You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Ep. 71: Larry Lepard - The Big Print & Coming Financial Collapse

Episode Date: March 26, 2025

My guest today is Lawrence Lepard, the founder and managing partner of Equity Management Associates, a fierce advocate for sound money and a respected voice in the world of gold, Bitcoin, and monetary policy. He has dedicated his career to educating people on the dangers of fiat currency debasement and the importance of protecting wealth through sound money & alternative assets. His latest book, The Big Print, breaks down the coming monetary crisis in a way that anyone—whether a seasoned investor or an everyday person—can understand. In this conversation, Larry shares insights into how the current financial system is reaching a breaking point, why central banks are quietly hoarding gold, and why Bitcoin is the most important technological breakthrough in monetary history. We also dive deep into the inevitable shift toward alternative reserve assets, the long-term trajectory of Bitcoin, and why personal sovereignty through self-custody is more critical than ever. Enjoy! ► Get Larry’s book with a 10% discount using the code EFRAT ► 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 –►► Watch “New Totalitarian Order” conference with Prof. Mattias Desmet & Efrat: https://efenigson.gumroad.com/l/desmet_efrat ►► Enjoy the Little 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 –Larry’s Twitter: https://x.com/LawrenceLepard Larry’s Book - 10% off with code EFRAT: https://bit.ly/4hDH7xF Larry’s Nostr npub: npub1d3f4m9dgvkdjxn26pqzsxn6lpfn78sxwllxyt8mp76q0a9zyyjlswhr4xvEfrat'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…01:31 Online Scams & Larry’s Ban from X09:18 Introduction to Larry10:49 Why Larry Wrote ‘The Big Print’18:39 When’s The Next Big Print?21:45 You’ve Always Lived In An Inflationary World25:06 Fiat Economies’ Tipping Point in Public’s Trust30:11 Media’s Protection of The Fiat Cartel33:08 Gold and Its Current Market Dynamics37:04 Will Bitcoin Replace Gold?41:14 Bitcoin’s Mindset Shift & The Real Opportunity for Change43:53 Will Bitcoin Survive?48:00 Networking Businesses as Investments 52:30 The Rise of Alternative Reserve Currencies to USD56:20 The New Monetary Order & Assets1:01:28 Larry’s Message Of Hope1:05:00 Larry’s Events Schedule

Gold in U.S. Treasury bond terms is up 200%. Bitcoin in U.S. Treasury bond terms is up 2,000%. So those, you know, you say tipping point. Well, those are like canaries, you know, that just peeled over debt. Like, oh, my goodness, this is really a serious problem. There's a lot of paper gold, what I would call, you know, ETF and, you know, gold futures commitments don't represent actual ounces. In a currency collapse or a worldwide currency event, I believe China would try and reset with gold, which is why I think the U.S. should really go forward with a strategic Bitcoin reserve because I think it'd be a way to leapfrog them and we'd be better off. The third Fed mandate is financial stability.

And they say they don't want inflation. They say they're going to be disciplined. The Dodd-Frank law basically said, you know, thou shall not bail out banks anymore after 2008. And yet along comes Silicon Valley and it fails and they bailed it out. So they broke the law. Because at the end of the day, when push comes to shove, they have two choices. Print the damn money to keep everything alive, everything solvent and everything going, or let it collapse. The only tool the Federal Reserve and all the central banks have when financial conditions get messy is they print money to solve it. And that's the nature and the problem. The whole broken system is based on the fact that they can print money. Hello, welcome. Thank you for joining for another episode of You're the Voice. I'm Afrat, I'm so happy to be here with you. And I have the most wonderful guest today, dear Larry Lepard. Hey, Larry, how are you?

I'm great. Thank you, Afrat. I always really enjoy talking to you. So I've been looking forward to this for a while. Good, good. I've been looking forward to talking to you as well. And I'm sorry that how we have to start it with some bad news but it's important i think to share with uh with people who are watching just for them to be careful but also because we really want you to be reinstated back to twitter slash x whatever you call it and you've been de-platformed what happened well so yeah i've been calling elon without success so just real quickly there's a there are several very sophisticated scams that are going around where they claim to be somebody in the media or somebody

you know, at a position that would be kind of bait for me. I mean, in my case, I've just released a book, as you know. And so somebody from Bloomberg reached out and I checked them out and they were a real person on Bloomberg and the email looked like it came from Bloomberg. It wasn't one of those funky email addresses. And so I clicked on the Calendly invite. And the next thing I knew, I had an interview set up on Calendly. And then I did that on Zoom. And I don't know exactly how accessed my Twitter account, the, it's, it's pretty, the technology on the other side is getting very good. They're sophisticated, right? And so I have two FA on Twitter. So in theory, I should have been protected, but I think when they get, they can somehow get into your computer

through a malware link, and then they can grab your cookies and that allows them to sign onto Twitter and your name. And so the next thing I knew, I got an email that says your two FA has been disabled on Twitter. And then I quickly got on, tried to fix it. And my password had been changed and my email didn't change all that stuff so they grabbed my twitter account they started uh hawking you know shilling uh shit coins um and then all my users attacked them saying that they knew it wasn't me and then they came back and started using the n-word over and over again and so twitter deplatformed me because i hit all their community standards right so yeah so so here's the here's the message be extremely careful about who you open your google calendar to allow

access to your Google calendar, open a Calendly invite from, because if their Calendly settings are wrong, I think they can get through. And even Zoom, they may have done it on Zoom where we were talking on Zoom and they asked me some information and I made the mistake of sharing a page. And apparently if your Zoom settings aren't correct, they can use that to get into your computer. So I don't know which of those three was the access point, but I do know that these people were fake and and they're they're pernicious and they're all over and other people have gotten caught too in this and they're pretty good and i was on a zoom call with these people and this wasn't you know there was no strange foreign language um i mean these people sounded like they were americans

they actually sounded like they were legitimate um bloomberg reporters so um or they could have been i mean i should have figured it out but i didn't so yeah they're sophisticated about all this and um it's deeply frustrating because as you know since elon went full doge on twitter he He fired all the customer support. And so I've been saying... You're talking to bots and AI. Yeah, I'm talking to bots. It says, refer to this page, go back to here.

The most recent one I got was, we're sorry, we can't verify you. Open a new account. Well, my account's eight years old and I've got 200,000 followers. I've got a gazillion DMs that I need to respond to. And so opening a new account, I mean, that is my last ditch effort,

but I really don't want to have to go there. No, no, no, no, no. and i hope that you know everyone that's watching this video now this clip please share this so that we can reinstate larry this is super important there's a campaign going on right now trying to reinstate you i really appreciate all the support yeah we're all gonna try and share this look in general i don't have that much to say and all i do is rail on the fed but you know if ever there was a bad time for me to get hacked it's kind of now because my new book is out right which you can see here and you know i mean when you when you launch a book you're trying to make some noise

and talk about it and so on and so forth and uh you know it's been selling well and all that but certainly it would be helpful if i could you are one of the people on twitter that is giving so much value to your followers you're sharing all the time a lot of super valuable information for investors for people who have interest in gold in bitcoin and economy that we need you there this is unacceptable you're very kind i appreciate that but look i just you know i'd like to get it back i i should also say i moved to nostre i always had a nostre account i wasn't very active i've gotten very active nostre's great nostre's the future everybody who's on twitter should get a nostre account it's great backup and i think over time we'll all migrate over there and we'll

leave these big centralized things behind but but in the meantime 200 000 followers is no joke and i'd like to be able to access that so for sure and we'll do what we can to help so i just want to add to what you said that i had the same thing happen to me but not via email via dm i was contacted by two different uh reporters from tech crunch you had bloomberg i had tech crunch and they said we want to interview you and this is the calendly link and it looked a bit suspicious because why would you want to interview me now like it's been a while since i've been on the radar of tech crunch and all these tech publications i used to be on there but not anymore so i googled the name of the guy that dm'd me and i got to this linkedin post by

someone who is warning about that specific scam account that they got also a dm from the same person and it doesn't exist that person doesn't exist and apparently they said exactly the same method as you said but they didn't say anything about zoom they said just the calendly it was enough for them to set it up and that opened like a pathway for them to get access to your twitter in some way i mean i'm not a techie or a software person i don't know about cyber security no but that's happening so i i people have gotten very sophisticated yeah yeah i could have fallen for it as well but you know people please watch out and you all need to be links that links that are suspicious do not click on them i mean exactly you can go back and anyone

that you don't know that is just approaching you have to be so careful with validating who they are i think that's right and that's that's my new stance i just assume everything is malicious and i mean i get you know tons of phone no i mean all of us could fall for it this is so it's truly annoying but it is what it is it's the world we live in today and it's going to get worse exactly it's going to get even worse with ai this is going to be so simple for hackers the ai will help people to fake, you know, you and your voice, all that stuff. I mean, you know, Preston actually says to me, whenever I talk to him, he's like, you know, we talk about something, he says, what do we have in common?

And I say, aviation. He says, okay, I know it's you. So he's already, he's already suitably paranoid. And, you know, it's not, it's not a bad idea, right? For sure. A hundred percent. You're the voice is brought to you by Trezor, 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 Trezor super easy to use and recommend it to my friends and family. Enjoy my 5% discount on Trezor product by clicking the link in the show notes and using the code flat. So hold on, Larry, I'm taking a step back for my audience that may not know you. I want to give you a quick intro about you and then we'll dive into our questions. Okay. Sure. Great. Okay. Do you want me to just give it out or you want to do it? I'm going to do it for you. Okay. Absolutely. I mean, you can then lead what I'm going to say. But Lawrence Larry Lepard is the founder and managing partner of Equity Management Associates, focusing on monetary debasement insurance through

investment in gold, silver, and Bitcoin. He's the author of the new book, The Big Print. Can you put it up, please? Thank you. Referring to the inevitable acceleration of money printing by central banks to sustain debt levels. And we're going to talk all about the book today. And please go watch episode 24 of You're the Voice with Larry, which was one of my and my audience's favorite episodes last year. That was a lot of fun. That was the first time I met you in Madeira. I had a, that was a riot. I went very much off piste on that. I was, I mean, some of that stuff was not for general consumption, the language, et cetera. My wife has really been all over me to clean up my act and I'm, I'm trying hard to do that.

No, you're great. Just keeping you that that's what's important. All right. So did I miss anything important? that's it really i mean i you know i i guess you know i don't know what your first question is but i'd like to explain why i wrote this book why did you i started with why did you name it the big print okay well yeah well i'll go there too but let me start with kind of the why i wrote the book so i was sitting around last year and i was watching team red and team blue debate and i don't really like either of them that much i like one more than the other but they both have flaws and frankly most politicians all have flaws and uh you know if you're going to that business you

gonna have something wrong with you but um you know and and they were it was like i felt like they were looking at a house on fire and they're arguing about the color of the drapes you know what i mean and so you know and to me the house on fire is the monetary system is broken the money is failing you know and and you know lynn coined it so great with the term you know with the title of her book broken money which by the way i borrowed from heavily in the book with her approval and um you know so the the money is broken and i i thought to myself gosh it's so obvious to me what the problem is and it feels to me like most of the world's not even aware of the problem obviously bitcoiners are um and then i thought well you know is there room for another book in

this space because safety's book is the standard it's fabulous it's a great book i've given it out to many people but frankly a lot of people who don't have a real strong interest in this they tend to bog down because it's a little textbooky and i think the same is true with lynn's book to an extent. And it's a fabulous book. They're both better than mine. They're so much more scholarly. And so I thought, maybe somebody could write a book here that kind of tells it more as a story and makes it more interesting and tries to really break it down and make it simple so that anybody, anywhere in the world, blue collar, chief executive, whatever level you're at and whatever level of knowledge you have about the monetary system, you kind of read this book and

go, oh my goodness, now I understand how they're screwing me. And now I understand what I got to do to protect myself. And so that's the goal of the book. And to me, success of the book will not be being liked by Bitcoiners because I'm pretty sure Bitcoiners are going to like it. Success will be, does the average person in the street who knows nothing about this, read it and go, oh my goodness, this really opened my eyes to how bad it is. And oh my goodness, gosh, this is really hopeful and positive, this whole Bitcoin movement that really can solve the problem so so that's the that's the general thesis of the book let me go to the next stage answer your question the reason i called it the big print actually that goes full credit to my

book agent a woman named maura phelan and uh she's she's really fabulous and x random house and i wrote the book and she started reading it and she came up with two very good conclusions she said one she said you know this the story you know about hbs this open you know this has got to be right in the front of the book and this is an amazing story you know you stood up and spoke Truth to Power. And so I shifted that around and that became the opening scene of the book. The second thing is I use the term, and my partner and I've been using, my partner David Foley and I've been using the term the big print for a long time because really the only tool the Federal Reserve and all the central banks have when financial conditions get messy is they print

money to solve it. And that's the nature and the problem. The whole broken system is based on the fact that they can print money. We've already had two big prints. We had one in 2008. We had another one in 2020. And the way the system is constructed, they have to print money to keep it going. And, you know, my belief is, you know, the one in 08 was a certain size, the one in 2020 was even bigger, and there's an even bigger one coming. And so throughout the book, I kept referring to the big print, the big print. And Maura said, you know, this really ought to be the title of the book, you know, and it plays nicely off the big short, which of course is Michael Lewis's brilliant book on the 2008 crisis so so that's how the title became the big print got it and in your

eyes the audience of the book are not just bitcoiners or gold investors or not at all any person can read that book i've been reading i think i got to like 60 pages now definitely anyone can read that absolutely and i tested it on people who didn't know much about the monetary system. My wife is an executive. She's in PR and advertising, a lot of things. She knows a lot about business, but she doesn't know anything about the monetary system. And I said, I want you to be able to make sure you understand this. And she read it and she had all kinds of useful and helpful suggestions. I started off talking about the Federal Reserve. She goes, what's the Federal Reserve? I was kind of like, all right, I need a footnote. Because you go out and you talk

to a person who's blue collar, they may not know what the Federal Reserve is, but that's the core the problem, right? And so, yes, I've tried to write it, but I've tried to make it sophisticated enough so that even people who know all these things will also go, oh, there's an insight I didn't realize, that there's a historical fact that I wasn't aware of. And also, I think a benefit I bring to it, I'm kind of on the older spectrum of a lot of Bitcoiners. And so I've been through this. I've been in the financial markets since the early 80s. And so I've seen how it got done i've seen where all the bones are buried i remember all the prior events and you know i mean i've talked to people and i was talking to one bitcoiner i said yeah well do you remember when

ltcm went down in 1998 and the guy looked and said i wasn't born i was kind of like oh yeah that's that's an interesting point so so uh uh yeah you have the you have the proportion like the the the reference from history because you were there you experienced a lot of these things you have three generations uh that you're speaking about in the book right yeah i tell the story of my family i mean they managed to get us three times like i said in the book i mean we've been lucky we both we all made it through you know but the the federal reserve in my opinion and the fact that the monetary system is broken and mismanaged it's caused a lot of pain for a lot of people you know i mean just an enormous amount and when you get guys like you know um

at the last Jackson Hole conference, Jerome Powell, you know, made a joke in front of the whole crowd and said, well, it looks like the good ship transitory has sailed. Remember how he used to say this inflation is transitory? Yeah. And so here he is at the Jackson Hole monetary conference. He's joking about it. Right. I mean, right. I mean, these people don't even care. They don't even see the suffering of the. That's exactly right. I mean, he makes a joke about something where, you know, 40% of the money supply got printed in a two-year time window. And, you know, if you were, say, a blue-collar worker and you'd worked your entire life to save, I don't know, $100,000 or whatever the number is, maybe even more, maybe a million bucks, you know, all that

labor, all those years of you working hard and saving, and they take 40% of away from you with one event, you know, in one two-year period, boom, 40% of your savings is gone. You can't, you know unless unless you're fortunate enough to invest in things that protect you from that you know like gold or bitcoin or to some degree stocks that protect people so yeah and the worst thing is that most people don't the most people don't associate it well that's that's the thing that's the thing i mean i think you know we're all everybody in bitcoin makes this statement i know you've made it many times on your pod that you know everyone senses something's wrong everyone senses that we're in this fourth turning that we've talked about

By the way, another great book that everyone should read. In the back of my book, I have a list of must-read books, and The Fourth Turning is one of them. We're in a fourth turning where the monetary issues are really, in my view, the key issue, and they're likely to spin out of control, and I talk about that in the book. When you get later into it, you'll see policy alternatives and monetary resets and all the things all the different paths we could take because we're kind of trapped in a system that you know based on this flawed Keynesian logic of you know you've got to print money to keep the system going we're trapped in that and until we until we return to sound money these problems

will keep coming up again and again so in your in your eyes what's a probable timeline for another big print yeah that's a great question nobody really knows it's hard to tell yeah it's very hard to tell so no don't don't bet on this but yeah it feels to me like we're getting pretty close i think in the next couple of years something's going to happen that you know it's going to break i mean yellen was able to hide it by you know taking a lot of the debt and making into short-term treasury bills um you know the reverse repo facility was then used to buy those bills and to hide it. The deficits are extremely large and getting larger. Now, there is a positive development on the other side, which is Doge, and that's going to help slow it down possibly,

but not nearly to the degree that Elon is pushing it. He says we can eliminate $2 trillion of deficits quickly. He's just wrong. I mean, if you look at the math, it just doesn't work. I mean, You know, 80% of the expenditures are in Social Security, Medicare, interest, and defense. And most of those are kind of untouchable. Now, maybe not. Maybe eventually they will become touchable. But, you know, to balance the budget today, we would have to cut those items 50%. Can you imagine the political hell that would ensue if all those things got cut in half?

I mean, it's just... And by the way, you can't really cut the interest rate in half without creating more inflation. So we're in kind of what I call a debt-death doom loop, where deficits get larger. Therefore, you sell more debt. You sell more debt into a fixed-size debt market. Interest rates go higher. Interest rates go higher means the U.S. federal government interest expense goes higher. It's now running at between $1.3 and $1.4 trillion a year.

We spend more on interest on the debt than we do on defense. And it's approaching what we spend on Social Security. you um you know it's i've said it in the past it's kind of like we're kind of like the americans the united states government you know they're different because they can print the money but they're kind of like the family that um takes out a new credit card to make the minimum payments on the old credit cards and just keeps doing it and you know so far as a world's reserve currency the largest country the largest military we've been able to get away with it for a lot of years But if you look at historical comparables, and there's a great Hirschman capital chart in the book that shows that typically when you get to about 130% of debt to GDP, we're at 125 right now, problems ensue.

And in 11 out of 11 cases that he studied, you either have some kind of a collapse or you have massive inflation. And so sadly, that kind of stuff could be in our future. Now, you know, I don't like to be some say, well, you're being a doom, a doom purveyor. I'm not I'm not a doom purveyor. Things are the world's a good place. Things are going to get a lot better. But we've got to we've got to transition from a broken monetary system to a sound money system. If we want to have that get a lot better thing take place. That's kind of my view. I'm with you. You speak about inflation in in page 22. I quote you, you say, you have always lived in an inflationary world unless you were born before me,

1957. It feels normal, but it is not. And most people think it is. And then you have this chart showing what happens around like 1971. Yeah, that's one of my favorite charts in the book. I mean, you know, from 1800 to 1971, the country, you know, had periods of inflation. You'll note they were tended to be around wars, you know, the 1812, the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea. But then in 71, when we went off the gold standard, I call it in the book, I call it galactically stupid act. It was just incredibly dumb. You know, they could have basically revalued gold, but Nixon didn't want to do that because it would have been inflationary. And so he just said, you know what, we're going to default. You know, all you foreign guys who

thought you had dollars backed by gold. You don't. And that started a path forward where we are today, which is a road that we were kicking the can down and the can has gotten really big and really heavy. And, you know, could it go on another 10 or 20 years? I suppose, but I'm not really sure. I don't see how. And to the degree that it does, it almost has to be an inflationary 10 to 20 years. I mean, there's no way, you know, that without, I mean, another chart in the book, I like a lot is the chart that shows the growth. It used to be my Twitter cup, you know, my Twitter posted chart. It shows, it shows GDP. I don't know where it is. It's further back. You're going to have a hard time finding it, but it shows debt has grown at 8% a year for 50 years. And GDP has

grown at 4% a year for four years. It's probably under the Stein's law chapter. And so what this means the GDP is what's used to pay for the debt. So if you grow the debt you're accumulating, it's like a family who's taking on debt faster than their income goes up. Eventually, once again, you can't meet the minimum payments. You know, you can't pay the debt off. And so, you know, and by the way, you know, Efrat, this is not something new or unusual outside of the reserve currency. So, you know, other countries over the past 200 years, we have a lot of examples of other countries exhibiting this exact same behavior. And what happens is they have hyperinflation, their currency fails. I mean, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Weimar, Germany, Russia, China after World War II.

I mean, there are many, many countries who've had instances of currency failure as a result of spending money they did not have and then printing the money to fill the hole. And of course, eventually what happens is when a quorum of the people realize they can never stop printing well that's the that's the suddenly part as you know bitcoiners often say you know gradually and then suddenly and so yeah go ahead sorry no no you finished yeah so that's that's and and so you know my my view is these other countries have done the same things that we are doing and we know how it ended for them now we're slightly different because we're the biggest and you know put the military with a reserve currency but what makes us think that by behaving

in the same fashion we won't have the same outcome eventually you know what i mean a hundred percent yeah and so is there a tipping point for a collapse in confidence in in the fiat currency or in the system is there in your perspective you know you've been seeing that many times is there like a specific time where people kind of wake up and go okay this is too much i think i think we're right on the cusp of it let me tell you why there are two really great charts in the book that i love which are the chart of the price of bitcoin in in bond terms so bonds treasury bonds used to be the base level of collateral they were the safest most pristine collateral in the world if you wanted to park your money somewhere where you knew you'd get it back and you'd earn a small

return or some return, you put your money in a U.S. Treasury bond. It was AAA rated, etc. That used to be the thing that you would do financially. OK, we know that the U.S. governments behave so irresponsibly that that's not working anymore. And if you look at, you know, from 2020, when we kind of started this last big print, gold in U.S. Treasury bond terms is up 200 percent. Bitcoin in U.S. Treasury bond terms is up 2000 percent. So so so those, you know, you say tipping point well those are like canaries you know that just keeled over debt like oh my goodness this is really a serious problem but but you you're right and what i what i tend to do is i tend to look at the bond market as really being the tell and we saw last in september we saw it

in the uk guilt crisis and we saw it in the fall of 2023 in the u.s or the tenure the tenure can't the u.s tenure now is in the fours it cannot go over five or else they've got a real problem at that's what historically we've seen. And so what will probably happen is if, if we see the bond market start to break and interest rates go up over five, because people have lost confidence in the U S government's ability, that will be a very important tell, but, but that's just the third tell the first tells, I mean, gold right now is reaching record highs, 2,900 plus, right. And, and there are shortages, which is not, you know, that's not conducive to what they're trying to tell us and then bitcoin is we're not very far off the record high was a record high 106 or 7

you know we're going to bounce around between 90 and 106 who cares i mean it's it's it's a lot higher than it was a year ago and it was the best once again it was the best performing financial asset last year you know it's up like 126 so so those are to me the indicators and you know if we wake up some morning and gold is at 3500 you know and bitcoin is at 150 and the u.s bond market is over five and and going up quickly well like all the sirens are it'll be red lights flashing you know we are in the theater you know the fire alarm has gone off there is a lot of smoke you know get the hell out i mean that's i mean that's those are the kinds of things i look at in determining and when might this happen you asked that early and i want to address that a little bit um i kind

of think this whole thing will happen by 2030 you might say gee can it really last that long possibly, they're pretty good at can kicking. I mean, take this failure of Silicon Valley Bank as an example. I thought that might be an event that would force it. And for a while it did. I mean, Yellen was talking about maybe guaranteeing all of the bank deposits in the United States because if Silicon Valley Bank went down, they were afraid there might be a nationwide run. And that's $17 trillion in bank deposits. The Fed balance sheet's only seven. So the Fed's going to print 17 trillion to guarantee all the banks? I mean, you know, and so what you can see is that, you know, the third Fed mandate, and I talk about this at length in the book, the third

Fed mandate is financial stability. And they say they don't want inflation. They say they're going to be disciplined. You know, the law, you know, there was a, the Dodd-Frank law basically said, you know thou shall not bail out banks anymore after 2008 and yet along comes silicon valley and it fails and they bailed it out so they broke the law because at the end of the day when when push comes to shove they have two choices print the damn money to keep everything alive everything solvent and everything going or let it collapse you know and this is why hank paulson had to beg nancy pelosi to give him 700 billion dollars for tarp he said if you don't give us this money the atms will stop working those were those were his exact words and so

so the you know the fact and by the way you know i gave a big speech to some people down here i'm in naples florida right now some older and you know a lot of people they regard they regard bernacki as a hero for saving the system you know and and that's not how i see him yeah but but that's the way the system is set up that's how you start the book with that meeting right that Yeah, they all think he's great, right? How do you not see that what happened in 2008 was so devastating? It was totally devastating for millions and millions of people. It was incredibly unfair.

I mean, bankers paid themselves $20 billion and they got to reload and do it again. Do you know what I mean? I mean, that connection between the media and the institution, whether it's banks or the state, is there to keep them protected. Because if the media is not showing people the truth about what happened and really highlighting or, you know, good journalists saying, listen, these guys are thieves and they've just been bailed out and received, even received money for what they did, then people wouldn't know. Well, people don't know because, and this is, so this is the hopeful part of the book. As I talk about in the back, we're going to be saved by technology, Efrat. I mean, you and I are speaking halfway around the world. We'll broadcast this out to thousands of people. They'll get this message. You know, the listenership or the viewership of CNN and CNBC and all these media stooge organizations that, you know, shill the state propaganda, they're losing share. And meanwhile, Tucker Carlson can do a podcast, get 90 million people to watch it, you know what I mean? Or Joe Rogan or, you know, Robert Breedlove or whatever.

I mean, we, you know, we are creating our own alternative media and we are, you know, slowly but surely dismantling these big sclerotic, you know, organizations. I mean, big food, big pharma, big defense, big, big media. The truth cannot be stopped. Right. It will find a way. Exactly. And people are just so tired of being lied to about everything. And so, you know, and that's why this election went the way it did and so forth.

So, you know, the, the technology is really, I mean, you know, I wrote the book to try to make this stuff happen faster because I'm impatient, but, but honestly, even if I hadn't written the book, it would, this is what I, what I'm describing, I think will happen any way you look at it because people aren't stupid. I mean, they may be, and they can be misled for a while when they found out they've been misled, they're mad and they try and figure out how to solve for it. and and so my book you know the goal of my book is designed to make people mad and then to show them how they can solve for it and so you know if i mean what would really really make me happy is

if this book kind of goes viral and we get you know millions of people that realize that this is a very very big and important issue and that's that's the goal that's why i wrote it um i'm with you i'm gonna help you push this this is super important i appreciate that i mean it's super important i've already i already have a link to your book on my blog because it's uh through knut's uh store that people can buy there and all my followers know that they can get a discount on knut store so fantastic and that's a great site you can buy it for sats there which amazon doesn't let you buy stuff for sats although a lot of people don't want to spend sets but you can spend them and replace them yep you you can do that all right i've got a few more questions okay so gold

yeah gold has a long history as a store of value and in the last few weeks months we've seen a lot of movements with gold especially when it comes to central banks and states and what they're doing like what's happening and obviously the price of gold is going up so me and all my friends who who have gold were very happy but we don't necessarily understand everything behind the scenes and well and and and full disclosure neither do i none of us know but the facts that we do know are that there's a lot of demand coming from the comics to get gold bars shipped from the lbma a lot of the big central repositories of gold of course but this is one of the the problems with gold compared to bitcoin and bitcoin is distributed and there is no central yeah there is no central

repository and we can all see all the addresses right but in in the gold world the big central repositories are in switzerland london and the comics that you know um in the united states and we've seen just enormous increases in volume of gold being demanded in the united states for comics delivery from the lbma and then the lbma came out with some lame excuses that well it's heavy and they're lorries blocking the roads and so it's right did you see that it was pretty funny Yeah, I did. There's going to be a big delay in getting you your gold. I mean, normally we could have it to you.

But you know it's a bit heavy. It takes time. Yeah, right? And so, of course, that is one of the flaws of gold. I mean, I can send you a billion dollars of Bitcoin in 10 minutes. But, yeah, so there's been a lot of demand, and there's a lot of tightness in the market. And we see spreads are higher everywhere. We see premiums in the Far East, et cetera.

All of which suggests that somebody and many parties are suddenly deciding that they want to buy gold. that it's important to own gold. And, you know, there are some who've even suggested it might be the United States government in terms of, you know, just trying to think about a reset. There've been some who've suggested that it's just very wealthy individuals who are trying to protect their wealth

and lots of billionaires in the world. And, you know, if they get worried about the underlying currency, they could say, I want some gold. And the other thing I would add is that those of us who've been in the gold trade for a long, long time, studied it very, very carefully,

can say with a very high level of competence that there's a lot of paper gold, what I would call ETF and gold futures commitments don't represent actual ounces. And so an ounce of gold is a physical thing. You can't replicate it. You can't print it. You have to mine it out of the ground. And we believe that there could be as many as 10 or 100 claims on every single one of the ounces that is above ground. And if that's the case, what you really have here is fractional reserve gold, like fractional reserve banking, and it becomes a game of musical chairs. And so if three out of the 10 people say, you know, I know you owe me some gold via paper. I'll just send you the paper. Why don't you send me the

ounce? Well, there won't be enough ounces to go around, you know? So the music stops, who's got a real physical ounce, who's got a chair. And so that's why I don't trust the ETFs like GLD. There is one ETF I trust is the Sprott Trust, PHYS. It's up in Canada. But if you're going to buy your gold through an ETF, that's the only one I trust. And that's why, you know, just like with Bitcoin, we say, not your keys, not your coin. With gold, I say, you know, if you don't hold it, it's not yours. If somebody's promising you gold, well, if the promisor is Lehman Brothers and they fail, you're not going to get your gold. And that's, I think that's, I think there's some of that out there. So it's an interesting development. It comes at

a very interesting time, right? I mean, with gold at record highs and Bitcoin at record highs. I mean, all of these things indicate to me that we might be on the cusp of the quote unquote suddenly phase. We might be. I don't want to chump the gun. You know, I don't know, but we could be. Got it. Okay. You often compare Bitcoin to gold. Do you believe Bitcoin will fully replace gold as a premium or a value, or will they coexist, especially now with all the movements that we're seeing? Yeah. So great question and complicated, and it all depends on timeframes. I mean, longer, longer, longer term, absolutely. Bitcoin completely demonetizes gold, but that could be 30 years. Okay. That's a long time. I won't be here. So, you know, the

shorter term, I mean, you've got to understand, you know, 8 billion people know that gold is money several hundred million or more understand that bitcoin is sounder money and better money lower better stock to flow all that kind of stuff um you know countries if they're likely to reset i mean china doesn't believe in bitcoin i think china's bet heavily on gold we know china has more gold than they say they have i think they're thinking they would back their currency in a currency collapse or current a worldwide currency event i believe china would try and reset with gold which is why i think the u.s should really go forward with a strategic bitcoin reserve because I think it'd be a way to leapfrog them and we'd be better off.

But, you know, let's talk about when gold will replace Bitcoin in terms of value. So total gold market cap today. The other way around, where Bitcoin will replace it. That's what I meant. I'm sorry. That's a Freudian slip, right? So Bitcoin is roughly $2 trillion of market cap today. Gold is, I don't know, it was $18.

I guess I haven't run the numbers at $2,900. It's probably getting to be $19 or $20 trillion of value. So the total gold market is $20 trillion, although not all that's available. Some of it's in museums. A lot of it's around women's necks, although that could be melted down. But the point is that Bitcoin could go up 10x, and it would only be the size of the gold market. So we could have a million-dollar Bitcoin per coin, and that'd be the same size as the

gold market. I think that's going to happen. I mean, the power law projects it. A lot of things project it. So I think that's probably likely to happen within five years, maybe seven years at the most. Maybe less. Um, yeah. And then, and then after that, I think it just kind of, it, it goes up 10 X again. I mean,

I'm, I'm kind of with, with Michael. I mean, you know, it's going up forever, Laura. I mean, you know, it's, it's, I mean, people look at me today and they say, well, gosh, Laurie, you know, you bought it for 10 and it's at a hundred. How do I, you know, how do I pay 10 X what you paid for it? And I, I give them two examples. I say one, you know, consider the financial system to be the Titanic. And these are lifeboats and seats on a lifeboat. I paid $10,000 for my seat. It's $100,000 to you right now. Do you want it or not? Your choice. Yeah, you got to pay more, but it's your choice. I mean, the other way I say it is, if it continues to compound at the rate it has, it'll be a million dollars in five years. It'll be $10 million in 15 years or 20 years.

And so, you know, if you, if that happens and you bought it at a hundred, you're going to feel, you know, very good that you bought it at a hundred and people are going to be looking at you and say, God, I got to pay 10 million for it. You got a whole coin for a hundred. Boy, that's, that's different. I mean, in the same way that I look at Max Kaiser, I bought my first one for 400, you know, and Max bought his for a dollar and, you know, and, and he was jealous of Trace Meyer who bought his for 50 cents. So, you know, it's, it's all kind of a matter of, you know, where you get in. Relative. Oh, relative. Yeah.

It's the soundest form of money. It's a technological invention. It's the soundest form of money that's ever existed. And mathematically, it's going to keep going up forever. It's going to keep going up forever. So, you know, and that's, by the way, that's a really beautiful thing because what it does is it changes around who wins the game. Right now, you win the game by playing around with money, by borrowing and speculating,

by gambling, by doing all kinds of financial engineering. Okay. if if it if we have an asset that goes up in value continuously and all you have to do is hold it and sit on it savers win the game and that's what you need you need people who save money because savings is what leads to productive capacity increases and i talk about that a lot in the book and that's what's wrong with the keynesian model so that's that's like larry i want to like stop you there because let's pull on that thread this is like that's i think where real change can come in the world where the the mindset of people starts to change from consuming consuming and

running on that um thread mill and being so obsessed with how you're going to feed your kids and you know and and make sure that you can pay your mortgage etc and just think of things that are very short term and you don't have any any notion of saving and thinking about long term and future and then something like bitcoin comes in that allows you to think about the future in the long term and people don't get that the scarcity of bitcoin is what makes this possible and and when a change like that happens it's not just you know you becoming rich it's you changing the way you think about money and you changing about how you think about your family and how you think about your future and your kids future so that's the opportunity for change right absolutely and you

can you can do long time preference things you know i mean so that you know you you can build i mean you know when when is the best time to plant a tree you know today you know yesterday but the second best time is today and you know good things take time right and so you can take the time to educate yourself you can take the time to build high quality things versus doing shitty things that you know on a quick basis to try and just make the maximum amount of cash that you can make and and more importantly i think i think it's really good as i know i'm getting closer to retirement age is you can act and i see what among my peers what i see that's sad is people work their whole life maybe their house paid off maybe they have savings they're in the 60s or 70s

and the savings are substantial by anyone would look at them and say you're rich although you know modestly so and but they're saying to themselves i can't stop working because i don't know how long it's gonna last you know i might live 30 years i'll outrun my money and and so suddenly that whole dynamic it's flipped on its head here i mean since i got into bitcoin since i now own bitcoin since i understand bitcoin and what it is i now feel like i can't outrun my money you know what i mean that that i will always every year i will grow richer just for having saved in bitcoin terms and the the feeling of relief that you get when you when you enter that world it's a really huge it's a big big burden off your mind because you know running

on the treadmill the other side you know playing the fiat games that's a hard hard life i mean it really is um you know absolutely well one of my followers has actually um gave a question chris he wrote a question so i would love for you to answer it i mean i can answer it too but i want you to to try and talk to that he says and i guess from his question is he's a beginner that is interested in bitcoin he says as as the deeply uncomfortable push by governments and the new desire for cryptocurrency in the u.s is happening how well do you consider the survival of bitcoin it's a great question and you know let's there's a couple questions kind of buried in there there's the one about the whole crypto thing and David Sachs and the strategic crypto reserve. You and

I are maximalists, and I hope most people listening to this become maximalists. I know a lot of other people like to gamble in crypto or participate in crypto. I consider that all to be really fiat-ish sort of behavior. As we all know, the Bitcoin innovation is the immutable proof of work that secures the ledger and really there aren't any other cryptos of any kind of scale that have that and so they all you know leave people vulnerable to being rugged and i hope that the you know the u.s crypto reserve really is only bitcoin although i'm sure the crypto side of the world xrp all those guys brad etc i'm trying to push to get their stuff in their ethereum etc but um i the answer to the gentleman's question is I feel very strongly that Bitcoin will survive, that it's

not killable, that it's now fully decentralized and too large to be undone. And so that it will become the premier form of money. I think my kids will pay for things in Satoshi's. I think so too. I think the only thing they can do is regulate the hell out of it. Well, they can slow it down. There's no doubt. And I've talked about this. And so let me just give you a bad scenario i mean team red won and i'm glad they did i you know versus team blue from a crypto point of view and um but that could change you know in four years if things don't get better and team red does dumb stuff team blue will win and we know team blue doesn't like crypto and so what they would do is you know they would try to maybe tax it you know they'd say hey you guys

are getting unfairly rich on the you know the back of our currency collapsing we don't like that We're putting a 90% tax on gold, 90% tax on Bitcoin. I mean, they could even do what Roosevelt did. He seized the gold in the 1930s. They could try and seize the Bitcoin. I mean, it wouldn't be hard for them to call up BlackRock and Fidelity and say, send all that ETF Bitcoin to us and give those people cash. If it's not in self-custody, yeah. Yeah, give those people cash, which is why I argue for self-custody.

So, you know, that's all a possibility. And we just don't know how this is going to unfold. I mean, these fourth turnings tend to be kind of messy events. And, you know, I talk about that in the book. There's a chapter on volatility and so forth. And we all have to be prepared, you know, for all outcomes. And which, by the way, is why, you know, you don't want to ever have. I mean, I met with a gentleman last week and he'd taken 100 percent position in one thing.

He was extremely conservative, thought the stock market was overvalued. He was 100 percent in Treasury bills, but it was killing him that all his friends had made a ton of money in the Mag 7. And I said to him, I said, and that's why even if you didn't believe in the mag seven, you might have wanted to take a 10% position in it when, you know, back when they did. And he said, what do I do now? And I said, you buy some Bitcoin, you take a 10% position of Bitcoin, 20% position. He said, yeah, but it's so high. And I said, you're doing the same thing. You're trying to time it. He said, what if it comes down? If there's a big financial crash, it's going to come down. I said, yeah, it might. And guess what? That would be a buying opportunity. Do you know what I mean? And so you get started, and then you let volatility become your friend. I mean, Bill Miller became a very wealthy man by playing the volatility in Amazon. Amazon was a network business that was adopted, and it probably had 10 or 12 cases where it was down over 50% or 60%, very much like Bitcoin. And he just believed in the concept, and when it would go down, he would buy more of it.

And that's another thing that's in the book that I think is very important to point out. the investment models got broken and changed when we got to networking businesses. It's in the back part of the book, but I, and I actually kind of discovered this as I was writing the book and I did the math and I was like, Oh my goodness, this is really some, this is an insight. The insight is this prior to the internet and prior to networking businesses, very few companies went up in value by over a hundred times over their lifespan. I mean, General Motors from 1916 to presence, like 300 X. Okay. That's a lot of money. That's good return. So get these numbers from the early two thousands when Google went public or when, um, you know, um, um, what Facebook went

public or Amazon went public. These are all kind of network businesses, right? Google's up 218,000%. percent. Amazon is up 9,000 percent. Facebook is up 2,000 percent. Okay. We've never seen anything like this before in the investment world. I mean, I went to, I got an MBA. I learned about investing. I learned about, you know, cashflow multiples. Networking businesses are different. Metcalfe's law says that the value of a network grows at the square or some exponent of its underlying user growth. Therefore, they are the best investment and you have to break the model. And I miss these. Okay. So I was in the growth equity investment business in the 2000s. I was looking at these things and I'm going, gosh, Amazon's growing fast, not making any money. And

the value is crazy. I can't pay for that. There's no price earnings model. Same thing with Google, same thing with Facebook. I had that conclusion, all three of those stocks. Boy, did I screw up, right um basically you're not gonna miss on the bitcoin you got it right i said to myself i'm not missing this time i get it i've seen this before i know what i've seen this movie i know what's coming i'm not screwing up i'm in this thing now big time so so yeah it's but i think it's an important insight you know lots of things over over time life doesn't change much there's lots of rules are tried and true but occasionally the rules get changed i mean occasionally and and they tend to get changed with a big technological development i mean i was at a

conference where i was speaking to an old gold guy an old sound money guy and he said and i said to him i said you know it was jim grant who runs grant industry observer and i said to him jim you really got to look at this bitcoin thing because by menger's definition it's money and blah blah blah and it's it's going to be and he looked at me and he said larry come back to me when you've got a thousand years of history and then i'll consider it and i i said i said i said jim i said jim slow down a second you mean to tell me that when air flight got invented you wanted to wait a thousand years exactly before you before you were right i mean right i mean now admittedly in the beginning air flight was really dangerous and there were a lot of crashes in the

30s and 40s you know but but i mean now we're going across the you know when the conqueror was running we go across the ocean in three hours i mean you know it's different it's a technological change right and and that was you know i just i think a lot of people just don't see that right yeah and the world's accelerating things are happening so fast technology has developed so quickly yeah add in ai right and and it's just and by the way that's one of the things that can help us out of the difficulties of this reset i mean if we get enormously more productive which ai promises and could could do that'll help that'll make the transition easier i hope it does It could help.

The only thing I always say to people is it's a tool. Don't forget that you need to use it and not the other way around. Well, that's right. And it also, I will say this because I lived through the dot-com bubble as an investor, watching it very carefully. And, you know, I mean, pets.com came public and crashed and so forth. And the AI space right now has a real March of 2000 feel to it. It's pretty bubbly.

A lot of money, a lot of hope, a lot of hype. Don't get me wrong. I know AI is going to change the world. I use chat GPT on the book. I was blown away with what I was able to do, but, or what it was able to do for me. But, you know, these new developments, you can get ahead of yourself. And I think AI has done that. Absolutely.

And never forget, it has no soul. It has no consciousness. That's right. It does not have the magic that humans have. It's not a human being. That's right. Exactly. Okay. So I want to ask you, do you see a geopolitical shift towards gold-backed or

Bitcoin-backed currencies as countries like China and Russia seek alternative to the dollar? I do. I mean, we've seen that. So let's go with China or just with dollar-backed trade. So the petrodollar was birthed by Kissinger in the early 70s. And oil trade, oil is the largest commodity, probably one of the most the most important commodity in the world and you know 95 percent of oil trade was dollar based you know pre the pre the war in um in the ukraine um that our seizing of the russian assets was a was a watershed moment in the way people viewed the dollar in my opinion and what's what it's led to is a lot of alternative currencies getting used for major trade things like oil and so i now heard statistics that suggest that oil is only 65 percent dollar

denominated. So the Saudis might be buying oil from the Chinese and getting paid in yuan or selling oil to the Chinese and getting paid in yuan. And then in turn, if they don't have anything to buy from the Chinese, if they don't want something that China makes, they turn around and they go to the Shanghai Gold Exchange and they buy gold as a neutral reserve asset. In the past, they would have bought dollars and put them into treasury bills. And you see that because the volumes in the Shanghai Gold Exchange are going up very substantially. So yes, I do see a shift toward gold becoming a potential neutral reserve currency. I also think Bitcoin is slowly but surely becoming a neutral reserve currency. I mean, first country adopter was a troubled small

country, El Salvador, but it's done great things for them. And now we now know that several countries in the Middle East, including the UAE and Saudi Arabia, are building Bitcoin reserves. And so, yes, I think that, and I think the U.S. actually is aware of it. I mean, Jason Lowry wrote a book on this. He's a brilliant young man. He works in the Pentagon. And he basically said to us at a private meeting that he believes that the CIA and the military understand the importance of a neutral reserve currency, and they understand that Bitcoin is the better of the two versus gold so so yes i i think we're going to get there um but you do have to remember that we're still very very early days that you know there's a lot of skepticism and you know

it's nice to what i find interesting and nice to see is you know real fiat lords and i'll say you know larry larry fink in my view who runs blackrock was a fiat lord right um have come to you know have come and they've examined it carefully and they realize that, gosh, this thing's going to work with me or without me. I'm better off to get on board and create an ETF and take advantage of it. Whereas the guy, I can't remember his name, but the guy who ran Vanguard was like, oh, this is all bullshit. It's a fraud. And he said, no, I'm not interested in that at all. And of course he lost his job. So, you know, I mean, Bitcoin kind of forces people to bend the knee. I mean, a guy, a real old school investor named Ray Dalio, who runs Bridgewater, a very successful

hedge fund, you know, has always been a gold guy because he understands the importance of sound money. And he kind of became a little bit of a Bitcoin guy a few years ago. And now he's talking a lot more and more about Bitcoin. And so it's what happens is it's like with all of us. I mean, in the early days, I honestly wasn't 100% behind it. I didn't fully understand it. I was always afraid it would technically fail. I mean, I remember the prior experiments, you know, David Chom, DigiCash, eGold. I mean, I remember all that stuff and I was afraid, ah, that's just another one. It's not going to work, you know, but here we are, you know, 16 years, 800 and some odd thousand blocks and, you know, TikTok, it just keeps working. So. Exactly. Yeah. It's stronger

and they cannot stop it. So they join. I totally, I'm with you on that page. What I'm seeing when I'm doing all my research about CBDCs and the whole digital monetary order that is going to be put in place. I see that the landscape is very diverse. There are different types of digital monetary assets that they're playing around with to try out. Some of them are CBDCs, But some of them are stable coins and tokenization of deposits and assets and things like that. But in the end of the day, they want to bring most financial assets to the blockchain, whatever type of privatized, permissioned blockchain they will work on. And they also experiment a lot with Bitcoin, which is obviously a good thing for us.

But at the same time, the push will be towards a permissioned, identified, you know, KYC type of Bitcoin and maybe through ETFs like that will be the mainstream. And I think most people that will go on to Bitcoin will go on to an ETF or or a KYC type of platform. So I think that when you have such a diversity of options, and it's like this, I call it the buffet, the smuggler's board of digital monetary assets right now, people could choose like what type of asset they want to play with and countries will choose what they want to implement. Some of them will implement CBDCs. Others will implement other types of technologies. But in the end of the day, it will all be digital. It will be global, permissioned and identified. The key is to be identified. I think in that kind of world, the thing that we can contribute to people is firstly understanding the difference between KYC Bitcoin to non-KYC Bitcoin and understanding the importance of self-custody versus ETFs or any other type of instrument. um and you know we don't know but maybe one day non-kyc will be considered like bad or you're not allowed to promote it or talk about it or even have it just like gold at one point was confiscated right yes so i just you know you make me think with with all your history and and and what we

what we said about how things are changing so quickly i think that i agree with you by the end of this decade, we may see a totally different landscape, a monetary landscape with different rules of the game. And I, I just really recommend to people to start learning about money to like, this is a time to start educating yourself about what this is all about, because before you know it, one or two years from now, you're going to start being bombarded by the government or the state or banks with all these offers for new products that you don't know anything about. and you don't have any discernment because you haven't learned anything i think that's right i think it's an entire a terribly important message um you know there will be people who try and co-op

bitcoin i mean they can't but there will be people who will you know there'll be probably people who will sell paper bitcoin too i mean there are lots of different things that that you know i mean when there's a lot of money involved bad actors will figure out a way to get involved and governments we know what governments generally speaking want to do which is perpetuate themselves in their power so right you saw now ethereum with north korea it's like right you know they're trying stuff out you see me lay launching his oh i know you know right like they're gonna try everything and anything yeah i mean well i mean look i i'm i'm supportive of this administration versus the alternative but you know trump coin i mean melania coin come on you know i just those of us have been

in the space of a while, we just know that those were bad ideas and that's not the spirit of fairness and equality and equity that we're trying to promote with Bitcoin. I mean, basically non-Bitcoin cryptocurrencies, I'm with Max on this, they're all shit coins. I mean, I will accept that there might be a layer two coin that'll emerge and be necessary if only the lightning network doesn't develop quickly enough. I mean, you know, I have to say, having watched this space for a bunch of years now, and watch lightning i mean it's great lightning's making progress but it you know i wish it were making more progress faster and because the means of the means of exchange medium of exchange use

of bitcoin is still really quite trivial do you know what i mean um and sure we can go to a bitcoin conference and use our you know our lightning wallets to pay for a sandwich but and sure there are countries where you can go and you can use it but in general it's pretty hard to use bitcoin in a lightning transaction find somebody who accepted so um you know but that that'll change i mean this of course it reminds me of the internet you know the internet was clunky and hard to use in the early days too and now it's ubiquitous and simple to use so the same kinds of things will happen here i agree with you so larry on that note what is a message you want to leave the audience with a message of hope or um well how do you see things yeah so yeah just my

general message would be look we're going through a big monetary transition don't ignore it you know lean into it you got to understand it um obviously i'm trying to sell my book and i know probably people think i'm just trying to make money off the book but as as an author i can tell you don't make much money selling books there's a lot of printing costs it's a mission it's so much more than that it's not about the money it's about and then and then more importantly oh but really stop for a second because you are an investor and you have a business and you do so much and you know how to make money so you make money the book if people know marketing or they know business books is not how you make money no you can't make money it's not a way to get rich but what you can

do and this is why actually you know when i was when i first started writing the book somebody actually somebody reached out to me on twitter said hey you got some really great content you ever thought of writing a book and i called her up i started talking to her we talked for a while And, and as you know, it turns out we didn't end up doing anything, but she, she said something to me that really stuck in my head. She said, you know, Larry books can change the world. I got that idea in my head. I was like, Oh man, change.

That's kind of cool. And so, so, uh, you know, that's why your voice and your messages are so important. Look, it's somewhat immodest to think that I have something so important to say that it can change the world, but you know, if you don't throw it out there and try, who knows, you don't, you know, no effort, no, no, no, no risk, no reward. So my fondest hope is that this message resonates with people. People buy the book, and then they think to themselves, gosh, I've got to give this to my friends. We've got to spread this word, and we've got to get a huge groundswell movement to make the world a better place.

The book is all about how to make the world a better place, to end war, to end divisiveness, to end financial apartheid, to end the advantage that the rich have over the poor, all of that. I mean, all of society's problems can be solved, in my opinion, by returning to a form of sound money. And Bitcoin is the best one we've ever had by far. And so, you know, I would just please, please, please take the time to study this. And then if you need a tool to help you, I think I've written, you know, a really good tool. I mean, I think this is a very sharp sword that can chop through all the horseshit that the mainstream have told us. and if we all you know if we all wake up and we pursue this mission you know we've got these other the other side is outnumbered i mean the people number of people in government and the number of

people in you know in banking and finance and the you know the federal reserve the fiat system it's not a big number of people what they've done is they've had propaganda to snow us all into believing that we have to live the way they say we have to live and what the book does is it says bullshit. You're screwing us. We know you're screwing us. We're pissed off about it. And we're not going to do that. We're not going to live that way. We're going to live a better way. That's the message of the book. So, you know, I just, yeah, right. I just hope, I just hope, you know, we can move a lot of books and put a lot of books. I mean, you know, look, if somebody can't afford it, DM me or, well, when I get my Twitter back, DM me or email me and I'll send it

for free. I mean, that's, you know, it's not about making the money. It's about, it's about spreading the word here. That's really, that's really the goal. Awesome. We're going to do everything we can to push that message forward. This is incredible. The fact that you have written a book is fantastic. Thank you. You're very kind. And I, like I said, I hope people like it. You know, I put all my warts in there. It's good and bad. But again, you know, I did that basically because you know people read stories and people watch reality tv they want stories so i got a lot of stories it's great and by the way soon we're gonna get a an audio version of it yes walker america is recording it right now it'll be out soon i've had a lot of requests for that sorry

for the delay i'm sorry i can't read it myself i just got too many things to do and no but walker is a great choice he's got a beautiful voice he's got a much better voice than i do so it look it's it's all going to be great. And I would just say, you know, if you can, I mean, buy the book and give it to your friends, recommend it to your friends. You know, that's, that's the goal, right? Yeah. Fantastic. Okay. And Larry, I'm going to see you in Vegas soon. Yeah. I'll be in Vegas. I'll just tell my people, my schedule, if anyone wants a signed book, eventually I'll have a website up. It's in development and you can buy a signed book there, but I'm just for the cost of the book. I don't charge for the signature. But my schedule this

year if anyone wants to i'm going to the bit block boom in dallas coming up you can google that um i'm going to cheat code in bedford uh england um sometime this spring it's april sometime i'm going to vegas um and then i will be at prague um awesome in june so in june yeah and then you know maybe some other things after that but those are those are all a definite i will attend all of those and anyone should just come up introduce yourself say hello i'll sign books whatever i'm happy to i mean you know i'm open to all conversations about anything any questions about the book any topics about this i'm just trying to i'm just trying to spread the word you know fantastic wonderful and we're going to put a link in the show notes to your twitter

which is going to be reinstated by the time you have my word this is gonna happen we're gonna make it happen don't put the link there until i get it back i'm hey if anyone if anyone listens knows elon you know if you're actually st claire and you're listening to this reach out yeah don't worry we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna help and also your noster um yeah it's going to be there yeah i'm big on it i'm noster has become a new go-to for me and i will over time twitter will be less and noster will be more so wonderful Good. Larry, thank you so much for your time. Yeah. Nice to see you.

I love speaking to you. Yeah. Thanks. I'll see you soon. See ya. Bye. Bye-bye. Thanks for being with us. Please take a minute to give this episode a like, a comment and subscribe or follow, and please share it with your friends so they can also get value and choose to take some positive action in their lives. Till next time.

Thank you.