You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Ep. 66: Eric Stacks - Digital Scarcity Creates Abundance

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

My guest today is Eric Stacks, a former cannabis producer turned passionate Bitcoin advocate. From his early life shaped by familial challenges to his pivot into Bitcoin after witnessing the inefficiencies of the fiat system, Eric has developed a deep understanding of economic incentives, free markets, and the promise of Bitcoin. Eric shares how his journey began with mistrust of the pharmaceutical industry, leading him to cannabis production and eventually to Bitcoin as a solution to the systemic flaws he observed. His unique insights connect the dots between free-market deflation, economic Darwinism, and Bitcoin’s potential to incentivize ethical behavior while punishing dishonesty. He explains how Bitcoin redefines property rights, empowers individuals, and offers a path to a more sustainable global economy. We also discussed El Salvador’s Bitcoin adoption, governments under a Bitcoin standard, and what a new monetary system would look like. Eric’s vision of an after-Bitcoin world is filled with hope, optimism, and practical strategies for how to navigate the changes ahead. This episode was filmed in El Salvador in Nov. 2024. ► If you got value, please like, comment, share, follow and support my work. Thank you!-- SPONSORS --►► Get your TREZOR wallet & accessories, with a 5% discount, using my code at checkout (get my discount code from the episode - yep, you’ll have to watch it): https://affil.trezor.io/SHUn -- SPECIAL OFFERS –►► Enjoy theLittle HODLer products, learn about sound money while having fun! use code EFRAT for 10% off on non-sale items: https://thelittlehodler.com/►► 10% off on all books & accessories at the “Bitcoin Infinity Store” - use code EFRAT►► Join me in any of these upcoming events: https://www.efrat.blog/p/upcoming-events -- LINKS –Eric’s Twitter: https://x.com/EricVStacks Eric’s npub: npub1h4397xuvfxne7p6l867j6ygl7cj4qn8j45fygt7hp5v3m5h5543qhms70fEfrat's Twitter: https://twitter.com/efenigsonEfrat's Telegram: https://t.me/efenigsonWatch/listen on all platforms: https://linktr.ee/yourethevoiceSupport Efrat's work: ⁠https://www.buymeacoffee.com/efenigson   ⁠Support Efrat with Bitcoin: https://geyser.fund/project/efenigson-- CHAPTERS –00:00 Coming Up…01:11 Introduction to Eric & His Background06:50 From Cannabis & Real Estate to Bitcoin16:20 Business Consulting & Putting Bitcoin on the Balance Sheet18:17 The Fiat Paradigm, Patents, and Misaligned Incentives22:17  The Paradigm of “You’ll Own Nothing & Be Happy”28:36 Coming Out of “Scumbaggery”: A Rotten System36:56 Economic Darwinism: Bitcoin in Politics & Institutional Takeover44:58 KYC Bitcoin, Privacy & Anonymity48:52 El Salvador's Bitcoin Journey & Relocation Opportunity57:29 Deflation Is The Natural State of a Free Market1:06:12 The Silent Revolution of Bitcoin: Hope and Ethics 1:18:57 The Future of The Monetary System on a Bitcoin Standard1:21:38 Final Thoughts

I'm not selling my Bitcoin for anything other than what I need to enhance the quality of my life. And that's not 37 rental properties. So we live in a world where you have corrupt central banks debasing the currency and funding killing and stealing. Because Bitcoin is metaphysical, inviolable, unconfiscatable, it's not debasable, and it is as this distributed ledger your ability to expose a dishonest market participant is quite quite high it's easy to do bitcoin is the better way it's perfectly engineered money it's quite literally the first money we've ever had in human history we had seashells yellow shiny rocks political currency units now we have an engineered money now that we have this inviolable

incorruptible monetary protocol like look at think about the potential of what we can do like this is the greatest time to be alive in all of human history hello and welcome hello so i go hello and welcome mr eric stack yes how are you doing very well a little tired we've been here in el salvador for three weeks and the conference was fun a lot of talking socializing um which is one of the most things most fun things about bitcoin it's the community it pulls together yeah um yeah so i'm doing well though excellent so for my audience that don't know who you are can you give a quick background on who you are where you came from what brought you to this space of what you're doing today but start as early as you want like

feel free to give us your yeah little story so i was born in southern california um my parents divorced when i was five years old my mother remarried a psychiatrist um and then my mother and my father went through i don't know like a 10 12 year pretty tumultuous court custody and child support battle right um and when I got um by the time I was like 10 12 years old my mother she ended up getting into pharmaceuticals because my stepfather was a psychiatrist and prescribed pharmaceuticals and so she was depressed and she had anxiety you know for whatever reasons I think we all do we have different versions of feeling happy or sad or anxious or, you know, challenged by the world and life in general. And so she got into pharmaceuticals

and I watched the quality of her life degrade seemingly quite rapidly. And I, in my early teenage years, 15, 16 years old, got into cannabis. And that was kind of an issue. A lot of people didn't like that. There was social stigma around cannabis. But I'm watching my mother take pharmaceuticals and I'm looking at this plant and then I'm looking at all the things that you can buy and you know to get intoxicated alcohol tobacco you got all these pharmaceuticals I'm thinking like why is this thing illegal so I started to develop a little bit of mistrust for the world at large I started to question the world and even before that when when my parents were going through their custody battle uh we I had my own attorney are you a single

I have a younger brother and the same mother and father. So you both were in the same... Totally. So we had our own attorney. My mom and my dad had their own attorney. What do you mean? You two had an attorney? Totally.

Like kids? How? Yes. How did that happen? It's the court appointed one. Wow. Yeah. And so maybe it was a mediator, but they represented us.

And so we would go and we'd sit down and we'd talk with this mediator. And the idea was like, this is a safe place. we'll, we'll, um, we want to hear what, what's going on with your mother and father. We're just trying to figure out the best solution for the whole, you know, divorce and whatever in the custody. And we would share what we thought was going on. And I must've been like eight, nine, 10 years old. And then we would go into the waiting room. My mother would go in and speak with the mediator. Then we would get into the car and we'd be driving away. And then my mom would be like, so you said this and you think this. So at a very young age, I started to develop mistrust

and question the world of course and my mother she went back to school when she married my stepfather and got a degree in sociology a doctorate doctorate degree in sociology and so we had very deep philosophical conversations she managed she happened to teach intro to soc and then gender studies no way so all of the stuff that i've seen take place in the world today um you were exposed to it i was exposed to at least thinking about these things at a young age and so by the time I hit my early 20s I think I was 20 years old my mother ended up sorry I have to yeah yeah go ahead and ask but what happened in the end with that trial and the custody um we ended up having split custody and by the time I was like 13 14 years old basically

we had the the option to make a decision uh to which parent we wanted to live with okay which was uh you know I don't think any kid should have to go through that exactly and I think it may have affected me to this point in my life where I put an enormous amount of thought into the decisions that I make because I think I was forced to make a borderline I mean quite literally an impossible decision as a child you know like what I wanted was both my parents to be together and that wasn't an option yeah so that was that was um yeah pretty interesting experience okay thank you for sharing that yeah and so when I was 20 years old um I was working at a Toyota store selling new cars at the time. And I went to my mom's house, which was near where I lived. And I had gone and I was

working on my car and I had some friends that were going to come over. And I found her laying in her bed with a large glass of a barbiturate that she had ingested in an attempt to commit suicide. And so she was hospitalized for a few days and she ended up passing away. And that kind of, I mean, heavily affected me, obviously. Yeah. Yeah. So that really fueled my distaste for the broken incentives in the world, the pharmaceutical industry, and kind of like created this vendetta in some sense and really empowered me in a way that I don't think I otherwise would have been to embark on a journey to become a cannabis producer. Okay. And so every time I bagged a pound in my earlier years, in some sense, it was like an FU to the pharmaceutical industry.

Now that I understand Bitcoin and how money incentivizes behavior in the world, I understand that it's more just the Keynesian economic model and the fiat paradigm and the incentives baked into that, that causes businesses to treat their customers in the way that they do and incentivizes what I call this is scumbaggery, you know, and, and there's a saying, a patient cured as a customer lost. So we can see in the world, we have all these broken incentives that are causing businesses to behave in a way that is unethical. Yeah. And so as a cannabis producer, I was in the right place at the right time. I had been producing cannabis for, I don't know, eight years or so. I had a lease on a property and I had a large grow. And then the governor at the time, Jerry Brown,

signed into effect a bill, MRSA, which is the Medical Marijuana Safety Regulations Act. That is in California. California. And that bill was essentially to put into effect the permitting and the licensing model and the regulatory framework to take cannabis from a medical use to adult use or adult recreational use cannabis. And so when that bill got passed, I was in the right place at the right time. Like I said, I had a nonprofit 501c3 and I had this leased property. And so I was negotiating with the property owner over the long-term terms with him and I couldn't come to a deal. And so what I did was is I scraped together every dollar that I could and I bought a property

in consultation with Humboldt County Planning Department, aware of the regulations. So I closed escrow on this property and started to go through the permit process. And with cannabis, it's similar to like having a bar. You have to have a liquor license, but the entity that has the license may not be the owner of the establishment. And the establishment has to adhere to certain setbacks. It has to be so far from the school or whatever. So you have to get a permit from the county and then you get a license from the state for the entity that is operating the business in that location. So I purchased this property. And as soon as I closed escrow, then I started to go down the economic rabbit hole because now I had this large incentive in my life to understand

what forces I was contending with. And when I was selling cars in my earlier years, I saw the 2008 crash and I witnessed firsthand how that affected people. And it definitely affected the auto industry, but I wasn't in a position in my life to really dig deep and understand why that was happening. From a higher level, I understood some of the basics, but I wasn't incentivized really to go deep. So there I am on this property in Humboldt County that I just bought, and I'm going through the permit process, and I'm learning a lot about the political process and developing these regulations, and I'm dealing with the planning department, and I go down the economic rabbit hole so I can understand the boom-bust cycles in real estate. Very quickly, that led me from

the Keynesian economic model and the Federal Reserve to the Austrian economic theory to hard money and then to Bitcoin. That blew my mind. I was quite well-primed to understand the magnitude of a monetary instrument with a supply that cannot be modified, altered, or increased as the supply or as the demand increases you're the voice is brought to you by treasure the original bitcoin hardware wallet company pioneering the development of self-custody for crypto assets since 2013 empowering individuals with an open source device enabling beginners and experts to easily and securely hold their coins i find my treasure super easy to use and recommend it to my friends and family enjoy my five percent discount on treasure product by clicking the

link in the show notes and using the code FLAT. As a commodity producer producing cannabis, I watched over many years the value of the product decrease and the supply increase and the demand increase. So as supply satiates demand and something becomes more abundant, we're bringing the value down. We're bringing the price down. Totally. So I'm looking at Bitcoin. I mean if value is represented in the price. Totally. So I'm looking at Bitcoin and I'm realizing like, wait a second, this thing either gets destroyed and shut down or it's going to appreciate at a faster rate than everything else forever

for as long as it exists. So that was the catalyst and what led me to being in the position that I was in in my life at the time to then discover Bitcoin and then understand and be open to the potential changes and the magnitude of what Bitcoin could really be. And when was that? That was in 2017. Right. And then so because of that, I actually pivoted my whole life strategy and my business, and I decided that I was going to sell my property. So I discovered Bitcoin in December of 2017. And a month later, I got a license from the state of California, which was a very vindicating moment for me in my life. Like there I am holding this license for my cannabis business on a

property that I bought by producing cannabis. And I'm realizing that my dream come true was actually a nightmare. And the reality was, is that the margin that was there was was so high and it was getting squeezed. But that was an incentive for entrepreneurs and capital to come into the cannabis industry and increase the supply at quite a fast rate relative to the demand, decreasing the value of the product. And without any traditional fiat subsidies, you could say business loans business debt whatever or without any great marketing yeah well so increase your branding is a way to hedge your growth totally what i mean yeah branding is a way to hedge yourself against commoditization exactly but i decided that the reality was is that i was in a

position where i had equity and i had value in this business and the value of the business was going to decrease as the value of the product decreased and i was going to have to spend all this time and energy building a business that's effectively going to be bleeding out over the long term. And I see that happening everywhere in the marketplace. And it's almost like in some sense, the game, economic game is to figure out how to become the biggest fish or get bought out and gobbled up by the biggest fish. And that's part of that centralizing force that our fiat monetary system creates. So anyways, I sold the property a year later. I owned it for two years, took me a year to get permitted and then it took me a year to sell it. And I plowed into Bitcoin

and I started doing farm management and consulting services, which I had a lot of opportunity to do because I'm quite efficient and I've been producing cannabis for a long time. And there's a lot of cannabis producers that started to really struggle as their operating expenses increased because of the regulatory fees and impedance, biological studies, taxes, all that stuff. They were struggling and so i had a lot of opportunity to essentially manage other people's farms um and so i've done that so in some some way the way i think about it is is i have all the upside of being a cannabis producer but none of the downside or liability you know that comes along with having capital tied up in the cannabis business so today you don't own so today i don't

i don't own anything except for two vehicles and my bitcoin yeah far out totally so when we see you do videos in the cannabis uh farms yes so that property is right across the street from the place that i owned and we myself and my neighbor at the time closed escrow purchased property at the same time it took me six months to get my permit from the county it took him six years to get his permit from the county so like for me i had a whole series of miracles and i'm very grateful to have had the success that I did navigating through that regulatory landscape. Cause there's a lot of pitfalls in that. Um, yeah. So the property that I've been managing, when he got approved by the County, he contacted me and asked me if I was willing to come in and set the facility

up, design the facility, cultivate the crops for a few years, line them up with the distribution companies. And so I've done that now for the last, I don't know, two and a half years. Um, and my contract is up and I'm on a cropped crop arrangement. So I have the highest level of optionality. So per every crop we do, like it's, we do a deal and when the crop is done, we renegotiate. And so I can be out at any time essentially. So it's in three month increments. So I like to think about it and like, I'm a free agent. I go anywhere. I can do anything at any time. I don't like to be tethered and committed to things that might be changing for the worst in the long term. So which is why I rent a house and why I manage somebody else's cannabis business

and why all my money is in Bitcoin. Because I have the highest level of optionality that way. Are you being contacted by other types of small businesses or businesses not specifically in the cannabis uh area to consult to them about how they do their work and about maybe bitcoin yes they follow you and they see the kind of transformation you've done for yourself in your own life because as you said this is a problem that is common for every industry that is under the fiat sun totally yeah and i have um i've had several conversations with people that have been referred to me by people that i have met in my travelings or because of the podcast that i've been on or any of the content that i've created and i've had discussions

around why it's so important to have bitcoin on the balance sheet and why although at first glance it may not be what people are aware of but that that is that free markets are deflationary and we're driving prices down on everything while your cost of operating is increasing and so the best way to hedge yourself against the challenges that the free market will create on your P&L. You know, if there's not enough of something that people want, the free market will bid the price up. And if the price gets bid up, then the margin increases and the economic incentive for other people to come into that sector of the marketplace and satiate that demand with supply for whatever good or service it is that that increases and as that happens though as other people enter that

sector of the marketplace we're creating more abundance you're driving value down on things you're making things more affordable but you're creating an existential crisis for the producer if their operating expenses are going up as long as they can keep inflating the supply totally and so the best way it's possible to do that yeah a certain product or service well and that's part of the broken incentives that are caked into the fiat paradigm, if you will, is that it incentivizes people to figure out how to stifle or prevent competition. And it incentivizes like the pharmaceutical industry to figure out how to build a regulatory moat around their sector and sector in the marketplace to prevent competition from coming in. So there's two companies that can

use, via the patent, there's only two companies that can produce insulin and sell insulin. So they can maintain their high margin. But if the patent law wasn't there and everything was open source, then what would happen was if there's a huge demand for insulin because there's a diabetes crisis, then people are going to be willing to pay a lot for the insulin. That large margin is going to be an incentive for other people to come into that sector of the marketplace, produce insulin, which will drop the price. But you can't do that. So the insulin producers can maintain their margin and extract high value from the marketplace. And so that's a big problem. So patenting is a technique to eliminate competition.

Yeah, to hedge yourself against the loss of margin or the loss of income. And on top of that, you have the ability of industries like big pharma to remove the risk or reduce the risk of penalties by the form of removing liability from them to the entities that they service, like governments, with certain products like vaccines, for example. They are not liable for any damage. I mean, in some cases, they are being prosecuted and pay hefty fines, but it's a small price to pay relatively to the margins that they have and the values that they drive on specific products. And so I think COVID was an amazing example to see how pharma companies like Pfizer, Moderna, and others were pushing all the liability on governments and all the plethora of adverse reactions that we're seeing. Yes. they're not liable for it but the governments are and the governments are not obviously they fuck you to the citizens and people are just dying or becoming disabled and living off subsidies and

yes yeah and so i see such a broken totally but i believe so many angles i believe that it's all broken because we have a debt-based fiat monetary system and as the currency is debased that inflationary monetary system paired with the deflationary forces of a free market, they're squeezing everybody. So if you're, I don't know, a wine producer, you produce wine and your cost of operating goes up, you can do a few things. You can increase your prices or you can maintain your prices and make less money, have less margin, or you can dilute the quality of your product you can water down the wine and if you do that or like the pharmaceutical industry if they promote medications that they have patents on that have negative side effects

then the incentive is as opposed to stop selling these shitty products that are killing people it's to remove the liability so that yeah that fundamental issue with the two opposing forces of having a deflationary free market, which is the natural state of a free market, as Jeff Booth would put it, and an inflationary monetary system causes the squeeze, which then incentivizes people to do things that are unethical. Right. And what did you experience during COVID, if we're already touching on that subject? Yeah. So for me, it actually didn't directly affected me. And I had spent enough time traveling down the Bitcoin rabbit hole that I had a general understanding that the incentives were skewed and that there was a major monetary crisis

on behalf of the governments and the central banks. And it almost seemed like they needed another vector to inject a bunch of liquidity in the marketplace with the PPP loans and they basically doubled, close to doubled the money supply within like a year or two years after COVID. For me in my life where I live, I'm in the mountains. At that time I was, you know, growing a big, managing a big farm, growing a large crop. I was definitely adverse to the masks, but there, you know, I live in kind of a conservative area. And so there was a lot of stores where, you know, I didn't have to go in and wear masks, but it didn't directly affect me and the quality of my life at that point. But it did affirm to me that my understanding of the world was seemingly

accurate and that my strategy to hedge myself against these issues was the best one that I could come up with. And that's to live in a rental and own Bitcoin. Because if California became too tyrannical and their COVID restrictions were overbearing and indefinite, then I can just easily move to another state or country or whatever without the time associated with selling a property, without the 6% commission, all of that. So it's like, I want to have the highest level of optionality and freedom. And actually pre COVID, right. Towards the first year of COVID, my wife and I, we were talking about, you know, buying a house. And when COVID it happened, I kind of had this aha moment. And I went to her and I'm like, look, we're talking

about purchasing a house because we want to have a safe place to live. And we want to be able to raise our family. And we want to, you know, I don't know, just have a nice little happy existence. But the liability associated with owning a house is a real thing. And we have all of the property rights that homeownership provides and more if I rent and just hold the Bitcoin. So that kind of changed our thought process and our strategy towards life and i'm pretty happy about that so i think that's quite different from the you'll own nothing and be happy paradigm that we're being pitched with from the world economic forum yeah because what we own now once we understand how the playing field works is on the bitcoin instead of owning a property yeah because people

people say okay but if you sell anything sorry if you sell everything and you put everything into bitcoin then you're basically playing out the prophecy that they put together and i say no that's not at all what they want they don't want me to own bitcoin they don't want me to own anything and i am the the how do you say the bear at the bear asset like bitcoin is my bear asset yeah yeah i'm the one owning that no one can take it away from me it's the ultimate way of owning something. Yeah. Right. It is. It's the highest form of ownership we've ever had because it's informational. I think about it, uh, and kind of like the spiritual sense it's metaphysical property. I believe it's like Satoshi merged the physical world with the metaphysical world,

the land beyond the realm that you can't see. And so what's ironic with this idea of you'll own nothing and be happy in some way it's true yeah so i own this invisible inviolable metaphysical monetary instrument that's beyond the reach of any government or anybody they can't take it from me they can't violate violate it but i believe that when the world economic forum embarked on they that great agenda i think that they weren't thinking about bitcoin at the time. And they weren't aware that if you can create scarcity and money, you create abundance and everything else. It's the abundance and money that's creating scarcity and everything else and is incentivizing plans and ideologies that are in line with the globalist movements.

That are totally communistic. And what I think is so beautiful about Bitcoin is it's quite literally imposing a new rule set on our civilization. It's forcing cooperation. And because we all want to figure out how to preserve capital or our stored up surplus life force and project that into the future in the most effective way possible, the incentive is for everybody to do that. And the beautiful thing with that is, is you go into Bitcoin and on average most people have to serve their self-interest. But by doing so, you're serving the interest of the collective by liberating and getting rid of all these physical assets or this stuff that we've been hoarding to save our economic energy in. So we're creating abundance

because we have scarcity in this money that's digital energy or metaphysical property. So the drive now is to hoard this invisible assets and get rid of all of these other things like houses and stocks and gold or whatever. And people need houses to live in. It's quite silly when you think about people are using houses and equity in companies as their savings accounts. And then they complain. These companies are so big. They're monopolies. Google, blah, blah, blah. Well, stop using google stock as your savings account yeah you're empowering the companies that are behaving in ways that you don't like yeah but you're you're unaware of that and so yeah it's just like i think beautiful uh bitcoin is like this beautiful incentive vortex that's sucking everybody and

all the monetary value in the world into it and the implications of that are so profound they are you talked about scumbaggery scumbaggery yes let's unpack that a little bit okay like the the rotten incentive structure which enables such scumbaggery yes come about uh-huh so how do you see um we're in transition phase the way i see it into a new monetary system yep and we're in a real fork and some people or part of humanity will go down the path of you know the predictable path of digitizing the fiat monetary system and taking it to uh greater surveillance and and greater enforcement capabilities and ai built on top of that and it's all very clear the direction that it's taking and then the other side is going towards a more libertarian future more self

sovereignty and self-custody of our own Bitcoin and property. And those are two totally different paths. And the scumbaggery, which is very prevalent these days, and almost any entity that is collective, like a company or a community or a city or a state, is being drawn into being corrupted or you know giving space and and and the ability to rise to scumbags yeah whereas on the other side you said just now we are encouraging collaboration yep we are you said forcing collaboration which is funny cooperation cooperation so yeah forcing cooperation which is funny because it's like a yeah um so how do you see the scumbags fading away from life and the forces of good taking more space how do you see those two two two opposite powers in a way

yeah continuing to to live in in the world so i call it the bb world the before bitcoin world or era which essentially is all of known history up until 2009 there was seemingly a game theoretic fuckedness is what i call it and what the way i see that is is because of the physicality of property you're you have an incentive to violence because if you have property that's physical and I want some of it and I kill you, I get all of it. So really the incentive is if you're sociopathic to just take from other people. It's like Robert Breedlove did a keynote many years back on taking versus making. And the path of least resistance to acquire something from anybody in the physical realm is to take it. And we see that in nature

And we see that in our world. And because gold was the money that we chose, it's like a free market emergence where we all decided to use gold because of the five properties of money. But where gold lacked in its portability, because it's physical, it required a custodian. And so the custodians started to issue certificates. Those custodians became central banks. And the problem in the BB world is the dishonest sociopath. If they can corrupt a government or a king to create regulatory framework like a bank holiday, they're capable of issuing more certificates than they have gold on reserve. And what that means is that the dishonest market participants has the advantage in the marketplace over the honest participants.

And so we can see the effects of that in the world that we live in today. And then additionally, the physicality of property incentivizes violence and at the very least causes the people who own the wealth to either be able to perpetrate violence against others to get more wealth or to be able to prevent others from perpetrating violence against them and taking their wealth or their physical stuff. And so the world is ran today by people with, I don't know, a psychological pathology, this little broken bit in them where they're willing to do harm to others to get what they feel like they deserve. And those entities are the best through co-opting and corrupting and accruing such monetary power to enforce the most violence so we live in a world where you

have corrupt central banks debasing the currency and funding killing and stealing and with bitcoin because bitcoin is metaphysical inviolable unconfiscatable it's not debasable and it is this distributed ledger, your ability to expose a dishonest market participant is quite high. It's easy to do. I can run my node and I can cross-reference someone's address. You can go online and look at a block explorer and say, hey, are these coins in this address? So if a bank or if an ETF or a lightning provider tries to issue more sats or Bitcoin or sell paper Bitcoin, and they don't have the Bitcoin to back it, the ability to expose them is easier than it's ever been. So over time, in the AB world, the after Bitcoin world, the way I see it

is, is that the honest market participants providing the most value are going to be the ones that will win and maintain and obtain market share, because it'll be so easy to expose the dishonest ones. And as people get pulled out of being so heavily impoverished, they'll also have the ability to purchase things of a higher quality from more ethical businesses. And so I think that Bitcoin quite literally punishes the dishonest market participants. It incentivizes them to do the right thing because our ability to expose their dishonesty is so high now. Yeah. And that's part of why, or that's kind of the idea and why I say that Bitcoin is imposing a new rule set on our civilization. Because if you want somebody's Bitcoin, you can't kill them

and take it. You have to offer them up some sort of good or a service that they want. Like they stay on the streets, you better come correct. Or as Robert Breedlove would say, Bitcoin will make governments beholden to the preferences of its citizens because it can't arbitrarily at whim extract their economic energy. It can't just confiscate their property. You can't tax away somebody's Bitcoin. If they don't like that, they have the ability to memorize 12 words and leave. And so the path of least resistance now, the way I see it, is not to drive everybody into some dystopian future and some CBDC where they're going to extract everybody's life force and value. The path of least resistance now, if Bitcoin becomes the world's money, and it's in the midst

of what I consider to be the great demonetization, over time, people are selling down all these other inferior monetary instruments and they're moving into Bitcoin. And the more that that happens, the more that the governments and the central banks and the ruling elites, you could say, are going to be incentivized to be more beholden to the preferences of its citizens if they want what's of real value and has the highest value, and that's the Bitcoin. So how do you see governments, and specifically the U.S. government after the elections now, going in the trajectory of honoring Bitcoin and maybe treating it as something that is as valuable as gold how do you and do you actually believe any of their promises that they made

before the elections now that trump's elected now that rfk is in place as well and he understands bitcoin and there are many others around them that do understand it and and call for it so how do you see that playing out and in addition to that with your experience from the cannabis industry where they heavily regulated an industry how do you see things forming and taking shape going forward yeah so the first thing that comes to mind is is i don't care so much what any politician has to say i don't necessarily trust it i think that what the current political regime in the united states is talking about doing. First off, I think it's a miracle the conversations are taking place. Yeah, the things that they're discussing are being discussed. That's a miracle.

I agree. But the thing that I believe and know will always be there is the innate desire to serve one's self-interest. And so it's that very desire that makes Bitcoin work. If you have the ability to amass enough energy to attempt to 51 attack the network as an example you're less incentivized to do so you're more incentivized to just mine the bitcoin and support the network because the energy cost to try to attempt the network is i think sailor said trillions and trillions of times higher than the energy required to run a node to run that ledger to validate the work of the miners right so it costs a lot of money to attempt to attack the network and if you can amass that much energy you would be better off just mining the bitcoin and supporting the network

sure and so i think that the united states government specifically since what that's what we're talking about does have an economic an existential economic crisis and as they issue more T-bills and the Federal Reserve prints money and buys those T-bills. And then they take that money or that currency and they fund their endeavors. They're injecting that capital or that liquidity into the marketplace, which is increasing the amount of monetary units in the marketplace at a faster rate than they're increasing the amount of goods and services. So that's driving costs up on everything, including, and most importantly, the operating expenses for the government. And additionally, it's getting lent to them as debt so they have

interest costs. So the more the currency is debased, the more the operating expenses for the government increases, the more property right violation is required to sustain the governmental endeavors. So then it's this back and forth game of debase more or tax more. You debased too much. You have inflation. People go crazy. You raise taxes. People go crazy. So it's this back and forth game. And then you have all this gaslighting from the media trying to obfuscate what's happening and why it's happening. And so people are confused. They don't understand what's taking place. They know they're getting squeezed. But the economic crisis that the Keynesian monetary system creates is an issue for everyone in the marketplace, from the individual to the

small business, to the large business, corporation, nation, state, and central banks. Everybody's suffering from the same problem. And the best way to hedge yourself against that problem is to adopt Bitcoin and mine Bitcoin. So I think that based upon that beautiful incentive vortex and the way that Bitcoin punishes people who ignore it or try to attack it and rewards people who adopt it and support it, I think that that over time, regardless of what any politician says, that's the path of least resistance. And that's the path of abundance and financial liberation. And, you know, Trump has been talking about the things that he wants to do, tariffs and deregulate, and he wants to drill. So if you're drilling, then you're fracking. And

if you're fracking, you're flaring. And if you're flaring, you're mining Bitcoin. You may as well. Well, or you're going to just waste the electricity. Exactly. And so, you know, I didn't grow up, you know, as a fan of Donald Trump. I mean, he's quite a pompous individual who's seemingly narcissistic and wants to put his name on everything. And, you know, he's including a shit coin. Totally. but he does he's a serial entrepreneur with a long history of successfully navigating and through the economic paradigm in which he was participating in and winning so I think it's logical it's logical to think that he'll continue to do so and in some sense I kind of you know I tell people this at times hate the game don't hate the player yeah and so I hate the game and I'm not so adverse to the player. And really, somebody who has a history of succeeding in the

way that he does has a high probability of pivoting his strategy as the game changes. Right. And the game has changed. 2009, Satoshi changed the game. Yeah. And so the economic incentive and all of the upside associated with adopting a Bitcoin strategy and being friendly towards the Bitcoin businesses, the miners, the developers and the holders, it's a high incentive. And so I think if the United States attempted to ban Bitcoin, the global economy would punish them as a result because it's hyper mobile liquid capital. People with the capital, if they can, will take their capital and leave. And let's say that they implement capital controls and lock the borders down. Well, then the United States would be closing itself off from the rest of the global

market and the rest of the globe and other competing nation states would then have the opportunity to adopt Bitcoin and get the benefits of doing so. And the people who don't are going to suffer. And I don't think it takes, you know, seven years of listening to every Bitcoin podcast or in every Bitcoin book there is to understand that. And so when people ask, you know, or talk to me about Larry Fink, and I've had several conversations this year around the concern of a 6102 attack, confiscating the Bitcoin, all the Bitcoin that Coinbase is holding. Is Larry Fink going to try to fork the chain? I'm not concerned about any of that. If BlackRock Issues sells more claims to Bitcoin than they have Bitcoin on reserve, then over time, at some point, they'll

be exposed. They'll be exposed. And then it also gives another ETF issuer the option to gain market share and destroy their competition by simply offering up proof of reserves. I can go online right now and I can look at how much Bitcoin the El Salvador government is holding. And so I do expect there to be fuckery and scumbaggery, but I'm not worried about it because what I believe based upon my understanding of how Bitcoin works is that it that will just weed out the dishonest sociopathic scumbags in the world and they will get punished it's it's in some sense it's economic Darwinism okay I want to ask you about KYC um we're seeing more and more companies in the bitcoin space being asked to be regulated and

this industry is becoming something that may be similar to what you've seen happening with the cannabis industry and a lot of people are being asked to you know if they want to participate they have to be identified in front of the state that they live in with its own AML KYC rules. Do you think that that will, how do you think that that will impact the adoption of Bitcoin in the coming years? And do you think that people will still be wise enough to learn about non-kyc bitcoin and what the network can offer them yep not in the traditional mainstream way that will be marketed to them um so i in some sense you could say my perspective is kind of like i'm grading on a curve what do you mean uh grading on a curve would be is like

you know, someone's taking a test, college students are taking a test. And instead of giving somebody, you know, that gets 90 out of a hundred questions, right. And 90%, the person who gets the highest grade is where you start that grading curve. So because we come out of an era where we, the whole, all of known history, the BB era, where we've been limited to physical and defective assets that are not thermodynamically sound and as their value increases the incentive to increase the supply goes up and the supply increases and in real terms your your value or your wealth is is bleeding out yeah i think that you know i'm okay in the world in which we live been today where if you have KYC Bitcoin, the government knows that you own it. And if I sell

some, I have to pay taxes. I think long-term though, we're going to get to a place where that doesn't matter. But we're, we, although I don't like that ideologically, we're moving in the right direction. So having property that somebody can't take from you, even if they know you own it is still better than having property that somebody could take from you that right yeah right okay so you're willing to live with that and you're saying it's better okay i understand what you mean i just feel like not many people will be exposed to the original way of holding bitcoin and maintaining some form of anonymity on the network well if you spend bitcoin then the recipient knows where the bitcoin came from right and there's a level of loss of privacy

there's a level of exposure involved in that yes so i'm not really worried about it because bitcoin allows our entire civilization to see what everybody else is doing yeah and this idea of wanting to prevent in a way that's the same thing with cash like when you go somewhere and redeem your cash someone knows who you are because you've given that cash totally right so there's no way to effectively use bitcoin and remain anonymous but i think that's part of the beauty of it i'm with you okay i want to ask you about el salvador you've been here for a while yes tell me about your experience here yeah what you thought maybe before what was your expectation how did it meet reality what do you make about the life in a country that has adopted bitcoin

as a legal tender three years ago but it seems to me like from the few days that i'm here that most of normal society is not even aware of what it is yeah and it's very very early even here totally so what is your take on how things are going in el salvador well i think the country is clearly on an upward trajectory i think that what bukele has done pretty miraculous and the reason i'm so excited about the political change in the the change in direction in the country is is because in some sense it's layered on top of bitcoin and because money is superordinate to law if you have if you can get a country and a populace to adopt bitcoin and they can't corrupt the monetary system within the jurisdiction that they're they're managing or operating or whatever

then the government is going to be more fiscally responsible and it's going to be more beholden to the preferences of its citizens and i think that it's all about property rights and what bukele has done that's such a miracle is he's eliminated corrupt politicians and governmental forces or governmental practices. And then he's also eliminated corruption on the streets with the gangs. And both the government and the gangs were violating the property rights of the people here in El Salvador. And so although I don't see a whole country using Bitcoin, I see a whole country that's been liberated from violation of property rights. And that you can see on everybody's face. Yes. People are happy. The economic opportunities that have unfolded as a

result of that, like it's pretty clear it's happening. There's a lot of development taking place. Beautiful, brilliant people from all over the world are coming to get that experience and being a part of it. And so I think that Bukele's movement is highly likely to stick because he's removed that broken incentive from controlling the monetary system and got the country on the way to being on a Bitcoin standard and giving people the option to do so. I think that that political movement and that assertion or protection of property rights is much more likely to stick even when he's not president again. And I also think that he's laid out a roadmap for other countries. And it's like a clear signal to people in positions of power who are defaulting to a

strategy that's the opposite and violate property rights more, everybody is going to make a selfless sacrifice to protect the system as opposed to get rid of all of the corruption and violation of property rights, do the exact opposite, which is counterintuitive, and provide and protect people's property rights. And then by doing so, you're incentivizing innovation and economic activity which is better for the people and the government that's managing the people and so i think you know the success that's been happening here is going to and i think it is you know bringing a lot of attention to a better solution a better strategy and the game theory can really start now when you're seeing the results of the at least the first stage of bitcoinizing

a country yes i think that the steps that the u.s are is taking are are incredible yeah and um you know yesterday i had a chat with stacy on stage at the conference and she's saying like for me seeing that the u.s is following the footsteps of el salvador is no less than a miracle and obviously you know she's very proud because she's she's heading that direction with together with Bukele and other people here that are doing amazing work but it's not personal about them it's about how you can actually improve the lives of people that live in a certain state I mean it's very easy to get caught up on its ego of that person or or that politician or whatever but in the end of the day as you said what matters is you see people's faces here and they're happy

and and you cannot fake something like that totally you cannot fake a population to be happy like yes it and and then a subsidy of a thousand dollars once a year will not make that totally if you throw free money at them that will not make them happy we know that and so i think that what you're alluding to that this is the first step like they're laying the foundation to build an economy that is based on different values yes i think that that is very substantial well they're similar values to what the united states was founded upon and that's a high level of property rights right if you have a high level of property rights and people can keep what they earn then they're incentivized to produce and earn and the prosperity that's created as a result of that

is immense. And so I think that, yeah, I think that Bukele, what Bukele has done is so much of it is surely common sense. Obviously you can't have corruption in the government. That's a problem. Everybody's aware of it. Even other governments try to, governments try to expose corruption within their own governments that they're operating within. People don't want corruption within the marketplace or on the streets. So that's obvious. But what blows my mind, which is much less obvious, it's becoming more obvious today, is that by putting the country on a Bitcoin standard, it really solidifies and increases the probability that that movement lasts. Because we had it in the United States, but the incentive is still there to figure out

how to corrupt the political apparatus to extract what you can to benefit you and yours, if you're a psychopath and they exist in this world. Yeah. Awesome. Would you recommend people to come and live here? Uh, yeah. I mean, it depends on what, what's important to you as far as, you know, to maintain your quality of existence. You know, the country is not without its challenges. Um, you know, imports of food and stuff that's, you know, kind of been a little bit of a challenge. You know, for me, I, as a 15 year career cannabis farmer, I've learned a lot about soil ecology, organic crops, GMOs, pesticides, animal agriculture. And so I have a very refined diet and, you know, like as an example, I can only assume, and I could be wrong, but my assumption

is, is that the pupusas that are being made here, um, are being made with GMO corn and that's an issue and so you know in the states and a lot of other places in the world it's easier to find the high quality foods that are very important to me and my family um but the weather is beautiful the country is beautiful the people are amazing and like the incentive to figure out how to make things better here is very high there's a lot of demand for stuff so the rate of change is quite incredible but you know there's traffic and yeah there's challenges obviously yes I think it's perfect for sure but the trajectory is very very yes makes me optimistic and totally awesome what else do you want to talk about what topic that we didn't touch on but you may be asked a

lot about or you're thinking about these days the natural state of a free market is deflation like when i first listened to jeff booth's book the price of tomorrow and then i listened to the booth series on breed loves what is money channel and for my audience that don't know there is an episode with jeff booth in my podcast so go listen yes booth is amazing to listen to there were so many times where like i quite literally had to press pause yeah stop and think and like literally wire new neural pathways because it's it's so obvious and profound but different than what we've been led to believe in how we perceive the world we are programmed in such a certain way and indoctrinated in such a certain way that when

you hear his simple yet profound ideas you're blown away you're like fuck how did i not totally about that before that's amazing yeah i agree with you yeah and so we grew we've you know grown up if you're living in the world today then you've been alive during credible monetary debasements and an inflationary marketplace where everything that people want and need to live is going up, denominated in dollars. So it's quite challenging initially to grok the idea that everything on planet Earth is going down in value as we create more abundance, as we become more technologically advanced. We're producing more of everything everybody wants for less. And in real terms, it's driving the price down, but people can't see it because it's

going up in dollar terms. And the Keynesian lie that you need an inflationary monetary system to keep the velocity of money up is entirely false. The idea that if you have monetary inflation in, or if you have an increase in purchasing power in the money, that people will then hoard the money and not spend money for the things that they need is crazy. People go out and buy an iPhone 16, even though they have the iPhone 15. And like, I would still spend my money if it's appreciating at a faster rate than everything else in the marketplace for a roof over my head, for a vehicle to drive, to get to A and B and to put food on my table. But I'm not going to hoard all of these other things if the money is the hardest asset in the marketplace.

So free markets, the natural state of the free market and the global economy is deflation. and that's something that's so important for people to understand and then if you understand that then you can understand the incentives baked into the pairing of a deflationary monetary or deflationary free market with an inflationary monetary system the incentive is to figure out how to become more extractive and to build a regulatory moat and monopolize your sector of the marketplace which is not providing value in the highest form to people it's a centralizing force and it's bifurcating our society as the currency is debased and the money is shitty, then you're incentivized to earn the money. If the legal framework says you have to earn this currency

and get out of the money as soon as possible and get into anything else that is preserving its value better than the money is. So as Booth says, if you have abundance in money, you create scarcity in everything else. And if you have scarcity in money, you create abundance in everything else. I would rather hold my Bitcoin. I'm not selling my Bitcoin for anything other than what I need to enhance the quality of my life. And that's not 37 rental properties. It's not Apple stock, Amazon stock, some gold, treasury bonds. It's none of that stuff. I'd rather have the Bitcoin. It's serving my highest self-interest. It's giving me more optionality over time. My Bitcoin and its convertibility into any other good or service is increasing over time. And so I'm

becoming, my optionality or wealth, you could say, is increasing at a faster rate than if I owned anything else. Correct. And by holding the Bitcoin, I'm holding those monetary units or that Bitcoin out of the trading supply. So the margin that is trading is smaller. So it's increasing the value of the existing or the units that are trading within the marketplace. So hoarding of the Bitcoin is ethical and it doesn't have any negative second or third order effects. It has positive ones. And so that's the big one that I think so much about. We live in a deflationary world. And you can't have those deflationary forces paired with an inflationary monetary system. And by having the inflationary monetary system, it is effectively and quite literally

harnessing the productivity gains of the global marketplace. That efficiency gain is being siphoned through the debasement of the currency and then allocated to the governmental apparatus or the recipients of the newly minted currency to fund otherwise unprofitable or unsustainable business models and practices and so as people capitulate into the incentive vortex that is bitcoin then over time the unsustainable fiscally irresponsible behavior on behalf of governments or zombie corporations should theoretically cease to exist right and that that natural dynamic that plays out in nature that that darwinian theory will apply to the economy and with fiat we've been able to subsidize unhealthy entities and activities that otherwise wouldn't be able to

exist. And so it's quite literally, Bitcoin is quite literally creating this economic Darwinism and it is going to weed out the dishonest and unethical market participants. It's going to cause governments to have to become more fiscally responsible and fund things that its citizens stand behind because then its citizens would be willing to participate by pulling capital into a communal pot and allowing the elected officials to fund what the people need. Like, I got no problem funding paying taxes for schools and roads and clean water. I got no issue with that. I just have a problem with paying taxes so that we go. As long as you know that that's where it's going to. Totally. Well, and I'm not interested in going and bombing people. Like, why are we doing all of

this? There's a better way. And Bitcoin is the better way. It's perfectly engineered money. It's quite literally the first money we've ever had in human history. We had seashells, yellow shiny rocks, political currency units. Now we have an engineered money. And when I look at the world and I think, dang, we've done everything that we have going on in the world today. And we've done so on the tech built on the technology of a yellow shiny rock with an incentive to violence and coercion and corruption. And now that we have this inviolable, incorruptible monetary protocol, like look at, think about the potential of what we can do. Like this is the greatest time to be alive in all of human history. You know, I'm 40 years old. So I spent the first

half of my life and hopefully I get to live into my elderly years, getting to witness like peak fiat, peak lunacy, peak corruption and the BB world. And now I have that contrast and that real world experience of how bad things are without having a solution to those problems. And we have a technological solution to that. Does that give you hope? Absolutely. Totally. Yeah. I mean, I couldn't be happier. And the more I think about it, the more I realize, you know, money is half of every transaction unless you're doing direct barter, but direct barter doesn't scale. So you need money. And if the money's corrupted, then you're effectively corrupting the entire marketplace and so we have honest money now

nobody can it's like a game that we can play or you can play and no other participant in that game has an unfair advantage over you energy flows where attention goes and so if you me personally i find that you know there's a lot of things that have been taking place in the world that I've become privy to and aware of and knowledgeable about that I'm entirely adverse to. And I have concluded that the best way to push back against that is to defund it with both my money and my attention. And now I'm not saying go bury your head in the sands, but if you're selling down all your dollar derivatives and you're saving in Bitcoin, you are defunding that. And if you're paying attention to what's happening with Bitcoin and you're talking about Bitcoin, you are in the most effective way, in my humble opinion, pushing back against some of the most diabolical and despicable forces in this world.

And then lastly, I'll add to that. And when the people who have been participating in unethical behavior come into Bitcoin, be happy because they're pumping your bags and it's the first thing that they could do that is ethical as far as monetary, I don't know, a monetary investment or strategy or whatever. It's the only investment that doesn't have any second or third order negative effects. and so we want the world to be on a bitcoin standard you know i've had a couple people that i've talked with that are all upset larry fink's in bitcoin and you got blackrock blackrock corporation you cannot it's what you want you want everybody and everything to adopt bitcoin

it's the actual chance of humanity to become more to become more honest totally and with more integrity. If entities like BlackRock can become less corrupt thanks to Bitcoin, hallelujah. Totally. I mean, I hate BlackRock as much as the next awake person, but would I be upset that they're coming into Bitcoin? No way. But you only hate BlackRock because of the game that they're playing. Exactly. Because they're levering up and continuing to hoard stocks and single family Because of the structure of the fiat system and what it led them to do. Yeah. And who is them?

There is no them. There is no entity such as BlackRock. It's just a construct, right? So, yeah, we have to start looking at things from a more positive point of view, I think, and calm down a bit with being upset about the trajectory of Bitcoin. Totally. And with the fact that this is inevitable because anyone can play the game. Yep.

You are just wasting your energy if you're becoming upset over these things. Just put your energy where you can actually make a difference and change something. Totally. Not there. And the fact that BlackRock is purchasing Bitcoin means that it's buying less single family homes. For example. So Bitcoin is making everybody's lives better, including people that don't own Bitcoin. So in my area, if Bitcoin didn't exist, I would have to own some real estate.

The fact that I don't own any real estate means that there's less demand on the existing supply of the real estate in the area in which I live in, which means in real terms, there's cheaper housing. And so that's taking place. You know, something else that gets discussed generally amongst the Bitcoin sphere that I'm starting to develop a larger aversion to is this idea that you don't have enough Bitcoin. Okay. You don't have enough Bitcoin. Get to one Bitcoin. Buy Bitcoin before you're priced out. 21 million Bitcoin is enough Bitcoin for infinite people and infinite

economic activity forever. It's subdividable. And as long as it stays decentralized and secure, on average, over time, it'll appreciate at a faster rate than everything else forever. So whenever somebody is ready to tether their economic energy and their life force and their ideology to this incorruptible monetary protocol, then they'll get the benefit of that. And the Bitcoin holders aren't winning at the expense of the non-Bitcoin holders. We're all winning. Sure. Did you see that paper from the ECB about Bitcoin holders, current Bitcoin holders are impoverishing the ones that don't hold it? And then exactly what I just said applies to that and highlights why I believe that to be false. Because the fact that people are buying

Bitcoin and like, I don't know, I just saw Gary Cardone just took Grant Cardone, his brother, to go hang out with Eric Weiss and Michael Saylor, Grant Cardone is likely to buy less real estate and start buying Bitcoin. And so if you're interested in living in a home, as more and more people figure that out, there's going to be less demand on the existing supply. And the prices will go down. Which means more affordable housing. Yeah. And as the Bitcoin price continues to appreciate at a faster rate than everything else forever. I believe it will. I say it's the most probable thing in the marketplace, as long as it's decentralized and secure, then that is going to be enough incentive

to get people to get into there. I think the people who have the biggest existential crisis is the mid-tier wealthy people and the really wealthy people in the world, because their ability to sell down their empires and get into the Bitcoin is limited in some sense, almost like by like just entropy and sheer market forces. Like Grant Cardone couldn't sell all his real estate tomorrow if he tried to. Correct. If every real estate mogul on planet earth woke up tomorrow, if RFK Jr. takes the floor out of the water and puts in orange pills in the water and orange pills the entire United States population. And everybody woke up tomorrow and realized that they need Bitcoin. They couldn't sell off all of the assets that they've been hoarding to plow into

Bitcoin because of supply and demand dynamics. There would just be too much demand. There's not enough people to buy it. And so over time, they'll figure it out and they'll figure out how to develop, you know, free up the liquidity and sell things down and move into Bitcoin. But I don't see some catastrophic collapse. A lot of people will talk about the dollar's going to collapse. I don't think the dollar's going to collapse. I think the system has to continue to debase because it's collateralized by assets that are defective and bleeding energy. And we're producing more of them and at a faster rate, the more technologically advanced we get. And as we produce more of those things, we're pushing down the value in real terms of the asset that collateralizes the debt.

So the nominal dollar value of the assets collateralizing the debt has to be higher than whatever the debt is owed. But we're pushing these down. So they're going to continue to debase, to continue to prop the asset prices up. So we're not going to see a real estate crash, in my opinion, or a stock market crash. They're going to continue to debase. And then I believe what will happen is because the system as a whole, generally speaking, has to debase because it's an inflationary monetary system that the debt is collateralized

with assets that we're producing more of and the free market's deflationary, the system as a whole is going to have to figure out how to continue to debase to stay solvent. And I believe that what will happen is the financial institutions are going to start to offer up BLOCs, Bitcoin equity lines of credit, because now it's another vector to base the currency against. It's another reason to be able to loan money into existence. It's an asset to loan against. That is perfect collateral that on average mostly is paid for by the people who own it. And if that happens, if banks start to lend dollars into existence through fractional reserve lending as debt against Bitcoin, then Bitcoin hits the balance sheet and it becomes part of that pile of assets that collateralizes the debts. But the difference is, is Bitcoin would be the only asset within that basket that's not increasing in supply as the demand increases.

It's thermodynamically sound in 2140 once we hit 21 million coins. Its stock-to-flow ratio is currently the highest out of all the assets on planet Earth. So even though we're mining more Bitcoin, we're producing less Bitcoin than we are producing more of everything else. So if Bitcoin's on the balance sheet as part of the assets that collateralize the debt, let's say in the States, then over time, because you can't push the value of the Bitcoin down by increasing the supply, the debasement required to keep the system solvent should decrease. So I don't see Bitcoin as a threat to the problems baked into the dollar system.

I see it as a solution to those problems. And I believe it's going to fix the fiat system at the same time it ultimately replaces it. Interesting. I think about fiat as an L2 or a layer two on gold because gold was physical and because you couldn't effectively audit the supply of the gold, it incentivizes corruption and dishonesty amongst the custodians and the central banks and warehousing the gold. You have to have that L2, but now you don't need that with Bitcoin. Well, you do need an L2. You need lightning for Bitcoin to scale. For Bitcoin to be a medium of exchange globally, you're going to have to have a layer on top of it or multiple layers on top of it. But the custodians, the honest custodians, will be the ones that obtain and maintain market share because our ability to expose the dishonest ones is now so great.

So in some sense, I think we had a one-to-one L2 on top of gold. gold in a warehouse, layer one certificates. Then the amount of certificates that were issued relative to the gold on reserve increased, becomes the dollar system. We completely detached in 1971. I believe we're going to reattach to a Bitcoin standard. And over time, someday we'll have a politician or a president or whatever that says, we don't need this anymore. We're solvent. We have bitcoin on the balance sheet bitcoin's been a reserve assets that's been that the dollar's been pegged to and we can go ahead and get rid of the dollar and we can use sets and so the way i look at things is from a more macro long-term theoretic first principles

perspective and what are the forces that are playing out that are causing things to happen and now that we have the change in our reality from what I like to think about the merging of the physical and the metaphysical world, now that you have this monetary instrument and this inviolable ledger, the implications of that are quite profound. I think it quite literally changes everything. Yeah, for sure. I think we're at an incredible point in time of humanity's evolution. yep it's so exciting yes to see everything that's unfolding yes it is insane okay you always give me so much to think about and you see you did come up with one last thing that you are thinking about these days and this is just what you that was it yeah that's it that's

amazing that's amazing i didn't go that far to think about it and that's incredible i am thinking a lot about the banking sector and how it's going to be influenced by Bitcoin. I think that is very, very interesting because we're going to see a mega change in the banking sector. I don't think it's going to go away. I think it's going to be heavily influenced by Bitcoin. And it will take time because there are a lot of rug pulling that needs to be done to a lot of entities inside that industry.

but it because they do serve a purpose like you said with custodians they do serve a purpose but just their role will change yeah and i do see in the future on a true bitcoin standard without fiat you're still going to have people who have large amounts of capital that are willing to loan it out yeah to entrepreneurs and they're willing to take the risk sure but your risk analysis will be different yeah and it's going to bring people it's going to take people from way far out on the risk curve and they're going to be much more fiscally responsible and they're going to only fund endeavors that they think have a high probability of being successful and that solve big problems in the marketplace and the allocation of capital is going to be changed and it's going

to be much more responsible but you're still going to have banks you're going to still have a lot of these things and you know it may eliminate mediocrity yeah right um you know the idea of anarcho-capitalism i think that if we just pressed hit a reset button and eliminated governments the first thing that would happen is is that people within local communities would get together and they would figure out who through some sort of democratic electoral process is going to be best fit to help come up with the strategies and make decisions on behalf of the populace to figure out how to provide the services and and and allocate capital taxes or some pool of capital that people pitch into to make the communities great so you end up back into a

position where you have some sort of governing body but by removing the ability to corrupt the monetary system and the money supply then they're going to be honest and they're going to be you know doing what's best for the people bring it on i hope to be alive to see things like that happen yep me too i want to live as much as i can 120 and more in order to see all these changes yes i really i really am fascinated with how life's gonna look like yeah under a bitcoin standard yep i'm sure you do too eric i love talking to you this is unreal this is so much fun for me yeah same to you you open my head my heart i i feel like you have such a gift and it's so amazing that you share that with with the world and with people so thank you well thank you it's an honor

to have the conversation thanks dear yes I'll see you then.