You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Ep. 20: Max Keiser & Stacy Herbert - Bitcoin, Liberty & Hope

Starting point is 00:00:00 if you were to look at the amount of energy that Bitcoin uses and the rate at which it's increasing, you would say good is triumphing over evil. So this gives me a lot of hope. And I don't think centralization in anything works at all, except cancer. Cancer is the only thing that seems to work to be overly centralized and parasitic.

Starting point is 00:00:22 That's the cancer model. But I think we're gonna win against the cancer of CBDCs. Hello, and welcome to another episode of You're the Voice. And today I have the great honor of hosting my two favorite Bitcoin OGs, Max and Stacey. I've been a follower and a fan for a while. Thanks for joining me, guys. It's great to be here. Thank you for having us.

Starting point is 00:00:58 Nice to see you. Thank you. So let me start with a quick intro. And of course, ladies first. So Stacey Herbert, also known as the Fairy Godmother, is a broadcaster, writer and producer, and she's co-hosting with lots of grace, wit and sharpness, I must say, the Orange Bill podcast with Max and formerly co-hosting the Kaiser Report. Today, Stacey and Max are advisors to President Bukele in El Salvador, leading various initiatives, which we'll touch on shortly. And Max Kayser is a broadcaster, filmmaker, and financial analyst. Wikipedia wrote about you, Max, known for his outspoken views on economics and finance. And I'll translate that to badass, funny, and sharp human. max began his career on wall street before transitioning to media and out of everything i read and i read a lot one thing stood out for me which i loved adwick magazine described you as

Starting point is 00:02:02 the most visible character in an underground movement that has spurred hundreds of blog posts and videos and played a part in driving up the price of precious metals did you know that Yes, I did. Cool. So anything you guys like to add? I mean, there's so much stuff about you out there, and I didn't know how to kind of put that all together for a short introduction. So anything you'd like to add? Well, oh, well, Max has the best legs in Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:02:34 Yeah, that's true. I have the best legs in Bitcoin. But no, that covers it. We have done a lot of stuff, and we bring that to our work doing podcasting for sure. and we we stay agile so when president bukele made bitcoin legal tender back in 2021 you know we wanted to be on the cutting edge we wanted to go where the action is so we moved here we met with the president and he we thought we would be continuing on as we were but you know he said why don't you come and help me create bitcoin country and so that's what we've been doing

Starting point is 00:03:08 which is unreal and and that's really um my first question to you and and we'll start maybe with stacy so here are some of my favorite quotes of you you said these are the last days of fiat el salvador is winning it's a new age renaissance and we're building an arc in el salvador and you've moved two years ago to el salvador it's safe to say it's the blueprint of how to orange pill a nation. And it's remarkable to me that a nation state actually adds money that it cannot control, that the president cannot control. So can you share a bit about what's being built in El Salvador right now? Yes, that's important. Things are being built. And in a lot of places in the world, things are being destroyed instead. But President Bukele, first of all, he didn't need

Starting point is 00:03:59 orange pilling, he was orange pilled already and he's quite an amazing guy. So that's why I say El Salvador is winning and we have Renaissance 2.0 because when we were doing Orange Pill podcast during the lockdown from our house in North Carolina in the United States, you know, we were talking a lot about Renaissance and imagining that this hardest money, most perfect money of bitcoin was the equivalent of the florin in you know the 1300s in florence and that that the florin led to the wealth of florence because the gold had been used as money for thousands of years by that point uh the the metric and the weight and the and the imprint of the florin of the house of medici and florence you know that was a more trusted unit of account when the

Starting point is 00:04:53 merchants of Florence would go to, say, North Africa, and they would go to the bazaar and try to buy the best goods. They would always receive the best. The merchants wanted to sell to those merchants from Florence because they knew for a fact they didn't have to weigh, they didn't have to determine whether it was a real chunk of gold or not. They knew exactly that they wanted the florin because it was the best. So they always got the best goods in a trade. And that led to the wealth of Florence, and Florence became a thriving place. The best and the brightest went to Florence. And that's how you had the best artists, the best architects, the best, the age of discovery happened there. And I imagined, we imagined, this is before President

Starting point is 00:05:38 Bukele had made Bitcoin legal tender here, that this could happen in a place where Bitcoin, that we were imagining it was like just around Bitcoiners themselves. But then President Bukele did that. And it's the, you know, El Salvador is like the size of a city state. It's six million, six and a half million people who live here. And we immediately knew like this could be Renaissance 2.0. Little did we know like that President Bukele is a sort of leader like Lorenzo the Magnificent in Florence, who was a leader for real during the time of the peak of the Renaissance, when you had Michelangelo, when you had da Vinci and Botticelli And, you know, Machiavelli chronicling it all. Max and I are like the Machiavelli chronicling all the building of this, a renaissance 2.0. So I just think, you know, he's like a true leader and leaders. He, you know, it wasn't like Lorenzo the Magnificent in Florence was the artist, but he attracted the artist. He inspired the artist. He gave them space to build.

Starting point is 00:06:40 And President Bukele is like that. He's super open to the best and brightest coming here and building like he's not going to interfere with you. He wants you to come here and build an amazing future for yourself and for El Salvador, therefore. And then what kind of projects and initiatives are you guys working on in El Salvador today? Well, we're working on so many. The number one thing we're working on at the moment is, yes, Like in 2024, we hope to launch the Volcano Bond, which is everybody in the world is hoping for that. Primarily what we do at the Bitcoin office, and I run the Bitcoin office, Max is a Bitcoin advisor, and he runs Volcano Energy, is that we're building not only adoption domestically, but we're seeking actively to have the best

Starting point is 00:07:36 and the brightest around the world in Bitcoin, but other fields as well, to adopt El Salvador as their home base, as their headquarters, as the place that they want to be, because we believe that will lead to a faster destination of getting to Florence 2.0 or Singapore 2.0 or like Switzerland 2.0.

Starting point is 00:07:56 Like we want it all in a very fast, short period of time because, you know, we have another five years with President Bukele as president. And, you know, he has big ambitions and fast ambitions. Okay. What's your take on Bitcoin's adoption in countries with totalitarian or authoritarian regimes, which we see more and more these days?

Starting point is 00:08:19 The nation states I hold citizenships in Israel and Australia are part of that game, too. You know, all those Western democracies, we call them, are, you know, heading down a very slippery slope, in my opinion. And so how do you think Bitcoin will come to play in those countries which are Western democracies, but really they're totalitarian regimes in disguise? Yeah, I guess to look at this from the perspective of 300 years

Starting point is 00:08:50 of an experiment with fiat money, which started with the Bank of England back in 1694, 1696 period. And then in 1971, we had another chapter in that experiment where the entire world went entirely on a fiat money standard without any currency backed by anything other than other fiat money. And so now this is ending. This 300-year period is ending, and we're heading into the Bitcoin standard era where you have Bitcoin becomes the global reserve. And so different countries are reacting to this in different ways.

Starting point is 00:09:27 Obviously, in El Salvador, the president was Najib Bukele. Very quickly, you know, he's been following Bitcoin. He understood that it's a way to leapfrog into the 21st century ahead of everybody else. So that's exactly what's going on. We mentioned some of the turmoil going on around the world. And people have called this the fourth turning, right? This is the simultaneous kind of a cyclical nature happening on multiple levels where you find the end of multi-hundred-year, multi-thousand-year cycles and the beginning of a new cycle. And in that perspective, you could say that El Salvador is the first out of the fourth turning, is the first country to emerge from a really horrible 40-year period that they went through with the Civil War and the gang war.

Starting point is 00:10:18 So I think that El Salvador is positioned as the new shining city on a hill. I say that the new Statue of Liberty is a volcano in El Salvador. And other countries are going to get to this place at their own pace. So in the case of the United States, which has the U.S. dollar and world reserve currency, they're going to reach this place at a different pace than other countries. countries where you have hyperinflation like Venezuela or Argentina or Zimbabwe and these other countries. They're obviously poised to more rapidly embrace Bitcoin as a way to save their economies. You have countries in Europe are kind of in the middle. So what we're seeing now

Starting point is 00:11:02 is depending on where you come from, it will depend on how quickly you adapt to Bitcoin as world reserve currency. But that is the end game. That's where we're all going. And when I talk about Renaissance 2.0 here, Renaissance 1.0 emerged out of the dark ages in Europe. And I think humans, we always have a longing for liberty, right? And President Bukele's entire policy of how he runs all of his government is economic liberty. It all goes through the prism of economic liberty. And Bitcoin is under that policy, the greater policy of economic liberty. Now, when you talk about the totalitarianism elsewhere, when you look at the refugees here from those states, you see a lot of Australians, Kiwis, and Canadians.

Starting point is 00:11:55 So many of them here. There are so many Canadians, you wouldn't believe it. Americans less so far, but definitely those three countries of New Zealand, Australia, and Canada are represented hugely here. We are also encouraging because we know that there are people who embrace freedom and want freedom. So we do have now a new program called the Freedom Passport. It's available to people around the world who want to move here and get their passport in a very short period of time, like four to five weeks. And you could adopt El Salvador. You could be part of this renaissance is happening here. It's a million dollars. It's within four weeks, you're getting a passport and you become a citizen of the country embracing economic liberty. It's like the United States

Starting point is 00:12:39 back in the late 1700s. What do you mean by it's a million dollars? It's $1 million and it's a $1 million donation to the government of El Salvador. So basically, what you're seeing with what President Bukele has done for El Salvador, the transformation, the very rapid transformation here, and he hasn't set one foot wrong. It's gone so well for the population. The donation will go towards those same programs of social, cultural, and economic development. And so you're donating towards that. So you're building further the economic liberty upon which you're fleeing to. So you're creating the conditions for rapid success on the order of Singapore, on the order of Florence 1.0, we're going to be Florence 2.0.

Starting point is 00:13:33 So it's going towards culture as well. So arts programs and things like the library, which is, you know, President Bukele, it was a very inspirational conversation he had during the, you know, the inauguration of the library. And one of the things he said that everybody quoted was that, you know, the public spaces should be better than the private spaces, like he was like referring, the only thing's big, right? So like ancient Rome or Greece, like we want to leave behind, like we want to build these public spaces where the people can congregate and ideas can flourish and economic liberty can take hold. Where can people find out more information on how to immigrate now to El Salvador? Well, for that program, they can go to

Starting point is 00:14:22 adoptingelsalvador.gob, which is for government, .sv. So adoptingelsalvador.gob.sv. Okay, great. And one more question, Max, when you were referring to the end of the cycle, end of the experiment of the fiat experiment and um el salvador emerging as one of the first countries in this new cycle with bitcoin do you think we're going to go back into another fourth turning another another cycle of 80 years or however long it would be because bitcoin creates a different environment a different reality do we have to i mean fiat has created that that cyclic kind of, you know, weak men phenomena. Are we going to see that again if countries adopt Bitcoin?

Starting point is 00:15:19 Well, one of the interesting attributes of Bitcoin is that for the first time in history, it separates money from the state or it separates money from any centralized control whatsoever. so money becomes something entirely different than we've been used to in our entire history as humans on this planet most of the time we have two problems with money one is concentration of power or concentration of wealth because money throughout history has been pretty much what's called proof of stake if i have a lot of money i have influence and i can change laws to make it

Starting point is 00:16:02 easier for me to get more money it's corruption and it's because of the nature of the money that we've had for millennia and the same applies to gold by the way but with bitcoin it's a system called proof of work it's not proof of stake and no matter how many bitcoin anybody has or any organization has they have no influence at all to change the protocol so it's very egalitarian in that sense. And it also, for the first time, is a savings technology, which has a huge impact on folks. It's the first time in history that anybody on any budget can store their wealth and it can be unconfiscatable. And the price of protecting that wealth is virtually zero. If you look at how wealth is aggregated today, usually those with a lot of wealth spend a lot

Starting point is 00:16:57 of money protecting that wealth. They buy, they have security guards, they have vaults, they have a lot of lawyers, they have a lot of accountants. There's a lot of politicians, right? There's a huge cost to protecting and maintaining that wealth. Well, with Bitcoin, you don't need any of that. You just have to keep, memorize your seed phrase. That's it. And that's available to anybody. So the person who's, let's say, you know, an artist who sells art, they make, let's say, 20% of the nominal per capita income in a country or 50% of it, the capita income. But they're happy to do that because they just want to be artists. They don't want to be grinding it out as a lawyer, perhaps.

Starting point is 00:17:40 But they can put their savings into Bitcoin and it's inflation proof. So their purchasing power will always go up. Their purchasing power will mathematically continue to go up forever. And they can be free to express who they are. And I think that's part of this Renaissance 2.0 is that it frees up self-expression in a way that we haven't seen since the Enlightenment, since we haven't seen since the Renaissance. And that's totally enabled because of the savings technology, this unconfiscatable separation of money and state called Bitcoin. So all of the changes are incredibly positive. And whether this introduces another cycle, I think that I'm sure it does, but I think that the nature of this cycle is quite interesting in a number of different ways.

Starting point is 00:18:28 But I don't see it being one that heads back into kind of a dystopian ditch at the end of the cycle. I think this is the beginning of something truly spiritual, which is as a species, as we've been lacking in a lot of ways to make contact with that on a sustained basis. As individuals, we have moments of spiritual beauty or we have aesthetic beauty or we go and we see art in the museum and we're like, wow, I moved emotionally by this. But imagine being able to ride that wave for your entire life and just be on that vibe. Well, this is what Bitcoin offers. This is part of the philosophy of Bitcoin. Beyond the monetary and the technology of it, there's an ethos and an aesthetic that is transformative. And we see it here.

Starting point is 00:19:17 So people in El Salvador, even though they don't use it necessarily, Bitcoin, they're aware of it. And once you start thinking about it, it changes the way you think. So I say, and I've said for many years now, you don't change Bitcoin. Bitcoin changes you. If you allow that to happen. So that that's the what I'm looking for. Yes. Well, you answered my next question, but I'm going to read it anyway, because, you know, this is perfect. This is perfect. As part of my as part of my red pill journey, I branched to my orange pill journey about two years ago and watched a brilliant documentary called The Four Horsemen. That's where I was initially exposed to the big lies about money.

Starting point is 00:19:59 And that's where I saw you, Max, for the first time. And since then, the more I learned, the more I'm in awe about how smart, simple, yet sophisticated Bitcoin is. But more than anything, how visionary it is, how it actually has the potential of creating a new reality for humanity, a new way for people to live. from a very earthy everyday sense to the highest spiritual sense which is exactly what you were saying i know you're always in awe of this invention called bitcoin and as i listen to many bitcoiners i'm always surprised to listen to you guys because you still even after all these years carry this infectious inspiring authentic excitement about bitcoin which i don't take for granted. And so I wanted to ask you how come, but you've just answered me. It is so aesthetically

Starting point is 00:20:53 beautiful and not just the technology, but what it allows on a humanitarian level, how it flips the, it just, it's a paradigm shift to how we view money, to how we view this tool and what it can enable us in our lives. And so I wanted to ask you to say a bit about that discovery that is Bitcoin. If you want to add anything. One thing on top of that, when Max says you don't change Bitcoin, Bitcoin changes you. We've had a long relationship with Bitcoin, but I respect how much it's almost, well, it's like a living thing, right? So back in 2010, 2011, it was so easy to get bitcoin you would go to uh you know um you know a bitcoin conference of the day and they would give you five bitcoin uh it just like the mining reward was like super huge every

Starting point is 00:21:54 it was so easy to get bitcoin that you just sent it to everybody here like look how cool this is here's you know 10 bitcoin or here's 20 bitcoin and you would send it to a friend so in a way Like, that's a very evolutionary, interesting thing, right? That it was like it needed to succeed. It needed the widest dispersal. It needed the seed of Bitcoin to go as far and wide as possible. So it had to seem really easy to get. So it was an abundance that just seemed like, oh, I got, you know, 500 Bitcoin today.

Starting point is 00:22:31 I'm going to be able to get 500 tomorrow, right? It's going to be no problem. I might as well just give this away. Um, so you're like, it, it's always doing what it needs to do at that time, at that time it needed to just be so easy to get and so cheap and so abundant. And now when it's, as price is soaring, like the, the, the price signals, like more media attention, which signals like it does exactly what it needs and it's just, yeah, and all very organically.

Starting point is 00:23:00 Yeah. It's almost like evolution or it's like a living organism. So it's a consciousness. It's definitely the right way to evolve something. And if you look at marketing, which is the area of expertise that I come from, marketing is trying to emulate that non-organically. if you look at, for example, if we take the case study of Dropbox and how it evolved when it started, Dropbox had this viral effect when it started. People just shared it amongst each other because if you share it with people, you'd get more space on your Dropbox. And that would give you the benefit of sharing it and making it grow. With Bitcoin, you just did it naturally because you had it you could it was and people were sharing it because they got excited about the

Starting point is 00:23:53 idea and the vision if they could see it and so naturally it's doing what it's supposed to do which is for for us for you it's a an indication that it's the real thing that it's a good thing because if marketing is trying to emulate that kind of pattern all the time then that's the real deal if it happens on its own organically and also Kaiser Report was the first and earliest right to spread the message of bitcoin around the world and again like it's just bizarre in a way that bitcoin almost designed itself to find us um because it was russia today so a lot of people in the world like in latin america in africa and parts of asia like they trusted more russia than the empire of the united states and cnn so like it naturally attract it was naturally being viewed

Starting point is 00:24:48 our content was being viewed by people who distrusted the authorities of the you know the bosses of the of the world right so uh like it it's just interesting yeah and speaking of lack of trust and it's circling me back to what max was saying before um most of my audience is red-pilled audience that has woken up over the past few years since COVID. And a lot of them are understanding what we're facing right now. Most of them are also in Western democracies. And we know that CBDC is the next step in line for our governments, right, in implementing this totalitarian regime that they're so dreaming of and, you know, loving the idea of controlling people even more. Max was talking about centralizing the control. That's where they're

Starting point is 00:25:43 taking us. It's clear. And I almost see a fork in the road here where CBDC is one side and Bitcoin is the other. And oftentimes for those who come from, like me, from a red pill background, they are afraid. They have all these concerns because they don't trust. And they don't trust the government but they also don't trust you know who invented where it was originated etc maybe it's a CIA operation or whatever and and I the more I learn about it I see how much it doesn't matter where it was invented and who started it and it's just you have this fork and now you have to choose whether you go this centralized control way or you go decentralized and you get it that you want to protect your wealth and you have a solution out there so if you guys can talk a bit about that

Starting point is 00:26:36 because that's where most of my audience is going right now and they're afraid to take the bitcoin path and i want to help them i want to orange bill as much as possible right well clearly cbdc's central bank digital currencies are on the other side of the of the fight toward individual sovereignty and and freedom because cbdc's are highly centralized highly controlled it's uh the fiat money on steroids it's it's fiat money everything you hate about fiat money but much worse and so that that's clearly on that the battle is it will be fought against central bank digital currencies and i think that what we can look for and what we can be helpful about is that the battle is going to be all about energy and energy use. And Bitcoin uses a lot of

Starting point is 00:27:34 energy. We know this. And so do CBDCs. So does the military use a lot of energy. So does AI, artificial intelligence, use a lot of energy. And we want most of the energy or all of the energy We want it to be hashing Bitcoin. So Bitcoin and the energy used by Bitcoin is the energy that gives everyone individual sovereignty and freedom and the ability to opt out of the monetization of violence and to opt into the monetization of love or the demonetization of violence. That's what the energy usage in Bitcoin allows us to do. And the good news is if you look at the amount of energy that Bitcoin uses, what's called the hash rate, it's absolutely skyrocketing. And it's never been in the bear market, really. It's been going up for 12, 13 years. And that tells me from a spiritual perspective that the forces of good are being are throwing energy at Bitcoin as a way to fight against evil.

Starting point is 00:28:50 And I think today, if you were to look at the amount of energy that Bitcoin uses and the rate at which it's increasing, you would say good is triumphing over evil. So this gives me a lot of hope. And I don't think centralization in anything works at all, except cancer. Cancer is the only thing that seems to work to be overly centralized and parasitic. That's the cancer model. But I think we're going to win against the cancer of CBDCs. I think a lot of people also probably instinctively, or maybe in your audience, the Red Pill audience, would like gold. But the thing about gold is it's expensive to defend it, to keep that property safe.

Starting point is 00:29:39 So often you'll find very isolated people out in the wilderness, hiding with their gold and burying it. Whereas Bitcoin is a liberating thing because all you need are the 12 words in your head. That's all you need to memorize and you're free. like you don't need to worry about anybody stealing your stuff because it's right in your head you you protect it's the ultimate property right like nobody can take it from you no government no guy with any gun nobody like nobody can come to your property and just take it you have to give it to them uh so it's all you need to do is trust yourself and if you trust yourself then you're totally free yes amen to that guys thank you so much okay um in one of your recent

Starting point is 00:30:28 interviews max you talked about bitcoin as an asset class and how wall street perceives it let me quote you and then ask you a question so you said in the gold market the ability to control price discovery and manipulate prices is real through the derivatives market so the price of gold has been lagging inflation for 20 years because governments around the world don't like gold making their fiat money look bad. So they make it easy for huge funds to manipulate the price of gold and to continuously skim profits off gold, which is what they do almost every day. And they're good at keeping the price of gold and silver down. Well, the same thing happened with Bitcoin with the ETF's trajectory and the Black Rocks of the world officially taking part

Starting point is 00:31:14 in it? The short answer is no. And I'll explain why. So with the gold cartel, you need participation of everyone in the cartel to keep the price suppressed because they all get to make a little money doing that. There is a natural buyer of gold. Gold always has a buyer. Central banks are always in the gold market. So you know pretty much that the demand for gold is pretty much omnipresent, there's always some demand for gold. If you can go into the market and manipulate prices using derivatives contracts, which in this case would mean counterfeiting sale orders to drop the price discovery mechanism by counterfeiting and putting counterfeit sell orders into the market, which drives the price down, you have the ability then to just

Starting point is 00:32:10 sit back, wait for the natural demand to come in, which there always is demand for gold, and then ride it on the way up again. And this seesaw back and forth is how the gold cartel is able to book, you know, one or 2% a week trading gold. But if you leverage that, you know, you're talking, you're making 30 or 40% a year, but really with no risk at all. And the way that the cartel sustains itself is that everybody in the cartel knows that the possible risk to them would be a sudden price spike in the price of gold. Like it went from two to 20,000 in a day. If that were a possibility, then you would be very difficult to maintain a gold cartel because that risk would be very tempting for somebody to break the cartel and take advantage of that risk. You

Starting point is 00:33:01 see that in OPEC all the time, the OPEC cartels, it's hard to keep it going because there's always one player who breaks it and wants to just make an outsized gain against the cartel. And then they could say, well, let's go to war. They go, no, let's bring the cartel back. Don't be such an idiot. And that's been going on really for 50 years. But with the Bitcoin price, because it's this new asset class that ultimately competes with gold, that means it's going to go from just under a trillion dollar market cap, the $10 trillion market cap, you're talking about an asset that's at $40,000 could easily go to $400,000 in a relatively short period of time. So you don't want to be the guy in the cartel who's short Bitcoin when it's about to make a

Starting point is 00:33:43 10x move. So it's very difficult to maintain that cartel in a Bitcoin scenario because it's got that huge upside potential yet. And it also, because it's redefining money as we know it. And so it's going to attract, by the nature of this new digital synthetic commodity, buyers are going to essentially rule price discovery. It's going to be very difficult to keep a sell order in this mix where you've got this upper trajectory of a new asset class where the total addressable market for Bitcoin is literally $400 trillion, which is the total market cap of all investable securities, stocks, bonds, property, all derivatives, all these things taken in an aggregate is $400 trillion. dollars so and that is potentially the total market addressable market for bitcoin it can dis it can demonetize i think it's already demonetizing gold just like gold demonetized silver right used to be on a bimetal standard now we're on a gold standard silver got demonetized bitcoin is now demonetizing gold it'll demonetize the property market it'll demonetize the bond

Starting point is 00:35:01 market the bond market's a 200 trillion dollar market bitcoin's not even at a 1 trillion that's a 200x right there so to get back to the price suppression of course there will be a lot of price discovery games being played with a lot of derivatives but ultimately unlike gold it'll have this natural upward bias the second thing is that gold is is very difficult and nobody really wants to stand for delivery of gold so when you're in the gold business you know it's all paper are settled and it's all cash settled and people rarely would say you know i've got um you know a ton of gold in the market i'm bidding for i'm going to take delivery of it i'm not going to the gold you've got to ship it you've got to insure it you've got to store it right moving

Starting point is 00:35:44 gold around it's very difficult shipping it and storing it with bitcoin because you don't have any of that cost whatsoever and you control the private key any laddered manipulative price discovery edifice can be quickly destroyed by pulling your private key because it's the base level of any manipulative scheme any ponzi scheme would have if you can pull it you know the whole thing collapses so that's a unique attribute of bitcoin which gold has uh doesn't no nowhere comes close with that ability either because it's you can move a billion dollars to 20 billion dollars in Bitcoin in a transaction, one transaction that's completely frictionless. It's costless. It might cost five bucks to move a billion dollars. So these things work in its favor against

Starting point is 00:36:32 a manipulative cartel emerging to keep the price from realizing its natural bias toward demonetizing every financial asset in the world due to its superiority in every way. I think that that delivery thing is the most important to the fact that prices on gold can be manipulated because nobody, very few people, it's only central banks. And even then, they don't like to take delivery of gold because it's very expensive to transport in mass. If it's one ounce, OK, that's OK. But to take delivery of a ton, you also saw this, for example, during the COVID lockdown with oil. Oil is very difficult as well to take delivery of. Well, that's why oil prices went negative in the U.S., because there was an ETF sort of product on a futures contract of oil.

Starting point is 00:37:26 And it got to the point in, you know, the pricing of oil where the expiration of the contract, they had to roll it over. And in order to do it, like, basically, they had to take delivery of oil. And nobody had the ability to take delivery of oil at that moment. So the price went negative because of that. So that showed the scheme. If you can't take delivery of the item, it all blows away. Well, Bitcoin is very easy to take delivery of no matter how much. If it was like $10 billion worth, you could take delivery just as easily as if it's $10 worth.

Starting point is 00:38:02 Yeah, I remember when I was working on Wall Street, there would always be these stories about that. You'd see in the Wall Street Journal that some farmer in the Midwest, you know, didn't roll over a futures contract and was forced to take delivery of 50,000 tons of wheat or something. It just showed up, you know, like you own it, you know, they ship it. You know, it's like, oh, man, I messed up that order. But that's not the case with Bitcoin for the reasons that we've just discussed. So I would say the short answer, again, is no. Thanks for recapping there. And what other risks or dangers can we face with BlackRock coming into the party now?

Starting point is 00:38:45 Well, the BlackRock is a useful idiot, right? Because they've got a lot of money and they're going to buy a lot of Bitcoin. And so for 12 years, we have front run BlackRock. This is really the first time, again, another first in history where the average person got in there a decade before Wall Street did, right? When we were doing Kaiser Report, Bitcoin was a dollar. We talked about it as a new asset class. We said that it had the potential to go to $100,000. A lot of people we know bought, you know, 1,000 Bitcoin, 2,000 Bitcoin for, you know, a couple of thousand bucks, right? They're sitting at $40,000, $50,000, $60,000,000. And they're very appreciative. They send us thank you notes all the time.

Starting point is 00:39:34 Of course. Okay. Okay. So, yeah, you covered my next question as well, which is fantastic. There are so many Bitcoin conferences around the world, and my audience is getting more and more curious about Bitcoin. And so I am recommending some books and podcasts and different ways that they can learn more. But if they want to go to conferences, where would you guys recommend they go around the world? I know you've been participating in many of them. So I would say you have to come to El Salvador because everybody has to come to El Salvador if you're a Bitcoiner or not. Because even if you're just red-pilled and not orange-pilled, El Salvador is definitely a place you have to come see for the liberation and the economic liberty alone.

Starting point is 00:40:26 In El Salvador, from April, the first week of April, we have the Bitcoin Habit Party. And many, many, many people from around the world are coming to that. But El Salvador also has a new thing where just a tourist visa, you arrive and it's $12. Some countries are different prices, but for most, it's $12. You arrive, you pay the $12, and you can stay for six months on a tourist visa. So you come for the halving party, and you stay for the Adopting Bitcoin conference in October. So I think you can get it all in one go. And maybe it's early November that the Adopting Bitcoin event will be, but it's definitely the beginning of a super dry season, really cool time to be here.

Starting point is 00:41:07 And this is a good year to be here because also President Bukele will be inaugurated June 1st. So you'll be here for a real huge party for his landslide victory and the second term beginning. I think everybody's in a good mood. Everybody's happy and it's cheap and it's also the home of economic liberty. Yeah, I totally agree with that. Totally agree with that. Yeah. Don't worry coming to El Salvador then, huh? Yeah, I guess. Do it, do it. I'd love to come. I'd love to shoot some episodes there as well and interview people. That would be fantastic. Yeah, the good times are like all the bad times you talk about in Australia or Israel or in the United States for us.

Starting point is 00:41:50 Everybody sees the footage of all the robberies, mass robberies, looting that just is very bizarre. New trend in the United States over the past few years. Well, you know, none of that exists here. All the bad times are gone because President Bukele always tweets strong men create good times. And this is like what we're seeing here. The good times are beginning because, of course, we went through 40, 50 years of bad times here and they created the strong men that we now see running strong men and women running this country. I normally ask people to end up on a message of hope as my last question, but I don't think I need to ask you guys to do that because we've done this throughout this episode. I think the very essence of this episode is hope because it shows that there is an alternative, both geographically and monetary.

Starting point is 00:42:42 And so I think so. I think, you know, El Salvador is winning and it's winning those people like the people who we want here are naturally coming here because they're the ones who are red pilled. They're the ones who are orange pilled. They see the emerging totalitarianism and the dark ages of fiat in their own countries, and they want to go to the light, and they want to go to the liberty, and that's here. So we're already attracting the people that want that. So by attracting people who want that, we compound that here. Yeah, I mean, it's a great feeling because usually in periods of global economic decline, the question always comes up, well, where do you go? It's the same everywhere. And people, when they say this to me, I say, actually, that's not true. There is a country that is showing the lights, showing the path forward where there's a lot of hope.

Starting point is 00:43:42 And the people here, I mean, that's really the most outstanding quality of this country is that the Salvadoran people are really just outwardly gregarious, friendly, open, hardworking, fun people. You know, they're just fun. And they are so appreciative of this chance they've been given by President Bukele in eliminating the gangs. And they are really almost dancing in the streets. If you go down and you see the scenes in front of the library in the historic center at night, at two in the morning, three in the morning, they're waiting in line for an hour to get into the library. they've got music on the streets they're literally dancing it's like victory in europe day after world war ii this is a really a fantastic feeling and the best way to enjoy it is to come here part of it yes join wonderful okay i'm gonna get my ass there this year i'm telling you yeah of course you guys as i said before you're infectious you're viral yeah the good viral stuff good thank you so much thank you so much for what you're doing and for who you are i appreciate your time thank you for having us thanks see you soon

Starting point is 00:45:01 thanks guys Thank you.

You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Ep. 20: Max Keiser & Stacy Herbert - Bitcoin, Liberty & Hope

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