage the proliferation of Bitcoin. I think everything the government does to do that injects discipline into the system because if Americans have an alternative currency that is actually commodity-based, that is a base currency,

it makes it much more difficult for them to just print money whenever they want because people have an alternative where they can go to. The value currencies always win those competitions. People will go to those currencies. They'll be drawn to them. But gaining mastery of the Fed right now, we've lost sovereignty over our monetary system. It is being run by obscure forces

that are linked to the big banks and to Wall Street. And they are operating it for nefarious purposes, or in other words, non-democratic purposes. We've lost all transparency. And what they're trying to do now is to do the same thing, get that same kind of, extend that control first to the states and then to individuals. And we need the state legislatures Fitz and others to reassert control. And we need to work with the attorney generals in those states and with the legislatures to make the system, to regain transparency in the system and to regain our sovereignty of it.

And, you know, I am bringing in a group of advisors. Well, this is all they think about. And that's what we need to do to restore Main Street, because the purpose of the Fed now is to commoditize Main Street, suck all the wealth and equity away from the American public and concentrate it. And we need to turn that around. And so that's going to be one of the primary missions of my presidency. consistency. So then just to clarify, sort of, even though they are semi-quasi-independent, but you want to kind of put them back in a box and sort of restrict their influence over the markets. Is that what you're saying? Yes, exactly. Okay, great. Appreciate that.

Probably my last question here, you mentioned earlier that you've been an environmentalist, and of course, your track record speaks to that. Marty asked you a question about Bitcoin mining, and you sort of answered that you don't think they should regulate energy for certain use cases. I'm just curious of your overall energy policy. The United States is in a situation where our main exports at this point are energy. And so we've seen specifically with the Biden administration, the energy industry sort of coming under attack a little bit. So I'm curious, being an environmentalist and with that track record and so forth, what's your overall energy policy would be, not just in using it for Bitcoin mining, of course, as you mentioned,

so you already know that Bitcoin mining chases the cheapest energy. So we need a strong energy industry so we have that cheap access. But what is your overall energy policy? My energy policy is it always had to be market-based. You can go back and see speeches that I made 35 years ago where I say that the best thing that can happen to the environment is if we had true free market capitalism, because a true free market promotes efficiency, and efficiency means the elimination of waste,

and pollution is waste. A true free market would require us to properly value our natural resources, and it's the undervaluation of those resources that caused us to use them wastefully. And in a true free market, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community. But what polluters do is they make themselves rich by making other people poor, the rest of us poor. They raise standards of living for themselves

by lowering quality of life for everybody else and they do that by escaping the discipline of the free market. You show me a polluter and I'll show you a subsidy. I'll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and force the public to pay his production costs. That's what all pollution is. You know, I fought the General Electric Company for many years on the Hudson River. I represented commercial fishermen on the Hudson. We have the oldest commercial fishery in North America. I represented hundreds of fishermen who are using

fishing methods that were taught by the Algonquin Indians and the original Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam and then passed down through their generations. And they came together to fight pollution on the river because their livelihoods were being destroyed. This is a fishery that was self-regulating in ingenious ways. They regulated themselves. They all, you know, they would count the fish, the recruiters that came into the river every year, and they would figure out how many were needed, and they would pull their net. The entire, every fishing family in the river would pull their nets on certain days of the week

to allow the recruiters, you know, the pregnant females to go up the river and so on so that they would have them for next year. They'd done this the same way for hundreds of years, and it was thriving. It's the richest waterway in the North Atlantic. In the 1980s, they began closing down. Today, I represent a thousand fishermen. Now there's only one or two left because the General Electric Company

dumped its PCBs in the river. It was illegal. And they did it up in Troy, New York, but they had a lot of political clout. And they were able to tell the governor, you know, let us dump the PCBs in illegally. We're going to move 60,000 jobs out of New York. Well, the governor let them, and they said,

we'll go over to New Jersey and we'll dump it from over there. And they'll get the tax. They'll get the jobs. So a series of governors accepted those threats and let them dump their PCBs in. And then in the 80s, he closed those plants. They closed down 60,000 jobs. So there's no general electric worker in New York State today. But now we still have the

pollution. And it's a $4.3 billion cleanup bill that nobody has. Every fisherman on the river is now out of work. And everybody in the Hudson Valley has general electric PCBs in our flesh, in our organs. And they've closed down this fishery that enriched the palette and the history and the culture of the Hudson Valley for three and a half centuries. And those fishermen understood that there was nothing wrong with their business model. What was wrong is that somebody had corrupted the political system to allow them to violate the law by privatizing the Hudson River. The Constitution of the state of New York says the river, the Hudson belongs to the people of the state, the fish belong to the people, everybody has a right to use them.

Nobody can use them in a way that will diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others. But General Electric got a permit to basically own all the fish on the Hudson because nobody else can use them anymore because they're too toxic. There's a lot of fish in the river, but they're dangerous to eat because they're loaded with General Electric's PCBs. And that's what all pollution is. And all the environmental laws that we passed after Earth Day 1970 are all designed to restore free market capitalism

by forcing actors in the marketplace to pay the true cost of bringing their product to market. In a true free market, if you want to bring a product to market, you have to pay for all the costs of getting it there, including the cost of cleaning up your mess, which is a lesson we were all supposed to have learned in kindergarten. What polluters do is they figure out ways the cost of cleaning up your mess, which is a lesson we were all supposed to have learned in

kindergarten. But what polluters do is they figure out ways to get the public to shoulder some of those costs, and they can lower the price of their product and out-compete their honest competitors. And so what I've said for years is, I'm not an environmentalist, I'm a free marketeer. I go out into the marketplace and I catch the cheaters, polluters. I say to them, I'm going to force you to internalize your costs the same way that you internalize your profits. Because as long as somebody's externalizing their costs, they're distorting the marketplace, and none of us gets the advantage of the efficiency, the prosperity, the democracy.

That's true free market. Capitalism promises our country. And, you know, I'll say this, that, you know, if you look directly at energy policy alone, which was your question, what I would say simplistically is my policy is to end the subsidies to the big industries. And carbon gets the biggest subsidies. Carbon gets $5.2 trillion globally, about $1.3 trillion annually, just from the oil in our country alone. And coal is the most heavily subsidized. So it is, and nuclear, of course, nobody's going to build a nuclear power plant unless it's fully subsidized.

And then all the cost of disposing of the waste for the next 30,000 years, which is five times the length of recorded human history, are all externalized. The taxpayer pays those. Nuclear also has the same thing the vaccine companies has, is it has immunity from liability. Now, if they have an accident at the plant,

they don't have to pay the cost. You do. So what I say is, let's make everybody internalize their costs and then see what happens. And what's going to happen is we're going to move to renewable power because right now, it costs a billion dollars a gigawatt to build a solar plant in America, which I built, and it costs about $1.1 billion a gigawatt to build. When it costs $3.6 billion to build a coal plant, and then you've got to pay for the fuel.

So when you build a wind or solar plant, it's free energy forever. The big impediment is we don't have a green system that can carry renewable power to all the markets. And that's what we need. We need a real market-based plan that will turn every American into an energy entrepreneur, every home into a power plant. And power our country on American ingenuity, what Franklin Roosevelt called America's industrial genius rather than Saudi Arabia, oil, or Appalachian coal. Now you build a coal plant for three and a half times what it costs to build a wind plant or a solar plant,

and now you've got to go to the Appalachian Mountains, cut down the Appalachian. So we've cut down the 500 biggest mountains in the Appalachians. We explode enough ammonia nitrate explosives in Appalachia every day, the same amount every week as a Hiroshima nuclear bomb. We've blown the tops off of, we've flattened an area of the Appalachians larger than the state of Delaware. You fly over the Appalachians larger than the state of Delaware. You fly over the Appalachians today and you will throw up. It is horrible.

And the 500 biggest mountains to the middle of the ground, they filled 2,200 miles of rivers with rubble. That's the cost of coal. And they burned the coal. And every freshwater fish in America has mercury, a dangerous level of mercury in it. The Appalachian Mountains have been stripped of forest cover on the high peaks from Georgia to northern Quebec. The Adirondacks, one-fifth of the lakes is now sterilized from acid rain, and we're acidifying the ocean. Those are the costs of coal. Coal says we're only 11 cents a kilowatt hour, but if they had to internalize their costs,

it would be the most expensive way to boil a cup of coffee that has ever been devised. It'd pay 20 bucks a gigawatt if they had to. And the same with gas. If the gasoline companies had to pay for the oil wars, much less all the other externalities, cleaning up the Gulf, cleaning up Valdez, the 200 billion we spend annually protecting the Saudi Arabian oil pipeline infrastructure, if they had internalized that and that reflected in the price of gasoline at that pump, you'd be paying $15 a gallon for gasoline, and people would figure out other ways to get transportation. And that's the way things ought to work. Everybody ought to have

to internalize their costs. We need to get rid of the subsidies and have true free market capitalism. Thank you so much, Mr. Kennedy. And now you had an incredible video today, actually, on your Twitter profile that said, if we gave you a sword and some grout to stand on, that you would win this country back. And of course, you mentioned that that sword is money. I want everybody to know that you can visit www.kennedy24.com slash donate. And you can donate even with Bitcoin via Lightning. Incredible way for this community to do that. And I just want to ask you quickly as we wrap here, are there any other ways that people

can get out there, spread the word, and help to support your campaign? Well, I mean, if you amplify our, if you have any kind of following on social media, amplify it, tell your friends, encourage people, even if they're only going to give, you know, five bucks, please encourage people to join the Army. And then, you know, you're part of our Army, you can give them five or $10. Do that. If you can give more, please do. I mean, many of you may notice that I'm, you know, I'm getting slandered and silenced and censored.

And when people hear me talk and they realize that I'm not a crazy person, not an anti-Semite, not any of the things that they say, not an anti-Semite, not any of the things that they say, not an anti-vaxxer. And my numbers are so much better than Biden's, you know, that, and I, you know, my numbers show me beating Trump, DeSantis, et cetera. People, when they hear me, give me a second, rethink me, and most of them end up converting.

Oh, the challenge is getting in front of people, and we need money to do that, and particularly in these first five states in South Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Michigan, and Iowa, we need to spend a lot on advertising. And so if you are anything you can send us, we'll help. And I'm very, very grateful for the incredible support that I've gotten from your community, from people. Twyner is are a unique breed.

Of all the financial people I've met in my life, people in finance, you know, I'm in New York right now, are mainly interested in making a big pile for themselves. Whoever dies with the most stuff wins. Bitcoiners are a different breed. They like money. They like profits. But mainly because it shows that you can make money by doing, you can do well by doing good, by winning freedom. And they're ideologically based.

They're people who love freedom and they're enthusiastic about Bitcoin because it's a symbol for freedom and it's the currency of freedom. Oh, I, you know, I love you guys. You know, I feel, I feel a spiritual bond with you. And you know, I want to, I really want to promote you. By the way, I, you know, before I went down to the Bitcoin Miami conference, people asked me, do you own any Bitcoin? I said, no, I don't. And I got a lot of criticism for that. And people from the newspaper, the Washington Post, for example, said, oh, you're promoting this commodity and it's volatile. A lot of people get hurt.

You don't even own any. So it happened that right after that Bitcoin conference, I got my pay from the Monsanto case. I got a big check and I said, okay, I'm going to put my money where my mouth is. So I bought two Bitcoins for everyone, for each of my seven children. That's what I used my Monsanto payment for. So now I'm a Bitcoin owner.

And I'm sure that they're going to now figure out a different way to come at me. But nobody can say I didn't put my money where my mouth is. So anyway, I'm really glad to be with you guys. And I'm very, very happy for the support that I've gotten from the Bitcoin community. And nobody can take your Bitcoin. Once again, everybody, I pinned the tweet that I mentioned before with that video just above, so you can all check it out there. www.kennedy24.com slash donate.

Mr. Kennedy, it's been a true honor. Thank you so much for your time. Robert, Natalie, Mark, Marty, you guys are absolute legends. A pleasure to share the stage with you. And I think we all have to thank Justin Rezvani from Zion for helping to put all of this together. Just an incredible, incredible person who I know we all share a bond with and love having been a part of this. So thank you all. Thank you, Mr. Kennedy.

Hopefully we'll do this again soon. Thank you very much.