We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC062: Monetary Cycles and History w/ Mark Moss (Bitcoin Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey, everyone. Welcome to this Wednesday's release of the podcast where we're talking about Bitcoin. On today's show, I have a good friend and student of monetary history, Mark Moss. During our discussion, Mark talks about financial cycles, political cycles, and technological cycles, and how they overlap throughout history. We cover his thoughts on other projects in the space and how they might evolve as more regulatory guidance is provided. And we also cover his thoughts on Bitcoin exchanges now purchasing traditional banks,

Starting point is 00:00:30 and onboarding all their existing customers into the Bitcoin ecosystem. So without further delay, here's my interview with Mr. Mark Moss. You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. All right. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the show. I'm here with Mark Moss.

Starting point is 00:01:03 Mark, it has been long overdue that you came on our show here. And boy, I'm excited to have you. Thanks, Preston. I am so excited to be here as well. One of the, I don't know, maybe the biggest podcast in the investing space. Go on. Go on. And always enjoy talking to you.

Starting point is 00:01:21 So it's going to be fun. Hey, so you're a student of history and cycles in general. And that's kind of how I want to start off the show because I have just deep admiration for the way you kind of view things that lends, the longer term lens, and how you're kind of piecing together, bigger themes. And I think it would just be an awesome opportunity for you to kind of start off there with our audience and just kind of provide them a site picture of how you think we've arrived where we are today. Because so many people will look at the world and say, oh, well, we're in this debacle and this terrible situation because of the current president or current

Starting point is 00:02:02 administration or the last president and the last administration. But as you've said on a lot of the different things that I've listened to that you've been on. This is way, way bigger than that. Talk to us about your framework that you use. I think, as you said, right, there's a lot of things going on in the world today. We have all this turmoil everywhere. We have protests all over the world. People are at each other's throat, never been more divided, all these different things and leaders that seem incompetent and you name it, right? A lot of people are like wondering, like, what the heck happened? How did we get here? Some people think that we'll just go back to normal. Some people think there is no new normal. And a lot of people think this was like a black

Starting point is 00:02:41 swan event, this virus that came out of nowhere. Who could have predicted that a virus would come and cause all this problem? That's the black swan event. And I would say, well, not really the exact trigger of the virus potentially, but the fact that the whole world is kind of up in arms over this isn't really. And so the way I look at is if you start zooming out, you start seeing things in more context. So, like, if you're looking at any financial markets, you're looking for indicators, and there's never one financial indicator that's conclusive, you're looking for multiple indicators. And then preferably, if you can look for indicators across different segments and across different areas that start lining up, it becomes even more powerful. So I think,

Starting point is 00:03:21 you know, we can easily start kind of in this financial. I mean, there's three different ones that I've looked at. So one is like this political, social, cultural angle. So populist uprisings, right? Revolutions. There's that. And then there's the financial revolution, the financial reset that we're in right now, which I think being kind of on an investing podcast and Bitcoin podcast, we kind of focus on that a lot, right? Like interest rates are at zero. They're negative.

Starting point is 00:03:47 Can they raise them? We have a debt sky high. Can they keep printing more debt? All those things. What are they going to do? The Fed's stuck in a rock and hard place. And so that needs to be reset. And then we're sitting on the edge, a beginning of another technological revolution.

Starting point is 00:04:00 So we have like a political revolution that goes on like a 250 year cycle. a technological revolution on a 50-year cycle and a financial revolution on an 80-year cycle, and all three are converging right now at the exact same time. And so I can walk you through this a little bit, but when you start to see it from three different angles and all converging, it starts to be very clear. And so kind of on the political side, I mean, as we said, right, we see people are at each other's throat. Who could have seen this? We have millions of people marching in the streets all around the world. And that's a black swan, right? I mean, they're protesting against mandates. They're protesting against governments or whatever. It's like,

Starting point is 00:04:37 before the pandemic broke out, there was 10 countries with over one million people each in the streets protesting. That was before the pandemic. So this isn't because of the pandemic. This was already starting before the pandemic. And so also kind of like financial cycles, we have like, if you're looking at like technical analysis, you have mathematical formulas. And so you might have like a triple bottom. And so we can also look at cycles happening in like triple cycles as well. So I'll explain what I mean by that. So even though progress is moving exponentially, things are obviously a lot different today than they were 100 years ago. They're also repeating within that progress at the same time. And so about every 84 years, and I say about every 84, because like just like the seasons

Starting point is 00:05:22 on a calendar, while you may have spring starts on a certain day, it doesn't mean the weather changes exactly at that time. And so about every 84 years, we have what's called a populist uprising or a regime change cycle. And so 84 years ago was the end of World War II and Hitler and Mussolini. We had FDR, created the New Deal turned America into a socialist nation. And about 84 years before that, we had Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto, which led to the European Spring and the largest revolution of European history. And of course, here we are, again, seeing the same thing, populist uprising all over the place. But, back to kind of this mathematical formula like the triple bottom. So three times 84 equals 252.

Starting point is 00:06:03 And every 250 years we go into a revolution cycle. So 250 years ago was the American Revolution, the French Revolution. 250 years before that was the Protestant Reformation. And what those really signify to me when I dig in and study that is that in the American Revolution, we pushed back on the centralization of the monarchy to be ruled by one king. And we, we're going to be ruled by one king. we pushed back and we set up a decentralized government, a republic. We rejected centralization. We moved to decentralization. 250 years before that, the church and the state ruled with an iron fist. There was one way to God. They had the Bible. No one else could read it. The printing press disrupted that. People got the information. They said, wait a minute, we don't need to only listen

Starting point is 00:06:48 to what you said. We can find our own path. And they went and sought this decentralized path. And so about every 250 years, we can see that. And it's like this pendulum that swings back and forth, and it goes all the way to centralization, and then it peaks out, and then it starts pushing back. And that's because it's reactionary. Almost again, like a financial chart, if you look at it, the further it deviates to one side, the further it's probably going to snap back to the other. And so we go so far to one way, it comes back the other way. And so while a lot of people think that this is a black swan that people are protesting and pushing back, well, about every 80 years they do. And every 250 years, we have the big one. And so I think,

Starting point is 00:07:27 think when you look at it from that lens, all of a sudden it's like, hmm, maybe it was, maybe it wasn't the fact that this pandemic, this virus happened because we've had lots of virus epidemics for the last 100 years or multiple 100 years, but it was really the fact that for the last 80 years or really for the last 250 years, we've been swinging from decentralized all the way to centralization and it's time to push back. And I think anybody who's halfway paying attention sees this, we can see that we have the world economic forum and the world health organization and the world trade organization and World Mediological Association and the UN and the IMF and the BIS, et cetera.

Starting point is 00:08:02 And so we're at peak centralization. And I think the people are just pushing back on that. So I think that's kind of lens number one, if that makes sense. What other lenses are you seeing? Real quick, before we move on to lens number two, the couple of things that I think are of interest in this as well is that if we look at this pendulum swing, it also swings in a couple of different ways. So about every 80 years in those 80-year cycles, we swing from

Starting point is 00:08:26 centralization to decentralization or what's called like a we or me cycle. But also what we see swinging back and forth is a swing from creative cycles to more analytical cycles. And so 250 years ago, we started in the Industrial Revolution. 250 years before that, we started in the Renaissance Age. And so we can also see how these things change as well, which is really interesting. Right now, I believe, and you've probably heard other people talking about this, like the Renaissance age is starting again. Something that most people have probably read, the sovereign individual,

Starting point is 00:09:00 they talk about these like mega political factors, these megapolitical shifts that happen. We can see what really broke the grip of the church was that new technology, the printing press, the Bible, which decentralized the information, right? And no matter how much the church tried to put a stranglehold on that, if you spoke out against the Bible, that was heresy and they would kill you. And they did, and they killed millions of people, but they couldn't stop the information. And today we're seeing the same thing, right? The information is out there. And even though they're trying to assassinate your character and shut you down online,

Starting point is 00:09:32 they're not able to stop this information. The tide is turning. So I think that's one of the big things. But what's interesting is that solutions are supposed to come to problems. And I say supposed to because today we got a bunch of money being printed and it's going around trying to solve problems that don't need to be solved. You told me about some of the questions we'll get to you later. And some of those are some solutions that we don't need.

Starting point is 00:09:53 But if you look at the problems that we do have, and so we're at peak centralization. So that's a problem. What kind of problems? Well, one, we have the Federal Reserve or the central banks. They've centralized the money printing, the money creation, and they're printing unlimited amounts of it. And not just that, but just the government. I mean, they're trying to control every aspect of our lives at this point.

Starting point is 00:10:14 Of course, in China with the social credit course system, but what we have going on across the world with the passport systems and on and on and so peak centralization appears to be a problem that the world is pushing back against right now. And so, on a 50-year cycle, we have these technological revolutions that happen. And I'm not talking about just like new technologies. A new technology would be like the iPhone or be like Uber. Like, that's pretty cool. New technologies, they extend a cycle. A technological revolution is something that changes the course of humanity. Well, not like the transistor. So the transistor is kind of a piece of that, but really it's the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s, which brought people from the farms and cottage industry

Starting point is 00:10:56 into cities and into factories. So it changed the way humanity worked, changed the whole course of humanity. About 50 years later, we had the invention of steam engines and railways. So for all of humanity, we had horsepower and manpower. And now we had steam engines and we had rails and we could move stuff across continents. So it changed the course of the world. Then we had electricity, electricity, steel, and electricity and steel. So that changed the course of humanity. When electricity came out, it was like, what is that? It's like a digital candle.

Starting point is 00:11:27 But what do we need that for? Candles have been light for 5,000 years. And look, I can, like, this candle's portable and I can move it around, and I don't need all these wires. Like candles are way better for light. But of course, electricity changed the course of humanity. Steel, you're an engineer, so you know how steel changed humanity, right? We could build skyscrapers.

Starting point is 00:11:43 We could build bridges and things like that. So that's what I'm talking about in technological revolution. Then we had about 50 years later, we had the age of oil and automobiles, assembly lines. All of humanity, people walked and rode horses, and now we could drive, right? Then 1971, we had the age of the microprocessor, which then, of course, brought personal computers, telecommunications, the internet, Zoom, what we're doing right now. 1971 plus 50 years puts us right here today, and I believe we're on the verge of another technological revolution.

Starting point is 00:12:11 And what is that giving us? What's giving us exactly what we need? So we need, the problem is centralization. We have a technological revolution giving us decentralization, which I think is pretty amazing. You were talking about the centralization of government and central banking. And I think that a huge piece of this is just the centralization of equity itself, of the ownership of equity and how small the mid-cap-sized businesses are just getting eaten

Starting point is 00:12:38 up by large-cap businesses. You know, if we were playing a game of monopoly, all the equity at this point is owned by one player in the game. And you think about how unfair and how difficult that is for anybody to compete in a system where everything is just gobbled up by the player who has so many resources and so much. And it just kind of plays into this whole idea and this theme that you're talking about, which is everything is centralized. Everything has been consolidated, right? Well, and as the government has gotten so big and the money printer has enabled them to not only to get so big, but also kind of allow these businesses to kind of have all this unlimited

Starting point is 00:13:13 capital. This is what happens. The beast just kind of keeps getting bigger. And so through the regulations that the cronyism, if you will, right, between the corporations and the government working together, they build these moats that don't allow for this competition. Last week, Alex Fetsky and I got together and did a book sprint and we took, if you're hearing it first, we haven't officially released it yet, but we took the communist manifesto and we rewrote it and we're calling it the uncommunist manifesto. And we kept the same struggle structure, four chapters, kept the same about word count 10,000 words, but wrote kind of exactly what you're talking about.

Starting point is 00:13:45 And we talked about how these businesses being unable to fail, they're not allowed to fall down. And so we don't have this dynamic creative destruction, right? And so it makes it harder for people to climb up and people aren't falling down to your point creative destruction. That's part of this collectivism or this cronyism that we kind of have in the system today. And so, yeah, centralization also because of the money printer, right? And so I think we both agree, the money printer kind of sits at the base of pretty much every problem that we have in society today.

Starting point is 00:14:17 It was Mises talked about in the crack up boom, right? When you have an economic expansion that's fed by credit and monetary expansion, it starts to lead to distortions in the market that leads to shortages and labor shortages. So he explained that. And then finally, the people wake up and realize that inflation is persistent, and then we have the crack up boom. But he explained how this money creation starts to have these distortions, which we're seeing all over the place. But back to the centralization. So if the problem is centralization, then we need something that's decentralized. And so I think it's pretty cool

Starting point is 00:14:50 when you look at it from that lens, that one's moving on a 250 year time frame and one's on a 50 year timeframe, but it's broad us kind of exactly what we need when you look at it from that perspective. And I think when you also look at like, again, problems coming into solutions, If you look at the big problems, again, the centralization, but more specifically, unlimited money printing, which I think says at the base of that. And so we need something that has a fixed supply cap. We used to have a rule of law that was easy to understand. Everybody could understand what that rule of laws so we could set our life. I could set my life based on those laws.

Starting point is 00:15:20 You could set your life based on those laws. But today, we're ruled by men who arbitrarily change the rules on us all the time, right? And then we also have censorship as a problem and not just censorship on that I can't say what I want on YouTube or Twitter, but that. But I can't even hold my wealth or my value without it being taken, inflated away, nor can I send it to you without it being stopped or blocked or prevented if the banking system doesn't want that to happen. And so then the solutions would be decentralization. The solutions would be immutable law, not governance.

Starting point is 00:15:51 The solutions would be censorship resistant. And I think when you look at it from that lens and you look at 15,000 cryptocurrencies that are in the market today, I think there's only really one that has all those attributes. which I think is pretty interesting. Like for example, one of the big gripes with Bitcoin was, or against Ethereum, was that Bitcoin has 21 million, but we don't know what Ethereum's cap is. And so was it five, six months ago, Vitalik Beteran and boys got together and they changed the monetary issuance of Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:16:20 But isn't that like the system that we're trying to leave behind? Doesn't that sound like the Federal Reserve that can change the monetary standard all the time, you know? Or you're about these POS networks, you know, Cardano has this decentralized governance. So whoever has the most tokens can stake them and then they can get votes to change the protocol. But that's, again, like the system that we have. What we want is immutable law. They can't be changed.

Starting point is 00:16:43 And so I think when you look at it from like a problem and solution kind of mindset, you see the case for, you know, what Bitcoin is doing. Do you find that Wall Street and entities out of this traditional system that have had extraordinary results and have their hand right next to the money printer? I think they're obviously incentivized for these other systems, these other protocols to be successful. So as you see this kind of playing out, how do you see that impacting just things moving forward? Is it a battle that they're just, that they're destined to lose for some technical reason? Just walk us through some of your thoughts on those ideas.

Starting point is 00:17:25 The battle that the bankers are destined to lose? Yeah, kind of. So you have Bitcoin, in our opinion, right? We think that it's the best decentralized choice, and we think that it's the fairest choice out there. But that doesn't mean that all this fiat printing that they could then nest into marketing for whatever token, and they have a huge interest and they have a huge stake in these other tokens. What's preventing them from winning in the end against what we see to be the, you know, the fairest choice? Just because it's the fairest doesn't mean that it's going to win, right?

Starting point is 00:18:00 Nature can select things in ways that a lot of people just don't necessarily expect, right? So moving forward, why do you think that Bitcoin will win and these other protocols will lose? Well, you said nature. So I think about natural law. And so natural law would be like the law of gravity. And so with enough money and enough technology, I could suspend the law of gravity for a while, but I'm always going to have to be beholden to that law. And so we have to think about natural law.

Starting point is 00:18:28 So there's another natural law called the law of sewing and reaping. And I must produce before I can consume, right? And so while we can print fake fiat currency, and that can work for a while, and we could suspend the laws of nature, and we can consume without producing, we can pull that forward through fiat currency, it won't work long term, right? We can suspend it temporarily. We could get by with it for 80 years, 100 years, but eventually it fails. And that's because some of the attributes of money, one of the main ones being scarcity,

Starting point is 00:18:56 And so with scarcity, you have to have like this true cost of capital, which is why gold has been a good proxy for that forever. Bitcoin, of course, fits that with its mining principle. But if you're just going to print fiat currency or go print tokens at will, you just end up with the same fake system that isn't based on natural law, in my opinion. And I think what happens is that as humans, we know this, we understand this. And we've seen gold kind of battled out with fiat for a long time. And I think we'll want to return to that. And I think on a longer lens, if we look back, if we look at again how the world shifted from when the church and the state kind of held control over everything, and then the world kind of

Starting point is 00:19:35 went into this expansion and through the Renaissance, where we had this explosion of science and technology through the 15, 1600s. We also had sound money. So we had the Florin, the longest lasting coin for about three, four hundred years that wasn't debased, globally recognized for trade. We had the flourishment of information. But then we went into the industrial age, which caused everything to start centralizing again like we talked about. But what we're seeing now is, again, through the internet, we've started this shift back to decentralization, so already in the process. And so the pandemic has helped speed that up.

Starting point is 00:20:07 So we saw people already, you and I are already working over the internet. I have a team of about 15 people. They're all decentralized working across the world. The pandemic really kick started that. And so we're seeing people leave the cities and move to Wyoming and Colorado and Idaho. But they're also moving to Mexico and El Salvador and places like that. And so I think as people continue to move, start decentralizing, the nation starts losing its grasp on people.

Starting point is 00:20:32 Instead of having big corporations they can squeeze, I mean, you did say that these businesses are consolidated, and that's true. So we're seeing Walmart and Amazon getting bigger. But at the same time, we're seeing all these small businesses getting smaller, and the money has been the key piece they continue to control. And I think once we can decentralize, we can go live where we're going to be. want and we can move to a different money they can't control. I think more people are going to want to use that.

Starting point is 00:20:54 And so can they continue to print more fake money? Sure. Can they continue to create more tokens out of thin air? Sure. But I think as they start to lose their grip, people are going to want to move to a currency they can't control. I think I made a video about this when China banned cryptocurrency for the, whatever, 13th time or whatever it was.

Starting point is 00:21:13 And it was about the Mundel Fleming Trilemma. Mundel Fleming Trimilemma is you can't control the monetary supply, the inflation rate, and free flow of capital at the same time. And so since they wanted to continue to adjust the monetary supply and the inflation rate, they had to take away the free flowing capital because capital would leave the country. Anytime they continue to monkey with that system, people are going to want to try to find another option, which in the United States, we are.

Starting point is 00:21:36 Of course, that's why real estate, that's why stocks, that's why those assets are sky high. People know they have to go into anything else but the currency. And so I would just expect to see that continue. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future.

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Starting point is 00:26:05 And now they're going to be expanding their Bitcoin services into Europe through this bank. And I guess it's just not something that I had ever thought was kind of like maybe what's going to play out next because there's so much regulatory friction all over the place preventing Bitcoin exchanges from basically touching the rails where the central banks are already integrated with traditional banks. And I guess I was not expecting to see Bitcoin exchanges step in and just outright buy some of these banks that are touching these central bank rails. What are your thoughts on this? Is this going to be something that kind of keeps maturing as we move forward?

Starting point is 00:26:47 And just I guess your general thoughts on the regulatory path forward for a lot of Bitcoin exchanges being integrated with traditional finance. I'm pulling up this quote that I was working on last week when I was working on that book. And it was John Maynard Keynes, and he was quoting Lenin. And he said, the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debouch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate. I'll skip to the end. He says, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism becomes so utterly distorted as to be almost meaningless. and the process of wealth getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Starting point is 00:27:27 So capitalism will be destroyed all the way down into gambling and a lottery. So what I think about in regards to Bitmex buying the German bank is that, unfortunately, the best way to make money today is theft and gambling. We saw last month the record amount of job quits ever, and people are quitting their jobs to trade options on Robin Hood and trade cryptocurrencies. I think NBC, CNBC did a whole special on Generation Gamble, all these kids that are just trading, trading, trading, trading. And so basically what Lenin was saying is that through inflation, deflation, the banks will

Starting point is 00:27:59 break it down to where it degenerates into a gamble and a lottery. It sounds like he foresaw NFTs. Right. And so what we're seeing is all these people are trading cryptocurrencies, trading NFTs, trading options on Robin Hood, options trading and surpass stock trading. None of that provides any value. They trade, they trade, they trade, no value is. being provided. No goods or services are being created. And then they take that money and go buy

Starting point is 00:28:23 goods and services from people that are actually producing wealth. And so it's a net drag. And the reason why I say that back to the Bitmex bank thing is that Bitmex has amassed a lot of money. They've made a lot of money more than most banks, more than a 234-year-old German bank. But how did they do that? They bought it because what are people doing on Bitmex? They're gambling. And so I believe it's a sign of the times, right? We're seeing the end of this long-term credit cycle. We're at the end of this, We're at about an 80-year financial revolution cycle. Lenin warned us, the banks would debauch the currency with inflation and deflation, and they would lead to a degeneration of gamblers.

Starting point is 00:28:58 And so 80 years ago, the entire global financial system was reset. We had the Bretton Woods Agreement. The whole world agreed to go to a single monetary unit standard on a gold standard, the dollar, etc. And here we are six months ago, Georgina, Kristolina, whatever, from the IMF called for a Bretton Woods, too. They're calling for a monetary reset right now. global monetary reset. And of course, we have Klaus Schwab calling for the Great Reset,

Starting point is 00:29:22 etc. So they're saying this, but what tool or how are they going to get global cooperation in order to pull something like that off? So I don't want to tell you my opinion, but I think you know my opinion. What does the execution of that look like? The way that I'm kind of seeing the world is a coup d'etat of bankers. The bankers have taken over the world. And I kind of look at this hierarchy of like maybe the BIS sitting up at the top of the world. We kind of have these think tanks, the W.F, W.H.O, et cetera, kind of there. And then kind of down a low level, we have like the governments, which are kind of like the policy enforcers, the bank, the policy creators, the policy enforcers. And so what we saw through the pandemic, I think kind of illustrates

Starting point is 00:30:04 how that would go. So, for example, the whole world locked down at once. I never thought that would have happened. A lot of people said, oh, the world will make Bitcoin illegal. I'm like, the world can't agree on anything. That's never going to happen. but all of a sudden, the whole world just locked down at once and how that happened. Well, the IMF issued a bunch of debt, a bunch of SDRs, and basically paid these nations to start locking down. We saw many reports at Belarus, so they offered them as much as $900 million to lock down. And so how could they do it?

Starting point is 00:30:30 Well, very easily, they get the nations to just switch to these SDRs and central bank digital currencies. Of course, we know China's rolling theirs out here, it's already been out. Most of the other nations are working on it. So I think the plan would be, and this starts getting into opinion. I think the plan would be to get these central bank digital currencies and try to get everybody to switch over that. We've seen the stimmy pumping out throughout the United States.

Starting point is 00:30:53 Of course, when they did the first round of stimulus, they started to build in that digital payment system into the stimulus bills. And so we know they're getting ready for that. And I think probably within the next two years, once that's ready to go, they'll probably be ready to try to switch the system over. They're not only telling us, right? The IMF said it. Klaus Schwab said it.

Starting point is 00:31:12 They're showing us. They're building the central bank digital currencies. And we also know it. I mean, the Fed's stuck. If they keep printing, inflation is going to keep pushing higher and higher. If they stop stimulus, the market's crash. You can't really taper a Ponzi. If you and I were playing a board game and we're out of moves, what do we do?

Starting point is 00:31:28 We reset the game. And I think that's kind of where we're at. I think you do a really good job of kind of looking at what we've just got done seeing and kind of demonstrating how it could potentially play out. I've always just kind of thrown my hands in there, but like, they can't agree on it on anything. There's no way that they're going to. agree on a new monetary unit or monetary standard. But I think you're right. I think there's a

Starting point is 00:31:51 lot more global cooperation happening with the BIS, with the, I mean, you're seeing it through the world economic forum, with the messaging that they're doing there, and they're even calling it the Great Reset. I mean, they're dangling carrots of freshly printed SDRs and everything else as the way to get compliance. What I would say to that, though, is that also, like, while the world is like, will the dollar remain the world reserve standard? Will it fail? Will we go to a Chinese yuan? Will it be a central bank digital currency? Will we go back to a gold standard? And so I think everybody's looking for what the next global reserve. What's the powers that be tell us the next thing is, I just think the future is decentralized. It's not centralized. So everyone's looking

Starting point is 00:32:31 for a centralized answer. The truth is that Bitcoin has been my standard, my reserve, and it's probably yours. And we know Fortune 500 companies like micro strategy now. And now we know nations like El Salvador as well. And so it's already starting to switch one by one. And so the way that I see it is not that the dollar dies and in a couple of years it's gone. I think my kind of vision is kind of looking at like this fourth turning model like for, you know, 20 year cycles and 80 year cycle and back to Lenin, not to quote him, is not one of my favorite guys. But he said that there's decades where nothing seems to happen. And there's days where decades seems to happen. And so that kind of fits into that fourth turning, right? And so we're kind of at the end of this. And so I think in the

Starting point is 00:33:09 next three to five years, we max out at peak centralization. And then the pendulum starts swinging back pretty hard. Do you know Chris McIntosh? I've heard the name, but I'm not, yeah. I spoke with him today. He's, he's brilliant. He's been studying this a lot. And he said that he thinks that we're in a global socialism blowoff top, a parabolic. So we're peak socialism right now. So you know how a blowoff top starts working. It starts sucking in everybody and goes, higher, higher, higher and he's like, we're in a, we're in a parabolic blow off top for socialism where socialism didn't die. Like, I don't want to deal with my health. Let's just push that to the government, government health care. I don't want to take care of my kids. Let's just push that to the government

Starting point is 00:33:49 run schools. We've basically just pushed everything off to the governments and socialism. The nanny state has just gotten bigger, bigger, bigger. And the way he called it was pretty interesting today. Like I said, like really the socialism like blow off top and it's just starting to go into this parabola and then it just blows off, which I think probably happens the next couple of years. But I don't think the dollar just dies. I mean, the dollar is going to be around. But you and I, lots of other people, we've left. We've gone into the arc and we've gone away.

Starting point is 00:34:15 And that goes back to that Mundel Fleming Trilemma that I said about China, where they had to stop the free flow of capital. What happens is the reason why is if enough people leave, then their monetary and interest rate policies don't affect that many people. If we were having a party and I was like, hey, you know, whatever, stop doing that. You're too noisy. And I started kicking everybody out of the party.

Starting point is 00:34:35 eventually I'm the only one at the party, and they've all started their own party over there. And I think that's why I see it, just more and more people. I think the Fed will continue to print more money. I think all the governments of the world continue to print more money. And in the U.S., they said it's 7% inflation is probably 15% inflation. Maybe that's not too bad. But if you're in Venezuela, at 2,500%, it is bad and you're looking for an alternative. If you're in Turkey, you're looking for an alternative.

Starting point is 00:34:56 At some point, the heat gets hot enough. At some point, the water's hot enough and you got to jump. And I think that's coming pretty quick. You know, we've been talking about this a lot on the show is just this delta between these inflationary prints that we're seeing and what the rest of the fixed income market around the globe is at. And the negative spread is just so dramatic. Like, nothing we had ever seen in our lifetimes.

Starting point is 00:35:21 And I just don't know if we can go another half a year or a year with inflation running as hot as it is with these fixed income markets as low as they are in yield terms. And I think you might get in this situation where, especially if they keep doing more of these policies, because these policies are what's causing this massive economic calculation around the world, the more that they do those policies, the more I think you're going to see that spread widen. And I think that's when maybe things just get away from these central controllers. And they might not be able to, I guess, going back to the point that you made earlier,

Starting point is 00:36:00 where you were talking about how they could maybe implement this, right? If those markets start selling off in these cascading sell-offs, and then they come in with yield curve control, right, where they're going to try to peg the yields from going up to where the inflationary prints are at, they're just making all of that economic calculation that much worse because they're adding more printing into the system. Maybe that just runs away in such a magnificent kind of way, not in a good way, but in a spectacular fashion that they just can't control it. And so then everybody turns to what you're describing as the decentralized solution where trust is garnered because there's not the basement

Starting point is 00:36:39 happening. Is that how you think this might play out? Is the cascading sell-off happens so quickly that they can't respond to it? I think partially that is based off an assumption that they want to save it. What you think is maybe a gross assumption? Well, they said they're calling for a Bretton woods too, they're calling for a whole new monetary standard, a whole new monetary system. I don't know. I can't pretend to know it's in a man's heart or in a man's mind. And that's the part of the problem. We don't know what Jerome Powell or the IMF is going to do anymore, but they're calling for a reset of the system. And so everything that I seem to think of and what you were kind of saying as well is like, that's assuming that they're trying to, they want to

Starting point is 00:37:19 keep the game going. But what if they don't? Yeah. What if they want to just, oh, that didn't work, sorry. And so how could they, how could they cover that up? So again, there are a calling for it, not me. Those are their words, but like war. So typically war comes after the financial crisis happens, not before. War comes after. And so we're in a war. We're in, Klaus Schwab two days ago said, we're in a war against the virus. We're in a war against the virus, he says, which we are, whether the nation, the world's gone under $20 trillion of debt in the last 24 months, $20 trillion. We spent fighting this war, supposedly. The next war that they're positioning for I mean, now there's literally war almost with Russia, what's going on in Ukraine over there

Starting point is 00:38:02 right now. But really what I'm starting to see with that war isn't like the shooting war, which I think most people are looking at, a hot war. The wars are fought over information and money. And so what they're really starting to seed is this cyber war. And they're starting to say that Russia, right, they've been saying for the last two years, Russia mess with the elections, Russia's interfering, they're in the cyber warfare. Was it today? I think Biden came out and said that, he thinks that Russia is going to continue to do the cyber attack on us. And so we've seen them talking about Klafswab made this video. He said the internet has a virus and we need to treat this virus. We need to be able to shut the internet down if we need to, to repair this

Starting point is 00:38:45 virus. And they're starting to kind of position for these like global IDs. The internet's not safe anymore. People like you who may use the internet anonymously are putting it in danger. And so about, was it a couple of weeks ago, they started saying that the Treasury and some of the financial institutions, they actually were running a game, war games on. If the financial institutions were to get attacked by a cyber attack, what they would do. So they ran this war game. What do you think this solution was in the war game if they had this attack on the financial system? It was a bank holiday. It was a bank holiday. We shut the banks down.

Starting point is 00:39:18 And so if we had this attack, if we had this war, a cyber war, if the banking system, The defense system was attacked. They went on to a bank holiday. They put it in their papers. I'm not making it up. But if that were to happen, and it creates all this problem, well, it was their fault. We didn't mean to crash the system. The system was going fine.

Starting point is 00:39:36 We had everything going great. So war, I think, is a great cover for it. Whether it's the virus war we're fighting now, whether it's a cyber war that they're positioning right now, of course, and then there's the climate war, which is next. Let's go down that path. I've noticed a little bit of a shift in the narrative, in the ESG, narrative where you're finding a lot of people starting to push back. Maybe it's because I have a lot of Bitcoiners that I follow. They're all just like not having it and not having it for good reason.

Starting point is 00:40:04 For me, personally, the thing that I think is one of the best responses to the whole ESG piece is Jeff Booth. Jeff throwing out there like, hey, we've got this inflationary system that requires more and more consumption of all these resources. And these two models are completely incongruent with each other. The inflationary model that produces deflationary tech and all these deflationary things that we've got to keep escalating because of the printing that's taking place in order to hit these inflationary targets for decades on end. And so his whole piece is like you can't have this environmental frame. And then whatever, if you're relying on these central banking inflationary policies.

Starting point is 00:40:55 How do you see it? I'm assuming you see it very similar. Oh, yeah. I mean, I love that. I love that angle. It's exactly right. So you create this inflationary monetary system that causes consumerism, this endless buying and purchasing products today are made cheap, right?

Starting point is 00:41:08 They're made to be thrown away, et cetera. So we have all this consumerism, all this waste. But then you're trying at the same time to then limit that through ESG. So you're trying to basically hamstring companies by extracting. money out of them to get them to produce less. So you're getting to produce more with the monetary system and then tax them at the same time. He's absolutely right. It's a genius way to look at it. And I would agree with that. But I think it's not really, I mean, and again, I hate to get into this side of it. But if we want to wade into that into the deep end a little bit, I think most of

Starting point is 00:41:37 it isn't really about trying to save the environment. Lynn Alden put out a pretty fire tweet thread. I think yesterday or day before. She crushed it. Yeah. And she crushed it. And it's like, It's not really about trying to save the environment. First of all, and this is probably going to kick the hornet nest, we don't need to go there. I'm not a professional or a scientist, but there's a conversation that should be had that the whole basis of their argument needs to be discussed in the first place. So is carbon really bad? I think there's a whole conversation that we had around that.

Starting point is 00:42:06 I'm not really prepared to have that. There's people that are prepared and I've listened to them. So there's that. But in regards to kind of what she just said, right? It's like, I think it's more about trying to control the system. We're at peak centralization. So they're trying to get as much power and control of everything they can. And back to kind of the structure of this world and you can't get any governments to

Starting point is 00:42:30 agree on anything. Well, how can they get control of the whole world? They can't take control of every government. What they could do is get every month, every government to buy in to a narrative on climate change and then have them basically lay down their sovereignty in the amount of energy and the types of energy that they use. And of course, I draw blank what he said, control the food, you control the people, control the money, control the continent, control the energy, control the world.

Starting point is 00:42:54 So those are the three attack vectors, right? Food, money and energy. You can, as he said, control the energy, control the world. So if they can control this energy policy, then they can start to control the world. And I think that's really what it's about more than really trying to save the climate. We know that pretty evidently, one, the monetary policy like Booth said, but I mean, just look at nuclear. If they really wanted zero carbon energy, I mean, nuclear is zero carbon energy. With about the size of a baseball, you could run a whole city of nuclear.

Starting point is 00:43:26 But in order to get windmills or solar, you got to dig out an entire nation. And so if they really wanted it, they would be using solutions that we know are better right now. And they're hiding behind safety, but the numbers don't support that. And so I think that kind of discredits their whole narrative. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up, and customers now expect proof of security just to do business.

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Starting point is 00:47:06 I think proof of work versus proof of stake is going to play out politically moving forward. Because I've been pleasantly surprised to date. I was expecting this to be way worse politically this past year. And I've been pleasantly surprised. But that doesn't mean that the 2022 things could start getting derailed. So I'm curious how you see it evolving. Well, I think from a political standpoint, there's two different things I'm seeing. One is that I think Bitcoin has reached a level of entrenchment, not just in the political

Starting point is 00:47:36 system in the United States, but also in the financial system in the United States, that I think it's past the point of no return. So the political system in the United States is mainly driven by lobbyists, right? They're the ones that write the bills and send them to get co-authored or whatever. And so who are the big lobby groups? Well, the financial industry. And most of the financial industry at this point has built out Bitcoin products, right? They've probably spent collectively, I would guess, billions of dollars to build out Bitcoin desks and Bitcoin products. And they're the ones lobbying. And so if there was a bill that would come under attack to shut Bitcoin down and proof of work for that matter, would come under heavy fire. We have a number, probably at least

Starting point is 00:48:13 two dozen senators and congressmen that are Bitcoiners, known Bitcoiners. And now we're starting to see with midterms coming up this year, we're starting to see lots of people starting to run on like a Bitcoin platform. And so I think there would be this massive pushback, both from the financial industry and politicians, if they tried to go against proof of work or Bitcoin for that matter. I think there was, was it 25 million Americans own Bitcoin? I think of some number like that. So there'd be a massive outrage there as well. And I also think that between the Fed and the government, they've spent $8 trillion trying to prop up the markets in the last 24 months, trying to keep them from crashing. If they made it, if they banned it or made it illegal,

Starting point is 00:48:52 I mean, they would just wipe the entire economy out. So I don't think they want to do that. So that's the way I look at it. What scares me a little bit is with POS, what we're really starting to see is we're starting to see a lot of entrenchment from the W.E.F. World Economic Forum into some of these proof of state companies, like Ethereum, for example. And so it seems like the World Document Forum is much more influential in the world than the United States is, not to get into, you know, super into politics, but, you know, when Trump went to Davos, he said, you know, the United States is a sovereign nation, you know, we're willing to work with other country. But we won't lay down our sovereignty. But, you know, I don't know if Biden

Starting point is 00:49:29 would necessarily take that stance. And so if the World Economic Forum, if the global power is trying to pressure the United States into this energy narrative, you know, maybe there's some problem there. But I think, like I said, with the entrenchment we have with the financial system, with the senators and congressmen, and then, of course, with the SEC Gary Gensler. I mean, he seems to be pretty pro-Bitcoin at this point. I think he's changed his tune even. Last comment I seen from him, he said, I think he said pretty much any token that isn't Bitcoin, even including Ethereum. is probably a security. I think is what he said, probably a security. So, yeah, I think there's going to be that posturing. I think, like you said, the ESG narrative is starting to crack.

Starting point is 00:50:10 There was something I saw today, and I didn't write it down who it was, but they were saying this whole thing about ESG narratives in Canada on the oil fields, and you're trying to take money from productive companies and put it in technologies that don't work. He says, it's going to ruin everything. It's crazy. And so it's breaking. It's cracking. I'm not really worried about the government and kind of cracking down on POW because of that. Yeah, and even if they do, even if you see it localized where some country cracks down on it, I don't think that's going to stop all the other places in the world that are just moving out on proof of work.

Starting point is 00:50:42 I mean, look at El Salvador as an example. It's like, hey, we've got a volcano. Let's do geothermal and ship was as many miners as we can buy. And this kind of goes back again to the printing press and the internet. And so the printing press, right, the church tried to control that information, but they just, They just couldn't. No matter how many people died, they couldn't stop it. Today, we have Joe Rogan getting hundreds of millions of listens,

Starting point is 00:51:04 and then CNN's getting a few hundred thousand. It's crazy. It's crazy. And so while they're trying to control the narrative, I just don't think people are falling for it that much anymore. You can make the argument that they're making people double down against it. People can see what's happening and they're not happening. You could.

Starting point is 00:51:21 And so like these outlandish headlines I saw going around today, a bunch of people reposted. I think I reposted too. The World Economic Forum said in 2017 that Bitcoin would consume more energy than the rest of the world, right? And I mean, it's like it's like less than 1%. Less than a percent, yeah. That doesn't even tell the whole story, right? Because Bitcoin mining, in order to be profitable, you have to be probably under five cents a watt.

Starting point is 00:51:44 To be super competitive, you're probably at under three cents a watt. Well, in California, in the summer, at the top tier, we're paying 40 cents a kilowatt hour. 40 cents. So you can't mine in California. You're not mining there. That's right. You're not mining there. So you're not taking power that's being used.

Starting point is 00:51:59 If it's 40 cents in California, where could you go get it for three cents? Somewhere that there's more supply than demand, somewhere where it's making a lot of electricity, nobody's using it. So Bitcoin goes to those areas where nobody's using the electricity. I was talking to Witt, the CEO of Compass Mining, and they were talking about a new facility they're trying to open up, I think down in Paraguay or something. There's a new dam that got set up, and there's just nobody buying the electricity. And he said there, I don't even know I should be saying this, but we can leave it there.

Starting point is 00:52:26 Like, it's like, it's like a penny and a half, like 1.5 cents per kilowatt hour. Yeah. And I'm like, how can you get it for 1.5 cents? Well, they built this whole plant and nobody's using electricity. That's right. So Bitcoin, Bitcoin seeks that out. Bitcoin is not competing. It's not taking energy that's being used by anything else.

Starting point is 00:52:43 And so I think people are realizing that. It's a bunch of nonsense. And I think what I'm seeing is that, you know, we have the information side, but also I think technology is moving so fast that it's not only making the nation state obsolete, But it's also making them look irrelevant. And so I think it was two or three months ago I saw in the in Europe, the ECB was talking about passing a law where you couldn't make anonymous crypto wallets anymore. And it's like, really?

Starting point is 00:53:07 Because like I could plug in my wallet right now and like make a hundred. Okay. And like, you know, there were some senators here in the US talking about banning 3D printed guns. Really? Because that's like code that I could just like know in my head. Like even saying that you're going to ban it, it just makes you look ridiculous. Right.

Starting point is 00:53:23 And so I think it's just moving at such a pace that they just can't keep. up with it, to losing the war. We had briefly talked about the NFTs and you were mentioning about gambling. And I love the quote that you shared earlier as far as when you're kind of getting to the tail end of these cycles, that that's what's happening. I was talking to a founder that's up in Canada who's from Venezuela. And he said that that's exactly what they saw in Venezuela was people were just trying to sell their cars in order to turn a profit. It was like, whatever they could do to try to sell something. and sell it to somebody else at a higher price than what they had bought it for was like

Starting point is 00:54:00 the only way you could survive. And I'm assuming I know your position on NFTs, but talk us through your thoughts on the potential that the tech could present to the world in five, 10, 15 years from now. And then kind of how you view it optically today. So I think I have a daughter. She's in high school. And a lot of the boys in high school, they're all trading options on Robin Hood. And they're, I mean, they're not into girls.

Starting point is 00:54:27 They're just into trading NFTs or whatever, crypto. It's crazy. And I want to get like her like kind of involved in what I'm doing. But like, dude, like the best way to make money is go trade that crap. And it's like that's just a state of where the world is. But I'd say a couple things. So I was in Art Basel week in Miami about a month ago. And there was like all these NFTs everywhere.

Starting point is 00:54:47 And I went to this one event and I met this guy. And he's like, oh, Mark, I'm a big fan of your channel. Come here. I want to talk about my project. I'm like, okay, what is it? He's like, well, we do NFTs on real estate. I'm like, okay, I've been a real estate investor my whole career. Tell me more.

Starting point is 00:54:57 And he said, well, what we're doing is we take a piece of real estate and then we tokenize it with a bunch of NFTs. And then like anybody here could buy one of the NFTs, which represents ownership in the property. Okay. So is that kind of like when I own a piece of real estate in an LLC and anyone can buy a share? Yeah. So it's the same thing that we're already doing, but you're just calling it something different. So I think there's a lot of, I guess, snake oil could be a word, right?

Starting point is 00:55:21 Where we're using these hyped up words, but they don't really mean anything. I got an email earlier today, and it was also talking about, they wanted to invite me to this web presentation to show me how to make money with NFTs, and they were going to show me how to take NFTs and put them into real estate, tokenized real estate with NFTs. Well, first of all, if I took a piece of real estate and made a hundred tokens or a thousand tokens, wouldn't all those tokens be fungible, not non-fungible? First of all, I think, I don't think they understand what NFT is. That's kind of funny. I think they would push back. So let me just try to play devil's advocate here.

Starting point is 00:55:53 Yeah, please. So I think they would push back and say, well, now it's got liquidity and you can actually trade it on one of these platforms that I'm sure it's listed on and you have easy access. Now, they're not talking about all the regulatory issues that are there for sure, which is the whole reason why it has liquidity compared to existing models. Let's say that we get some regulatory stability there and you're able to go on there and you're able to just buy this without being an accredited investor, which I'm sure the regulatory framework would have to address some of those pieces. What do you say to something like that?

Starting point is 00:56:28 So I think if we talk about tokenizing the world, so tokenizing real estate and it adds a bunch of liquidity and the average guy could buy one token in a piece of Manhattan real estate or something like that. I mean, sure, I think that sounds okay. But it doesn't sound revolutionary in the sense that will change the world, not like a technological revolution, because I can already own a share of a building in Manhattan today. Now, if I can own a token instead of a share and it's easier for me to sell it. Like, that's cool and it increases the liquidity because it's easier. I get that. But it doesn't change anything. We still have an investor that builds a building. He still tokenizes it or turns it into shares or into a reet. Me as a person across the country can

Starting point is 00:57:04 still buy a share or a token in that project. Yes, because it's more liquid, the value goes up. So you kind of have like this. Yeah, so it's more liquid. The value goes up. But it's not changing the world. There's no revolution there. That's what I'd say about that. And I would also say the same thing about the stocks, right? So if I own a share of Tesla stock and I own it through my E-Trade account, okay? But let's say that E-Trade puts it on a blockchain. And so I still own Tesla through E-Trade, but now it's on a blockchain. What difference does it make? I still own Tesla. Now, I don't own Tesla, but I'm just saying if I owned a stock. Now, I get it. I understand the way the stock market works and, you know, there's six different people in between me and the issuer.

Starting point is 00:57:42 And so the custody is really... Yeah, it becomes 24-7, 365, like all that stuff. Yeah, and like, you know, there's the famous Dull Foods case where, like, they found out there was 30% more shares issued than there were owners. And so it's a much better model, 100% than I think that it should go that way. But I don't see how it changes anything. I guess that's the point. And then like, in NFTs as far as like, you know, the- You're talking about FTs. You're talking about fungible tokens. Right. Well, but they would be. Well, if it was like whatever, a thousand shares of Tesla stock, each one of those would be fungible. And back to the real estate, those would be fungible.

Starting point is 00:58:15 That's why I don't understand why they're calling them non-fungible. If it was one token for one house, okay, sure, that one house is not fungible with another house. But they're talking about tokenizing the house, so all of those tokens would be fungible within that. Well, maybe they should call them EFTs, equity fungible tokens. Yeah. I see a world where assets are tokenized. I mean, it's a better model, but it just doesn't change anything, in my opinion. And then we have the NFTs, like the apes, right?

Starting point is 00:58:42 Like the JPEGs and things like that. And growing up as a kid, people traded baseball cards and people trade coins and people trade stamps. I never did. I was never into that stuff. My little brother, he have a brother who's quite a bit younger than me. And his whole career, his job right now is he sells Pokemon cards. And he's tried, Mark, you don't understand. I can make so much money.

Starting point is 00:59:01 let me show you the differences in these cards. I'm like, I don't care about those cards and why one's worth more than another, but that's cool and you're making money. And so whether it's a baseball card, a stamp, a coin, a Pokemon card, or a JPEG, it's the same thing. That's not revolutionary. Yeah. And so to me, I'm not that interested. I don't understand why a lot of Bitcoiners are really upset about that. So, you know, if I'm a musician and I'm selling my, you know, to my fan club, my collectibles, and I want to sell them a JPEG, I mean, I don't know what that has to do with Bitcoin. I don't know why anybody's mad about that, but something that's already been done, there's nothing revolutionary about that, in my opinion. I think where it could get interesting,

Starting point is 00:59:40 maybe in the future, is if you're playing a video game. And again, I'm not a video gamer, but I have kids and their friends, they play these video games and they play for a long time and they earn things in the game, right? So they skins for their gun or they buy things. And so I guess maybe they should have a way where they could own that and then maybe sell those things to other people. I mean, that kind of makes sense and those could be NFTs. But again, the game designers have no incentive to basically handicap their ability to add more whatever weapons. I'm not a game or someone. It's like a total idiot. If there's 10 broadsords in the game and the person who created the game wants to add another 10 so that they can collect the IPO of broadsords or add more stock into

Starting point is 01:00:25 the game in order to, you know, make some money, I think they want to have. that flexibility. They don't want to be handcuffed by something that's sitting on a blockchain that they can't control the issuance of. It just defeats the whole purpose. And also, every single video game looks different. It's a completely different graphic. It's built on a different set of code. It runs on a different console or whatever it may be. And so how could one item go into another game and look exactly the same? And like, maybe that'll be solved someday. I mean, I saw the movie Ready Player One. Maybe that's what the world looks like. And was that 2040 or and something like that. So maybe that's what the world looks like, and maybe there will be those

Starting point is 01:01:01 NFTs in there. So, Mark, for me, when I'm looking at this, I agree with the way you're describing this is pretty much exactly how I view this as well. The question becomes, if there is a decentralized protocol that people want to do some of these things on, who's the winner of that? Because the tokens that are being used in order to facilitate all of this processing and all of this data storage is going to be the thing that's going to go up way and value just because of the utility that the world would be putting into that protocol. So how do you see that kind of playing out? Is it even an investable space today? You know, what are your thoughts? So the first thing I would say, and this is abrupt for some people, not everything needs to be decentralized. Amen to that.

Starting point is 01:01:48 Not everything needs to be censorship resistant. So money does, but why does my video game need to be decentralized and immutable. I don't understand. And I saw there's somebody now building video games on the Bitcoin blockchain. But why? Why does the Bitcoin blockchain? I don't understand that. So anyway, back to the question that you asked, I got this from somebody else. I heard it somewhere. I don't know where I got it from. But it was basically saying if you understand how technology works and you can look at the monetary system with the base settlement layer of gold and then layer two paper money and all the layers on top, where you look at the internet. So the internet's a layered system. So you have the TCPIP protocol that transfers information via packets across it and then you

Starting point is 01:02:28 build all the layers on top of it. So there's the TCPIP layer and then we have trillions of dollars of value and trillions of applications built on top of it, my personal website, Amazon or Zoom, all those different applications, but they only use one protocol. So does that make me a TCPIP protocol maximalist? We just only needed one. There's trillions of ways that you can play that. And so I kind I don't look at it as if we have Bitcoin, which is the value transfer protocol, we just need one, right? We need one. And there can be, I guess, trillions of different applications built on top of it, each one making a different tradeoff at different levels for people that want those different things.

Starting point is 01:03:01 I went on the Monero talk show and tried to debate those guys with Monaro. I'm not okay with the tradeoff that Monaro has made. So, for example, I want to verify the amount of Bitcoin on the network. Monero's privacy doesn't allow me to do that. I have to trust them now. I don't like that tradeoff. They could make that on layer two and people that are okay with that tradeoff could opt into that.

Starting point is 01:03:24 But they've made that option on, they made that on layer one. And so I think that we need one layer one, which is hard and it's kind of dumb. It's kind of dumb. It's kind of slow. And the reason why is because the more basic it is, a flat table I could build almost anything on. The more complex that base layer is, the less options I have to build on top of it. We want something slow and dumb, if you will, basics.

Starting point is 01:03:48 We have unlimited optionality on top of it. And then we make tradeoffs for whatever we want on top of it. So one, yeah, not everything needs to be decentralized. But the things that do, I think, all end up being built on one blockchain. And I think a couple other things, I think, one, if you understand how business works, understand Bitcoin's difficult because you have to know all these different disciplines. In business, my goal is to get customers. And one of the main goals to getting customers is to lower or remove the friction, make it as easy,

Starting point is 01:04:16 is possible to do business with me. So if I'm in Dave and Busters and I got five minutes before I have to meet somebody, shoot, I could play one of these video games. Oh, I got to go stand in line and I got to buy that card and I got to put 20 bucks on it. Like, I'm not going to do that. I won't play. Right. So there's friction there. And so we don't want Dave and Buster cards. We don't want tokens and cards everywhere we go. We just want one. And so I think, you know, from that perspective, it's pretty compelling why one base chain is probably all that we need. All right, Mark, those are the questions I have for you. I love some of your points here, especially there at the end, just talking about how you kind of see the protocol stack kind of evolving moving forward. If people want to learn more about you, you have an incredible podcast. I know you do live streams and things like that as well. Give people a handoff where they can learn more about you and then anything else that you want to highlight. The best way to catch up everything is my website, onemarkmoss.com. That's the number one. As of October, I'm a nationally syndicated radio host.

Starting point is 01:05:13 on the IHeart Radio Network. So I broadcast nationwide, and I try to get my radio voice like Preston on there. So we're broadcasting nationwide, which is pretty cool. The world's loving it. The audience is loving it. That's great. I make a couple of teaching videos per week on my YouTube channel, breaking down these complex subjects.

Starting point is 01:05:30 And so that's it. Check out my website for more or check me out on the radio or my YouTube channel, Mark Moss. And I'm pretty active on Twitter, more active than I should be. Join the club. My goal this year was to try to lower how much. This is time I spent on Twitter, but you can find me on Twitter at one Mark Moss as well. Mark, I'm sure everybody's going to be interested in learning more after this incredible interview that you gave.

Starting point is 01:05:52 So we'll have links to all of that in the show notes. Mark, thank you so much for making time. Yeah, Preston. Thanks so much. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin-specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I'd love to have you as a regular

Starting point is 01:06:11 listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. And it's something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening. And I'll catch you again next week. Thank you for listening to TIP. To access our show notes, courses, or forums, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions, consult a professional.

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We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC062: Monetary Cycles and History w/ Mark Moss (Bitcoin Podcast)

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