Clint Russell and Guy Swan diagnose the global economy as a debt-fueled binge since 2008, where artificially low rates caused malinvestment and central banks now buy their own bonds to avoid insolvency. They argue that CBDCs and ESG mandates from giants like BlackRock threaten total state control, while Bitcoin offers a neutral alternative to prevent authoritarianism and climate-driven collapse. Ultimately, the hosts conclude that avoiding World War III requires rejecting the "Great Reset" through fiscal responsibility and adopting Bitcoin to separate money from political manipulation. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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A Real Jew's Low Bar00:02:18
Fill her up.
You're listening to the Cash Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
What's up?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I'm very excited for this episode.
This is a recurring episode that we do.
We did a two-part series a few months back, and this is going to be a regular thing.
We keep doing the state of the financial system, the economy, Bitcoin, all things concerned with money and economics and stuff like that.
And I got the two guys who I love to talk to this shit about.
First off, I got Clint Russell, who if you guys listen to the show, you know who he is, the host of Liberty Lockdown.
I would say, I think possibly the kind of fastest rising figure in the Liberty movement over the last couple of years and one of the most outspoken critics of the Federal Reserve and ESGs and the whole state of authoritarian crazy economic shit.
How are you, Clint?
I'm good, man.
I'm better than the economy.
That's for sure.
That's a low bar.
That's a low bar these days.
It's like, man, you're doing that bad.
And of course, that voice is Guy Swan, host of the Bitcoin Audible podcast, my Bitcoin guru, the Scott Horton of Bitcoin, as he's been called, all around great guy.
What's up, guy?
How are you, brother?
What up, Dave?
How you doing, man?
Good, good.
Now, Rob, Robbie the Fire Bernstein, who I always love to have on these episodes with us, but he is not here today.
I asked him to come on and he was being a real Jew about it.
And when I say that, I mean really a literal Jew about it.
He was like, tomorrow is Yom Kippur and I'm celebrating with my family.
There's never been, I just, I love that.
I made that to you guys earlier, but there's never been a better way to say someone's being a real Jew about something.
Bond Market Cycles Speed Up00:15:30
I mean, literally.
And if anyone gives me shit for that, be like, no, I mean, quite literally, he's being a real Jew.
Like, that's what you're supposed to do.
I am not being a real Jew.
I am here recording on Yom Kippur Eve, but I will.
Yum Kippo is the day of atonement, and I will atone for my sins of not bringing up Bitcoin on the Joe Rogan experience in a little bit.
We'll get to that at some point.
At some point, I will try to, I'll fast all day long.
Do what I do.
Somebody said, somebody said in the comments that you're going to have to put the, you're going to have to do the orange pill as a suppository this time.
That shit killed me.
All right, fine.
Okay.
So we'll, we'll get to that in a second, but let's start with, I don't know.
So, you know, it's interesting because when we talk about these things, if we're talking about the general state of the economy, obviously that incorporates a lot of things, a lot of different paths that we could go down.
You know, like, hey, if there's a nuclear war between the United States and Russia, I would say that will be bad for the economy.
I think nuclear war is bad for the economy.
We will see less productive growth.
That's the negative.
Yeah.
So I wouldn't be buying Lockheed and Boeing.
I mean, it's never, it seems like it's never a bad idea to buy them until it's not.
But so I guess maybe why don't we just like kind of start with this, a real general question.
But since the last time that we all had this, this kind of roundtable discussion, whoever wants to jump on this, what do you think?
How have things developed since then, Clint or Guy, whoever wants to jump in?
I mean, I think things have developed essentially exactly how we had warned, unfortunately.
You know, we're starting to see an uptick in inventory finally in housing.
That's kind of my forte.
So that's exactly what I predicted.
The escalating interest rate cycle from not just the Federal Reserve, but many central banks globally is putting downward pressure on pricing.
And the top end of the market, the more expensive housing, million-dollar plus type stuff is already seeing significant softening.
So I think that that's a leading indicator for the broader market in real estate.
And I ultimately believe that this is all a product of maintaining interest rates too low for too long on top of obvious quantitative easing programs that happened from the majority of central banks globally for the better part of two and a half years and for many of them, the better part of 15 years.
So we binged on sugar and now we're having the crash.
I think it's really that simple.
Yeah.
So it's interesting too, because if you remember last time, like you said, last time on this show and then many times on your show, and when we've talked, you've been predicting this stuff.
And now it's not just you saying it.
It is like all the Wall Street banks are saying, hey, housing is going to take a big hit over the next year or two.
So it's interesting to see that kind of like way after you've been predicting it, they're going, oh, yeah, here's a prediction.
Yeah, it turns out that the Federal Reserve forcing a recession is going to lead to a recession.
Yeah, it's stunning.
I mean, it's literally their intention, but it reminds me very, you know, the cognate is either yourself or Scott Horton, you know, warning about different geopolitical things.
And then six months or a year down the road, it's like, oh, well, now CNN or Fox News or whoever is talking about it.
And I feel like that's kind of our job on the financial front is to also give people some of these warnings.
So I'm grateful that I was able to.
I'm very disappointed that I was correct because I was not proposing positive outcomes for people.
And I know that that upsets people.
And, you know, it is what it is, but I would rather people be aware and have a chance to get in front of it, profit, hopefully.
You know, I'll tell you, one of the things that's very interesting about this, the situation that we're in right now is that even, so we're coming out of, in a way, the zero interest rate, you know, in real terms, negative interest rate, if you if you account for inflation economy that we've had really since like since 2008, really to now.
And that we've, we've had artificially low interest rates for well beyond that, but the zero interest rate, like the Fed fund rate being zero to, you know, a quarter of a, of a point, right?
And that was a really new thing.
And by the way, just for people who aren't like too, you know, like into the lingo here, when we say negative interest rates, just meaning that if the Fed is lending money at zero to almost zero to banks and there's inflation, you're losing value in your money, then essentially you're losing money by holding it, right?
So, but so we've been in this period for a while and now we're slowly raising rates up, very slowly, still historically very low interest rates.
And everyone's freaking out like whether the market can handle these high interest rates, But they're not very high interest rates.
But now you're actually starting to get a lot of pushback from European central banks, from the EU saying, hey, this raising rates could really have some negative effects.
And so it'll be interesting to see.
It's not a foregone conclusion that the Federal Reserve is going to continue to like inch up these rates.
I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibilities that they could fall back to like zero again going soon if this, you know, so that'll be interesting too.
Guy, anything?
I honestly kind of think they're going to have to fully reverse course.
You know, I kind of think what we're looking at is these cycles speeding up is these things are happening in like two year, like potentially even one year cycles now because we're just kind of reaching the end game of a you know 30 year, a 40 year bond market bull run that's completely manipulated, it's completely artificial and a complete suppression of all the price of time.
Like the interest rate is the price of capital over time.
And they've just completely obliterated any sense of actual prices in that market for since like the late 80s.
And it's been horrific, horrific since essentially 2000.
Just so grossly manipulated.
It's so funny that something like price controls that we recognize, you recognize in your first economics class is a disaster, is stupid in that you would never do it on something like bread.
Because what would happen?
Oh, you would run if you, you know, set the price below the cost to make bread, you just wouldn't have any bread.
But when you conflate actual money with credit in an economy, when they're the same thing, like they were never fungible in, they were never the same thing in history.
You know, money was money and credit was credit.
Credit has credit risk.
You know, credit has a counterparty that is liable for something and you are trusting that liability.
And money is money.
You know, your banknote was for your bank.
It was your bank's credit note for the gold that they had.
And when you needed the money, when the credit, the value of the credit fell apart, you would go get the gold.
But we have been on a system essentially arguably since like 1913, but realist, like truly, truly since 1971, we have been on a system where credit and money are the exact same thing.
Like they're completely indistinguishable.
You can create new credit that has a systemic counterparty risk into the economy and it is 100% indistinguishable.
You do not know whether you have debt dollars or real dollars to the point that there's just no real dollars anymore.
Like there's just, it's just all liability from top to bottom.
And we're just the end game of that is that it all falls apart because we're just issuing liability to pay for liabilities.
There's no, there's no other end game except that it dies and we're in this competition of who dies first.
And the EU is kind of mad at the Federal Reserve, but I think that I think the Federal Reserve has to turn around because in the next two years, we were just on Clint Show, like last late last week talking about this.
And Greg Foss was talking about, I actually didn't confirm exactly the number, but it's something like $10 trillion is going to be rolled over in 10-year bonds in like in somewhere around like the next two years.
Government can't afford high interest on that.
They can't pay 4%, 5% interest on those bonds.
They don't have any money.
What do they have?
The only thing that can possibly, when the bond market is drying up, nobody's buying bonds anymore.
We're having a sovereign debt crisis across the world.
Japan just announced we're going to buy our own bonds.
UK, like two days ago, we're just like, oh, by the way, we just bought like a shit ton of our own bonds and we bailed out BlackRock.
And as this happens, the Federal Reserve is going to do the same thing.
I think they're just holding out for the election.
I think they're trying to maybe in some sense, maybe they're trying to put pressure on the EU to kind of make them crack first because, you know, whoever's the slowest horse, you know, whoever's sinking slowest is going to benefit the most and they're going to be able to buy up the most capital with the money that they can still print if everybody else is lose, everybody else loses that ability first.
And so maybe they're trying to allocate as much capital, but they have to turn around.
The Fed has to buy U.S. government bonds.
We'll never make it.
We just can't, we can't turn anything over.
Right.
They have the easiest bonds.
This is a real, it's such a fucking weird dynamic.
It's really fascinating.
I mean, it's terrifying, but it's just really fascinating to watch because it's like all these things that so many of the people like the leading experts in our camp, you know, to say that Ron Paul's and Peter Schiff's and even Murray Rothbard's before, you know, he died in the 90s, but he was kind of talking about a lot of this stuff.
It's almost like we finally hit this moment that so many of them were talking about.
So forever, the markets would be freaked out by the Fed raising interest rates.
And so they would always just lower.
Whenever there was pressure on, they would go, okay, we'll just lower.
They'd talk about raising them.
We'd talk about quantitative easing one being the end of it.
And they go, oh, we'll do round two.
Oh, is there pressure?
Okay, we'll do round three.
Oh, is there this?
We'll do infinity.
You know, we'll just keep going back to this.
But finally, the inflation, even as measured by the CPI, got out of control.
And obviously, I think all of us would agree that we've been living with inflation for, you know, like 100 years, but that and certainly since, you know, we talk about this a lot on this show, but the idea of like the consumer index price raising, like, well, why would that be the measure of inflation and not the stock market prices or like all these other prices that you could think of?
But regardless, the point is that right now, everyone's concerned about the fact that it's gotten so out of control that it's like, it's not like, oh, houses are really expensive or stocks are really expensive.
It's like milk and gasoline and heating my home.
The most basic things are really expensive.
And so now there's actually a fear that if they were to say, oh, we're going back down to 0% interest rates, that that might tank the economy on fears of inflation.
So now they've got this kind of, they're in between the situation where you're like, okay, you can lower interest rates and accept that inflation is not going to be tamed at all.
Or you can raise interest rates and accept that you can't live in a debt-based economy.
But the problem is that we live in an inflationary debt-based economy.
So man, talk about a corner to paint yourself into where you've got no option.
There's literally no option.
It's just like, hey, how do you want to be fucked?
Which way would you like it?
There was a little fork in the road meme or something that somebody put out.
But it was, do you want global depression or global hyperinflation?
It was like pick, you know, which are the same thing.
It's just too different for getting there, right?
I do.
I have a strong opinion that the answer is global depression, but still, neither one is good.
Yeah.
I mean, the health, the healthier outcome would be a global depression just because it would wipe out all of the malinvestment that is so rampant.
And that's what we desperately need.
The problem is that the people will suffer terribly in either environment.
The reason that CPI really only considers things like groceries and fuel is because those are the things that actually get people to riot.
And I think that's really what they care about.
As long as the cancel on effect is functioning properly and all of the money managers are getting rich off the stock market or housing or whatever else, then inflation's not a problem there, Dave.
It's only when it hits the people and then they start to get really angry.
And that's what we're starting to see now is people are getting angry.
And this is a catch-22 for the ages where the central banks of the world have to decide, do we look after our moneyed interests, the people that put us in power in the first place and maintain our power structure, or do we look after the people that allegedly vote us into power?
We're going to find out.
And I don't know that there's a right answer here.
I mean, certainly from the Austrian perspective, the right answer is to fight inflation tooth and nail.
But from a hardcore ANCAP perspective, I think there could be an argument made that perhaps we want to see fiat die.
And ultimately, that might create more competition in the crypto sphere, which I'm sure Guy will talk about.
And we could create a completely secondary market economy in the rubble, but it's going to be very tumultuous in the interim.
Well, the problem with that is that that flirts with kind of like an accelerationist argument, which I've heard a lot of times in our world.
This has been something that a lot of people who are libertarians who believe in liberty and free markets and stuff go.
It's like, well, and you can kind of see on the surface where it's somewhat plausible, like to say, okay, we're never going to get anywhere until this whole system collapses.
So let's root on the collapse, right?
Because then is when we'll have our opportunity.
The issue with that is that it's a risky game to play.
And this is why I've always been very skeptical of the accelerationist argument.
What do they call the collapsitarians?
I think is what they call those guys.
Because you're like, well, I mean, you know, if that's really your view, maybe you should just really root for communists to take complete control, you know, because that's collapsed.
But, you know, at the same time, when the communists took control of the Soviet Union, it did last for like 70 years or something like that.
Those are pretty rough 70 years.
So I'm not so sure that that's, you know, the best.
And also, you know, I've more and more, especially since just having kids.
And I think, God, you had a kid since last time we've podcasted, right?
Congratulations, by the way.
Thank you.
Congratulations.
We just had a year, right?
Yes.
My boy just had a year.
My girl's about to be four in December.
But so after having kids, I turned, I became much more of a conservative libertarian on the collapsitarian issue and go, no, no, no, no, let's let's hold this thing off for as long as we can and like try to build up as big a liberty movement as we can.
I still do feel, you know, I'm conflicted in a way because I feel like I'd rather have the big painful thing now when my kids are very young.
I'd rather bite the bullet right now, but life's okay when they're 20.
You know what I mean?
Than like kick the can down the road and it all falls on them.
But at the same time, you're like, yeah, okay, I guess it's possible that if fiat is completely destroyed this year, okay, then maybe we could move to Bitcoin or something.
Bitcoin Adoption in the US00:02:23
But it does seem even more likely that we would move to some type of like central bank digital currency, which is for everything, for all of the like beauty and promise that Bitcoin has, the equal inverse of that is like a Federal Reserve Bitcoin, right?
No, I think you're literally like the polar opposite.
Yeah.
And they'll try to take advantage of that to reset.
And the reason I kind of used to be, I used to think of myself as an accelerationist of like, yeah, let's just, let's just kill it and be done with it.
But, and I don't think it, I don't think it was specifically Rad.
I don't think it was specifically my son, but that certainly does change your perspective on exactly how.
But people are stupid when things are terrible.
You know, like they just latch on to anything.
I don't see any reason if Bitcoin basically isn't in a place to build out a foundation for an alternative economy.
And you get a place like, you know, like Lebanon was a perfect example of Bitcoin could have been there, but it's like the network effect wasn't, you know, timing is everything, right?
You know, you could make an Amazon five years before the time is right for Amazon, and then it just dies.
And I think that's kind of like what we saw with Lebanon is that everybody was still just kind of like whatever with Bitcoin.
And even though there has been a lot of adoption and a lot of use in the country, what could have saved the most people still is just kind of seen as like a toy, as like this, this thing that, you know, people speculate on on the internet because it kind of hadn't reached that sweet spot.
And if that happened in a current hyperinflationary event, then, and we don't have an economic base to have any sort of semblance of information to transmit true information in the economy.
Dude, there's no, there's no telling what we end up with, you know, like you have to have some sort of an exit that's liquid enough for people to move into.
Luckily, I think the U.S. actually has a shocking amount of adoption for Bitcoin and the idea of digital assets in general that major institutions would kind of get over their when they're talking about collapse and just the inability to move funds whatsoever.
Quit Smoking with Fume00:02:53
I think a lot of them would get over their bias.
They're like, oh, it's, I shouldn't, I shouldn't touch this when it's literally the only avenue for them.
But Jesus, who knows, man?
Like, I don't know.
I would like to delay.
I would like to delay.
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So I always feel this way.
Fiscal Responsibility and Morons00:10:00
And I guess I've felt this way for the last 15 years, but I'm like, just give us a few more years.
Give us a few more years to have like, you know, like 30, 40 million really good people who are like libertarians.
And then like, okay, we can brace for this collapse and deal with it.
And I get, you know, as I think we said this on the last podcast that all of us did together, but you know, the silver lining of all of this is like, go read James Grant, The Forgotten Crash.
Like go read the truth is that if we were to just do all of the right things, I really believe as bad as things are right now, that it would be like a couple bad years and we'd be right on track because we are so advanced in terms of like in terms of like true capital and labor saving devices and human knowledge and how much technology we have that if we really just did the right things,
we could liquidate all of the debt.
We could get through this.
The problem is that it's, it's just, it's somewhat unrealistic that we're going to actually do all of those right things in a crisis, given, you know, how we've handled the last several crises.
Yeah, let me let me clarify.
I am not a collapsitarian.
And in fact, there was many libertarians that argued that Joe Biden's presidency was preferable because it's more of a collapsitarian type thing.
And, you know, that works out fine as long as you don't end up in nuclear war.
So now we may find out that we may find out that that thesis was deeply flawed.
And I think that the same argument can be had that defending the dollar's position as the global reserve currency, even though that often entails war, which we all oppose.
But when it comes to hiking interest rates to do it, that's kind of the peaceful path to a semi-glide path in the sense that you're going to have a deep recession, but you maintain the purchasing power.
And for the sake of my friends and family, that is by far my preference.
I do not want to see, you know, hyperinflation that wipes out everyone I know and love, even though I have hard assets that offset that.
Like this, there are things that are way more important than my personal net worth.
And, you know, this, the security and safety of my family is way higher on that list for me.
So I think that people should be very cautious before they root for a hyperinflationary death spiral.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I guess we all kind of more or less agree on that.
All right.
So guy, let me give you, because I know if I don't do this, people will give me shit for this episode.
So let me let me ask you, I saw you tweeted something earlier today.
I got this response from a lot of the Bitcoin community, who is always very fair and reasonable.
And never so accommodating.
And they were upset with me that I did not bring up Bitcoin when I was on Rogan most recently.
I was for the record.
I did, whenever I go in and record with Rogan, I always have like four or five things on my mind that I'd like to talk about.
And it was one of them.
But, you know, then it's just, you know, you sit there and talk to Joe Rogan and fucking, you know, he's, yeah, he, he leads you and you just follow.
And the number one thing I wanted to talk about was the fucking, as anyone could guess who watched the episode was the Russia-Ukraine shit.
I really wanted to get all of that off.
So I got all of that shit off.
And then before you know it, three hours is up.
And I wanted to do a whole thing on inflation and what really causes inflation and really get into all the economic shit, but it just, that didn't really happen.
But you did say something about how there was constantly this talk about how, you know, like decentralization and, you know, kind of all of this stuff was the key.
And that you were saying that, like, obviously, like, well, the answer to this is to separate, you know, the money power from the state, which by the way, Bitcoin people go back and look.
I did when I was on what's it called on Valutainment, I did have a good rant about Bitcoin there.
So give me some credit for that one.
But, but so I get your point.
I only got that one.
I'll put that one together.
Oh, yeah, you would have liked that.
I had a good rant on Bitcoin when I was on there, but it was all about that, basically just saying that the most important thing right now is the separation of money and the state.
But what do you think, like, how, how, what do you think the importance of making that point is?
Or why is it that, you know, I get this still from, I'm, I'm pretty much sold on Bitcoin.
I own some Bitcoin, not that much of it, but I do own a decent amount of it.
I really am big on like the potential of Bitcoin.
I understand that.
But what is it that I'm missing that all these Bitcoin people always tell me where they're like, Bitcoin solves all of this?
You're wasting your time talking about this other shit.
You got it.
You know, Bitcoin is the answer to all these problems.
And at the same time, we're furious at you for not talking about Bitcoin.
You know, like, talk about Bitcoin.
We hate it.
Well, if it solves all this, why do you care if I talk about it or not?
You know what I mean?
So like, what is, I don't know, give it school me, guy.
All right.
All right.
So the first thing is like in the context of like a depression as opposed to hyperinflation, a depression in the context of like actually having fiscal stability of fiscal sense is that Bitcoin forces the hand if it becomes the ultimate saving vehicle.
Like I actually think Bitcoin is a mechanism to if enough if enough value is routed into Bitcoin, is routed into something that sits outside of the authority of monetary instruments.
You know, everything that exists in the current monetary system isn't a thing of authority.
You're just talking about it like right when I got in here before we started the show is that you don't actually own your house.
You know, like at the end of the day, like everything, everything is just a token by authority.
Like the actual money is just, do you have permission to be an institution that says someone has money?
And then you have it if that institution says it.
But it literally just doesn't exist otherwise.
The only way to actually force their hand for fiscal responsibility is to remove their ability to be fiscally irresponsible, is to remove their ability to manipulate and buy their own debt, which means that the value of the thing that they are using cannot, we have to take our value out of it.
You know, we, the only reason fiat works the way it works is because we are pushing it.
We are behind this giant behemoth.
And every single time they want to purchase something, they want resources from the economy.
We are accepting it and we are holding our value in it, which means that we are, we're the only reason it is being held up.
You know, it's like all the people on the plank that holding up the politician, we are that for fiat.
If we divest, if we divest from that, we remove, we just stop pushing it.
We just stop pushing it and it will steamroll and people will have to just kind of exit in droves.
And what will happen is they simply won't be able to buy their own debt.
A bond liquidation will occur and you'll actually have to go back to fiscal responsibility.
They'll have to have the requisite value in order to, which means they will either have to tax everybody at 100% or they have to default.
And if we're using their money, that's not possible.
We're the ones supporting them being able to postpone this indefinitely.
But a depression for them to default, it would actually reallocate everything.
The only reason that all of this misallocation has happened and think about the cultural consequences of this.
You know, like it's so easy to get lost in the kind of chaos of the branches and leaves of everything that's happened because there's like a billion things happening at once, right?
There's like crazy woke culture stuff, there's riots, there's a war, there's all of these things.
But where is the misinformation that's just sending everything into chaotic and into all the different ways that's making this culture of nihilism?
Is it's in the fact that nothing means anything.
You know, when we can't, when the value of everything that we do, like think about, think about what money is.
It is how we value what we do with our lives.
It's how we value our dreams.
It's how we value making one decision for our family or not.
Why do people think that they're in this economy where some like there's this huge portion of people that are just doing things that are non-productive that are destroying resources that are corrupt, but they're wildly successful?
What does that do to the person who is responsible has real values that are aligned with reality and they get punished?
Their life gets harder every single year.
Of course they're nihilist.
And of course it, the culture, degrades over generation after generation because it just squeezes each generation a little bit more.
That they see why the is the rich person, the one that's the worst of us.
Why is it always the person that's closest to the politician?
Why is it the banker, like?
Think about what happened in the real estate bubble, millions of people, absolute morons, just became house flippers absolute morons making millions of dollars.
And somebody who's actually producing something, somebody who's on the ground working an oil well or doing some grueling work, is watching all of their costs go up, is watching the price of a house go up 20 to 30 percent in a few years.
Of course they think everything is meaningless like these things.
Yeah no, that's a great, that's a great point.
Listen, I think there's something really deep and and brilliant about the observation that this is uh, that poisoning the economy poisons everything about our culture, and that when you reward all of, we can't value any who are doing the worst things that you yeah, it does.
Gold vs Paper Manipulation00:14:53
It draws everyone into, you know look, I mean there's so many different like directions.
You could go with that, but whether it's like uh the, the Wall Street speculators making all of this money, how we've drawn, we've sucked all of kind of like the talent uh, into this world of speculating on different, you know, trading paper and that you know you could talk about like only fans or something like that, like just sucking talent into the lowest form of human activity and all of this.
So I completely agree with that and so that's that's a great argument against fiat currency and against this whole system.
But what is it in order, in other words, in order for bitcoin to be the solution For that, is it just that you're saying?
I need to be talking about this on a platform like Rogan so that I convince enough people to what use Bitcoin as much as possible?
Like they have to get this, they have to get that whole eloquent point that you're making there to then use Bitcoin so that then we're outside of this whole system.
Is like that almost like what's necessary for this thing?
Is that why the Bitcoin people are so angry at me for not pushing it more?
That I'm not taking all the energy I have and being like everyone.
Okay, and here's the game plan.
We need to use Bitcoin.
I'm just honestly like to some extent.
That's not a setup.
I'm just like asking if that is the totally get it.
Totally get it.
To an extent, yes, it's about how fast can we get there?
Because monetary, you know, markets, particularly for base layer protocols, you know, the idea of trying to explain language to someone, the value of language to someone that doesn't have a language, like the lower you get in kind of the hierarchy of the critical need of something, the most difficult it is to actually make a shift in it, to make any sort of change.
And the Overton window, the bare, the mental barrier to understand why you should actually think about what your money is and choose one as like make a deliberate choice as to what the best money is is so outside of the normal psyche and like the normal way of thinking about things.
It's just like my government has the money and that's just how money works.
And so money necessarily moves incredibly slow.
You know, historically, you're looking at centuries usually for a monetary shift.
We're literally what you were looking at in the context of Bitcoin is so aggressively fast, it's crazy.
But sharing like the constant repetition of like of kind of cracking that Overton window, like allowing people to think in the frame of what is value and why would I care whether or not I am using, I'm using a token.
I work.
I go to work.
I spend eight hours a day.
I bleed.
I sweat.
I struggle.
I make hard decisions for a piece of paper that somebody makes for free.
Somebody makes for free.
Somebody gets to do this and take all of that work from me without participating whatsoever.
We should never do that.
We should think about what that means.
You should never accept something as valuable that somebody else gets to do by producing no value whatsoever.
The money should be fair.
It should be fair.
The only way the economy works is that every transaction actually has information of value, actually has a weight of some trade-off between not this and for this in order to put that information in the economy.
You know, Hayek talks about.
No, listen, I don't mean to go up.
I just want to give you, I want to give you some mild pushback on that.
Because, okay, so I completely agree with everything you're saying there, but that's not necessarily a different argument than an argument for just sound money in general.
Like, well, it is.
Like, so if there was an argument for why, why Bitcoin rather than saying we should be on a gold standard or we should just have some, because that would achieve the same thing you're saying that, like, yes, the money actually means something.
It's actually tied to something and it's not just created out of thin air.
So is it, is, is the argument that it's just like, well, it's too, which, which, by the way, this, this is the argument for Bitcoin that I'm most like attracted to is the argument that it's like, well, what are we going to do?
Are we going to wait for the powers that be to decide that they're going to have fair money?
Or is there going to be a fair money that we can just enforce on them and pose on them in a sense?
Yes.
That's a that's a really good way to frame it, I think.
But ultimate, gold is what got us here.
Gold is vulnerable.
Gold doesn't work in an age where you're trading paper, like where the economy has to work on something that's faster than physical gold.
Gold loses all of its core monetary properties and monetary security.
You can't validate it.
You can't confirm.
Like it's all a liability.
Again, the money has to be not a liability.
All gold notes are gold liability.
That is why we got here.
If we're reinforcing gold, we have all of the same vulnerabilities that led to Fiat.
We have all of the counterparty risk.
We have all the centralized institutions that have to hold the gold.
It's easily captured.
It's like saying we need a Twitter that says, I love free speech instead of a Twitter that censors when the reason.
We're getting one on Monday.
Have you not been paying attention?
It's coming.
That's the end of all the examples.
I lost 2,000 followers and then gained 500 in like all within the span of a few seconds.
Literally, I could check my Twitter right now.
Every time I've checked it over the last few hours, by the way, it's up and down like crazy amounts.
But anyway, okay.
So I'm sorry, finish your round.
But it's why, like, I don't think any of the gab or the let's make Twitter free speech or whatever.
I don't think those are solutions.
They're band-aids.
They're band-aids on a bullet wound.
It's ultimately, it's ultimately just going to be captured.
And if everything has to, if it only works as long as Elon's in charge and Elon's like super, you know, principled or whatever, well, then it just happens when Elon gets bored, you know, and it gets recaptured again or compromised or compromised, which is so easy.
Well, okay, Clint, do you, do you have a take on this, the age-old or age-old, few years-old libertarian gold versus Bitcoin take?
I don't know if I've ever really gotten your take on this before.
Yeah, I'm certainly pro Bitcoin.
I'm also pro gold and silver and I do own physical.
I think if you get into the paper contract arena, you're dealing with a lot of obfuscation and lies and fuckery.
So I would highly encourage if you're going to have diversification into hard assets, particularly gold and silver, that you've owned physical, because there is just a lot of manipulation in the paper contracts.
So that's one.
Two, I think that Bitcoin is in many ways an advancement technologically on most of the positive properties that exist in the hard, the older hard money sphere of gold and silver.
So I think that it's an advancement in the sense that it's able to transact globally, essentially friction without friction.
There are many arguments as to why it's an improvement.
Additionally, you can produce more gold and silver by mining it, whereas there is a hard cap on the ultimate total production of Bitcoin.
So I think that there's many arguments as to why Bitcoin is superior.
I think that it's just a matter of proving the case out over the next decade or two as to whether or not it can be the dominant cryptocurrency forevermore.
I think from most people's like kind of the layman's perspective, I guess I don't know if I call myself a layman in this field, but amongst people who are Bitcoin people, I'm a layman.
Amongst like regular people, I'm probably not.
You're super advanced.
Yeah, right, right.
But according, like that is, by the way, that's the story of my life.
Amongst the dumb, I'm a genius, but amongst the kind of smart, I'm a retard.
That's basically where I am in the pecking order.
I know.
I am.
But that is really, by the way, it's why I'm successful.
It's because I'm right in that sweet spot.
There are so many people who are way smarter than me who are like not doing nearly as good as me.
And you go, you were just too smart.
Sorry.
You have to be able to convey it to the layman.
And you can.
Exactly.
So it's important.
I'm right.
I'm right where I need to be here.
But so I think that there are.
So the way that God, and this is part of the reason why Guy is the person who's kind of like sold me on this more than anyone else, is because that your pitch of Bitcoin is very appealing to me.
I think one of the problems is that there are several broad pitches about Bitcoin that have appealed to people.
And this is not the one that has been the dominant one.
So I think the idea of this is a way to get rich has appealed to people a lot.
I think the idea that this is a hedge against the system, this is a hedge against inflation.
This is a better hedge against inflation than gold, say, or something like that, has appealed to a lot of people.
And what happens is when, first off, the first one is the one that's probably the most dominant.
This is a way to get rich.
People know people who, you know, or have heard of people who bought Bitcoin when it was a few bucks a Bitcoin and are now, you know, somewhere on a yacht with fucking strippers all around them.
And they're like, wow, that's, that makes me want to get into Bitcoin, you know?
Yeah.
And that works really well when the price is going up.
But when the price comes down, they go, everyone's got to get out of Bitcoin because no one's getting rich anymore.
People are getting poor, you know, like, so that, and then I think, um, I think also the fact that during the last year and a half where inflation, again, not the way we would define it or anyone who actually understands economics would define it, but the way that the layman defines inflation, which is like my gas and groceries are going up, Bitcoin hasn't done very well.
And so I think that's really kind of taken a hit as this idea that it's a hedge against insanity, inflation, the system being bad.
You know what I mean?
Do you get like, do you think there's something to that guy that like those other ways, which is not, by the way, I recognize not the way that you're selling it, but the way that others have been, you know, what's what's attracted them to Bitcoin, that that's taken a real hit in the last year.
Yeah, the inflation hedge one is something I've talked about a good bit recently on the show, just because like when it literally did beautifully in the context of inflation of the money supply, but it's not about CPI, you know, and that's what everybody thinks about when they're talking about inflation is CPI.
And when Bitcoin basically went parabolic this last time is when the monetary, the money printers went full force is when the, and you saw in all asset prices and Bitcoin essentially outperformed is, you know, Bitcoin went from like 6,000 to 69 or something, something like that on the 70,000.
But I think really like the thing to remember with Bitcoin is that it just kind of does its own thing.
Like I think it's correlated right now with a lot of risk assets and like equities and stuff like that, because it's responding to the finance environment, to interest rates and stuff.
Like when interest rates come down, it's been squeezed, right?
Like it's people just sold off risk assets like crazy because it looks like the Fed's getting hawkish and everything and you're going to have a tight economy rather than lose money.
And that is irrespective to the fact that CPI is going crazy is that inflation, quote unquote, from the context of like the everyday man is going wild.
But I think it's just eventually going to break that correlation.
Like Bitcoin kind of has done this a number of times is that it appears to correlate with something and it kind of enters this area where it's treated as a certain thing.
But the thing is, is as its network grows, it's still just 21 million.
Like as it's, and I think we're entering this phase where Bitcoin is actually going to become a really strong medium of exchange for a lot of the world for international commerce.
It's going to start eating like 1%, 2% of international money moving, international capital.
And the funny thing is, is it's it's kind of coming into its own at the exact same time that the traditional rails are becoming just weapons.
They're just becoming political tools to control other people.
So the idea of a radically neutral money is like super critical right now.
And I think it's going to, I think it's going to kind of squeeze into that space.
But as that network grows, I think the liquidity grows.
I think it starts to like become a really solid foundation in a world that is insanely volatile and unstable just across the board.
But one of the things about the hedge against the system is that, you know, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank, like these things, like they're looking crazy scary right now.
Right.
And as banking infrastructure breaks down, as people basically wake up in the morning and they're not sure if they can actually move or access any of their money.
One thing that Bitcoin is a hedge for that people kind of forget is the actual monetary infrastructure is whether or not you can move money or you have access to money because it doesn't run on any of those rails.
Like the entire banking system could go down.
Nobody could log into an ATM, their bank statement, nothing.
I can still log into my wallet and I can do whatever the hell I want.
And things as long as you have internet, I guess, right?
As long as I have the internet.
And I don't even have to have good internet.
I can have crappy internet.
The base network of Bitcoin is designed to be lean enough specifically to make sure that consensus cannot be broken.
And like going back to why I think Bitcoin is the answer and gold is not, like not only do I think gold already failed, gold got us where we are.
And I think it was really kind of, I mean, you could call it all the way back to the 1600s with the like Amsterdam bursts and stuff.
Like Nick Bhattia has a wonderful book called Layered Money.
If you want to listen to the audiobook, I did it.
But I highly recommend that one, Dave, if you have not listened to that one.
I have not.
I'll check it out.
I will read that.
It's about how money became virtual, essentially, about how money became a proxy of money and like kind of the entire history of that from the 1600s onward.
The History of Virtual Money00:02:39
But it's a fascinating breakdown.
He does such a good job.
But he in that context, like gold necessarily, the economy became virtual.
The economy became virtual, which means that gold, we can never go back to physical gold, which means gold can never give us the security and the properties that gold started with, that for 5,000 years, it was able to provide.
But it's because we used it physically.
It's because we can actually verify it with our hands.
And that was the speed of trade.
But when trade became virtual, when trade started happening over the telegraph, when trade started happening over the phone, over the internet, it doesn't do its job anymore.
And I think the things that we need is something that cannot be manipulated with price.
So it cannot be issued, right?
It must have a perfectly provable supply.
And it must be easy to validate.
Like I can't rely on somebody else.
It can't be something that Twitter can validate for me because I can't trust Twitter.
I have to do it myself.
It means I have to be able to run a node.
It has to be on a network that can't be shut down by any government because otherwise it is otherwise it's just going to be shut down as soon as it's threatening any government's sovereignty or bond market or whatever.
It's just going to stop, right?
So it has to be decentralized and secure enough and robust enough as an infrastructure that is completely separate from the current global monetary infrastructure, that it simply can't be stopped.
And that includes all governments.
That includes the U.S. trying to attack it.
And it has to be able to scale.
It has to have a network of layers, a system of layers in order to actually work for direct transfer.
When you put, and it has to be digital.
Sorry.
The last one is it just, it purely must be digital.
I don't think we will ever have a good money unless we figure out how to do it digitally.
If you put those things and you just look at what satisfies that list, I think that's the premise that if we don't fulfill those, we don't get it.
It's the only thing the problem in money in general, like if you look throughout the history of money, which is something I am like fairly well read on, is that what you had for a long time was that money, money was basically created by like notes, right, from different banks that were like, you know, holding the hard assets.
And so there'd be a note that was like, this is how paper money was created, basically, was that there'd be some bank that was holding mostly gold and silver and stuff like that, but it could be other hard assets.
And they would write you a note that's like, hey, this is Jim's bank saying like he has this here.
And then so you could trade that.
Central Bank Digital Currency Risks00:08:02
And one of the big problems they had is that it, well, if you were within a little radius of area where people knew who Jim's bank was, that was great.
But if you traveled outside of that, they were like, who the fuck is Jim?
Who the fuck is Jim's bank?
And so it does seem like the internet is like the obvious solution for that.
Like if we had a true marketplace of money, that that is what would win out.
So I listen, I'm very sympathetic to that message.
I think it's a great pitch.
I also think that people who love Bitcoin should really pay attention to the fact that I'm having this pitch on my show right now.
And this is, okay, I didn't say it on Rogan, but it's right after I'm getting the Rogan bump.
So all the people who heard me there are hearing it here.
And so fucking leave me alone and be nice to me on Twitter.
That's never going to happen.
I just want you to know it's never going to happen.
They're all assholes.
No, I know.
They're really goddamn the most fucking aggressive motherfuckers who still kind of like me, but are so mean to me.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Anyway, so switching now to the flip side of this, as we mentioned before, and this is where I want to bring Clinton, because I think you specialize a little bit more on the flip side of this.
So one of the things that I thought was really interesting that went kind of unremarked about my last Rogan podcast.
I don't know how many, the show is very long.
I don't know if you guys listen to the whole thing, but I didn't bring this up.
Joe actually brought this up and just said at one point, which I thought was so fucking cool that he goes, like he said, you know, the scariest goddamn thing is this central bank digital currency that they're trying to push right now.
He's like, that's so goddamn fucked up.
The idea that there would be, like the government, central bank, is going to create a digital currency because it's like all the benefits of what you're talking about become, it's so like the polar opposite, all the evil of like now the bank wants you to not be able to hold anything that you can't even hold fiat in in physical form.
They want to have digital access to what you can hold.
And look, as we already saw up in Canada in the trucker protests oh, that would be really easy to just turn that off.
So, no matter where you think you are in this pecking order or how much you go, like well, i'm comfortable because I got some money in the bank it's like well, check it again, you got nothing there right now.
So much meat did you buy this month?
Yeah well, i'm not worried about that.
I don't really buy uh weed, but I am concerned about safe oh meat.
Oh yes, that's a good meat.
That's what's your carbon?
What's your carbon allocation?
For I buy a lot of meat.
Really have money yeah um, so this does seem to be like a major concern.
I know this is something you've talked about a lot, Clint.
So if anything, you want to uh, jump off on that oh, my god uh, so much.
Um, first off, let me let me go back to the prior topic and just explain briefly why I think that bitcoin has not proven itself to be a great uh hedge against cpi or or inflation over the past nine months.
It's just, it's very simple really.
It's just strictly because there is so much leverage in this market and people have been buying on margin to acquire additional bitcoin that, because of the coinbases and all these other uh, you know, brokerage accounts that allow people to purchase and trade on leverage, that you see a bunch of people that are getting washed out.
So it's, it's actually healthy.
I think that what you want to see is people who are using bitcoin for the purpose that that we would prefer that they use it for, to be the ones that are still holding it at the end of the day, and the the speculators, to get wiped out because they purchased on leverage and now they have margin calls, which is forcing them to liquidate when they shouldn't be liquidating, and I think that that's that's actually preferable.
So now, moving on to central bank digital currency, that's an interesting point.
Okay yeah I, I think that that the uh, the Cbdc is the inevitable conclusion of the death of global fiat, and and it's because all of the same mechanisms for control that the central banks, as well as the governments, are able to maintain over us through the fiat system migrates perfectly and improves upon itself by migrating to a central bank digital currency, which is why it has to be the ultimate red line of red lines.
It cannot be allowed to occur in at least our country.
I mean, it's going to happen in many, many nations worldwide.
Uh, China already has its social credit score and it is already very rapidly developing its own central bank digital currency.
The?
U.s.
Has a white paper on it.
Uh Biden has issued executive orders demanding that its development be uh expedited, And they are doing So.
You have Christine Lagarde over in Europe that's talking about it openly.
I mean, this is not in the conspiracy theory realm any longer.
This is a real thing that is happening and it is happening for a good reason.
The central banks of the world realize that they are insolvent.
They have no choice but to migrate to something else.
They have to reset.
They have to.
That's what the great reset really is at the end of the day.
The World Economic Forum and the Great Reset language.
What I think it ultimately is, is a realization that we have lived off of credit for so long and that this house of cards is coming down.
And if they're going to maintain their ability to keep a stranglehold on power, they have only one pathway.
And that pathway is the central bank's digital currency.
And that is why people like Guy and all of the rabid Bitcoin Maxis out there are constantly advocating on behalf of Bitcoin is because I think they recognize it more deeply than the average person because they understand all of the positives that come from a decentralized currency and they see the inverse of that and they're scared and they should be.
And I am too.
And I hope that people use this not as a reason for nihilism, but rather as a reason for optimism and action to actually start to work on this stuff to create the pathways that are secondary from their capacity for control because it's vital.
Well, the argument would be that we're at a fork in the road where we're going to digital currency one way or the other.
And which one do you want to go to?
Do you want to go to like a free decentralized digital currency or a government-controlled digital currency?
And I out of those two options, I am very clear about what I would prefer.
All right, let's transition because we have to kind of talk about this because I think this is one of the big developments in the global economy since last time the three of us spoke with Robbie, who wasn't being such a Jew that time.
I was here.
He was still being a Jew, but not like such a Jew.
All right.
So what the, and we can get into a couple things off of this, but there's been a real push in this kind of like climate change crackdown of economic activity.
Climate Lockdowns and NATO00:15:04
That is, I got to say, even to me, as someone who I think was one of the bigger people who really predicted this.
I mean, I was literally doing podcasts in March of 2020, going, look, here's the end game of COVID: is that we're going to come out of COVID.
This will roll back and it will be climate lockdowns, climate restrictions with all piggybacking off of all of the precedents set by COVID.
And that in March of 2020, I was like, I think this is one of the biggest dangers is that if this is justified for a fucking upper respiratory virus, then, oh my God, this is so justified for the extinction of all humanity and stuff.
And climate change has become this thing that it really kind of, okay, there was this thing called global warming when I was a kid that was like, I don't know, it was something that like fucking bleeding heart lefties talked about, you know?
And they'd say the science had proven this.
And then they were like, oh, well, we can't really call it global warming anymore.
We're going to call it climate change.
And then it was just kind of like this thing that, I don't know, was it was like one of the talking points of Democrats, Democratic politicians for a while.
And then it was like, you know, you're not allowed to question this or you're a denier.
We all have to accept that this is true.
But it still seemed very like low on the list of what the absolute worst things that the government was doing was, you know?
And then AOC came out in like, what was it, 2018 or 2019 with like this Green New Deal.
And it almost just seemed like something mamak still.
Like, aha, you idiot.
This would destroy Western civilization.
You know, are you seriously proposing this, you fucking retard?
This would mean we're all a third world country.
Like, yeah, this will never happen.
But now that really did kind of accelerate in a way, she kind of pushed the Overton window and her whole camp pushed the Overton window to a point where now, even though it's not quite the Green New Deal that she was proposing, you are going like, oh, shit.
There's actually all of these European countries who are adopting these policies.
California, another European country who unfortunately happens to be located in the United States of America, has like signed on to in 2030, you cannot sell any more, you know, cars that run on fossil fuels and all this shit.
And this actually seems to be like, wow, this is, you know, short of nuclear war with Russia, you know, or nuclear war with China.
This is almost like the most pressing issue, that it's an actual war on modern economies.
There's actually like all of these people who are pushing these policies that say, no, I don't think you can be a first world country rather than a third world country.
You must be a third world country.
I mean, I know that's like a kind of like, I don't know, a crass way to put it, but that really is exactly what they're saying if you look into the details.
So Clint, why don't you, whatever you think about it?
Well, the irony being that it is the first world countries that have the capacity to make these changes without starving to death.
It's the third world countries, which they are also forcing upon them in order to have relationships with the IMF and the World Bank.
This is the same way the Bitcoin Maxis are sitting there watching your entire three hour Joe Rogan experience episode and going, when's he going to bring up?
When's he going to bring up Bitcoin?
The Clint Russells of the world are sitting there going, when's he going to bring up ESG?
And I'm just telling you, this is all a product of ESG.
I actually warned about this at Porkfest.
I couldn't believe it.
I rewatched my speech at Porkfest from four months ago and I actually referenced Nordstream in it.
And the reason I referenced it is because I understand that ESG and the push for ESG, environmental, social, and governance to try and limit carbon, which ultimately means limiting modern economics and getting away from the current capacity for energy production is going to create geopolitical turmoil that is unpredictable in ways that can be extraordinarily catastrophic.
And that's what we're witnessing today.
You had Germany about a decade ago says we're going to, because of Agenda 2021, as well as Agenda 2030, which are plans and proposals that were pushed through the United Nations and then propagated by the World Economic Forum.
All of this sounds like conspiracy theory stuff.
It's not.
I can prove it.
They write it all out.
It's all true.
And that's what they're doing.
And because Germany decided to get off of nuclear power, they decided they were going to ban all nuclear power, including even in the teeth of a recession, even with the Ukraine and Russia war, they still proceeded with their plans to migrate off of nuclear and shut down their final plant plants.
They then were completely reliant because wind and solar do not give them enough energy to keep their people alive.
What's more important than that?
If you run a country to keep your people warm during winter and food on the table, schools are handing out blankets instead of turning on the heat.
It's absolutely insane.
So now you have this hot point, this incredibly vital lifeline to this entire nation, not to mention an entire continent of Europe.
And now it blows up.
And now you have all the catalysts you could possibly want for justifiable fury if you're able to convince them that this was done by Vladimir Putin.
Now, anyone with a thinking brain is looking at this going, well, this is clearly either the UK or the CIA that most likely did this because there's no benefit to Russia to do this.
It's completely counter to their leverage point.
It removes their leverage.
I mean, if you have a functioning pipeline, then you can promise, okay, we'll turn back on supply.
This is the negotiation process.
Now that's gone.
Now you only have one pathway and you have angry, starving, cold people that are going to be wanting payback for whoever they think is responsible.
So all of this, I know I'm tying together a lot of disparate points, but this is really important stuff.
I think people really got to understand this, man.
They're saying now, and this isn't like, I'm not saying they're saying like Alex Jones is saying this.
I'm saying like people who really like know what the fuck they're talking about.
Not that Alex Jones doesn't on some issues know what he's talking about.
On some, he's pretty out there.
But I'm saying I'm not people who aren't saying intergalactic beings are creating this or like economic experts are saying that firewood is going to be the new gold this winter in Germany.
In Germany.
It's already the richest country in Europe.
This is going, this is what they're looking at this winter.
And there was a great podcast just the other day that came out on the Mises podcast that Jeff Dice and Bob Murphy host.
And they had Daniel McAdams on, who's, by the way, all three of those guys are phenomenal.
Everyone should check out all of them.
And Daniel McAdams made a really good point.
He was talking, he was saying, you know, like, first off, all the points that you would make that he goes, well, why would Russia do this?
You know, they could have just shut it off from their end.
They're trying to blame them.
But he made two other points that I thought were really interesting that people should consider.
There's like, if you were going to say that Russia blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, it was like, number one, wouldn't that be an epic failure by NATO?
That NATO, who's justified as this defensive alliance against Russia.
Well, so you're saying Russia was able to get into the Baltic seas, the NATO seas, and commit this like, you know, and the whole purpose of NATO is like, well, we're here that if you attack a NATO country, then we will defend and we will do all this.
It's like, okay, so for all that shit, all the money we've spent on NATO over all these years, you still didn't stop Russia from committing this act of fucking economic terrorism against not even like bothered.
Yeah, right, right.
And Judge, you just seem to go like, well, we assume it's them.
Anyway, we're going to continue as proceed.
Like that doesn't seem right.
And then number two, he was like, if Russia did this, why would they be lying and saying they didn't?
Like if Russia did this, then the point, the point would be to let you know we did this.
Like Osama bin Laden wouldn't, despite what some 9-11 truthers will tell you, this isn't true.
He didn't deny doing 9-11.
He bragged about doing 9-11.
And he was, you wouldn't do 9-11 and then go, I have no idea what you're talking about, America.
I love America.
I would never attack them.
You would commit 9-11 and then go, yeah, it's because of all these reasons.
And this is why this happened to you.
You know what I mean?
So it's just so bizarre to like say no sense.
It makes no sense at all.
On the opposite, you have Victoria Newland and Joe Biden bragging seven months ago, eight months ago, that they're going to bring an end to Nord Stream one way or the other.
I mean, and now, and now it's this completely different wink wink, you know.
Let's say with the Joe Biden one, and even kind of with the Victoria Newland clip, it's not look, it's not proof.
Like there are some, it does sound like with Joe Biden that he's kind of saying, now we'll strong arm them into shutting this down.
And they did, by the way, they did strong arm Germany into shutting down the pipeline in terms of they weren't taking any more of the natural gas.
However, it was still in a position where they could have changed their mind.
And going into this dark winter for Germany, it was tremendous leverage for Russia.
And so it doesn't, it doesn't make sense.
The only thing that makes sense, the only people who would benefit from this would be an enemy of Russia, you know, to do this.
However, whoever you think actually did this, if we're just on this podcast talking about like the state of the economy in Western civilization, this is a huge blow, a huge blow.
I mean, at this point now, it seems pretty obvious that, look, Germany, it seems highly unlikely.
I don't even know.
I don't know.
I don't have the technical expertise to know this.
I don't know if they could back off of their nuclear ban to like actually get this up and running by this winter.
But it seems like now they really have no other option and they've embraced this insane, like green energy policies.
And we're on the precipice now.
And this has happened in a lot of countries, but we're really about to see like, oh, it's not just like, oh, how I was mocking AOC back just three, four years ago and going, oh, you idiot, this policy that you're proposing would mean 100 million people dying in this country.
And now you're like, oh, shit, this is actually going through.
That's what a lot of people are going to die over this if something drastic doesn't change.
That's what I wanted to drive home is that this is no longer like, okay, don't water your lawn when the sun's out.
This isn't, hey, we're going to give you an additional trash bin so that you can recycle.
And that doesn't cause too much.
I mean, it makes you feel better.
It probably doesn't save the world or the environment in any significant fashion.
However, it's a minor inconvenience.
We are talking cataclysmic inconvenience, as in you could freeze to death this winter.
And what's wild about it is that in many of these nations, the populace has voted in this direction.
They have voted for politicians that have promised to migrate off of nuclear power and to go for solar and blah, And I just really want people to realize that there are real world cataclysmic consequences that will come from this greening of the economy.
They are willing to sacrifice the people in the present for the hypothetical savior of the future.
And it's going to get very, very bad.
And unfortunately, because of the ESG aspect of this, you have the richest money managers on earth, including BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, all of the biggest guys out there, tens and tens of trillions.
By most estimates, it's north of $40 trillion that's under management right now.
We're talking more than the GDP of America that is specifically targeting investments that will only be placed if they go along with ESG guidance.
ESG guidance meaning carbon reduction across the board.
That is an anti-human push, and it is being done from the highest levels of power.
And until people actually wrap their head around it and understand who the enemies of the people are, you know, you had Trump popularized it as well as Michael Malice, as well as yourself, when it came to the media being the, or the, you know, the news reporters being the enemies of the people.
Well, we got a whole nother problem.
And this is why I've made it my mission to get the libertarians on the right side of history with this one, because our knee-jerk reaction is to defend capitalism and to defend capitalists.
What I want people to really realize is that these are crony capitalists at their core.
Their entire mechanism for financial wealth is via central banks and governments that give them sweetheart deals.
These are not our friends.
They are our enemies.
Yeah, for sure.
We should never be defending.
At very fancy, we should never be defending capitalists.
We should be defending liberty, you know, but never because capitalists under modern connotation are just people like in bed with the government, at least at the highest levels, for sure.
Guy, do you have any thoughts on any of this stuff?
Oh, yeah, for sure.
Particularly because, you know, Bitcoin is kind of a, it's kind of been become a political punching bag for the ESG narrative because Bitcoin uses lots of energy.
Well, that energy, that energy is used to secure Bitcoin from corruption and manipulation.
And if they didn't corrupt and manipulate all the money, we wouldn't need it.
The energy is there to protect us from you, you corrupt sex of shit.
But the interesting thing about the entire ESG, you know, the reason Vanguard and BlackRock have all of this money is because of this weird passive investing thing that has happened over the past three, four decades, maybe.
And it's because money is no longer money, right?
Is because it's they even say it is, you know, we're going to ruin the money.
We're going to inflate the money so that you have to quote unquote invest.
Well, what does that mean?
Does that mean that the everyday person becomes an investor?
No, nobody's got time for that crap.
Nobody's got time to have a job and learn their own skill and deal with their family and then also figure out how to do P ⁇ E ratios.
And I'm going to be a professional investor.
It's retarded.
Flared Methane and Bitcoin Needs00:10:05
You're asking them to do a professional job, specialize twice that first you're going to have to earn all of your money and then you're going to have to learn an entire entirely new profession to keep all of your money.
And so you're requiring them to earn it twice for it to be persistent.
So what happens?
You have this passive investment where everybody just puts it into some index and suddenly everything just increasingly centralizes.
And then as you have these deleveraging events and these massive everybody's, everybody's over leveraged and you have these collapses.
Well, what happens?
The only way to actually manage the poisonous liability is to wrap it up into a liability that's not quite as poisonous yet.
So all you, the only thing you do, you see it with the banks, like go back to like 2000 or 2001 and like the number of banks and then watch them consolidate.
And they went from like, you know, it's like 120 banks to like four, four or five major banks today.
And we've seen the exact same thing in the regards of like BlackRock and Vanguard is that it just constant, constant consolidation.
All of this is about financing.
All of it.
The control, the means of pushing ESG, the way that they make sure that only the ESG, if you, if you are beneficial, if you play the ESG game, you get preferential treatment to the new money.
You get preferential treatment to what we issue.
It is literally because of the money.
It is all financing that allows this to happen because bank people will just be stripped from the economy.
We can't finance.
I mean, we can't pay for the previous supply for the previous liability if we can't finance the next supply.
We went from an economy that was had savings, bought supply and then sold it.
And then the profit paid for the next supply.
And now we switch to an economy that finances the supply and then the sales pay off the previous finance so that you can finance the next one to get new supply.
We're perpetually catching up back to zero rather than perpetually staying ahead of zero.
And note that he just defined a Ponzi scheme via financial terms, but that's what this is.
But that because of that, financing rules everything.
We can't, we can't have economic value outside of the access to new capital.
And the new capital is just debt.
It's just issued, which means it's entirely politically captured, which means that everybody has to buy the ESG game.
If you attack them at the financing, then banks and these institutions have to make decisions regardless of it.
If the financing falls apart, this is another, I hate to be a broken record, but Bitcoin fixes this, is that you undermine their ability to control the interest rates and issue new money because it undermines their ability to push where all of the investment goes.
People will have to like aggressively against all of this.
They'll still have to say, I'm sorry, but we're entirely going to go out of business if we don't invest properly.
And then there's another interesting element about Bitcoin that I love that's super underappreciated is I think it's actually going to lead to an energy revolution is because there's this, it's referred to as the energy buyer of last resort.
If you're an energy producer, plugging into the grid is a pain in the butt.
Trying to find an energy source is a horrible pain.
Like it's an incredibly elaborate and costly process to get the financing, to go find it, to build it out.
And then most of the cost is often in figuring out how to get the energy that you're producing to people.
You can sell it to Bitcoin immediately.
Doesn't matter where you are in the world.
Doesn't matter what time of day it is.
You can go park.
You can make a dam in the most northern parts of Canada out in the wilderness that has nothing.
And you can set up a cheap $40 satellite and you can sell all of your energy to Bitcoin.
And Bitcoin will finance that for you.
It will finance new infrastructure.
And we're seeing this.
One of the crazy things is we're watching methane caps, like burned off, flared off methane.
There's enough flared off methane, I think, just in just in Iran that could or Iran that, yeah, I think it is, that could actually double the amount of energy going to Bitcoin mining.
And it would actually be completely carbon negative.
I mean, I almost kind of hate that because I don't think I don't even like benefiting the narrative, you know?
But what's funny is that like Exxon is actually using that right now in like the kind of like north Midwest area.
I can't remember exactly what state it is, but they're doing this specifically to meet the ESG requirements because they're capping all of their flared methane and they're actually making it profitable.
Energy that's totally unusable.
It's not profitable to put it into a pipeline.
It's not enough.
And you, you can't, you know, no other energy source that's actually, Actually, I mean, energy use that's actually profitable can just happen whenever you just happen to want to turn it on.
You can't just like cut it off in the middle of the day.
Like, if you're running Netflix servers, you can't just be like, oh, well, it's not quite working for us right now.
So we're going to cut them off.
And then like your Netflix goes off at six o'clock at night.
No, that's never going to work.
But you can do that with Bitcoin.
Bitcoin doesn't care.
Bitcoin will pay for your energy no matter when you are, no matter where you are.
Like, and all you have to do is have be able to see the clear night sky.
And that actually has enabled, we're seeing financing across really interesting projects that are happening in like Africa and things that are actually being funded because miners can just come in, set up shop in a matter of days, park a few crates chock full of miners, and they can get funding instantly without the state, without like even in place of that.
And it's a very, very interesting dynamic that I'm excited to see kind of like play out because the grid is no longer the determining factor.
The grid, which is obviously politically controlled, you know, it's always essentially state run is no longer how you get paid for producing energy.
So that's a way to rally.
That's very interesting.
All right.
Let me ask both of you guys because we're coming up at the end of the show here.
So I want to go to each of you and tell me, because obviously we've kind of painted a grim picture to some degree, which I think is fair given the times that we're living in.
So I'm going to go to you guy first and then to Clint.
So what do you think when you say, and I'm look, I'm intrigued and I want to buy into this.
So when you say Bitcoin fixes this, as so many of your people tweet at me every single day, it fixes it.
It fixes it.
Okay.
So what?
Because Bitcoin exists and this shit still ain't fixed.
So what do we need for Bitcoin to actually fix this?
Is it just that we need more people to fucking adopt Bitcoin and say, this is what I'm going to do in as much as I can?
Like I just bought a house.
I couldn't have bought that in Bitcoin.
But there's probably a lot of other things that I could have bought in Bitcoin that I don't.
So is that what I need to do?
And do more people just need to kind of like use Bitcoin transactionally for whatever we can purchase with Bitcoin?
To some degree, yes.
I would say right now, play the Gresham's Law game is save in Bitcoin.
Save in Bitcoin.
So don't spend my Bitcoin.
Do not backstop fiat with your value.
That's what saving it is.
It's giving fiat long-term value.
Dump your fiat immediately, save in Bitcoin.
So don't, you're not even saying transaction in Bitcoin.
Transact in Bitcoin when you need it and when it makes sense and if you can.
I always, but to be clear, you're saying I should hold my Bitcoin and fucking spend my dollars.
Yeah.
Huh.
Okay.
Interesting.
Play the monetary law, you know, hold the good money.
What is the goal?
But is the goal to convince more people to do that then?
Like, what extent?
Where is it that everyone who's angry at me from Bitcoin comes in?
What am I supposed to be doing?
I'm supposed to be convincing more people to buy and hold Bitcoin while spending their fiat.
You talk.
So you mentioned because if I don't, if there's nothing I can do about this other than what you're telling me to do with my own personal finances, fine.
But then everyone on Bitcoin Twitter stop fucking giving me shit for this.
You know what I mean?
Like, fine, fine.
I get it.
But if there's something obvious, like, what is the, is that, because I actually think that's kind of interesting to buy Bitcoin and hold it and then transact in fiat, like when you're dumping dumb money on bullshit, but it's not as if there, if there's some business that also takes Bitcoin, I really should be trading in this, or is it just saying like, hold this, but then how do we ever get to a point where there's actually enough businesses who are trading in Bitcoin that this is a viable currency?
That this could be something.
It naturally happens.
The transition, I think, and the monetary path, I mean, that's that's a whole discussion in and of itself, but it has to kind of be a foundation of value first until it's liquid enough and the infrastructure is built out for it to be a medium of exchange.
And then when it becomes the most liquid thing in the economy, then it can become a unit of account because it's, it's the totem, right?
That necessitates it's the highest liquid, the most liquid thing.
Um, that's, that's how that's why it becomes the thing to price everything in.
Deleveraging as a Healthy Event00:09:55
Um, so there's a very long transition, but I think it's just that, you know, you talk about like, you know, Ukraine and Russia, like Russia and avoiding nuclear war is the most important thing right now.
Bitcoiners just feel that Bitcoin is the most important thing because it's the one thing that attacks the roots of all of this.
Yeah.
You know, I agree with that.
Well, I get that.
I think, I think attacks a long time to make this transition, but the more people are aware of it and the more people kind of move toward it, the more and more, the more blocks we're pulling out of the foundation of this chaos.
Okay, so that I, I, the separation of money and the state, I believe is what like, I think the connection of money and the state is what leads to all of these problems.
So I'm very sympathetic to that argument.
I do think that nuclear war is the biggest, you know, issue because, you know, that happens.
It doesn't really matter about any of this other shit if there is a nuclear war that goes off.
But okay, so that's your Clint.
What would you say is for all this shit that we're talking about, whether it's, you know, threat of nuclear war, the threat of this climate insanity, inflation and the kind of downturn in the business cycle, what makes you, you know, it like you mentioned before, talking about this ESG shit and talking about all of this, is it just that people need to wake up to push back against this shit?
Or what do you think is the most important thing right now?
Yeah, I mean, this is, this is why I gave you no flack for not bringing up ESGion Rogan is because I think you focused on the most important thing.
The most important thing is preventing World War III.
From there, we have a litany of other options that we can focus on.
So pretty long list these days.
It is unfortunately a very long list, but that is, you know, A with a bullet, pun intended.
So let's make sure we avoid that.
From there, I think that just what we're all doing here is, you know, an education process, getting people more informed as to not just the risks they face, but also some of the solutions they're in.
I mean, if you were a liberty lockdown listener, you know, I was going contrary to most libertarian advice and saying that going toward to cash as of late last year was the most advisable thing you could do.
And everyone lost their mind because they're like, they're like, you're an Austrian who's saying that inflation and the death of fiat is inevitable, and yet you're telling me to go into fiat.
Are you, have you lost it?
And it's just simply because as my background being a mortgage lender, I understand the leverage that exists within the system and a deleveraging environment, even with an inflation that's, it seems counterintuitive to have both of these things at the same time, but we do.
That's that's the ultimate outcome.
And now we're dealing with both.
We have a stagflationary economy and it's going to be very, very challenging.
So, I hope that most of my listeners that either sold their houses over the past six months or went to cash a year ago are now able to take advantage of depressed asset prices and are able to capitalize on that.
So, I think that's one thing is that because of our understanding of economics on a really deep level, I think that we're able to weather this better than most.
So, my job and my belief is that bringing more people into our camp that understand this on a deeper level will give the people that believe in liberty and value human freedom an opportunity to survive and thrive, whatever may come.
So, that's that's my preference.
That's why I remain optimistic.
And ultimately, as I said earlier, I think that a deleveraging event is healthy.
It's what the economy requires.
It will wipe out so much of the malinvestment that's occurred when it comes to green energy.
Green energy is tremendously cost-ineffective.
If it were cost-effective, you wouldn't need all of this supplemental government income or just printed money that goes to all of these projects.
So, this stuff is going to fail and it should fail.
And I think that that puts us on a more solid foundation by which we can build a more prosperous, fair economic model.
And that's my hope.
And I think that it's going to be very challenging, but with the right mindset and the right people that actually value human liberty, giving some instruction as to how we might weather this storm, I think that we will come out the other side much better.
That's assuming we avoid World War III.
Yeah, I think I'll just end on saying that I do think that this kind of like this populist energy, which has manifested itself in not very productive ways at times, I think Donald Trump's an example of that.
I don't know about this new Italian prime minister or stuff like that, but I hear like Joe Rogan, the biggest host of any show, saying that the biggest threat is like a central bank digital currency.
And like the fact that it's even on people's minds on such a level, you go, look, I think we're winning.
I think the best hope we have is that there's such a popular uprising against, say, like, you know, Germany, you know, starving through this winter.
You go, what the fuck?
We all know we're past the point of technology where anyone has to worry about starving through the winter.
Like, that's just insane.
And if there's enough of a pushback against that, I think that as we've seen many times throughout history, the powers that be will back down, accept their fate, at least to some degree.
Not say they'll accept their fate as then they're hung in the streets, but they'll accept at least like shit.
We need to go in these two directions of inflationary, you know, meltdown and we move to a digital central bank currency or kind of like raise interest rates and there's a big kind of depression that we recover from ultimately.
I think hopefully they'll go in the better direction.
So anyway, listen, this was great.
We're going to do this.
Say something because you go ahead, guy.
Okay, but final word and then we got to get out of here.
Go ahead.
I'll make it quick.
You actually said it earlier on in the show is that we are moving aggressively forward one way or the other.
Yeah.
And we are moving into a CBDC world that allows them to have full micromanaging control over the financing, full control over the ESG narrative and how we spend and where we spend, full control over who we can talk to and what we can say, full control over what wars we fund and how quickly and aggressively we go into them.
Or we go to digital, we go Bitcoin.
And the more and more, every single time we take a little value out of the drive to the end game of fiat and we put it into Bitcoin, we put it into something we own.
We put it into something that they can't control that we can move without their permission, the harder and harder as an entire, as a species network, the harder we are pressing the brakes on all of that shit.
And we need critical mass.
We need 5% of the people to say, nah, I'm not doing it.
It is an economic foundation to halt their ability to move the value in the way they want to move it.
I think Bitcoin is the foundation of that anti-authoritarian movement.
I think it can be the base that allows us to put economic teeth behind our political goals.
And I think we choose CBDC or we choose Bitcoin.
And I don't think that's a hard choice.
Yeah.
Well, between those two choices, it's a very easy choice for me.
All right.
Listen, thank you guys so much.
We're going to do this again sooner than the last time since.
We don't have a choice.
The economy is going to break down.
Or we will get nuked, in which case we will never do this again.
So it's one of those two options.
Okay.
So guys, just let people know where they can check out your stuff.
Clint, go ahead.
Yeah.
Big, big things happening this month.
I've been scheduling and I've had to reschedule three times now with Alex Jones to come on Liberty Lockdown.
So that'll be huge.
It is going to happen.
I also, later in this month, I have Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who's the Surgeon General of Florida and one of the few doctors I've actually increased my respect of over the past two years.
So that'll be a great interview.
So I hope people will subscribe.
Liberty Lockdown on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, all over the place.
And last but not least, at Liberty Lockpod on Twitter, replace all those bots that I lost today.
Thank you so much for having me today.
Yeah, we all lost some.
We all lost some bots.
All right, Guy, where can people find you?
Yeah.
The show is Bitcoin Audible and I also have the other Shitcoin Insider that we update from time to time.
Fun stuff over there.
But Bitcoin Audible, actually, a lot of what I've been covering and talking about lately is there's some really exciting new technological infrastructure.
I think we're going to have social media as a protocol instead of social media as a platform very soon.
There's a lot happening on that front.
And I've been covering that because I think, and I actually think Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, the ability to do micropayments is kind of key to making that infrastructure monetizable.
But there's really fascinating stuff.
And I've been covering a lot of economics and macro finance just because of what's going on.
But yeah, we've been, I've been just trying to pound out episodes, interviews, reads, all of it.
So check out Bitcoin Audible if you want to kind of dig into the Bitcoin perspective on all of it.
Hell yeah.
Well, listen, I highly recommend everyone listening.
Please go check out both of these guys and go subscribe to their shows and listen to all their stuff.