What Bitcoin Did - HAS BITCOIN ACTUALLY DONE ANYTHING? W/ Junseth

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

Junseth is the co-founder of the legendary Bitcoin Uncensored podcast and a longtime Bitcoiner. In this episode, we discuss whether Bitcoin has actually “done anything yet,” why financialisation might be both Bitcoin’s future and a serious threat, and how MicroStrategy’s could play a key role in that. We also get into the risks of leverage and ETFs, Junseth’s unique investment strategy based on volatility and diversification, why most Bitcoiners aren’t truly prepared for sovereign-level adoption, and the missing financial tools — like insurance and mortgages. FOLLOW: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles & https://primal.net/danny Junseth: https://x.com/verysmallclaims THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: IREN: https://www.iren.com/ RIVER: https://river.com/wbd CASA: https://casa.io/ LEDGER: https://www.ledger.com/ ANCHORWATCH: https://www.anchorwatch.com/

Bitcoin hasn't done anything yet. We're on the verge of Bitcoin having done something. It has to matter at scale. If it doesn't matter at scale, it doesn't matter. What if there is nothing anyone can do that the country is headed towards civil war one way or another? At that point, the only question you have to ask is who do you want to be in charge when it happens? What Bitcoin did is brought to you by our lead sponsor, a massive legend, Iron. the largest Nasdaq listed Bitcoin miner using 100% renewable energy. Iron are not just powering the Bitcoin network. They also provide cutting edge computing resources for AI, all backed by renewable energy.

So whether you're interested in mining Bitcoin or harnessing AI compute power, Iron is setting the standard. Visitiron.com to learn more, which is iraen.com. Why are you trying to get me banned from YouTube? What? Are we... We're going. You've got one, two, three, four hand guns. Welcome.

I don't even know what the other guns are called. Welcome to Florida. This is a, what do you think was going to happen to you when you came here? Well, I wanted to make sure I was safe. This is not a great area. Is it not? I don't know. No, not really.

We have this beautiful lake behind us. In Florida, we call those drainage ditches. Yeah, I thought I'd got like lakeside property. No, that's a drainage ditches. Yeah, not so nice. Yeah, you're sorry. So we've got forehand guns. I don't even know what these are.

Which ones? Like this one? This? Yep. It's a 9mm. Yeah. It's a 9mm. Is that basically an AR-15?

No, no, no. No. This is. This is an AR-15. See? Different. Different. This is Milspec, right?

What does that mean? Like, it's a... You can swap any of these parts for any other AR-15 parts. So this one's a cheap one. It's kind of rattley, you know? Yeah. Kind of shitty. Why did you get the shitty one?

Because it's an AR-15. Are they all shit-y? No, no, no. You can buy really expensive ones, but you might as well just buy the shit ones. Okay. Because they shoot the same, you know. But this is a 9-millimeter, you know, rifle. So that's like a handgun in rifle form.

And then what's this one? Oh, this is a Henry. This one, these guns won the West. The repeating rifle, the Henry repeating rifle. Okay. You know, this thing here, like basically just, it's like your grandpa's like raccoon gun, you know. I saw a raccoon running around here, so maybe do some harder practice. This was a 30-30.

I think that you'd probably explode the raccoon into many, many pieces if you hit it with something this big. But maybe a 20, you know, so like you want a 20-cal, you know, like a small, a small bullet. The AR-15 might be a good choice, but its velocity is a little high, so it might also explode the raccoon. This here is another Henry repeating rifle in 20 caliber. So this is the raccoon gun. Yeah, like a little raccoon gun, you know, a little gold. I'm just going to take a picture of this, just so I'm going to post that and say you're trying to get me canceled. That's fine.

You, I brought these mostly, Dan, so you could see. the plentiful array of things America has to offer. And the many ways you could protect yourself. Well, it's more, I've shot a gun very like this in a range once. But I don't think it was like, I don't think it was this one. Like, yeah, that's a common form factor. But I've never shot anything bigger than basically that. I actually shot a Magnum once too.

Nothing bigger than that. But that was definitely bigger than the Magnum I shot. This one is a Kiopper Rhino. It's a cool gun. It's a 357 magnum. What are you defending yourself from? Well, you know. That's getting cut.

I don't know whether to bleep that or cut that, but I'm probably going to cut it. No, it's, uh, most, honestly, most, most gun stuff in America is for recreation. Yeah. So, you know, it's recreational. Well, maybe tomorrow we should go and shoot them. Oh, yeah, that'd be a pleasure. Let's do that. That would be fun.

And you want to go do that? I want to shoot this one. This one here? Yeah. See, that looks. big and strong, but it's going to go poof, poof. It'll be a little poofter with that one, you know what I mean? But is that automatic

or is that semi-automatic? You have so much to learn, my friend. I know. Okay, so automatic guns were banned in the 80s in the US. So everything here, everything is semi-automatic or you know, single shot, like these

repeating rifles. It loads one bullet into the chamber every single time. So that's why people have loads like bump stocks. Well, yeah, bumpstocks. or you can actually shoot the guns. Are they only no, not anymore. Okay. They never should have been.

The way the bump stock works is it basically allows you to put your finger kind of like this. And if you hold it steady, it'll bump against your shoulder and you'll just get multiple. The trigger will basically hit your finger for you. So it seems like still automatic, but it's not. Yeah. It shoots like at a very fast speed. But the thing is most American guns really aren't made for an automatic fire. like if you shoot if you if you if you do automatic firing with like an air 15 it's it's gonna heat up and

break pretty quick so that's the truth of most of these stuff most guns uh i think most guns probably are better semi-auto anyways so do you have true freedom if you don't have automatic weapons uh do you have true freedom i mean i'm fucking i'm gonna say yes for for various reasons that only gun owners understand. I do not understand. But thank you for bringing your display pieces. No, these are for our protection. I've never felt so safe.

I wanted to welcome you to America. I actually feel less safe than if they weren't here, mainly because you all sat behind them. Well, you know. Only six or seven of them are loaded. I don't even know where we go. How are we even get into Bitcoin from here? Russian roulette after this, huh?

How do we even transition from here, Jenzeth, away from guns? Well, you're talking about freedom. It's a pretty good transition. Is Bitcoin freedom? Is Bitcoin being used? Is Bitcoin being used as freedom money right now with the US coming into Bitcoin? It's weird to watch the US coming to Bitcoin, isn't it? I don't know where I stand on this.

Like, I find it really hard. I'm definitely sympathetic to the like Bitcoin a take that this is always about separating money in state. And now we're like cheering on the state to come in and help us. It's still separate. I mean, like, here's the thing. There's always been a history of this, particularly an American, an American, I don't what you call prudence, like an American politics. In the 1800s, there was a huge debate about gold and silver.

I think it was it Nathaniel Hale has a famous quote, like, give me silver or something about a cross and silver. This is a famous quote. You can look it up. And I don't know exactly what it is. Give me silver or give me death. That was I was going to say. Give me liberty or give me death.

There's a cross, a silver cross or something like that, some famous quote. But they were debating whether like gold or silver should back the currency. And it was a huge debate in the 1800s. And, you know, then we've moved to this world where currency is backed by nothing. And I tend to like to say that I think without the innovation of currency backed by nothing, we wouldn't have Bitcoin. I think that's fair. Because we didn't know that currency didn't need to be backed by anything until we didn't

back it by anything. And it continued to work. And it works fairly well. I mean, I think libertarians like to talk about how the money system is broken because it's not backed by anything. But the reality is the biggest innovation in financial history is the realization that money is really just a list of IOUs. Yeah.

And the beauty of Bitcoin is it can be used for that same type of thing, this, this ledger of like, you know, people holding it. But I don't think that that's this ledger where like it keeps track of, you know, who has the most and who has the least, right? Which is essentially what you need in the monetary system. But I don't know that it is money. I think it is. I think a lot of us think it is, but it might not be.

When you say that, what does that mean? I mean, it's a, it's a commodity. It's like we pulled it out of our computers. We found this commodity in our computers, and we were pretty sure of its use, but we're not absolutely sure. Like, it's like oil. You know, oil comes out of the ground. And the first thing it does is it replaces whale lamps. And it's dirty, it's gross, but all of a sudden, the impoverished are able to light their house at night, whereas that used to be only a thing the rich could do.

Yeah. And then it goes from oil lamps to like a couple of other uses and lubrication and whatnot. Before that, like it was, you know, I think. It was found in Pennsylvania. And the Indians were using it as a salve for, you know, wounds and such. And I don't know if that, you know, it was a good use of it, but that's the reason you for it. And then eventually we get like the motor car and the entire world becomes dependent on this,

you know, petroleum liquid. And then we have plastics and all sorts of other things. So, you know, Bitcoin is a commodity. It's unlike oil. It isn't tangible, which is weird. I can't think of many other commodities that are intangible. I was talking to Zach Shapiro, and he mentioned that, like, data might be another intangible commodity of the modern era. Block space.

Block space, I guess, yeah. However, that's used. But these are intangible commodities, and, like, we don't really know what they're all useful for. I think data is finding its niche as a useful commodity. but it took 20 years for people to really figure out what to do with it. There's just so much data and so few data scientists. We don't really know exactly what we're doing at this point with all this information. Yeah, I was going to say, I don't know if they've even figured out what they want to do with it yet.

Like they're collecting a lot of data. I don't know if they know how to use it properly. They probably, yeah, like probably put you in to like the right prison eventually. Yeah. But to get back to like the Trump thing, I guess do you think that, this is going to be a positive for, like, one thing is certain. I think it's definitely going to be positive for a Bitcoin holder in terms of just like number go up.

Do you think it's going to be positive for Bitcoin as a whole, though? Well, what's your goal as a holder? Generally, I think holders want the money or the thing that they, the commodity they have or their investment in general to increase in value. And if the United States government takes a huge amount of supply off the market, then that's necessarily what will happen. And that's, I guess that's neat. That's good for us.

So that's good for the holder. I don't know what it means long term, how long the United States government, you know, holds it. Is this going to be a four-year cycle where like Donald Trump declares it a commodity we're going to hold? And then Elizabeth President Elizabeth Warren or whoever else, Ocasia Cortez declares that we are going to dump it. and then, you know, like, I don't know what's going to happen. So we're in a weird time in Bitcoin because I think, I think that leaving the Bitcoin price up to the whims of government is not something that we're necessarily ready for as individuals.

And I guess it doesn't leave the price. It kind of like creates a price floor. It takes a lot off the market. It kind of ends the time of acquisition, I think, for individuals. Interesting. Like there's now, it's kind of a declaration that the institutions or the big, the big pockets are here. And that's, that's a different era. So you think if you didn't front run Wall Street and now potentially the US government and other governments around the world, maybe it's too late for you?

I don't know that it's too late. It's just that I don't think you're going to, you're going to see the epic rise that you saw. Like, you're going to see maybe if Bitcoin is money. I don't think it's money yet, but if it were to become money, if it were to monetize and we would be like, it has money. In that world,

I think you'd probably see a currency that if you hold it, it increases at the rate of human birth. I don't know, like 9% or 4% or something like that per year. Just kind of goes up at a standard rate. And that's just what it, you know, minus whatever, whatever it measures,

plus lost Bitcoin maybe or something like that. But when you say Bitcoin's not money yet, but it may become money, what does it actually have to do to become money be used in day-to-day trade? Yeah. And not just like, not just esoterically, not just in this sort of, you know, like there are, I can think of instances. I know people that have like written children's books and paid authors in, you know, Argentina or Venezuela, right? And that's that's a cool use. I'm all for that. But I don't know that it's,

but those are those are esoteric sort of derivative uses, use cases. And they're not your mother's use case going to the grocery store. Yeah. Right. Or buying a Starbucks coffee as everyone has always talked about. And whether it will ever be used for that is a giant question. And I don't know if it will be. I don't see why it can't be.

and apart from, you know, whatever normal critiques there are of all of the methods we're trying to get those things done in, whether it's, you know, lightning or... But even if it's not lightning, it could be something else. Yeah, on the chain, et cetera, right? It's kind of a weird thing. There's like this tax to be on chain in some ways, right?

Like you want to spend money now and the block space is full because all the ordinal poop heads are filling the block space with their, you know, trash or whatever we want to call it. I like it. I love ordinals. I had Bob Burnett in this morning. So you have a slightly different take to him on Ordnals. I love them. Well, you know, as people are feeling block space, it's kind of a weird thing to think that like your transaction, your Starbucks coffee might be $2.50 today, but like $5 tomorrow, depending on like what people are doing. I think that's kind of neat. But I also think that that's not exactly ideal when it comes to money. I think you really do need something stable. And the thing is,

I think people don't realize this is those small changes in daily value are inflation and deflationary, right? Like in some ways, like it depends. Like if you have to spend $5 on coffee tomorrow and $2.50 today, that's inflation of 100% overnight. And then if tomorrow it's back to 250, that's a deflation of 50%. Right. So like there's a lot of really strange things that happen in Bitcoin that need to be kind of resolved before, you know, it's money. And, and you'll know it's money when it's like the porn standard. You'll know it when you see it. And if you don't, if you don't know it, then it's not money yet. It's funny that, though, because like obviously stable coins fill that role. And like when it comes to seeing like the Trump admin or whatever nation state adopted

Bitcoin, the camps of Bitcoin seem to fall into two sides. And they're like the anti-state and anti-stable coin side. Or you kind of pro-state and pro-stable coin side. Where do you fall on that? not in terms of both them, but like unstable coin specifically. You might call me an ambivalentist. You're just happy to sit in your house and watch this thing. I'm just watching. I feel like this was like when we were doing Bitcoin uncensored,

I was joked about being Madden. And we were just watching their like announcing like, oh, and there's Bruce Fenton on the field. Oh, he got tackled. That was how it felt. We were just like the high school gossip girl announcers of what was happening in Bitcoin. And Bruce Fent got tackled a lot.

So, but still getting back up, though. Well, yeah, yeah, he is dealing a school board. Bruce, we love you. We love you. But that was, you know, back in those days, it was the same thing. I felt like an observer. I don't feel like I can dictate anything. I feel like this thing is going to do whatever it does.

There are people doing good work today to try to get Bitcoin into certain places. I have no idea what the effects of that will be. whether it matters whether states put it on their balance sheet or whether it matters in the end ultimately whether the government puts it on its balance sheet uh i mean i'm happy to make predictions when i have any insight into what the effects of that are apart from price but i don't know if that increases use stable coin wise i think it's it's interesting because for i don't know 30 40 maybe maybe 40 even 50 years how long it was 40 years we had the the euro dollar and that entire market. And in some ways, the stable coins kind of

replace that and give global access to a currency that millions of people around the world want access to. And there's a lot of questions as to whether that same sort of thing will happen with, you know, let's say tokenizing everything. Well, not everything. Like, there's people that want to tokenize everything. I don't think it's efficient, but like tokenizing, uh, stocks, which are already essentially tokenized database items. What happens when you as like, uh, I don't know, a person in Djibouti, uh, can invest in the S&P 500, right? Or, you know, some person in Japan or, you know, whatever.

Microstrategy. Sure. Yeah, they could invest a micro strategy and, you know, and get access to 5x value Bitcoin or whatever, 5X levered, I don't know, whatever it's levered. But yeah, like the possibilities are endless. And I think like right now, even in the American stock market, there's like a lot of evolution with like leveraged products and stuff like that. So the ability to suddenly give the world access to that stuff, I wonder whether that's

going to be a blockchain instrument or whether these. individual companies, like, let's say fidelity or something, take a more global perspective and realize that that's their competition. Like, why wouldn't fidelity just, you know, open that up or something? I don't know if it's just hard or what. Yeah. I mean, presumably that's just down to like financial regulation, but I have no idea there. Yeah, that's, I would think so too. But I don't think you can, you know, this has always been my take is I don't think you can actually, uh, you can't regulate this anymore. No, you can. I think that it's very difficult to, to go around regulations. Like if you are, if you're the person issuing these certificates on the blockchain,

on Bitcoin or whatever blockchain you choose, and you're selling S&P 500 shares to people in Djibouti, like you are, you are regulated, right? And like even if you're an anonymous person and you're doing it in your fidelity account or something like that and they just don't know it's you, when they find out like you're going to have to pay the piper. So I don't, I don't know. I don't know what this looks like. The stable coins are a swing and a home run, right, rather than a swing and a miss. Because they came out for many years. And I think they would have, I think the government would have loved to regulate them heavily. But they just got so big. So that's interesting. Because do you think the government doesn't regulate them? Because the thing that I've always assumed with Tether,

and I have literally no inside info here, is that when they went through the New York district attorney trial, that they were given some kind of deal where it's like, you can continue to operate, but make sure we're in on this, this, this and this. I don't, I doubt it. But maybe I just, they've, they've been allowed to get so large. I think it's been largely inactivity by regulators that has allowed it to get to grow. I think, I think regulators didn't understand what Tether was. For sure.

For those that, that think Tether is this great validator of other blockchains. Tether started on Bitcoin. It was a Bitcoin project. It was on Omni, which before that was after MasterCoin. And it started there and it grew there. And then it turned into something else. And then when Ethereum became good marketing, they moved blockchains to Ethereum. And that actually is what's interesting about stable coins is they're totally and completely centralized.

Of course. Like people don't really quite understand. Like people talk about governments issuing blockchain assets and, uh, And, you know, doing these currencies on whatever they want, like a database held by the Fed. I don't know, blockchain, whatever they want to call it, CBDCs. And the reality is that that's really no different than a tether. Like, tether can invalidate outputs and invalidate all of the coins in your wallet because they're in charge of which coins are actually legitimate. And it's not even a could, though.

They do this. They do do that. But yeah, like that's the thing is like they're in full control of your wallet. So if if the United States government, you know, let tether be the main currency of choice, you could wake up one day and 10% of every single person, you know, maybe, maybe they require a 10% haircut of anyone who's last name is, you know, Dickerson and, uh, and then and then everyone named, uh, Mr. De Carson has 10% haircut on their money, you know, on day two. Yeah. Like they could do something like that, who knows.

And anything that's not in a KYC wallet could be invalidated. You know, there's all sorts of things they can do. And it's because it's a totally centralized product. And that's kind of what the government wants. But it's also like very useful as you see in global commerce because there's not like you think, I mean, think about it. You don't have to like take a helicopter and drop it over hostile, you know, drop pallets of dollars over hostile territories anymore. You can have assets on the ground literally distributing dollars. and knowing that if they leave that country

and they come to the US or they go to Canada or, I don't know, Djibouti, they can find somebody who will give them a dollar for tether. Yeah, I was in D.C. maybe like a month ago, and Paolo was there. I think it was the first time he's been to the US ever. I assume because he always thought he would get just blackbagged when he arrived. But now, look, Nick's here, and he feels, he feels, so, yeah, I'm sure he's been given, like, assurances.

But he was, in fact, it was Malas interviewing him on stage, and Jack started it by, explaining the scale of tether. And whenever people talk about the scale of tether, they always talk about like the number of treasuries they buy or whatever. But they're onboarding 250 million people a day. Yeah. That seems wrong.

But I think it's right. I don't think it could be right. Because they'd have the whole world in like... Maybe it was 250,000 people. It was. It was 250,000 people a day. But even still, like it's a crazy, crazy number. So like, like, what, 32 days?

They'd have the whole world. It's quick math. But like that, that scale is on the number. Yeah. And like, it's crazy. And so if you're sat in the global south, like there's no reason that you would, there's no reason you'd use your own currency. And really like, I can see a case, but there's no reason you'd really want to use Bitcoin.

Well, I've said this for Tether for a long time. And it's that there's a world in which Tether doesn't actually ever need to do any cash outs, right? If global trade is such that anybody is willing to trade you a dollar for your Tether, you you have a very different kind of world where no one ever no one's ever going to test whether you can cash out at tether.com or not yeah right they're they're never going to they're never going to have anyone actually yeah so like if you have a global exchange of people that are actually trading the tether you know like the tether becomes synonymous with one dollar somewhere and that's a really interesting world and yeah it does it does kind of subvert uh the bitcoin part of the blockchain

but you also need the Bitcoin to act in that sense as sort of like a lubricating oil for the tether or whatever it is. You know, like now tethers are moving to lightning, I think is what they're doing. And I actually sat down with like Michael Saylor a few years ago at breakfast. You ever been to Michael Saylor breakfast? I've not been to his house. It's very funny.

I always thought the billionaires would eat something like very different than you and me. They always eat like McDonald. He's like fucking like waffles. It's just he gets like eight choices in the morning. And the way that he does, he goes, he looks, he has a chef and he gets a menu every morning. And it's like the same things that you get at like the Sheraton. I'm sure it tastes bad. It tastes fine.

It's just same. And he goes, I'll take all of it. Right? Because like his chef's already bought all the food. He's like, I'll take one of everything. And so he gets like one of everything. And then you're like, I guess I'll have the waffles. And then like they bring the waffles out.

And it's just like, you know, share it and hotel food made by the chef. I'm sure it's, I mean, it's very, it tastes. good it's very good are you complaining about having dinner at say no no i just i just thought it would be like i don't know like you'd wake up like would you like squab for breakfast or it's not like that i don't even know what squab is it's pigeon okay that brings a full circle june set was telling me a story in the car just before this about the pigeon king you've got to tell the story i learned this uh yesterday from a canadian friend apparently in the early 2000s there was this scam that was running canada

where this guy said, look, I've been in New York, everyone there's eating pigeon. Pigeon's the new chicken, bro. Everyone's eating pigeon. Pigeons the new chicken. And I have endless buyers for pigeons. So convert your farm over to pigeon. And I will just buy them and sell them to New Yorkers

who just can't get enough pigeon. They just want pigeon every day, every meal. And so, like, thousands of Canadians converted over their farms, and, like, got caught in what is effectively a pigeon Ponzi scheme. And this, this happened, like, he declared bankruptcy in, I think, 2008. That's what shocked me the most. Because whenever you tell me something about that, I'm like, this is just bullshit. This is a Jun-Seth story.

1732. No Junsteth story is bullshit. You haven't learned this yet. But I looked up, and the Ponzi scheme closed down in 2008, and he had $350 million in outstanding. Like, I did not believe it. Unreal. Canadians are very stupid in the best way. They are very nice.

They are very nice. They like maple syrup. This episode is brought to you by River, the best place for Bitcoiners and businesses to buy Bitcoin. With River, you can set up zero fee recurring buys, making stacking stats effortless. And while you're waiting for the perfect buying opportunity, River lets you earn daily interest on your cash balance paid in Bitcoin,

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and commercial customers located in the US. Speak to Anchor Watch for a quote and for more details about your security options and coverage. Visit anchorwatch.com today, which is anchorwatch.com. But to get back to Bitcoin, right, I want to talk about the financialized. I can't talk about pigeons all day. We're not going from Squab to there, but let's talk about Sailor. Do you think micro-strategy is a good thing for Bitcoin?

I don't know. I feel like I don't understand enough of what he's doing. Like, I feel like he sees... I think Michael Saylor sees very clearly some hole in the bond market that needed filling. And there's no doubt that there is some kind of appetite for the thing that he's selling. And I don't know how big the hole is. Does that make sense? How big the demand is.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Is it infinite? Because the bond market's huge. Is it nearly infinite? Maybe. Is it limited?

Probably. is the exuberance around what he's doing a little bit too much? I don't know. I mean, probably, yeah. So is it good for Bitcoin? I don't know. I never know. I never know whether something like this is good for Bitcoin necessarily.

It's definitely a Bitcoin use. I think he's found if the bond market actually does have an appetite for this, I think he's found a killer app, as we used to say, for Bitcoin, there's clearly a use here. It's a little weird to me the idea that you could have a company that doesn't do anything. Like, that's not the case with micro strategy. They do have like a, they do have a real business. But it's like pretty insignificant compared to the Bitcoin side of what they're doing. At this point, yeah.

Yeah. So like essentially they don't do the thing they did. They're so big now. And the thing that's big about them is their Bitcoin holding. So it's like the inverse Bitcoin zombie company. Yeah, it's it is a zombie company of sorts. Their entire, I mean, even says it that they're, that the product they're providing is volatility. I mean, it, it smells funny.

So I think the same thing. Like whenever I've heard people talk about micro strategy for the last year or two, everything I hear feels like a top signal in terms of micro strategy. I'm going to keep going up. And then it keeps going up. And I don't know how to kind of like round that. And then they tell you you're stupid and don't understand what he's doing. And the other interesting thing is that so many people now aren't coming into Bitcoin, they're coming into micro strategy as like a conduit to Bitcoin.

Well, I've always said that I think that we run the risk both with chick coins and Bitcoin itself of sort of a, I think it was it was Algeria, Albania in the 90s. What happened? And well, the, it's something like 60% of the economy became Ponzi schemes. And this is what started the, you know, the civil war there. But politicians started branding themselves with these Ponzi's. Everyone. Everyone was in the Ponzi's. I mean, Trump mean coin, Malay Mincoin.

That's what I'm saying. Like, I've, I've always thought that there's a big risk of rerunning that. But on a global scale, and in big economies like America. And that is, to me, like, these might be the first signs that were headed toward that. I don't think we're anywhere near the top on that. I mean, like I said, like 60% of their economy was Ponzi's before they blew up. It might have been 40% but it was enormous, the amount.

And can I ask you a question? When you say that, do you mean the companies were literally, like textbook definitions of Ponzi schemes? Or was it that the currency was like failing? No, they were full on textbook definitions of Ponzi's. And just everyone had their favorite. And were people aware when you say everyone had their favorite? Like, because I never know in these, in these like different countries.

Like when I talk to Ukrainians, for example, they've had lots of bank failures over the years. They have very different understandings of banks. Very Bitcoin-like understandings of banks. We're like, the bank's going to steal your money. I know a number of Ukrainians who have jobs that pay half a million a year, and their goal is to spend half a million a year. You know, they don't save anything because they figure. Because they can. Well, no, they can.

They just have no trust in the bank. Yeah, they assume that by the time, it's retirement time, there's not going to be anything there because the bank's going to take a haircut or their money is going to be stolen or the government's going to change over and be like, no one has anything. You know, or like the currency has now been, you know, depreciated. And I don't know, maybe they're right. Like, we'll find out, right. Um, but like, I don't know what the opinions were there. There's, uh, the famous MMM Ponzi from Russia where it was stated like, this is a Ponzi, like get in while it's hot, you know?

And that thing ran for years and then kind of collapsed. And then he rebooted it and ran it again on a more global scale. Like he wasn't put in jail because he ran for like Russian Congress and was so, so beloved that he was elected. That's why. Yeah. Mavrodi. Most villainous name I've ever heard.

That is pretty, I mean, Russian. So you think we could now be like entering that? I think there's a possibility. I'm wary of social greed on mass. Like, I do think that like greed has its place in an economy. Like, I think that greed runs Bitcoin in some sense, right? Because people only care about number go up. Well, it's more like, like mining, right?

The most efficient way to mine is to mine the most profitable blocks, right? That's how you end up with ordinals continually getting in, right? Because is that greed or just like good incentives? Pure greed. But greed, greed is the, greed is the motivation caused by incentives, I guess. It's a response to. incentives. People want to maximize their returns, right? And so they are greedy. That's the way a business ought to operate, you'd think. Yep. And so when you're greedy, you maximize returns.

And sometimes, sometimes, particularly with like externalities and such, things get out of whack. And you have a misalignment of incentives. And when that occurs, is you can have a whole society collapse because, you know, it's because of misaligned incentives that cause everyone to invest in a Ponzi scheme. So that's a, that's a scary possibility. And I don't, like I said, I don't think we're on the verge of the, of the whole economy becoming Ponzi's. But wouldn't it be weird if all, like, I don't know, like Goldman Sachs was like, guys, fuck banking. We're going to start like doing convertible notes, just like MSTR. or just do that for the rest of the rest of our banking life for the rest of our life that's what we're

doing we're just you know accretive dilution giving everyone less shares but more bitcoin yeah and that's what goldman is now you know like what if you had like walmart and goldman and like every company in america uh move its focus from retail or from banking or whatever its risk profile is and start moving into this like bond issuance world like that's a really weird world. And then that, I mean, that's a weird incentive. Maybe, maybe that works because maybe, like I said, maybe this is a product that everybody needs infinite amounts of. So maybe all of America's economy could just be this. Or maybe it's a hole that is only so big and needs, you know, X amount to be plugged. But what are you saying here? Because I want to make sure

this is clear because I don't want it to be misconstrued. But are you saying that you think micro strategy could essentially be like a Pondi scheme? what I'm saying is I don't understand exactly what they're doing my spidey senses go up when I don't understand something it doesn't mean it doesn't mean that they're doing anything nefarious it doesn't mean that they're doing anything problematic but it doesn't mean I don't understand it and ultimately like when I think of what a corporation is a company is this like it's this pool of risk acceptance, right? Like Walmart, for example, the best risk, like they exist to take on the risk of retail, right?

And so as long as retail, whether it's tariffs or anything else are going on, all of those things are in their pocket of risk, right? And all of retail is subject to those risks. Some of them different types of risks. Maybe Walmart happens to maybe get a lot of stuff from China. So like Chinese tariffs would be like much worse for them. But that's the risk that they exist to absorb. Micro Strategy before this, the risk they existed to absorb was a fair,

they were a fairly small public company that did like business analytics. And there are companies that use their service all over the world, all over the United States at least. And that was their product. And that was the risk pool that they did. And then they got into this Bitcoin thing. And it has overtaken that business. So it's a different set of risks and it's a different business altogether. And they're not abandoning the old business.

They're kind of touting it as an advantage that it's tied to that. But they're certainly not like as focused on that as they used to be, I don't think, because they used to be their primary and only focus. So I don't, I don't know. Like I just don't know. Like I said, it could be that he's found the killer app for Bitcoin. Or it could be that there's something else going on. And I don't know that I don't know that I will be able to answer that question for 20 years.

I'm also very unfamiliar with the bond market. So like I'm not saying I'm not saying that like Michael Saylor is leading us down a path to like Albania. But I'm saying like I think that we do as a whole run the risk of walking down that road. And I think that people are willing to put a lot of money in places on products they don't understand. And whether they understand them or not doesn't mean they don't work or do work. Yeah. But they don't understand them. And everyone who sat down and tried to explain this to me has not given me an effective explanation.

Yeah. So presumably then you think this has the potential to be a threat in the next like bare market that this could be one of the things that collapses. Like every bare market we see businesses collapse, do you think that could be micro strategy? I don't know. I never, I would never make a prediction like that. I don't know. But I'm all on like my position is very clear.

I just don't understand it. And I'm not like, I don't want to be so fluff. is that, but I just don't. I don't understand it. That's why I don't, like, I don't ever tell people to do it or not to do it. I don't understand it. Just like get a real good understanding. If you can wrap your mind around it, then good. If you can't, then, you know, do what I do and don't do anything. Just buy Bitcoin. Yeah, I don't know. Like, presumably what he's doing should be good for me as a Bitcoin holder, maybe not as good as it is for an MSTR holder, but he's buying Bitcoin. A hell of a lot of it. A hell of a lot of it. And so that

that's good for me. It's accretive to me. It's not dilutive to me, but it's accretive. And maybe at the end of the day, people that held MSTR long term have a lot more Bitcoin than I do. I'm really comfortable with not necessarily participating in market exuberance. I'm going to get another bit and then I've got a question for you. I'm going to need one too. Don't cut this out though because then people think I left and went to the bathroom. I can't have that I like maybe I walked over there and went the bathroom. I can never ever, my goal is to never take a bathroom break on any podcast. What's that? Just beer breaks are fine. You know what, beers and guns do mix.

Do they? Yeah, we're proving it. You have an interesting take, so I'm told, on how people should be like positioning themselves to own Bitcoin. Oh yeah? Do I? This is what Hoddle told me. Yeah. I tend to think that Bitcoin is a highly volatile asset and that I equate volatility with risk. I'm an advocate of efficient market hypothesis. I don't think that's a surprise to anyone who's been a long-term listener. I've been told many times that I've cost a lot of people money by advocating this. But that's okay with me.

I don't really care. I believe markets are efficient. I believe that I believe that I believe. that you can gain at times a big advantage by following a number of factors that the market that the market gives you. So one of them being volatility, right? One of those things is having more knowledge than the market, holding risk and such. Like there's a few things that the market will or can compensate you for. And it's said it by a lot of economists like Eugene Fama that the only free lunch in economics is diversification, right? So I'm an advocate of diversifying your holdings.

Maybe this is why you don't like sailor. Because he's not diversifying? Yeah, well, he doesn't he say diversification selling losers to buy losers? Selling winners to buy losers. Selling winners to buy losers. Well, yeah, so that that's like the rhetoric of diversification from like the 80s, I feel like. it's not really buying losers and selling winners. It's selling noise and buying noise that's lower priced. And it's buying and selling decorrelated assets, right? So like as the S&P is tanking, right now it happens to be a great option to have gold in their portfolio. If you were to right now, rebalance and you, you.

you were holding gold and S&P shares 50-50. At the end of, you know, today, you'd have more S&P shares than you did yesterday. Yep. You'd have a little less gold. And then at some point, the S&P is going to recover, the American economy will recover and gold will maybe go back down. And the S&P will grow faster than gold. And then you can, you know, do it again.

And you'll have a little more gold than you started out with. And so you do this cyclically. And the idea is to just kind of get a little bit more of everything. I think like a lot of the critique of it is that Bitcoin has grown so fast over time periods that that you're poorly compensated for a strategy like this. And I think that's a totally fair critique. But the reality is that if you believe that Bitcoin is going to become a main part of the economy, it's that over the short term, the strategy may not be the one that compensates you the best.

Over the long term, a strategy where you're holding decorrelated assets, and Bitcoin is going to compensate you better than just holding Bitcoin. But that's a very long-term look on it. But presumably the problem there would be that, like, I can't remember the number of days, but it's like 345 days a year or something. Bitcoin just goes up or down 1%. And then there's only a very small amount of days where Bitcoin actually has any real price appreciation. So how do you try and, how can you be diversified if you have to be in the market only for a few days a year?

Because you're probably not going to time those days. always be in the market. But just with a smaller amount you start. Well, like, you've got to pick allocations. So, like, I don't know, you can, you can have a 5% Bitcoin allocation or an 80% Bitcoin allocation. It doesn't, I don't really tell people what to do. But let's say you have a 50% Bitcoin allocation and a 50% dollar allocation.

I don't think that would particularly perform well, but let's say you did it. As Bitcoin goes down, if you're reallocating, let's say, every quarter, you're going to be buying more Bitcoin with those dollars. Yeah. And then when Bitcoin goes up, you're going to be selling it for those dollars. So what it does is it pads you. It means that you don't get, you don't buy at the bottom and you don't sell at the top. You buy along the way to the bottom and you sell along the way to the top.

And what you get is an average sale price somewhere in between the top and the bottom. Do you do this? Yeah. Hmm. That's interesting. Because I would say probably 99% of the people that come on the show are just like all in Bitcoin. And I would definitely be one of those. people. It's fine. I mean, like, I don't, like, again, this is just either, either I'm, either I'm

right or I'm wrong. And again, it's a long term strategy, not a short term strategy. So in the short term, I think it's made me poor. But in the long term, I think it makes me much richer. And I don't know that I'll ever get what I've lost back. But I think it's a strategy that allows you to keep your wealth. Yeah. I think anyone who's ever sold Bitcoin knows they're not going to get it all back. Like, I'm never going to have as much Bitcoin as I possibly could have had. Right. And that's just a bitter pill you've got to swallow. Do you mess with these, like, leverage Bitcoin ETFs? Yeah. So are the, are you looking at like the two X ones, the, what is it, the pro shares one? Yeah. Do you not think that that is, again, because of like the fact

that Bitcoin only moves a very small amount most days, does that not just constantly steal your Bitcoin from you in the sense that if it goes up one percent one day goes down one percent the next day he has to go more than one percent the following day to make up the what you well it depends on your strategy so like again if what you're doing is a volatility strategy like me um when it goes up you're selling when it goes down you're buying so like i have a volatility strategy which means that like my portfolio is in flux all the time yeah uh lose a huge amount of money when when the uh when the when the market goes down and I allocate from Bitcoin to that and then usually it recovers. So like, you know, right now Bitcoin's highly correlated with the market.

Yeah. But sometimes it's not. So when it wasn't highly correlated with like the market itself, I don't know, a year ago, Bitcoin was going way, way up. Was I doing? I was reallocating to like, you know, let's say triple levered cues, right? But I hold them in allocation. So like if you have TQQQQ,

maybe like a 60, a 60, 40 stock to bond portfolio would look very different, right? Because like with TQQQQQ you have 3X exposure. So all of a sudden you can hold in a portfolio like that. If you want it just to hold, you know, 100%. You hold what, like 30% TQQQQ or 20% TQQQ and then the 80% bonds. And you get the same returns or a proxy. the same returns as if you're holding just, you know, 80-20. But you have a lot more security because like, like, if it goes to zero,

you only lose 20% of your portfolio, right? So there's, if you're holding things in allocations, uh, you can get what looks a lot like very cheap exposure to like leverage without blowing out, without blowing out your position. Interesting. Do you think Bitcoin's correlation is going to like remain going forward? Because like I've been really surprised, while gold's been doing well that Bitcoin has remained so correlated to like the NASDAQ. I don't think Bitcoin is correlated in any way. I think it is mathematically correlated at times. Yeah.

And I think that it is functionally non. It has to be not correlated because it has nothing to do with the S&P. Right now it's just kind of a risk on asset at times. And then other times it's not. It's very weird. We don't really know what's going on or why. but Bitcoin sometimes acts like a totally correlated asset and sometimes it doesn't. Why?

I don't know. I have no clue why. But I think at some time Bitcoin will break the trend. And we saw that recently. Like the T, like the Q's were going down. The S&P was going down. And Bitcoin sat at 82. Yeah,

after the tariffs. Yeah. It sat at like 82 for a week or a few days. And then eventually it got pulled down. But like again, if you're doing, if you're doing what I'm doing like with a portfolio that is, that is leveraged, you sold some Bitcoin at 82 to buy TQQQ, and then TQQQ went up 20, 30%, and you sold some of that to buy Bitcoin. And you're just back and forth and back and forth.

And you're making small amounts. And what you're doing is you're bringing down your average price for any of the stocks that you've bought. And that's always my goal, just bring down my price and get more of the thing. And that's really hard in a bull run because Bitcoin just takes off, right? Yeah. But I'm okay with muted returns. if I get a little bit more stability. So this all comes down to Bitcoin just being too volatile as a store of a store value.

Well, I'm a Bitcoiner. I'm so comfortable with volatility. Like I've pitched this portfolio to a number of people. And my friends who work in the industry are like, that is a ridiculous portfolio. It's way too volatile. Nobody would accept that. And it's true because the drawdowns are like 70%. Right.

But at the end, like at times, you end up with more Bitcoin. At times you end up with a little less. But what you end up with are, like, returns that are slightly less volatile than Bitcoin. So you end up, you're holding a little less risk. It just sounds like a lot of work. I would so much rather just hold Bitcoin. And like, you do get the volatility. So this is interesting, actually. It's actually not that much work. I mean, I have a spreadsheet for it. So it's very easy to do. But I can see why people think it would be a lot of work. Yeah. So to go back to the leveraged Bitcoin ETFs, Do you think that has a chance of blown up in the bear market?

Because I don't fully understand how they work and what the risk is there. Yeah. So the risk is that Bitcoin drops 50% in a day. Yeah. So yeah. They could absolutely blow up. And then that's game over. For anyone holding them, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, 50% drop. It's the same with like TQQQQ. If it's a 33.334% drop in the market, it's bankrupt. Yeah. So, you know, like that's what I was saying is allocations matter. You have to hold these things.

And, and a lot of the money ends up getting transferred into like the bond portion of your portfolio or the gold portion of the portfolio. And all of these things are at risk. That's, but that's always leverage. Leverage is that way. That's why like when. Right. That's getting cut. Leverage is like leverage is a very difficult game to play because.

leverage just like it can it can murder you in the markets right so people i know people that took leverage when they thought bitcoin is going up they put too much in and they got liquidated everything they own yeah so leverage is a very like a very scary game and the only way to do it in my opinion is to do it in a way that gives you a little bit more uh a little bit more safety so this all kind of gets back to the finance. And by the way, sorry, I am one of the very few people I know that does things like counts their house as a portion of their portfolio. Very few people you know. I'm surprised that everyone doesn't do that. I don't know anyone that does when they're doing allocations. Like, I literally have my home. I have the mortgage portion allocated. Like I have, I have an

understanding of all of the leverage that is in my portfolio, all of it, every inch of leverage, including how much leverage is caused by having leveraged products in the portfolio. So, you know, maybe 140% or 200% or 350% depending on like, you know, what people have is in their portfolio. But like, I have a perfect understanding of the leverage in my portfolio. And I think very few people understand how much leverage in their lives is in their portfolios, whether it's their car loan or whether it's their mortgage or whatever it is. Yeah. And so, like, I'm a very, very, I'm fastidious when it comes to understanding my own fiscal position.

I'm obsessive about it, mainly because I think it's interesting, but also because I think that, I think there is truth in understanding, like, returns when you follow a principled investment strategy. So, like, if you are leveraged 300%, you have to be compensated. for for holding that leverage and if you are leveraged zero percent um you also want to be compensated for not holding leverage you want to be compensated for the level of risk you're taking yeah so you need to understand what your what your leverage actually is so like when you get a mortgage you might put down 5 percent right a lot of people do this uh like an fha loan or something like that or maybe even a conventional loan right like 5 percent down so now you've got this like 20 x leverage position on your house. Well, the only way you can actually take advantage of that is if you could

pull, if you could pay your house off in full today. Yeah, that makes sense. Otherwise, you're just, you've basically created for yourself a money pit. So for me, I want to have a perfect understanding of exactly how much leverage I have, exactly what my risk is and exactly what I ought to be compensated for the risk that I've taken, whereas most people just kind of take a lot of risk as it comes and don't understand exactly what it is that they have in their portfolios. Do you think this financialization of Bitcoin with things like micro strategy, ETFs, potentially U.S. buying Bitcoin maybe fits in there? Do you think that's whether it's inevitable or not?

Do you think it's a good thing? I don't know. We'll know that for 20, 30 years. Like, it depends on what people who are more sophisticated than you and I will do with it. how they'll use it. Yeah, like, rehypification is something that libertarians talk about a lot with dollars.

And they'll say, like, you can't re-hypothicate Bitcoin, but like, why not? Why can't you? If you put, and people will try.

Well, if you put Bitcoin in an institution, the institution can re-hypothicate it. Like, they don't have to hand you Bitcoin. They can hand you a representation of a Bitcoin, you know. And if Bitcoin is stable,

they can give mortgages in Bitcoin, et cetera. But I do think a lot about, like, Like, right, I, so we're Bitcoiners. So we know a lot of people who maybe have quasi retired. Yeah. Right.

I'm not one of them. I like to work. We're looking at you, Hado. Yeah. You're a huddle. Um, but people that have quasi retired and have trouble with things like buying a house.

Right. And I think a lot about like what, what are the financial products that are missing? We used to say this in Bitcoin uncensored. It was like, if it exists, there's porn of it. Like, if it exists, there's a financial product of it, was the idea. And there is, there, there are these needs that Bitcoin sort of puts on display for the world that there are no products for. So like housing, you're worth $30 million. You have no income last year. You're a perfect candidate for a mortgage because you can pay it.

Yeah. So like the bank should be happy to give you money. So you go to the bank. You're like, okay, I want a mortgage. And they're like, okay, show us your financial statements. And you're like, I have none. But here, here's my $30 million portfolio and I have zero debt. Okay. But what do you make per year?

No, no, I have $30 million. Okay, but what do you make per year? Yeah. Nothing. Okay, but we can't give you a mortgage then. Well, why? Because you don't make anything. Okay.

So like, I think what that kind of thing. Yes. They do. Absolutely. They do that. And it's crazy. Whereas I think about it, I was like, why isn't there a product

where I can be like, look, the homes were 700,000? Yeah. Let me take 40 million of my money. And I'll take $700,000 of it. I'll put it in an escrow fund. You allow me to continue to like invest it. If it goes under the amount, the house is worth or whatever the mortgage is worth, I'll top it off.

Yeah. And so you can take that money whenever you want and I'll take the house. Or you can take the house whenever you want and I'll take the money. Right? we're even Stephen. Anytime it goes down, you give me 10 days to fill it. I'll put money in it, right? Something like that where you could like basically put money away into an escrow

account. You would still be able to invest it. You'd still be able to keep your Bitcoin. And you would also be able to like collateralize a loan against a mortgage. Like I don't see why that's not a thing that exists. Yeah, I'm sure that's not a thing. It's not a thing. So what do people with like $30 million?

in stocks and shares do. Same issue. If you don't have an income, a lot of them will show income, they'll have an investment company or something like that. Like you have dividends. Yeah. They can show dividend income at least. Like Bitcoin doesn't pay a dividend, right? So if you're 100% in Bitcoin, you don't have that. I mean, surely someone's working on that products. It seems obvious. I don't know. I hope so. So you asked what the financialization means in Bitcoin, the answer is I don't have a goddamn clue. But, But I can see that there's a lot of products that Bitcoiners need that have apparently never been needed before. Because if they were needed, they would exist.

And I, like, it, maybe they do in some esoteric corner of the market. Right now there's more people than ever that need these products. Yeah. You want to buy your neighbor's house for 700K, right? Or like, you know, something like that. Like, you go to the bank and they're like, oh, what's your income? You know, like, there are Bitcoiners that could buy entire blocks. And they can't because they can't get loans.

Yeah. So really it needs like an entire rebuilding of the financial system based around Bitcoin. I think there needs to be a rebuilding. I think there needs to be new products available. I don't think we need to rebuild. I think there's a lot of things that are really useful. But I think there are new products that need to come on the market that specifically target a demographic of people that are apparently underserved. Like Anchorage.

Anchor Watch would be a great. I actually suggested that I was talking to Becca about this the other day. I was like, you guys should think about this. And she's like, that's actually interesting. So I don't know, maybe, maybe Anchor Watch could do something like that. Maybe they'll provide the escrow. Yeah. But I think that that is a product that needs to exist.

And there's other products like it that are in all sorts of corners of the market where particularly for Bitcoiners, they just need leverage or they need access to like, access to some leverage in a way that isn't absolutely insane, right? Where they're like, hey, I would like to take some Bitcoin off the table. Well, they're not sell it, but I want to like, you know, get a loan on it. And the, you know, the Bitcoin company's like, well, that'll be 14%. Yeah. Like, you don't really need it to be 14% if you have both Bitcoin and a home collateralizing. And Bitcoin's a deep market. If you're a bank and someone gives you $700,000 worth of Bitcoin,

you can liquidate it in half a second and you'll get $694,000. Yeah. Like the slippage isn't even that big on a number like that. Or you can sell it, you know, over a course of of three days over the counter, you know? So, like, you have plenty of options. Even if you had to over collateralize your account, who cares? But, like, there's just no options like that for anybody. I do, like, Anchor Watch are a sponsor of the podcast. Yeah.

And they're a portfolio company of Epoch. Well done. So, like, I'm certainly, like, selling my bag here. But I do think they're a perfect example of a company that have addressed an issue that didn't really exist before Bitcoin and they've gone out and fixed it. So I think that's totally fair. But one thing you said on a previous podcast, we recorded this like two years ago or something,

was that Bitcoin hasn't done anything yet. And that was one of those things. Like, every now and again, there's something that it just sticks with you. And I've thought about a lot. Do you think we're still a way away from Bitcoin doing anything? Or do you think we've got there? No, Bitcoin hasn't done anything yet.

I think that there's, I think that there's, again, the financialization question is a good one because I care a lot about this question. I'm an investor in Anchor Watch. I've not invested in many companies. It violates my investment ethos, as you can imagine. But Anchor Watch in particular matters to me because in order for Bitcoin to work, we need robust tools that reflect normal financial products.

Insurance is the most important product that has ever existed that humanity has ever figured out. out. Yeah. Maybe apart from vaccines. Move on. That's for you, that's for all you libertarians. No, like insurance is one of the most important things that has ever been figured out in financial markets. It really is. And figuring it out in Bitcoin is one of the hardest things to do. And I think Anchor Watch has figured it out better than anybody else. Yeah. And I think they've got a better understanding of what needs to happen, particularly with like the negotiation with Lloyds about the wrench attack stuff because that's a real worry for Bitcoiners. Totally.

Luckily, we've got about 18 guns in here. Yeah. Well, that's no, this is, this is for you and me to be protected against someone. They're all on your side of the table. Well, you know, you got a couple that you could grab right there, you know. I don't know that you know how to use them. No, I don't. You're fucking British people.

You know, this is how we became America. Hey, I'm proud of you. All power to you. Yeah. It was funny coming here. So how do we get these into the apartment? I was so nervous. There are kids.

You're going to get me. There are kids around. You're going to get me banned from YouTube, ban from Airbnb. There's a camera outside. Yeah? The police show up. Well, people will be like, cool guns, bro. Yeah, I didn't post that picture yet because I don't want to get swaffing.

See what I mean? It's very funny. So, yeah, Anchor Watch has figured out insurance. And I think the wrench attack is one of the scariest things for Bitcoiners. And the fact that they can insure against it is an amazing feat. I think I have to hand it to Becca for negotiating that more than anybody. Like it was literally a thing. I think she negotiated because she got so many people asking as a joke, but also

semi-seriously. And so she got that negotiation, that term negotiated into the Anchor Watch terms because it's actually something Bitcoiners care about. For sure. And apart from that, just the insuring of the Bitcoin itself, like, you know, insuring it from, you know, whatever else there is, whatever other troubles. Honestly, the base thing is like stupidity. Yeah, but, but like, we don't lose that much Bitcoin to stupidity. Like, people talk about things like, oh, what if you send your Bitcoin to the wrong address? Like, explain how that happens. It's not sending it's the wrong address.

It's having bad key management. Sure, bad key management. But like, you know, that's, you sign a, you sign an agreement there that you have good key management, right? But you're doing it with that tried and stuff. Yeah, yeah. The part of it is that they'll hold, you know, a part of the key, but not a key that they can spend. Yeah. You know, and there's conditions that you, your key must be used in a spend, you know, stuff like that.

It's, it's cool tech. Mm-hmm. And they're really the first ones to implement a lot of the tech that is endemic to Bitcoin. that no one's ever really touched before. Yeah. It's incredibly cool. But yeah, there's, apart from the spend conditions, there's just all sorts of really cool things that, like, insurance provides.

So now that we have Bitcoin insurance that's credible, and there's been a couple of other companies that have attempted and are doing it and even have some big accounts. But I think it, I think Anchor Watch got it right. I'll put it that way compared to any other product. I think they did it right from beginning to end. They understood Bitcoin. They understood Bitcoin natively.

They understood Bitcoin intrinsically, and they created a product that utilizes Bitcoin in the way that Bitcoin is supposed to be used in order for it to be insured. Yeah. So now that we have that product on the market, first of its kind, in my opinion, you now have the ability for Bitcoin to do something. You never could, Bitcoin cannot do anything until it can be insured. Because until it can be insured, it's just a, it's a fart in the wind. Like you, you get hacked. You spend it. It's gone.

If somebody like does a man in the middle attack, you know, Tony Galeepi and team of BitPay sending off their Bitcoin to a Barry Silbert, you know, fake email, which actually we got caught up in that same hack, interestingly. But like basically handing their Bitcoin or over, Bitcoin's over to a hacker, whether that comes back or not, you know, is anybody's guess, I don't know if they've already found them or if they never will. But there are these institutions that hold huge amounts of Bitcoin and they're not being stolen from as contingent on the continued good luck that all of the keyholders operate with perfect, perfect accuracy. Yeah, like perfect knowledge of when they're being hacked and when they're not perfect understanding of the risks of every transaction. it's anathema. You can't run a company if the way you have to run it is that every single person has to act perfectly 100% of the time. So Bitcoin can't do anything until it can be insured.

Now that it can be insured, it can do something. What that thing is, I don't know. The thing that triggered me about saying Bitcoin's not done anything is, I mean, maybe for a couple of reasons, but one of the really important reasons would be like the human right side of it. Because Bitcoin's certainly done a lot of people with a lot of things for human rights activists. Like it's the thing that's allowing women in Afghanistan to get education. Maybe.

Why do you say maybe? Maybe. Where'd you hear that from a bitcorner? Yes. Maybe. But like it does have, like it has the ability to do that. It has the ability. The Belarusian protest, for example.

Maybe. But why did you say maybe? Because like what, like what one guy sent some Bitcoin to some like protester? There wasn't like millions of people. or millions of dollars sent probably to the Belarusian protesters. I don't know the numbers, but it certainly wasn't one guy. Okay, maybe it's 10 guys.

But is that not doing something? No. No, you need scale. You need big things. You need an entire country. You need Burma. You're watching what's happening there? I mean, I know vaguely, but go on. The government has decided they're going to genocide all of their farmers,

basically. They're going through the countryside and they're murdering people. So what are the farmers do? The farmers go on. internet sure that they were introduced by probably some american they find this outline for this thing called the uh fgc nine oh the 3d prints of gum it's not a 3d printed gun what is it it's a gun that you can construct from home depot parts okay the pin is a nail the firing pin is a nail you can construct it from parts you find around your barn and so the government shows up and a bunch of farmers suddenly have arms

Like, what the fuck? The farmers shoot them. They take their AK-47s, and now they have AK-47s. And what's happened is all through Burma, the farmers have been arming themselves like this with these guns that were produced by a guy in Germany. And they're preventing the government from genociding them. It's like the story of Esther from the Bible. But instead of pitchforks, and instead of like having to be handed pitchforks by, uh, Who was it, you know, Haman or whatever?

Like, instead of having to be handed pitchforks, they're literally taking their lives into their own hands, and they're preventing the government from killing them. So guns do something, right? The ability to defend yourself does something. It saves you. It saves your life. It can, and it can save an entire country's life if the entire country is able to,

like, at scale, use this weapon against their government if they have to. not advocating that like everyone goes out and you know fires guns to the government but if your government decides to genocide you yeah yeah go get go get some guns but does have does having money not do the same thing having money does the same thing so then why don't you think bitcoin's done anything because it hasn't done that yet it's not money yet no one's using it like that yet maybe some people are but not that many like you need scale the day that i find out that people in burma were only able to get their guns because of bitcoin bitcoin hasn't done something Like, you know, there's, there's a lot of things that, like, if Michael Saylor's bet here on the bond market is pulled off, like, it doesn't end up, like, collapsing or it like, you know, is a forever, it forever, like, modifies the bond market. Then Bitcoin did something, right? Like, I, there's a lot of variables and a lot of things that are happening right now that are interesting. And, and that could be like an example of Bitcoin doing something. There's a lot of places where it could be. But there's just, like, it hasn't done.

it yet. We're on the verge of Bitcoin having done something. So what what does Bitcoin have to do then? Is it is it all about scale to you? Yeah. Because like Bitcoin can like even saving one person's life is to me is doing something. It's not not that important. It is to that person. Maybe. Like, you know, a ladder allowing one person getting a coconut is a ladder doing something. But it's not that like I don't look at ladders. I'm like, oh, I guess they are world changing. you can climb coconut trees but um no like i'm just saying like to me like when i think of something like bitcoin mattering it it has to matter at scale if it doesn't matter at scale it doesn't matter that's just really what it comes down to like all of the things you're talking about people like

minaro might be able to do that for a brief period or a theorem like transferring value is is a thing that it does yeah um that's not that interesting like i need if it's transferring value at scale. Like, the Ukraine war was an interesting possible example where people were sending money to Ukraine. I don't think it got much scale. But like, if, for example, Bitcoiners were funding the Ukraine war, that would have been something, right? That would have been interesting, you know. And there hasn't been much that Bitcoin has, there hasn't been anything I can think of really that Bitcoin has done at scale. This episode is brought to you by Kasa, the leading Bitcoin self-custody solution.

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How much of a part do you think Bitcoin is played in getting Trump collected? A lot, because we, I think, we're the biggest donors, as I think crypto generally was the biggest donors to the campaign. So would that not be Bitcoin doing something? That's Bitcoin making people rich and those people doing something. Yeah, I like, again, I don't want to lay this. No, no, it's just, it's like, I get what you're saying. Like, there are things that I think we can point at and say, like, if not for Bitcoin,

that wouldn't have happened. If not for Bitcoin, Trump wouldn't get elected. I don't know, maybe. I don't know that Bitcoin or, like, it depends. You can't run that scenario without Bitcoin. Yeah. Because that was the scenario that was run. But to me, like, I'm looking for something explicit, something that, like, really just

as Bitcoin did something very different at. scale that that like only bitcoin could do you know again it's not that interesting like industries pop up all the time that maybe become the biggest donor for a few years or something because they got really rich yeah um you know maybe semiconductors in the 80s or something like that but like like that's i don't know that the donors of a particular class of object that got rich donating to a political person is them doing something i think it's them hoping that that trump us something to allow Bitcoin to be more effective as an asset. Yeah.

That's not. But I don't know that it's Bitcoin doing something yet. Like I said, I think there's a lot of like things lining up right now that could be like Bitcoin's moment. But like something that is uniquely Bitcoin that Bitcoin does that no, nothing else could do. I'm still kind of waiting. I'm waiting on that. Fair. I mean, like I said, that point did trigger me.

But you're a little kind of grueling, man. But what, so, that should we talk about Trump? Sure. Yeah, my favorite subject. Yeah, I know, you're a big Trump fan. I'm really not. Are you not?

I thought you were. No, not really. I'll tell you what I am. I am very, very protective of Trump because everyone believes so many lies about the man. And getting through a conversation

with people that believe those things is nearly impossible. possible. Yeah. And so it has been in America, I think that like people outside of America don't understand what it's been like here if you're engaged. I try not to be politically engaged, but I got politically engaged a little bit when I started watching the left just do an awful lot of things that I think we're going to, like very antithetical to the sort of ethos of this country, which matters to me because the ethos of this country is what allows. me to disengage from politics.

Right? Like, if America's running smooth, I don't have to pay attention to it every second. If it's not, then it's kind of contingent on all of us as Americans to, like, jump in and be like, okay, now we care. Shit, we got to fix this. So, you know, the Trump stuff is really hard because, like, basically there's just

millions and millions of lies that you have to wade through to get people who are of who believe them. And what defending him looks like is a person as a fan. That's that's what's become of the current era. So like,

if I defend him. What are the lies that you have to get through? What are the one? Well, for the entirety of his last presidency, people believe that he was a Russian asset. Okay. Yeah.

So there's that. Like a huge percentage of Americans still think he's a Russian spy. What else? There were lies about him going to Moscow or sending representatives to Moscow to build a hotel and making deals of Putin. There are stories about him making deals with like the president of Argentina or Venezuela and like other places before he became president.

I see these art. People send me these articles and I'm like, there's no evidence of this. It's just this article. And it's stuck in people's craw. Like everyone's got their own story that's stuck in their craw and is 95% false. And I had this, I had a friend who is just an absolute Trump hater in the last cycle. And I was pretty ambivalent, but I got, I figured it out. I actually read, I read a book by, was it Antipopopopalus, Papadopoulos.

Okay. He wrote his, he wrote this book about like him being like on the campaign and what happened and how he started getting trailed and followed in every country and how all of this stuff seemed to like coalesce and come together. And then all of a sudden he gets arrested. And he's like, I could tell that the way he wrote that book was, you know, he went day by day through his email and just wrote what occurred that day. And it's like, oh, yeah, I remember that was the day.

I could tell by the way the book is written. I was like, this is not a ghost writer. This is him writing the book where he goes day by day through his email because that's how I would have written that book. And he talks about it. And then on the other side, he has this sort of cogent narrative of what happened. And it was the first, I was reading it. And I thought to myself, oh, this is a ruse.

Like if you listen to some of the older Junsteth's world, I, I had friends in DC. who were telling me that like there were a lot of people in state department who you know had evidence of x y and z and there was like you know all of this stuff and i was like okay well if that's the case then like you know let's get ready for the prosecution of this guy and when i read that book i realized that like none of those things that i was being told by these people who are very close to the state were true and i started realizing that they were in themselves in kind of this cult where they were hearing people in the government declare that they had goods on Trump that they didn't have and then never releasing them. So, for example, during the last Trump presidency,

I was told by numerous people in D.C. that it was common knowledge that Donald Trump would log into his accounts, his hotel like booking software from the White House and that he would check which dignitaries were staying at his hotel. Common knowledge. Well, if it's common knowledge, where's the evidence, right? Like, is that? Is it? Is it. There's no evidence. There's no evidence. He didn't operate like that, but it's common knowledge. It was common knowledge in D.C. And there was no dissuading people from the fact that that might not be true because they'd heard it from someone that they thought was credible. And that person who they thought was credible, I don't know where the hell they heard it, probably from someone they thought was credible. Yeah. And all, it was turtles all the way down. So I spend like, I care a lot about honesty and truth. I care a lot about people believing the right things about Donald Trump. mainly because it it has torn the country apart and at some point in 2016 the left decided that all right wingers are Nazis it was the first time i ever started hearing every person in america used the word fascism it was not a word that everyone used until then and i started seeing violence in the streets and it was just it was just a problem like there was there's nothing like it that had existed before then and it was all because of these things that people were telling you me about Donald Trump that weren't true. So like I think I think memes are very powerful.

Totally. And I say I say regularly that a bad meme is like a virus. It, it infects like a regular meme, but it makes people do things that are unconscionable because it's a bad meme. And they get in your head and they, they cause bad outcomes. And the Donald Trump is a fascist and all Republicans are fascists is a bad meme. Totally. And it infected America's,

even their center left to the point that we now have millions of people in the U.S. that believe that we are headed towards a communist state. So then you have the interim four years. Is that a right wing? Sorry, not a communist state, a fascist state.

Yeah. A Nazi state. I do think, though, it works the other way too. I think the right would think that if Kamala had a one of the election, that it was going to a communist state. It depends on what you define as communism. Mm-hmm.

if Hillary had won the election I'll just run this back for you if Hillary Clinton had won the election she would have had three Supreme Court picks I don't know it was three Supreme Court picks you can tell me whatever you want because I'll believe you

I think it was 18 Supreme Court picks you could have and she would have elected far left or left wing at least judges maybe even moderately left judges and we would have had full-on gun control in the United States. So like, and I don't know what that means. Like maybe that's the point the country falls into civil war. Like America's always on a precipice in some sense.

But if Hillary Clinton had gotten her picks, she would have gotten judges who were anti-gun. Yeah. Pro abortion. You know, very, very much different than the rights perspectives. and we've had kind of a, we've had this. But do you really think that would have escalated to Civil War? I don't think you understand how much we like our guns. Maybe not.

Maybe not. Have I not demonstrated for you? I don't think that anyone outside of the United States understands what, you probably don't know this, but a few years ago in Virginia, which is, Virginia is a conservative state, co-opted by D.C. So all of Virginia is red except Richmond, right, right there, that little blue speck. But because it's a city, there's a lot of people. And it's been invaded by DC people.

The entire state now votes blue. So they have this Democratic governor. And he says that he encourages the, uh, the Virginia state, uh, representatives to vote for ban of AR-15s. And so what happens in Virginia is, I don't know what it was, two, 300,000 people showed up at the statehouse with their AR-15s on their back. Some of them had two, three AR-15s on their back. Some of them had one.

It doesn't really matter. Just hundreds of thousands of people showed up with their AR-15s and stood there and said, go ahead, do it. Ban them. We dare you. try it right and that's like america is always on the precipice so i don't know i don't know what they would have done but the the the left wing in this country is obsessed with guns not in the way that i'm obsessed with guns i'm obsessed with guns in the way that like you're obsessed with dildos right

like you have like a collection of like 80 of them right i've heard that through the grapevine am i wrong It's way more than 80s. It's way more than that. All shapes, all sizes. Some vibrate, some don't. But that's like a lot of Americans really love collecting guns. They like having them. They like, you know, shooting them.

Lots of choices here. We can go to the range. You can experience the beautiful kickback of a CZ shotgun over under, right? Or the nine, the wonderful. the wonderful poofiness poofiness as you might say in England of the 9mm rifle

or scorpion the scorpion or the 3030 you can hurt your shoulder with one of these and feel like what it would beat a kill a bar or a moose or something like that it's a big old round and you can do all of that

and then at the same time like in America if you look at the kind of constitutional right. It's not a right to go to the range and have guns. It's not a right to go hunting. The left is always saying that in the U.S. like, who needs an AR-15? What are you going to do? You don't need that for hunting. The Second Amendment guarantees us the right to defend ourselves. That's it. The government could actually ban hunting. There's no reason they couldn't. There's all sorts of regulations on hunting. They can ban it all together. We don't have a right to hunt.

We have a right to defend ourselves. And it is, I think, definitively a God-given right. And America is unequivocally pro-second amendment, right? So I don't know what happens when you end up with restrictions at the highest level. I also don't know what the left wants to do, right? Like, everyone's afraid because they think that the left wants to ban these things and they give every indication that they do. And the AR-15 is the most popular, popular gun in America. They indicate that they want to get rid of that.

So what do you do if you have one? You're going to be forced to give it up? A lot of times what they do is they'll try to pass laws that prevent you from like passing it on to your kid. So you can have it, but you can't do anything with it. You can use it until you die and then someone's going to have to saw it in half. It's not a very, that's not a very healthy gun culture. Yeah.

So I don't know. I think the left has devised a lot of schemes whereby they think that Americans will accept whatever the punishment is. Like, oh, no one's going to protest if we let them have that gun until the end of their life. But I also don't know what the tipping point

for Americans is. In Virginia, it was, you ban the AR-15, like we stand at your doorstep with a lot of AR-15s, come take them. Do you think the... So it's interesting that you say the risk of civil war, do you think the risk of civil war

has decreased under Trump? No. And this seems very extreme, like, that we're talking about civil war here. The country, we live in a country that does a revolution every four years. Every four years? Yeah. But it's not a revolution in the sense of revolution, like what an actual revolution? It's fully on revolution.

It's full on revolution. What do you mean? Well, what do you mean? Why do you think it is? Because every four years, you have the ability to completely change the direction of the country in any way you want. But most democracies, republic democracies, have this. No. Why not?

Because the parties are more like center, like center, left, center, right rather than being more extreme. No, no. Like, look at the UK. Like, you guys, the king's government. Like, would you guys call yourselves a democracy? Yeah, because the king doesn't really have much to do with it. No? No.

You can call a vote at any time. What are you talking about? Can he? Yeah. Is that true? He dissolves his own government, doesn't he? I don't know. I don't know.

Well, the queen could, but the king can't. I actually don't know if that's true. I believe it's the king's government and he can dissolve parliament at any point and basically call for a vote. That was my understanding. I'm going to look there up. In practice, this power is exercise

on the advice of the prime minister. Like, to be fair, like the monarchy has very little power in the UK. They may have, like, technically have powers to do something, but... Well, I don't think a monarchy exists unless it can be taken. I thought about this.

I think the monarchy ends, I don't know, probably, you guys had the Civil War with Cromwell, right? Charles is beheaded. King Charles. I don't know anything about your own people. I've heard no very little about anything. So the point, though, is that, like, the monarchy in the UK is very much there as, like, a symbol. It doesn't actually have no much power.

Yeah, yeah. It's post-Magnar Carter, really. It really does, it can't do anything, right? Like, the, but we do have democracy, yes. I don't think you do, though. Like, your politicians make all of the decisions in your country for you, right? And the politicians that we vote in. Yeah, but kind of, right?

Like, you have the House of Lords still. Like, you kind of still have to, like, be of a certain class. You have, like, a class structure very much in the UK. The United States has a class structure based on, like, your bank account in some sense. Yeah, I was going to say, so like to, I, the UK definitely has a class structure, but here, getting in power is all about how much money you have.

And some of it's J.D. Vance isn't that rich, right? I mean, he's pretty rich. More, more rich than most people, but I think he's got like four million dollars. Oh, I thought he was much rich in that. I don't think so. Okay. So J.D. Vance isn't that rich. And Trump is, phenomenally wealthy.

But generally the politicians that go up and do this or not, you know, as wealthy as Trump. And, you know, Trump lost to Joe Biden, who's known as like the blue collar, blue collar guy, you know, blue collar senator. So it's not just about money in the U.S. It truly is a semi-democratic vote. I think that there's plenty of critiques about who we allow to vote. Like, I tend to think that universal male suffer. was the greatest mistake ever made in America.

People think that men were always able to vote in the US, but it was not until, what, 1880, something like that, that men started to vote. It was all men, all of a sudden, all men can vote. I think that, like, a limited electorate is the only way to maintain a republic, because we're not a democracy, we're a republic. And I think that, like, we're really the only functional republic on the face of the earth. I've got to go about that.

Was that not about, like, voting on the basis of the color of your skin, though, then? In part, in part it was, like, the question needs to be like, what is it that the people in Washington are being sent to do? And I think, I think most people think that they're going there to make laws and govern. But that's not how I see it. I think the people are being sent to Washington to spend the treasury. You know, everything they do is about how.

are they going to spend the treasury. And the treasury is a pool of money that is given as a gift to the government by the American people as long as the government remains legitimate. And as soon as the government's not legitimate, the people have no reason to give to the treasury. And this is true until the government begins printing its own money. And so like I think a lot of Bitcoiners are against fiat and money printing for a very different reason than I am. And it's because, uh, for, for me, the act of printing money is the act of democratizing everyone's role in losing money as the government basically taxes you through inflation. So I acknowledge that like the greatest invention in money is a separation of specie from the unit. But,

the greatest travesty in all of history, at least as far as the American experiment goes, is the participation of everybody in funding the Treasury through inflation. But if it's not everybody, who is it and who picks those people? Well, there's a huge number of people in America that are not net taxpayers. If you're not funding the Treasury, I don't see why you have any ability or saying, and you don't have any stake. You're a taker. And so I think it's a hard discussion to have,

but we have people voting that I just don't, you know, I don't, I think ruins, ruins the republic. And, and that's the thing is like these, at this point, the politicians are, are attempting to find more and more constituencies of these people that will ruin the republic on their behalf so that they can remain in power. It's not, it's not a, it's not a,

it used to be. that there were a bunch of people that would go to the House of Representatives, like they would be farmers. They would go to, they would go vote, and then they'd go back and attend their farm. We now have professional politicians that go and vote and they stay there and they vote. They don't really vote. They basically just stay there and do nothing. They name, you know, post offices for the most part. And then occasionally they sneak a thing through and then they hope that the Senate ratifies it. But for the most part, like it's a totally functionalist. system at this at this point where the people that we've elected to be our representatives don't even

show up to like hit the button so the republic is broken and so back to the Donald Trump question do i like what what needs the system is broken everybody knows it how do you fix that system that system is a question on the table that no one actually has an answer to. The American way, if we were to go back to our foundation, would be to hang them all. But that seems to me to be impalatable to most. Maybe not to me. I'm all for it. But most people find that impalatable. So that's not an option, unless I can convince everybody else it's a great option. Maybe can convince Donald. But that's the American way.

The American way would be to hang them all. We're not doing that. So short of hanging them all, what is the solution? And nobody knows, especially given that we have this democracy, we have this bureaucratic system that has grown out of the 2019, 20s and 1930s. We have this bureaucratic system that has grown and grown and grown and and eats a huge portion of the treasury to give to eaters.

and those same eaters who continually vote for themselves more food, if you will, for eating. So no one knows how to fix it. And Donald Trump, as some call him the Great White Hope, shows up and says, you know, I'll wreak havoc. And I think for a bunch of people, the answer is like, maybe that'll work. I don't know. And that's, it's very strange because like for the last eight years, the left has been gaslighting the right story after story with so many falsehoods that you can't really fight them. And now that the right is in power. I'm watching the same thing happen with like Doge.

Doge is gaslighting everybody. They're lying. Like all of this fraud they're claiming they found. They didn't find an audit doesn't take two days. But I'm noticing among the left that they are so defeated at the moment that they're not. even fighting the allegations of fraud or finding of the fraud. And the right has accepted it now whole cloth as if it's just true. Yeah. So maybe maybe this myth of the mountains of fraud that Elon Musk is finding is what the right needs and is necessary for changing the government.

I don't know. But we all know it's broken. And we also know there's no one like Donald Trump in the wings to fix it. We don't have answers because we no longer have the rudimentary option of hanging them all on the table. Do you think he'll go for a third term? Wouldn't that be fun? I mean, I think that would be civil war. Fine. But the question is, do you think you will?

Wouldn't that be fun? You're being cage, you're in Sir. Well, I mean, like... Because there are things that are moral and there are things that are immoral. and there are things I don't give two shits about. And like, whether someone runs for a third term is not, it's not a moral issue. Like, why couldn't he?

I don't know. We have it in the Constitution that he can't. Well, we have that in the Constitution because the left had, had FDR run like four terms. But surely, like, why is three, why is two the max? I don't think it matters what the number is. It matters that that number remains the same. Who cares? And if he breaks Constitution to do that,

Why can you then before that, but then against the left breaking the Constitution to get rid of your guns? The last president to break the entire constitution was Abraham Lincoln. He suspended habeas corpus. He put entire Congresses of states into prison. Like, you ask Americans who the greatest president in the history of America was, you're going to get two answers. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. I don't know what needs to be done. but I'm an ambivalentist.

I don't care. Like there's no moral reason you can't run for a third term. There's just a stated principle that we have. It's a stupid principle. Like what if it's going to take another four years for him to finish? What if like we all see on the horizon that what he's doing is good and we like it? And that's where we want America to go. And it's going to take another four years on the same goddamn horse to finish it.

Now, I don't know that that's what's going to happen. I don't have any faith that Donald Trump is going to do this correctly. The guy's got like the attention span of a rabbit, right? Or a squirrel, as I say, like, he's, he is an idiot of monstrous proportions. He might be the right idiot, but he's an idiot. But does that not then just lead to dictatorship? Or is there not a least a risk of that? Sick, Emperor Taranis, my friend.

Explain. The man who shot. Abraham Lincoln. at the Ford Theater, jumped down from the balcony and onto the stage, and he turned around, and he said, sick, Semper, Tyrannus. And that's translated to what, I don't speak Latin, but what, to tyrants death, death to tyrants.

There was an overwhelming understanding that Lincoln was a tyrant. And there was a man for whom eliminating that tyrant, tyrant was consequential and mattered enough that he did it. So America is a weird place because we don't actually have rules. We are a maverick society with nothing in stone, nothing. We have some things that we've set in stone that we view as principles. But the rest of it is people acting on their own accord and taking for themselves the consequences at hand. So, I don't know what is needed to fix this place.

Maybe it's a tyrant. Maybe it's a tyrant for a few years. Certainly has seemed to work in certain countries that Bitcoiners love. I mean, I obviously talk about Buchay there. And this is another area where I really struggle because I disagree most Bitcoin is on it. I'm just saying like it depends on what your goals are. And again, America has principles that we agree are sort of like the elastic goals that we return. to in moments of crisis. But our favorite president was an undoubted tyrant. The president

that most Americans think is the greatest president ever to live was a tyrant. He was a tyrannical despot. He was an, by all American standards, an evil, disgusting president who should never have been revered. And yet he's the greatest man that has ever lived in American history because he kept the union together. So I don't know. I don't know. All I know is that everyone in this game is accepting consequences. Like I think Donald Trump understands the stakes. He may be stupid, but he understands the stakes. He was nearly shot for them. I think he, I think he understands the history. I think he understands better than anybody now, the role. The US aid thing is very interesting because it may or may not be something that he's allowed to do

to close down USAID and yet he's done it. And join him. Stop him. Please. You can't. Maybe you can. I don't know. But no one's figured out how.

USAID's still gone. He's gutting agency after agency. Like, is he allowed to do that? No one knows. But. Maybe he is. Like in the American system, you're allowed to do whatever it is you can do. And then the check on the president is the Congress and they can impeach him or not.

And we just had a president that broke tons and tons of constitutional like edicts. The Biden administration was terrible at this. And he did it because with impunity, his party was the majority and no one could, do anything. There was no point in impeaching him. There's nothing that you could have done, even if you got a majority to impeach him. His party would never have voted. They were unified and unwilling to vote him out for any of the derelictions. So, like, in the case of President Trump, I think he's trying to work as quickly as possible knowing that he better get the ship set a right by midterms. Because if he doesn't, the Dems are

going to have like a, I don't know, 85% majority in the Senate. or something. It'll be, it'll be crazy. It'll be a bloodbath. And then presumably he just can't do anything. Not only would he not be able to do anything, he'll be voted out and put in prison. Like, this is a race against time for him. And I don't, again, I'm just an observer in some sense. But I say, I think America is a really weird place because they're like, the belief

that there are rules is very un-American. And the rules, like we've set up this thing of like these, these three forms, these three branches of government where everyone gets to be in a constant fight and no one actually knows what the powers of each individual group are they're kind of made up and they're discovered through through uh fiat and attenuation right where one person says something and then another group says you can't do that and then he goes why because we said so he's like well stop me so so like the courts can tell him he can't do something. Doesn't mean he's not going to do it.

It doesn't mean he's not going to do it. And the check on him can't be the courts because the courts have no power to check the president. Congress does. So the Congress can say that the president has created a constitutional crisis. But unless they have the number of votes in the Senate and in the House,

they cannot impeach him. So like Trump is in a weird position. He knows this. He seems to have figured this out. And the people surrounding him seem to have figured it out. So I don't know what happens in the next four years. And I don't know what constitutional, quote, crisis we end up in.

But it seems to me that America, for the first time in 150 years, 175 years, is learning that the American system is not what people thought. There aren't new rules here. And that's what makes it great. Damn. Okay. There's a lot in there that I probably would disagree with, but I need to think on it. Okay. But I appreciate it.

I appreciate that you bringing about 18 guns. That's now the record on what Bitcoin did. Yeah? A record set to be broken. It was zero guns before? There's probably been a gun or two in here. I think there's, but definitely not an armory. Is there anything we didn't talk about that you want to?

Well, I don't know. Have we talked about Bitcoin yet? Barely. Just kidding. This is the guns and politics show. Yeah, I think it's a weird time right now, right? It's scary. Well, scary for whom?

I think for Western democracy, maybe. Do you think that democracy is a threat? What you said makes me think it could be. Go on. I'm interviewing you know. I can't see... I am Peter now. I can't see how, oops.

If Donald Trump did decide to run for a third term, that's not a complete breaking of democracy and how that doesn't escalate to civil war. Well, okay. So take the two claims. he runs for a third term. How is that a breaking of democracy? Because it's in your, is it in the Constitution that they can only run for two terms?

Yeah. So, it's breaking the Constitution then. So. And you're saying you think the U.S. will go to civil war if the left broke the Constitution is take your guns. No, what I'm saying is that there's all sorts of triggers. I think that the United States is in a perpetual state of being nearly in a civil war. And that's the thing that scares me.

But it's been that way since 1776. Like I was saying this too in the car. The dial's been turned up. Maybe. There, there, there, there, there, there, there been, we've had a relatively peaceful time. But we're only 200 some years old, 250 years old as a country. And we've always, always been on the precipice. Always.

At all times. And you can see that because in the 90s, you talk to people, they'll be like it was perfect. Everything was perfect. Yep. The blacks will tell you it was perfect. The whites will tell it was perfect. The Mexicans will tell it was perfect. Everyone, everyone, everyone thought,

the 90s were perfect. 10 years later, people are like, those people are Nazis. I would never invite them to a barbecue, you know, 10 years. That's how long it took to take a demographic of people that thought they were living in the perfect world to a people that thought the other side was 100% Nazi. And the swing is 50%. We are always on the precipice. So what brings you to that full, like, final thing?

I don't know. But I remember saying during Occupy Wall, street i felt like we were like 15 years away that was like kind of my thinking as i was watching people say eat the rich that's a really problematic worldview for people to have but i also don't know what a civil war in america in the modern day looks like yeah right but okay so so number one the rule that states you can only run for two terms is arbitrary and capricious it's in the constitution it's a negotiated settlement because they were sick of allowing FDR more terms.

But then out of those. Yeah, but it's 30s. Like it's, it's so recent. Your grandpa remembers when they added it. You know? Like, it's not that far away that they added this thing. It's and and as, you know, Thomas Jefferson talks about every generation rewriting the constitution for themselves.

I think, I think Jefferson's a little egregious in his opinions on this stuff. But I do think that Jefferson is a little bit correct in that I think there's this reality that every generation has different concerns. And the concerns of like one generation, which you read the Constitution, all sorts of all sorts of post-Civil War like antebellum provisions are are written specifically about slaves, essentially, right? So you have the provision that is currently allowing for citizenship, for anyone born in the United States. It's clearly written.

You look at the debate on the floor. You look at everything about this article in the Constitution. It's written basically to say black people can be citizens. It then begins getting used later on to allow anyone born in the United States. You know, you get on an airplane, you get off at O'Hare, you get pooped out of your mom, and now you're American citizen. I mean, that's a crazy rule. It's absurd. It's absurd as like a group of Americans telling you that we should vote

without ID. It's an absurd thing to think about. That's the American law. And that is not what that was. So the previous generation had a concern. They wanted to integrate black people into the American system because we had not previously integrated them. We made America better.

We made it more whole. We allowed a group of people that were disenfranchised from the American system to be franchised. Yeah. And what happened is that was taken by a next generation, modified and used to, like, bring in immigration and immigrants and then to naturalize all of their children, which was not the American way. And now it's being used to, like, bring in immigrants from other countries and have them,

like, have as many babies as possible so that we just create citizens left and right. So the previous generation had a use for it. We have no use for it. They didn't, they weren't very specific about their use, but it's in the constitution. So now people like look at it in the modern way. They don't look at it in the context during which it was written and it was argued about. And they look at it in the modern way and they say, well, these are what these words mean. If you look at it in the past, that wasn't what they were supposed to mean.

So, you know, every generation has like different concerns. And one of those different concerns might be that maybe this generation decides that this president in particular needs three terms. it's a for me uh the way that the left treated trump in the first uh term where they essentially stole the entirety of his first term by claiming he was a russian spy and not wrapping up the investigation for two and a half years after he was president stole from the american people four years of a president that they elected that they have no idea how he would have done i think that's pretty egregious I find that to be probably the biggest scandal in American history. And many people disagree with me.

But for someone who agrees with me, a third term probably feels like a second term. So there's different concerns today. Would that cause a civil war? Maybe. If you're someone like me who thinks that we're on the precipice of civil war, I would rather a civil war start under a right-wing administration in the United States than a left-wing one. neither

those seem like good outcomes to me. What if they're going to what if one of them is inevitable? What if the Civil War aspect is inevitable? Is that way you are? Do I think that? I'm just asking.

I don't know. I'm just saying what if there is nothing anyone can do but that the country is headed towards civil war one way or another. At that point,

the only question you have to ask is who do you want to be in charge when it happens. This is Hobson's choice though, isn't it? Maybe. I'm old. I'm not going to fight. I'm going to move to the country.

And if the left wins a civil war, then I, too, agree that cutting off the penises of little boys is a good idea. But if the right wins, then, like, I think America will look a lot like America looked before a lot of this bureaucratic, like these bureaucratic nightmares took over. and began governing the country. But I don't know. It's, it, I think there's a lot of people in the modern day, particularly with social media, particularly the like generation after me who think talk like this is all like very stupid.

Who think that like China's a great place. And I just, I think there's a very different mentalities among like these generations. So I don't know. Maybe it's not inevitable. Yeah. I really have no idea. I think I've thought for a while that it was, but I also am very open to the possibility

that these up-and-coming generations are going to have very different priorities than many of us. I mean, that seems inevitable. I do have to pull you up on one thing. I know you've just had a baby. Yeah. You know babies aren't pooped out.

Pooped out. Never they. I watched it happen. I don't know what else you call it. Right. Should we get dinner, Jensen? Let's do it. All right.

I appreciate the time. Thank you.