April 19, 2025 - Slightly Offensive - Elijah Schaffer
01:22:09
Will the FUTURE Be Controlled by BITCOIN? | Guest: Max Keiser
In this episode of Almost Serious, Max Keiser, a Bitcoin Pioneer reveals why Bitcoin is the unstoppable future of money—secure, decentralized, and built to dominate.Show more Meme coins are mercilessly exposed as scams that can’t match BTC’s relentless rise. Don’t sleep on this explosive wake-up call!
Special Guest: Max Keiser
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#bitcoin #cryptocurrency #crypto #digitalcurrency #xrp #bitcoinnews #memecoin Show less
And one of the things you just mentioned was that because RT was basically censored in the US and the UK by and large, a lot of people did not hear our shows, which starting in 2011, well, 2010, actually, we started talking about Bitcoin.
And so people all over the world who heard the message and started Bitcoin, started buying it at $1 or $5, $10, they become Bitcoin millionaires.
And I hear from them all the time.
And they're really happy that they heard that message.
And in the U.S., sometimes censorship is really financially suicide.
You know, censorship is really an evil thing.
And in this case, it meant that a lot of people who could have heard about Bitcoin and taken advantage of the message did not hear about it because of censorship.
And I think there's a lesson in that.
As far as do I still believe in Bitcoin, yes, of course.
It's just getting started.
The message and the path of Bitcoin is a is a deep spiritual path, and it's pulling in everything that can be liquidated and put into Bitcoin is being liquidated and put into Bitcoin.
So that means that it's demonetizing all fiat money, obviously, but that's not a hard thing to do because all fiat money eventually goes to zero.
That's the history of fiat money.
They've all gone to zero or lost 99% of their purchasing power.
None has ever escaped that fate.
The average lifespan of fiat money is roughly 27 years.
And the U.S. dollar will not escape that fate either.
It's currently the world reserve currency.
There's a lot of interesting things to talk about the U.S. dollar and how that relates to stable coins and how that plays out globally.
That's an interesting topic.
But the dollar itself cannot escape losing another 90% of its purchasing power as it's already lost.
And that should happen pretty quickly for the same reasons that all fiat money ends up going to zero.
And that is that the countries that sponsor them engage in a debt spiral.
They borrow too much.
They can't pay their debt.
Now, the interest on the debt for the American dollar is the single biggest item on America's budget.
It's bigger than the Pentagon.
It's bigger than the military, is the interest on our debt.
So it's not that we can't afford to pay the debt.
We can't afford to pay the interest on the debt.
That's called a debt spiral.
And it always ends the same way.
And we're seeing, I guess, to digress a little bit, in what's called the stablecoin market is an attempt to stave off the inevitable collapse of the U.S. dollar.
I think of these stable coins and U.S. dollar stablecoins as like the hospice for the U.S. dollar.
You know, it's where the U.S. dollar is going to die.
It'll just prolong the agony of having an unstable, worthless fiat money.
And we see already what's happening in the gold market.
The gold market has woken up to this.
After being kind of asleep for a while, for a few years, it's now hitting new all-time highs, over 3,000.
Gold will go to $4,000 or $5,000, $6,000 an ounce.
Bitcoin is a million, $2 million, $3 million, $4 million, $5 million a coin, right?
That's the path that Bitcoin is on.
Everything that can be liquidated and put into Bitcoin will be liquidated and put into Bitcoin because everything goes to zero against Bitcoin because Bitcoin is the best money that we've ever had as humans.
And humans are compelled to seek the best possible money.
Humans essentially have a fetish for money.
And Bitcoin is perfect money.
It's absolute scarcity meets infinite demand.
And that infinite demand is driven by an infinite desire for aesthetically beautiful things and a sexual fetish, which are combined with Bitcoin.
You know, my heroes like Buckminster Fuller or Henry Miller on the writing side of things, they preach this idea of just essentially you're a channel and you can just essentially take everything in, all that cosmic beauty and the cosmic reality.
You can channel all that in.
And it's interesting that I just read in science how scientists are now talking about the phrase that I can't seem to remember.
So remote viewing is this idea that, you know, scientists and the science is allowing us to essentially read your mind, right?
You read your mind.
But that's true.
That's always been true.
We've always been able to read each other's mind, but we've blocked ourselves from exercising that skill because it's very difficult to do so in a Jungian way of self-actualization, right?
Carl Jung, the contemporary of Freud, would talk about the path of self-actualization and how to know the soul, to know yourself is the greatest battle one would ever face in one's life and the hardest battle.
And the access to this battle, you go through the symbols, the mandala, the historic totems that have carried us as a species for thousands of years.
And the same thing now with this idea of reading each other's mind.
We can always read each other's mind.
It's always been available to us.
And I think that we're entering a period where we're all living in each other's mind.
And this is where you get the monetization of Bitcoin and the Satoshis, which are the smallest unit of Bitcoin, to send telepathically Satoshis back and forth telepathically into your mind, into my mind.
All the Bitcoin that you own, I own.
All the Bitcoin I own, you own.
So we enter what I call the Bitcoin singularity, where we're living essentially in this cosmic dimension of the ultimate freedom, the ultimate emancipation from all physical constraints, where we're just on a vibe of pure love.
So everything comes down to two factors, fear and love.
That's it.
You're either in fear or you're in love.
And Bitcoin is pure love.
And everything else is fear, fear-based.
So the more you get out of that stuff and the more you get into Bitcoin, the more you enter a state of pure love consciousness, which is what God has been trying to get humans to do since the beginning.
I think God is the collective G-spot of our collective unconscious, as Jung would call that.
There is a G-spot that we all share, which is God, that activates us as a pure spiritual being.
And our journey as humans has been off and on, getting, touching it, not touching it, getting away from it.
Certainly when you see artists and scientists achieve certain goals, you know, they achieve moments of God consciousness and then it's fading, it's fleeting.
The idea of having a continuous singularity where you're crossing over to pure love, God consciousness is now rapidly approaching because of Bitcoin, because Bitcoin was sent by God to us to unf our money.
You know, money is just f ⁇ ed over, f ⁇ ed up.
Bitcoin is perfect money.
And this is how we climb that ladder to God consciousness.
You know, they talk about the Bitcoin height, which is the block number.
We're on block number 890,000.
That to me is the staircase to heaven.
That's the stair.
That's the, we're climbing up toward heaven.
And around block million and 200,050, maybe, that's when the portal opens and we join consciousness with our, with the God consciousness.
The Bitcoin singularity occurs and time as we know it disappears and we've entered the beautiful kind of re-entering of the Garden of Eden that we were cast out of, biblically speaking, many years ago.
So it's the whole circle is coming back and Bitcoin is paving the way.
I mean, religion is an attempt by humans to codify and organize how to become more harmoniously aligned with nature.
And that has been successful or non-successful in different faiths of different years, different types, different epochs, different groups of folks.
No organized religion has cracked the nut of actually bringing down the artifice of intermediation.
So all faiths, all religions tend to have an intermediating force.
There's like a priest, for example, who is the translator or the pope, you know, between you and God, et cetera.
And this is always room for corruption.
So you want a direct contact with God.
You want a conscious contact with God.
AA is decentralized spiritual program, religious inqualities, but it's decentralized.
And they say in AA, you're making conscious contact with God, but it's not organized.
There's no center.
There's no organizing principle.
It's just, it's self, self, it takes care of itself in a lot of ways.
Same way with Bitcoin.
It propagates itself.
Nobody controls it.
There's no center to it.
It's on its own path.
And it's self-regulating in a way, self-motivating.
It's just on its own.
Nobody can stop it.
And so the folks who take it in the way that I take it, which is that it's a spiritual path, it does have qualities like a religion and for better or worse.
So religious quality doesn't just means that you have a need or desire to have a spiritual connection, I would say, the spirit.
Okay, but the weird thing about that is with the religion, to me, what it sounds like, if I bought into Bitcoin under a dollar and I made the smart moves you did, an investment, I might feel ethereal too.
But to people in my generation who missed your RT show and did miss the wagon, or at least it feels like we've missed the wagon, the question to you is like, Bitcoin almost feels like another trap like the monetary system where it's hard for us.
I don't own a home.
I don't know anybody my age who owns a home.
You know, that's that ship has sailed for most of us, especially in the larger cities.
I don't even know if it's a good investment anymore to own a home with the way things work and what the buy-in is for such a piece of shit, you know, house in Florida.
But Bitcoin somehow feels like that to me, to be completely honest, where it's like, well, now it's over $80,000.
So in order to buy in, you've already got to have pretty significant wealth.
But so how much of what you're saying actually applies to people today who don't own Bitcoin?
I was at the halving party in El Salvador recently, and I was on stage, and this nine-year-old kid comes up to the stage and says kind of the same question.
He says, you know, Max, I'm nine years old and Bitcoin's already at 90, 80,000, $90,000,000.
Am I too late for Bitcoin?
And I thought about it for a second and I realized suddenly that actually I'm too early for Bitcoin.
I'm too early.
And what I mean is that the world that Bitcoin is building will be here after I'm gone.
I'm not going to see the Bitcoin world in 20 years from now, 25 years from now.
I'll be gone.
I will not experience and enjoy the ultimate Bitcoin wealth that's coming because I'll be dead and I'm too early.
What's coming is an absolute repudiation of everything that we don't like about organized religion, organized states, organized money, centralization.
You know, we're here in El Salvador.
My good friend Jack Cruz, he's into the whole idea of decentralized medicine and decentralization is a big theme of Bitcoin.
And I believe you talk about the First Amendment a lot, the freedom of speech.
Of course, that would be parts of the checks and balances of our federal government to allow for the avoidance of centralization of power, which is what the U.S. is all about initially to organize itself in ways that you don't have tyrants rising up from the constituencies.
And so this is what Bitcoin is doing in creating this perfect sense of decentralization.
And the world that we're approaching is one where the satisfaction of being part of it is removed from materialism.
It's removed from owning a lot of Bitcoin.
If you have a lot of Bitcoin, it doesn't really differ from someone who has just a little Bitcoin.
It's all fucking money.
If you have $10 worth of Bitcoin or a few billion dollars worth of Bitcoin, it's kind of the same thing.
Michael Saylor has billions and billions of Bitcoin.
He can't affect Bitcoin.
He can't change Bitcoin.
He has no impact on Bitcoin.
He can only kind of, you know, join into this group spiritual community as he does more and more.
If you notice on his social media feed, he's more and more getting into the spiritual side of Bitcoin because that's the inevitable path of one who hoddles Bitcoin for any length of time is that you realize that this kind of it's it gets rid of money in a lot of ways.
You know, money is a very imperfect way to manage a society and to generate signals within a society.
And money ultimately is a signal generating mechanism to allow people to communicate across language barriers and geographic barriers.
You know, my canned speech that I gave at Jack Cruz's recent events here is that money existed before the state.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, money existed before the state.
Bitcoin separates money from state.
Bitcoin kills the state.
And when you kill the state and you have an all on all and decentralization takes place on a globalized basis and everyone everywhere is essentially hooked into the Satoshi economy, our sense of well-being transcends materialism completely and utterly.
So I would say that there's never a bad day to buy Bitcoin.
Buy Bitcoin, hoddle Bitcoin, own Bitcoin, and experience the satisfaction that comes with owning Bitcoin and join the Bitcoin community and start to change the way you think as much as change your wealth status or what you think about your net worth or your economic place in society.
Think about your spiritual place in society.
The way to enter that realm is by owning Bitcoin because it carries with it all of those pieces.
I want to talk to you about like altcoins and meme coins, right?
But not just their value and what you think about them, but also the spiritual side of it, considering the fact that there's a lot of these meme coins are, there's a lot of fraud involved, right?
You saw with the Hawk Twagirl or whatever that was.
Plus, you know, there was a, there was a, there's like coins with all types of like derogatory and like racial words.
This will be bleeped, but there's like a butt token and it spiked during the UF during the fight between like Jake Paul or whatever and whatever that boxing match was.
Yeah, Mike Tyson showed his butt and then the butt coins spiked.
Yeah, and then Trump Bitcoin as well that just lost, you know, 90% of its value.
You know, from the outside looking in, a lot of that stuff reminds me of just real shadiness.
But I want to know, because I have a lot of friends who believe in these altcoins.
They believe in these meme coins and not all of them are bad and not all of them have been pulled.
So I want to hear your take on what you think the value set of those are, as well as how that connects to the spiritual side of Bitcoin.
They're all bad and they all go to zero against Bitcoin.
And that's provable.
I mean, I've been around since 2010 and I've seen there's over 2 million of these altcoins that have been created and they've all gone to zero against Bitcoin.
Some slowly, some quickly.
Ether took a while, but now it's collapsing to zero against Bitcoin.
Cardano will go to zero against Bitcoin.
They all go to zero against Bitcoin.
They are all essentially like numbers on a roulette wheel.
They have nothing to do with money per se.
They're all to some degree centralized, either relatively or absolutely when compared to Bitcoin.
So Bitcoin is the only truly decentralized project of any of them.
So it's unique in that way.
It shares a uniqueness and that none of these other projects share that uniqueness.
They're all like outside the Louvre Museum in Paris.
You can buy a Mona Lisa for five bucks, right?
Is it the real Mona Lisa?
No.
People buy it, though, because they're outside the Louvre.
They want to do whatever.
It doesn't make it any good.
So they're just knockoffs.
And this is an attempt.
There's an attempt to recreate the magic of Bitcoin thousands of times, hundreds of thousands of times, and none have been successful.
Some people are getting rich off them, though, but you're saying that's out of a, is that a dark energy or is that because like, what if they're doing it?
Like, I know people who have off of, there's like a bunch of, some friends that have gotten rich off of Doge.
Like some of them did, they sold pretty high and they bought very low.
And so I've seen a lot of sell-offs and they weren't involved in, you know, the mining or anything.
And so I'm just wondering, that's why I'm like, is that a whole different spiritual ether to be to be around or to be on if you're involved in that versus Bitcoin?
Because I'm somebody where I'm trying to build something myself, but I also want to make sure that I'm spiritually taking care of my life.
And I want to make sure my money, I'm kind of, I'm kind of tired of like tithing to churches that are just mega churches that use the money to buy four-year-olds a new 6K television or whatever.
Like we don't need that to find God.
Why are we spending our money on this stuff?
So I want to know where to put money to help my family and help my community.
And everyone says opposite to you, put it in these coins.
I like to hear this.
So yeah, I kind of want to, I want to say, what energy is that?
Next time you go to Vegas, go into any of the casinos and you'll see people sitting at the black at the one-armed bandits, you know, the slot machines, right?
And go talk to those people.
And every single person you talk to will tell you they get rich playing the slot machine.
They're a winner.
They make money in doing this.
And every single one of those people is lying.
100%.
People say they get rich off shit coins, either two realities.
One, they're lying.
Or number two, that is maybe for 20 minutes before they lose it all.
Because the mentality of gambling, they're gambling.
So people who gamble are gamblaholics, like I'm an alcoholic.
There's gamblaholics.
There's sexaholics, right?
There's an addictive quality.
And people that trade shit coins, I started something called Shitcoiners Anonymous online.
You know, if you're trying to recover from shit coinery, I have a few friends.
Right?
The 12 steps of shit coins anonymous.
Step number one, realize you have a problem with shit coins, right?
There's essentially it's a gambling addiction.
And every gambler will tell you and every drug addict will tell you that they're fine.
It's great.
They just need one more hit and they just need to lend me some money.
I'm just going to get right.
It's a mental, it's a disease, essentially.
Shitcoins are a disease like alcoholism or gamblaholism.
And right?
Okay.
So when you meet somebody like that who says that, it's like meeting an alcoholic who's begging you for a drink.
Just say, look, I don't want your disease, but there are, there is help.
You know, go seek out shitcoiners anonymous, but don't, don't, don't try to save them yourself because you could be sucked into the disease of shit coinering.
Well, most of the people I go with, I leave and I spent most of my money on the hotels in Cabana and they leave and they're 10, 20, 30 grand down a day, you know?
And I've always, I've always looked at that because I don't suffer with that.
It feels so foreign to me.
But I've noticed that gambling has become more covert these days.
Like it is with the polymarket and all these betting things.
Say that Coinbase in California is not only selling unregistered securities, but they are an unlicensed casino.
They are an unlicensed casino.
You cannot operate a casino license that's not available in California.
Coinbase should move to Nevada and get a proper casino license and operate as a casino because that's what they are with the shitcoin market.
It's just a casino.
And they also sell unregistered securities, which are also the problem with all shitcoins is that they're essentially unregistered securities.
Now, there's been some regulatory back and forth on that.
And there's because the SEC, of course, is late to the game and they try to catch up.
And some projects got grandfathered or didn't get grandfathered, but they're all essentially unregistered securities.
Ether, even though they, according to the latest SEC mandate or ruling, they're suggesting that they are not an unregistered security.
However, as a registered stockbroker myself who worked on Wall Street for many years as a securities dealer and broker, I can tell you without equivocation that Ether is an unregistered security, as is XRP, as are all shitcoins.
You're selling with the expectation of profit, and there's absolutely no, that they don't, it doesn't pass the smell test when it comes to how we test, which is the test used to determine whether something is a security or not.
Then are eligible to be outside of that law.
But they play games and they try to influence regulators, right?
I mean, I worked on Wall Street for many years and the regulators are not hard to lobby, right?
They get subject by lobbyists and laws are created because they get lobbied by banks, right?
Wall Streets were the biggest lobbyist component in Washington, like the pharmaceutical industry, you know, and I know this very well, having worked in the industry myself for many years.
Like the biggest, most egregious violation of this was when Citigroup bought Traveler's Insurance because according to Glass Steagle, which is part of the Securities Act of 33 and 34, you cannot mix a broker and a bank or an insurance company.
They're supposed to be separated.
But Jamie, but the Citibank went ahead, Sandy Weil went ahead and bought, and then they retroactively passed a law breaking up Glassdeagle.
The people who you've talked to about them typically are gamblers.
And a lot of gamblers who live in gambling life and they're gamblers and they make money gambling and they're convinced that it's, you know, it's that they're not gambling and it's something else and whatever, but it's gambling.
I'm like one of the last 30-year-olds that still has kids and stuff because no one my age even has children.
It's not even reproducing.
And that's actually the main reason why I'm doing this is because I want my kids to grow up in a world that they were made to grow up in, or at least tell them that I tried to wake people up or try to do something, right?
They go, our taxes are, it's a charade because it's only $3 trillion a year collected in taxes.
And it's a two-quadrillion dollar global derivatives market, right?
The banks by lending out trillions of U.S. dollars every single day.
I'll tell you, if you want, you're interested to look at this globally and see where we're at and what the pin that when the pin that's going to be pulled to implode and explode the global Ponzi scheme, just look at what's happening in Japan because the Japanese yen for 40 years has been the go-to funding currency for every hedge fund and central bank in the world because they have the lowest interest rates in the world.
And you can borrow from Japan and put it in any other currency in the world and get a positive carry.
It's called the carry trade.
And then you can leverage that 10 or 20 times through the derivative markets.
And you're making 30, 35% a year with no risk.
If you're compounding money at 30% a year, that means you're doubling your money every seven years or so.
The rule of 72, you know, how you double your money.
So if you're on that trajectory, there's no way in hell you're not going to become super wealthy.
And with that wealth comes the ability to lobby Washington to make it easier to do this exact same thing, but much bigger.
The 2008 crisis, Obama, first leader in history during a global financial crisis, bailed out the creditors.
That's never happened ever in history.
Usually you bail out the debtors.
But instead, Obama wrote a check to the banks.
And what do they do with that check?
They did the exact same thing all over again, but 10 times bigger.
But what I'm saying now is, is, well, what's the hope then for young people, particularly for young men?
Because like, okay, so you have an average job.
I'll say an average, not like friend of mine, but like, let's say someone I went to high school with is probably making somewhere lower end of salary, probably about $60,000 to $65,000 a year.
Okay.
They're unmarried.
Almost all of them are unmarried.
They're just jerking off to porn and smoking weed and they're trying to get out.
How does one get out of that loop and find any financial freedom?
What would you actually tell them to do?
What's a five-year action plan?
Not in detail, but like of what someone can do if they're in this position to taste some of that victory that boomers feel, taste a little bit of that freedom that you're preaching about.
Because I feel like sometimes everything's just talked about on podcasts, but it doesn't really release anyone.
And sometimes podcasts become part of the problem where everyone's listening to all these successful people be successful and it becomes like porn but for ideas.
And then they feel like they're getting out of their hole and they're becoming successful, but they're not doing shit.
And not in most Western countries, actually, because I was living in Australia for a couple of years.
I've never seen, I've never seen such a rapid vision of where America's headed than being there.
It's like there are basically no white people left, which means they've lost the Australian culture.
There's like a mixed, non-homogeneous feel of just random units of enterprise, right?
It's like everyone's just there to, it's like an amusement park and they're all just like cashing in.
And then on top of that, the crime is getting out of control like it is in, you know, it already is in many places in the United States, but even in the nice area, it's getting out of control.
The government is working against its own people, selling everything out, even mineral rights, everything to foreign governments, to India.
And you sit there and the house has started, you know, $1.2 million for a shitter and you go, This is, and there's no upwards mobility.
At least in the U.S., there's still some upwards mobility.
If you do work hard, still, you can still get, kind of get ahead.
There's still a lot of business opportunity, but there it's just shut down.
There's the upper class and the lower class, and it's just like you're not going to, no one's going to give you opportunity there.
And that scared the hell out of me, which is why I came back because I realized America is not as far gone as some countries are in the West.
Do you think America is the furthest gone?
Or do you think Australia and other nations like that could be further gone in terms of hegemony and economy?
With the U.S., under Trump, it's like a fantastic break that the United States got with Trump because Trump is really, I think, trying to get rid of all the waste and the fraud and the abuse.
And he's really in a position to rejigger the economy and bring in a lot of jobs, right?
The whole tariff scheme is bring in a lot of these factories and factory jobs and bring them all back and have them in the U.S.
And he might be successful.
At the current trajectory, if things keep going the way they are, I would think he would be successful.
So the heartland, the midland, the flyover states, there are places where there's going to be new auto factories and new industrial jobs and things potentially.
He's going to be drilling in the oil patch for the energy markets, get an engineering degree in energy, and you can get an awesome job in the fracking business somewhere in Oklahoma or something.
So if that's the energy security, it would require him to start drilling in areas that are currently owned by the United States.
They probably sell some of those off and do energy exploration.
Those are high-paying jobs.
The whole northern, you know, the Alaska area is becoming, it's a brutal place to work, but it's opportunity as far as opportunity in the future, as far as energy goes.
And a lot of things are moving to the north, the North Pole, you know.
But you have to be agile in that way, right?
So you have to be agile.
And the worst, the worst, the great, or I should say, the great benefit of that is that you do get another perspective, which is also very helpful.
Because a lot of times, if you just stay in your space and you don't, let's say, move out of that space, you're not getting any perspective and it becomes kind of depressing.
But if you move out of that space and at least go somewhere else, see other things, experience other cultures and other people, it can really open you up and open your imagination, open your creativity, open up that third eye, where you're trying to get creative.
And that comes through by taking out of your comfort zone.
And when I moved to France originally in 1990, I didn't know any French or I didn't know anybody.
So I realized that my personality as a brash New Yorker was not going to help me.
I had to become somebody else.
I had to become more polite, which for a New Yorker is hard to do.
And I had to learn some French and I had to be humble to survive.
It became a survival mechanism.
Otherwise, I would have just been completely ostracized as that loud American loudmouth.
We don't want to talk to him.
But I had to get, I was determined to become part of a different culture and to see things very, very differently.
And, you know, it's an invaluable experience.
When I was, I'll tell you another part of my story.
When I was, I went to New York University and I went there in 1978.
And by 1979, I said to myself, you know, I am surrounded by the exact same people I grew up with.
And by the end of this education, I'm going to walk out of here no different than how I was when I walked in.
So I made the decision to move to 145th Street and Broadway or Harlem, Sugar Hill.
And I lived uptown for four years.
I was the only white guy uptown.
And that taught me a lot, much more than anything I learned at New York University.
And being a minority and being at risk every single day like that was an experience.
And to have, you know, because, you know, when I grew up, I was always interested in jazz and Harlem has always been the center of jazz.
And I've always felt a pull toward something about that way of thinking about being extemporaneous, about being able to create on the fly.
And I knew that Harlem was the center of the global jazz world.
And so I just, I just moved there.
And it was difficult, really, to live there because I'm living in a railroad flat, paying $140 a month.
And I'm living on cream of wheat.
It's the only thing I ate for like two years.
And I was also, I sunk into a lifestyle of ghetto vacation.
So I became a really, really deep into alcohol and drugs living in Harlem to the point where I was almost completely a pariah.
I was almost completely out of society.
And I, when I did graduate eventually and I couldn't get a job at all, the only job that would have me where being an asshole was considered an asset was being a stockbroker.
And that's what worked.
That's what saved me was because in that job, there's no limit to how nasty you can be, how much of an asshole you can be.
And the more of an asshole you are, the more successful you are.
So I immediately was successful on Wall Street, but not because I knew anything about economics, but because I lived uptown and I knew how to say, fuck you, how to fucking throw down.
You know, it's like, buy the stock.
I'm going to blow your fucking head off.
It's essentially the subtext of a good sales call I've discovered.
You know, when you're talking to somebody like you sells a lot of potatoes in Idaho and they got a million dollar trade on the line, it's like, brother, you got to sell it in a way that they, they want it.
They want it bad.
And the only way you learn that is by living where just to get downtown, you've got to fucking sell that idea to like five brothers who want to stick a knife in you.
It's like, I just want to get downtown, you know, and it helps.
It does.
So that experience was formative.
Living in Paris was formative.
Getting out of my comfort zone is always formative.
I mean, let me pick your brain on that for a moment because what I'm sensing, and I think a lot of people are sensing is it's when you say, okay, what we were taught in school, it doesn't help us to know what's really going on in the world, right?
They lied to us about our own history.
Then you could talk about the economy and it's, you know, the way they told us to make money doesn't work anymore.
That you just, you know, go to school and you get one of these expensive degrees and then you get a job and you work your way up and then you pay it off.
And then with relationships, what we were taught, you know, like, oh, you just go to the corner store and tell a girl you like her.
And, you know, you see her in a shop.
Well, now we're on online dating and, you know, this is, we're in a gynocracy.
Well, you can go down the rabbit hole on podcasts, just in the gynocracy, because it is the true empire that won World War II, actually.
And the funny part about this is it's like, you know, you look at this, and I think a lot of men, particularly my age, like 25 to 35, are realizing we have to change the very ethos of who we are, right?
Like something has to change because it's part of people call that red pilling, but it's deeper than that.
Like people realize it's not just red peeling and finding out that, you know, your testosterone's down and you need to be a man.
It's like finding out that the entire way I perceive information, the institutions I trust and my behavior is affecting me in a negative way.
Like there is a consequence to this.
You said you gave up alcohol and that led you down a path of self-discovery to changing who you are.
What do you think is holding young men back today that they could actually affect change in their life?
And how do you think that the negative things that they're not changing are affecting them today outside of institutional control?
Because I don't want to be this victim blaming like, well, the institutions, the whole system is just rigged, man.
It's like, okay, well, maybe it is.
But what do they have control over?
What can they change?
And I kind of want to hear that with your own story, because I think what people need is ego death and they need spiritual rebirth.
Well, what you're describing there, I can see as 100% accurate.
The challenges as you describe them that you are facing, I see that.
And I can feel it.
And when I'm talking to men, younger men, it's not incorrect to describe the situation as you have described it.
The playing field has changed dramatically in your lifetime.
The earth has moved substantially.
I would open this up from a perspective, have myself having been 65 years old.
So I lived through the 60s and 70s.
So we had essentially the women's rights movement, which began with good intentions in the 70s and has over decades morphed into became the Me Too movement, which is quite considerably different than what was originally the women's rights movement.
We saw this also in the gay rights movement.
You know, there was a video this week on went very viral of an OG lesbian talking about the first generation of gay rights in America, the Stonewall riots and these things, and gay were has morphed into trans rights and the other initials on the LGBQT, et cetera, the other sides of it, that this OG lesbian, as she called herself,
had morphed into something pernicious and not at all in keeping with the original intent, the black rights movement of the 1960s.
We kind of morphed into Black Lives Matter, which became something very different in a lot of ways.
So all of these 1960s movements and the Black Panthers at that time, that was an interesting organization that had a lot of merit at the time.
And to see the arc of how that has progressed over the decades is interesting from a sociological perspective.
And so you are at the crossroads of when a lot of what was meant as good intentions 30 or 40 years ago has become poisoned.
So you're the institutional poisoning and poison is what you're living with.
And so most of your waking moment is spent trying to cleanse the poison out of your body.
It could be either the total degradation of the manufacturing process and agricultural process where you're eating essentially chemicals all day.
The pharmaceutical industry, which as Jack Cruz would document very well, has turned into a genocidal machine of death.
It's not the wellness business.
It's the death business, right?
The banking business has gone from your local banker making a loan to start a business to being somebody who's trying to actively get you into debt slavery.
The political process turns you into a political income poop where you're battling political fights that are meaningless, that mean nothing, that are just a distraction from having any social discourse for a civil purpose, right?
All civility has been drained from the system.
So you're at this point.
You're at this point.
So it's either give in and capitulate or have faith in something other than yourself, which to me comes back to Bitcoin, right?
So Bitcoin is something that can throw some light into these shadows and give somebody some purpose where maybe they don't feel they have purpose.
Because if the world does go on a global Bitcoin standard, a lot of these institutions starve to death because they all work on fiat money and the Ponzi schemes that are fiat money.
And Bitcoin eviscerates and eradicates all of that.
So that's one way it can be defunded and destroyed.
And so that's part of the ancillary benefit of talking about Bitcoin and being on Bitcoin and using Bitcoin.
It's not about just I'm buying it cheap, it's going higher, I made money.
That's the least important part of Bitcoin.
It's just, it's the number go up psychology that brings a lot of people in, but it's not really what it does.
You know, a lot of people go to AA to get sober, they think, or to stay out of jail.
I mean, I was given the choice 30 days in jail or go to my AA meeting by the New York City Police Department.
So I chose AA to stay out of jail.
But what I found was spiritual recovery.
Bitcoin is, it offers number go up, but it offers a spiritual solution.
And it's not, it's, it's, thankfully, it's not a get-rich quick scheme.
It's a get-rich-slow scheme because instant wealth usually brings instant problems.
More money, more problems.
Right.
And getting, just being self-supporting and having a satisfactory relationship with a spiritual connection is really all you can ever hope for in this in this life.
And everybody else, you know, don't compare yourself to anybody else.
There's nobody else out there on your journey and they don't care about you.
You only care about yourself and your family.
And as long as everybody, that's if you have, you can go to sleep at night believing that you've taken one step forward.
You know, that's all we can hope for, really.
You know, that's it.
So, but, but obviously, it looks like a gargantuan task.
You're at a shitty generation.
Your generation has really inherited a lot of shit.
I don't know if I could survive if I were 31 years old right now.
I don't know if I could survive really.
It's too daunting.
For me, as I explained it, it's easy.
For you and your generation, it's really, really hard.
And a lot of people are not going to do well.
But I think with Bitcoin, it offers a lot of philosophical depth.
And there's hope to it.
And if you can take a step forward, then that's one step forward.
It's, you know, the look that prostitutes have where they've been used and abused and their holes have been filled, but they have a hole in their heart.
That's the look that even women have that aren't even whores today.
There's something gone.
Like the feminine spirit, the beauty of a woman doesn't even exist anymore.
Well, they're sexy, they're hot, but they're like, they look like sex dolls almost.
Like there's something unhuman about humanity today, and people are sensing that.
And a lot of us are refusing to take part in that and want to get back.
It doesn't mean that men watching this don't have addictions or don't suffer with alcoholism or maybe don't maybe you do suffer with gambling.
It doesn't mean you're not currently locked into the vices, but a lot of people that are that are locked in are like just kind of crying to get out.
And that's what they use these podcasts for is like a sort of soothing to find like, yo, maybe I'm not crazy.
Maybe it's not normal to just go to the game and gamble and just party until I'm 40.
Like maybe I was meant for something more and you're living for something more.
And that's a good, I've never thought about the community.
How much I just want you to talk about how much is community and mindset involved in the Bitcoin arena and how important is that towards your spiritual success?
The success is successful because it's a community, right?
It's open source community.
It's like open source software meets money, right?
What made open source software successful?
Because it's superior to centralized software.
Decentralized open source software is a better solution because it's community driven, community-led.
And the community will always do better than a centralized system, right?
So it's very important.
It's the key aspect to it, the community of Bitcoin.
And as the community grows, all the metrics improve.
All the metrics improve.
But on the topic of women, I love this topic of the battle of the sexes, which has been going on.
The Greeks wrote plays about it, the island of Lesbos.
It's like there's always been this dynamic in society.
And during World War II, of course, women were asked to enter the workforce.
Then we had a different style of feminism that came in.
And Hollywood generated a different style of feminism.
The women's movement of the 70s, we have a different definition of feminism and womanhood.
And it's an evolving situation over time, always has been.
And I think one of the lessons that men need to learn is basically how to talk to women, how to be around women, and what's the deal with women.
And there's not a lot of opportunity to be in a situation.
You know, when I was growing up in grade school, in kindergarten, in first grade, we would actually dance with the girls.
They would put on music and you would dance with the girl and do like a proper dance.
And like you would hold their hand and be gracious and learning a certain modicum of graciousness and chivalry or manliness.
Women are to be it's a topic that is not discussed enough in my in my view, in my opinion.
And it's a topic that it's a skill and it's a knowledge that's passed down from generation to generation, from father to son.
How to relate to women?
What is your relationship to women?
What is a couple?
What is a marriage?
This type of thing.
And you're right in that we're living in the end stages of a consumer society that has commodified women to a degree that's quite almost disturbing.
And it's not going to go any away because now with AI and robotics and it's not going to get any better anytime soon.
I think that, again, what helps is to travel to different parts of the world and see how this battle of the sexes works in different countries.
So like in Europe, and particularly in Northern Europe, it's very much a matriarchy.
So women in Northern Europe are very much in control.
You know, they pick their mate, you know, and they are free to do whatever they want.
You know, if you've lived in France for any length of time, you know that almost every French movie is about a French man who's been cuckled by his French wife.
This is 90% of French cinema going back 70 years.
That's the entire culture is male cuckled by French women.
If you're an American man living in Paris, you can use that to your advantage.
Trust me.
So again, there's like an arbitrage.
Different countries have different situations and just ways to work in those different situations.
And it's very interesting and prospective garnering to travel and just see how different things work.
And but here in the U.S., though, it is, I would say, I would, from what I've observed from this generations coming up, it looks to be quite troubling.
What is the landscape for forming a family, right?
So as Elon Musk has complained about, the birth rate is dropping.
It's dropping sharply.
Maybe Jack is assigned more of a scientist would know the details, but people are not copulating.
They're not forming families.
They're not having children.
A lot of that has to do with late-stage empire.
People become decadent.
There's a lot of decadence.
There's a lot of hidden poverty in the United States.
A lot of people are actually quite poor in the U.S., a lot poorer than the statistics would capture.
And so there's a lot of on the fringes and on the margins, there's a lot of folks that are in desperate situations.
So the level of stress in society is high and it hits women harder.
I think that's the point i'm getting to, that women are suffering from stress in the society as a whole.
Um, you know there's there's, i'm sure it's true that women are stronger than men in a lot of ways.
Um physically, you know, the childbirth is an extraordinary.
Most men, I doubt, would be able to do it.
It's, and there's all stories about women, you know, picking up cars.
You know, to save their kids, or whatever.
I think.
I think women are innately.
I think they have a strength beyond what what men have.
But I think men you've been around French women too long well, but I think men can handle stress a little bit differently.
Like if you stick a man on the front line and there's bullets whizzing over their head, they'll be like this is pretty stressful, but you know what, i'm gonna kill that guy.
You know there's like a certain testosterone kicks in, whereas women I they, I don't think like the stress factor because they don't have testosterone.
They have estrogen.
It's like they're hormonally, they're just different.
So I think the stress affects them differently.
So society is breaking down and this stress and overall stress in society is increasingly getting higher.
I think women are having a really tough time.
Uh, I mean all these videos online of women just freaking out.
I mean they genuinely seem to be having endurance breakdown.
In a lot of ways, I think that's just societal stress.
Though and this is like this is coming from from experience there is even if they're a stay-at-home wife, like my wife's, a stay-at-home wife yeah, there is something being placed upon the backs of women that does make them nervous, it makes them like a little bit afraid and that might be an innate biological, you know, mechanism of survival or whatever.
But I do notice that, like you know, there's a lot of propaganda even towards stay-at-home wives or anything that's on.
You know that it's not a good idea yeah, or that you should be living for yourself, and there's a lot of like outside pressure put on them through social media and whatnot, that it can make you a little bit, you know it can put you in a position to where, rather than appreciating the opportunity to stay at home or being around, you could end up almost despising Or despising yourself, think you're missing out on something.
It feels like women are attacked on every front, no matter what they choose to do.
I think physiologic, kind of mentally, that women by nature are the most are the least stressed out if they have to feel like they have this, they're safe.
They want to feel safe.
Because women generally are not safe.
Women have always been attacked.
And they are, and women generally want to feel safe.
And so men can offer some sense of safety and protection.
And traditionally, this is what the relationship can be.
And in your generation, you know, it's hard for you to communicate that sense of safety because the world is genuinely up.
Like, it's hard for you to hide your stress.
Because usually it's like the man is like, honey, everything's going to be fine.
So then, so if they pick up stress in their mate, they're like, that they're going to be stressed.
So that adds to acting out, as we say in recovery.
So it can end up being different things.
So it's easy to blame women, but I think it's wrong to blame women.
I think women, it's, you know, the job of the male of the species is to calm the fuck down.
Don't give in to these psychosis of technological, algorithmic-driven insanity and find the fiber, the inner fiber in one way or another.
And this will de-stress the woman who will be like, won't be able to articulate it necessarily, but they'll just be, I just feel more, I feel safer now because I don't feel like I'm being attacked.
You know, this is the thing.
It's just that, sadly, women are attacked all the time.
I mean, if you, every day you read stories, some cultures, like in India, what happens in India, women get there.
But that's any conflict zone, any war zone, of course, women are always getting attacked, always getting abused.
And so they know it.
I mean, they know it from day one.
I mean, they're just, they're by nature cautious because for good reason, they get attacked.
So for us, for men who even have to pretend like things are fine when they're not, it's harder to do that because we live in a fishbowl of social media where everything is open and you can see that it's you're lying.
I tell her, don't be on it because I just go, you know, if you want to follow some cooking recipes or whatever, but just stay off all the rest of the stuff because it's not going to be good for her brain.
And I know that I feel like a lot of men don't want to look out for their wives these days or like give them advice.
They're kind of led by their wives.
And I think it's a very dangerous position to you want to provide for your wife and provide her structure and safety and provision.
But you also, you know, there's a fine balance because the whole struggle between men and women is that God said, right?
That's like the whole genesis story is like the whole struggle of females is that their hand would always be raised against men to try to take power, try to take control over the man, but they never would be able to.
They never would work.
But now they kind of have in many ways.
I mean, our government is run by their menstrual cycle.
That's why the world feels, we used to be on a daily male cycle and now we are on a menstrual cycle.
So you have good weeks and bad weeks and horny weeks.
I mean, you have to wake up every day and say, how can I help my marriage today?
It doesn't just go automatically.
I mean, love is not a program run on your Apple laptop.
Love is manual labor.
It's manual.
You got to go down and stick the logs into the fireplace every day.
Start it up every day.
Just like sobriety, right?
Sobriety, there's no cumulative sobriety.
The sobriety I have for over 36 years doesn't help me if I have a drink today because I'll be exactly where I was as if I drank for 36 years tomorrow, right?
There's no sober bank of sobriety.
It's like every single day at the end of the day, I had one day.
That's it.
That's my sober day is over.
Tomorrow, I have to wake up and I have to commit myself to sobriety again for one more day.
I only get a day at a time, one day at a time of sobriety.
That's all I get.
Doesn't accumulate.
Doesn't make me any more sober if I have 36 years than the guy who has two weeks.
So I was like, so you know, I was like, yeah, you didn't, you didn't realize that.
Let's go.
It's fine.
I don't care.
I don't care.
Well, this will be published fairly soon anyways.
But it's like, yeah, I think I needed to hear that.
And I one thing that I hope that the viewers or listeners, wherever you're watching or you're listening to this Apple Podcast, Spotify, Rumble, it doesn't really matter what, as long as you're listening to these words, I'm not having these conversations because I want to show how smart I am to people and look like I have, like I'm cool.
Austin, I would be booking myself on shows.
And I intentionally stopped booking myself on shows a couple of years ago and have not been really doing any because I'm like, I have my own shows, but it's like, if you want to hear me, then go there.
But like, I'm not here to tell anybody that I know what's up and that I know.
If you're dumb enough to listen to my shows where I'm the main one speaking, then we're probably just as lost as each other, you know?
And I don't mean that jokingly.
But being able to having the privilege to sit down and talk to people like yourself and Jack and others is like where I want to be personally.
And I've wanted to, I want to speak and hear these kinds of things and I want to apply them, right?
And that's what I want people to understand.
If you heard anything here that you say it resonated with you, don't treat it like entertainment.
Don't just shut it, shut it off, go home and go, yeah, that's pretty cool.
Now let me turn on the jerk my and go bang tonight.
But you can do that and it'll be fun tonight.
But if you hear something that's like could help you or that it can speak to you, write it down right now.
Like write it down your phone, write it down in your notes, and maybe write the time stamp down, re-listen to what it was and try to like get it in your head because these conversations are really helpful for me and I hope they're helpful for you guys as well.
And I want you to know, and I try to talk to you guys at the end of the podcast because, you know, you're sitting there by yourself.
There might be 100,000 people that listen to this, but it's just you and you're alone and you're by yourself.
And this is information going into your head.
And you have the choice now whether to just take it and discard it and make it like it was entertainment.
And if we were entertaining, you're welcome.
Thank you as well for listening and for providing the viewership.
But also, please absorb this and do something about the things in your life, or this is kind of pointless.
And if I have to travel everywhere around the world to talk to more amazing people, if I've got to come back here multiple times talk to the same people, it's only worth it if you guys put it into practice.
So please listen.
And that's why I wanted to give the last word to my guest, Max, who I don't even know his last name, but you don't need to know people's last names to get words of wisdom like this.
The marriage advice is the most helpful.
What's your last word on this?
And also, could you share with the people where they can find where they can follow you on social media to keep up with your crazy thoughts, which I know are not going to be drunk thoughts at two in the morning.
So if you write something out of this world, it's coming from you and you alone.
i appreciate it because yeah i appreciate i appreciate sitting here too So I'm like, just listening to the listening to the wisdom.
It's crazy.
You know, you should consider getting into media yourself.
I've heard you've done one or two shows in the past, but maybe you should consider starting back up, you know, and getting more of these ideas out there because we need, we, we don't want to.
Well, I started in media and really my most recent journey in media as an international broadcaster starting in 2005 was really getting on news shows and shouting at people, particularly during the 2008 financial crisis.
So they'd have economics experts on shows, and I would just shout at them and shout at them from a knowledge base, like why they're wrong.
And I got a lot of resonance in the global audience.
I got a lot of fans in Greece and Ireland and things like that.
And then I guess a few years ago, I started doing this type of podcast, which is longer chat, you know, longer, longer forum.
But I, yeah, it's the media space is interesting.
You know, I'm building another facility here in El Salvador to do more media.
That would be super helpful and looking forward to that.
It's been fun not doing any media, too much media the last few years here in El Salvador and just focusing on really what the country is doing and how to help the country and help the leadership in whatever way we can.
And that's been a very interesting experience.
It's not, you know, media, you know, it's a different, different skill set, different, different skills and different things.
And so, yeah, the media is good.
And then other than, but I'm mostly just on X.
And other than that, you know, the last word is that actually El Salvador is a very, very interesting destination for a lot of people who are looking for to reinvent themselves or to come and enjoy some opportunities.
I think there is a lot to say about El Salvador.
People should consider coming here and moving here.
It's pretty easy.
The people who have come here, a lot have, people from Canada and Australia in particular, because those countries have had political changes that a lot of people don't accept.
They refuse to accept.
They've come here and they've rediscovered a lot of positive things about themselves.
And the people here are amazing.
They're people who have been through a civil war and a gang war.
They've been under occupation for 40 years.
The president liberated them.
And there is a sense of liberation.
And that's very infectious and very contagious.
And it's a very different feeling than people, let's say, in the States who feel like they're at the end of the road.
It's like, as you describe it, there's a lot of, it's hard to, it's hard to do anything.
But here, this is kind of the opposite in a lot of ways.
People are like, we're finally free and we're doing stuff.
The president's really cool and he's always starting new things, new programs.
And he's, you know, so this is a great country to actually consider moving to, if one were to consider moving to a new country.
It's like quicker for me to get here than it is to get to New York.
So it was like, you know, living in Australia felt like, oh, because it's just like, you know, just to get to LA, like 14 and a half hours.
And then it's six hours across to, you know, Florida and you're like, dude.
And then the four hour layover in LA and you're like, living there felt isolating, right?
I mean, you just felt like you were in the middle of nowhere, but coming here was easier than getting most places in the States.
And even immigration is they didn't check anything.
It's like, they just wanted to know where I was staying.
And it's like, you know, it's like, it's like when you get back in America and you're in there for like an hour and a half and just like when I go back to Miami, I'm not looking forward to that.
