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Bitcoin 2024 had a lot of twists and turns and huge speeches, even for those not into the world of blockchain (I’m still trying to wrap my head around it). Edward Snowden provided a dire warning for the US, Trump delivered a shocking speech about crypto, RFK gave a great speech, and I spoke with Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski! Enjoy. Remember to subscribe.
Check out my social medias and more - https://linktr.ee/RussellBrand
Hello you Awakening Wonders there on Spotify, Apple, Stinkwhistle, Gurgledot, or wherever you download your podcasts these days to remain at least peripherally connected to some tendril of truth in a bewildering miasma of lies and propaganda.
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Now please enjoy this episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand.
Thanks.
Hello there you awakening wonders Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand where we are talking about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and how decentralized economic models might be a significant part of liberty and freedom in so much as anything that's by able to bypass corrupt institutions affords us greater opportunities for interpersonal transaction
And I suppose parallel economies.
I learned a lot about Bitcoin while I was there at that conference.
First of all, I want to show you a little bit of Donald Trump's speech.
A lot of people thought he would go further, making some of the Federal Reserve be held in Bitcoin.
But nevertheless, is it important just to see speakers of that magnitude and gravitas appearing at a conference for something that just a few years ago was a very Marginal, peripheral and niche subject.
Let's start off by looking at Donald Trump.
We'll be on YouTube for the first 15 minutes but then we'll be exclusively available on Rumble simply because we are part of the set of parallel bodies This afternoon I'm laying out my plan to ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world.
Let's have a look at Donald Trump first of all and see if what he said there was an indication
that cryptocurrency is indeed the future.
This afternoon I'm laying out my plan to ensure that the United States will be the crypto
capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world and we'll get it done.
If crypto is going to define the future I want to be mined, minted and made in the USA
It's going to be.
It's not going to be made anywhere else.
And if Bitcoin is going to the moon, as we say, it's going to the moon, I want America to be the nation that leads the way.
And that's what's going to happen.
No, you're going to be very happy with me.
You're going to be so happy.
You're going to say, he's the greatest guy.
That's why I'm proud to be the first major party nominee in American history to accept donations in Bitcoin and crypto.
For three and a half years, the current administration has waged a war on crypto and Bitcoin like nobody's ever seen before.
For those who work in this industry, they target your banks, they choke off your financial services.
Have people seen that?
Yes?
Yeah, they have.
Plenty of hands up.
They block ordinary Americans from transferring money to your exchanges.
They slander you.
They slander you as criminals, but that happened to me too because I said the election was rigged.
He said the election was rigged.
He should spend the rest of his life in jail for making that statement.
Of course, they say it about us and it's okay, right?
No.
And by the way, we're doing very well on the election.
You know, we lost a candidate recently.
Rookie Joe Biden.
And I thought, we lost this wonderful person, and it's actually a terrible human being if you want to know the truth, so don't feel sad.
The problem is that Kamala is worse than Joe, is worse.
She's a radical left lunatic, defund the police, all of the different things, and so far we're doing, she's got a little honeymoon going on right now, but when people hear about her, and she's against crypto by the way, and she's against it very big, so I just want to let you know, you gotta get out.
You gotta get out and vote.
It should be no surprise that these same totalitarians are hell-bent on crushing crypto and obliterating, and that's what they want to do, and that's what they are stated.
Well, I mean, they're there right now.
You have the SEC, you know what they're doing, obliterating Bitcoin.
The reason could not be more clear because Bitcoin stands for freedom, sovereignty, and independence from government coercion and control.
I pledge to the Bitcoin community that the day I take the oath of office, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris's anti-crypto crusade will be over.
It will end.
It'll be done.
It'll be done.
They're going to keep their hands off crypto.
They're going to let it grow.
We're going to let it grow.
On day one, I will fire Gary Gensler and appoint a new SEC chairman.
I didn't know he was that unpopular.
Thank you.
Well, I didn't know he was that unpopular.
Let me say it again.
On day one, I will fire Gary Gensler.
Whoa!
APPLAUSE I will appoint a new SEC chairman who believes America
should build the future, not block the future, which is what they're doing.
Thank you.
And no longer will your government sit by and watch as Bitcoin jobs and businesses flee to other countries because America's laws are too unclear and too tough and too angry and too stiff.
We will keep Each and every Bitcoin job in the United States of America.
That's what we're going to be doing.
Those who say that Bitcoin is a threat to the dollar have the story exactly backwards.
I believe it is exactly backwards.
Bitcoin is not threatening the dollar.
The behavior of the current U.S.
government is really threatening the dollar.
The danger to our financial future does not come from crypto, it comes from Washington, D.C.
It comes from trillions of dollars in waste, rampant inflation, and open borders, while giving welfare and free healthcare to all of the illegal aliens that are pouring into our country by the millions and millions and millions.
It comes from printing hundreds of billions of dollars to fund endless wars overseas while our cities are like combat zones here at home.
We had the greatest economy ever, and we will soon have it again.
Under the Trump administration, the typical middle-class family income rose by $6,000 a year.
People don't like mentioning that.
America had more money to save than at any time in many decades as a result.
During my four years in office... Now, you have to listen to these numbers.
These numbers are, like, beautiful.
And I don't want to repeat myself.
Listen to these numbers.
As a result, during my four years in office, Bitcoin surged by 3,900% from $898 the day I took office to $35,900 the day I left.
from $898 the day I took office to $35,900 the day I left.
That was the biggest jump, I guess, in just about any industry.
Think of that.
Now compare that to just after three and a half years of Biden and Harris adjusted for inflation, Bitcoin is up 50%.
Now 50% sounds good, but not when you're comparing it to almost 4,000%.
Right?
50%.
You know, normally you'd say, oh, that sounds pretty good.
Let's not put that into the speech.
No.
50% is not good.
When people can't afford groceries or rent, they have no savings to store in Bitcoin.
This administration caused the biggest inflation in the history of our country.
And that's what's happened.
Our people are being wiped out.
From the very first day we take back the White House, we will replace the Biden-Harris economic stagnation with a brand new Trump economic boom.
You're going to have a tremendous boom.
Most importantly, for our citizens, we will end the inflation nightmare that this administration has created, and we will end it quickly.
It's got to end.
It's destroying our country.
You know, inflation is a country buster.
You can go back Many, many years to Germany, and you look at what happened to Germany during their huge period of inflation.
Destroyed the country.
It's a country buster.
The Bitcoiners, and I say to you that you recognize the dangers of inflation long before most others did.
You understood inflation, frankly, better than anybody else.
You know that, don't you?
If only they had listened!
They didn't listen to you.
They didn't listen to you.
The trillions of dollars in ridiculous waste approved by our opponents resulted in the very inflation disaster that Bitcoiners had always predicted.
20, 30, and even 40% of the value of every dollar was wiped out and wiped out quickly.
You understood that, but a lot of other people didn't.
The life savings of millions of Americans was rapidly destroyed.
And very simply, uncontrolled inflation is a stealth taxation of the middle class.
It really is, it's a stealth taxation.
I call it the Biden tax, now I call it the Harris tax, or the Harris-Biden tax, or whatever the hell we're gonna call them.
But it's a disaster.
It's a tax of 50%.
It's a 50% tax.
Inflation.
Think of it.
It's a 50% tax on people.
5-0.
This is a human tragedy, and it's destroyed people.
It's a national disgrace.
It's destroyed everything in its way.
It must never be allowed to happen again, and it won't.
Many Americans do not realize that the United States governor is among the largest holders of Bitcoin.
Does anyone know that?
How about that?
The federal government has almost 210,000 Bitcoin, or 1% of the total supply that will ever exist.
But for too long, our government has violated the cardinal rule that every Bitcoiner knows by heart.
Never sell your Bitcoin, right?
That's right, isn't it, huh?
That's right.
How did I figure that one?
Never sell your Bitcoin!
And so, as the final part of my plan today, I am announcing that if I am elected, it will be the policy of my administration, United States of America, to keep 100% of all the Bitcoin the U.S.
government currently holds or acquires into the future.
We'll keep 100%.
I hope you do well, please.
This will serve, in effect, as the core of the strategic national Bitcoin stockpile.
And so, as I take steps to transform that vast wealth into a permanent national asset to benefit all Americans, today I repeat my pledge to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht to a sentence of time served.
It's enough.
It's enough.
With your help we will save our nation, we will restore our republic, and we will make
America and Bitcoin bigger, better, stronger, richer, freer, and greater than ever before.
Thank you all.
Have a good time with your Bitcoin and your crypto and everything else that you're playing with.
And we're going to make that one of the greatest industries on Earth.
Good luck and God bless you all.
Thank you.
God bless you.
Thank you.
My own participation in this conference was largely about liberty, freedom, freedom of communication, the importance of demonopolization and how monopolies necessarily lead to censorship and exploitation.
I spoke with Chris Pavlovsky, the CEO of Rumble, about those subjects and as well tried to manage an audience of I think five, 10,000 people while ultimately trying to have an intimate fireside chat.
Have a look at that.
One of the undergirding principles of Bitcoin that I'm learning a lot about today, because I am something of an ingenue, you know, this is quite new to me, is the significance of decentralization.
And if you decentralize power, something beautiful happens almost automatically.
There is something almost inherent in monopolies that leads to corruption.
It seems that what's happening with Rumble, and in particular Rumble's evident David and Goliath struggle against YouTube Alphabet, their evident and obvious attempts to censor, control, possibly participate in surveillance, certainly facilitate some extraordinary operations, their odd relationship with a group called the Trusted News Initiative, ...that seem to be interested in further centralizing and controlling the flow of information has some obvious correlative with the monopolization that happens in the financial industry.
It seems to me that what I've been learning is that when you decentralize and make transparent the very business of transaction, authenticity and integrity almost automatically appear.
In fact, they are a requirement.
What I suppose I find pretty encouraging about that, Chris, is the suggestion that individual, because an event like this, there's people that are right heroes.
Edward Snowden, what an incredible hero, what an amazing sacrifice he made for America on behalf of his ethics.
Bobby Kennedy, another heroic individual.
Tomorrow, the extraordinary spectacle of Donald Trump, just fresh from his resurrection, just one earlobe down.
We are only going to be on YouTube for another 30 seconds.
Click the link in the description to join us for a conversation about new modalities and models that could ultimately replace the sets of institutions and ideas via which control is established and asserted.
Click the link in the description.
See you in a few seconds.
Not the first man to nearly be annihilated by the dreadful phenomenon of slopey roofs.
A threat to all of us anywhere.
There could be a slopey roof around us now.
And like, it's very easy to fall into the adulation of individuals that seem heroic.
Or, perhaps alternatively, condemn them, loathe them, despair of them.
But what it seems to me is available in blockchain technology is the regulatory principles that occur when individuals are empowered.
And indeed, Rumble has comparable principles, because a commitment to free speech does not favour or bias towards a particular type of free speech, it
encourages all of our free speech and has a kind of, I would say, acceptance that universally,
through discourse, we will arrive at conclusions that are positive if we're not prohibited, inhibited, censored,
controlled by institutions that claim that they care while actually practicing control.
It seems to me that there is something quite beautiful in learning, that individuals, when trusted, will reach the
right conclusions.
And that is antithetical to an era of elitism that we appear to be living through.
Because what is the central principle of censorship?
We are a moral authority.
We know more than you.
We are smarter than you.
And similarly too, when Rumble first came out, what did they first say?
It's disgusting.
It's filthy.
What did they say about Bitcoin?
It'll all be used to trade drugs and pornography.
And I bet some people have done that, Chris.
But ultimately, when people are allowed to live deregulated and free,
what emerges are something closer to our higher nature and our higher principles rather than our lower.
You sum that up perfectly.
I What's happening right now is that you have all these entities that are controlling and now they're fighting for control.
They're losing their control.
They're losing control to companies like Rumble, Truth, X. They're starting to actually fear that their narratives are going to change because for once, There's not someone with an agenda telling Russell, hey Russell, you have to say this.
Has that ever happened with us?
Never.
No, only the voice is in my mind.
So now what you're having is that you're having like true authenticity start to come out and true opinions start to come out.
Things that we would have at our dinner tables that apparently we couldn't say online and we still can't say online on the incumbent platforms.
So, like, YouTube, for example, for the last, I would say, eight years has just been moving the goalposts and moving the goalposts, creating new terms, sometimes on a monthly basis, sometimes on a weekly basis.
Something is changing constantly on YouTube to try to Say that you need to say something specifically or not say something at all.
They're trying to control speech in many different ways.
And when Rumble came along in 2020, late 2020, where we actually had prominent figures start joining our platform like Dan Bongino, Congressman Devin Nunes, we started to break that fold.
And that's what created a shift happen.
Everybody Pick the side.
This is exactly what happened.
Everyone actually picked a side, and Rumble just stayed in the middle.
Our policies didn't change in any meaningful way in the last ten years.
They've been relatively similar, but everyone else's did, and they left us all in the middle, and what happened, they all picked a side, and then the middle started coming towards us.
Why?
Authenticity.
People get to hear what you're really thinking and they know that you're not saying, doing,
or saying something that has some kind of agenda or corporate agenda behind it.
When you watch people like Russell on Rumble, you're getting to hear what he actually thinks
and not someone else that's telling him what to think.
And that's what's created the opportunity for Rumble in such a large way.
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All right, let's get back to this content.
I thought of so many things while you were talking then, and not because I wasn't listening.
Because I was.
That's just common good manners.
Here are some of the reflections that I would like to offer you, Chris, and everybody present.
When dealing with an organisation like Google, YouTube, and I recognise that my voice was significantly amplified by that platform initially, before the blessed day where I got the opportunity to begin to work with Rumble.
You recognize how tyranny and power may guide us towards dystopia.
Let me illustrate that further.
We're being encouraged to imagine that the dystopias of the future might resemble the despotism of the 20th century, that we might forfail to militaristic 20th century style demagoguery.
We're being taught to fear fascism, And of course fascism is something that ought to be feared because indeed Bitcoin and Rumble, the technologies that we're talking about, are about primarily individual freedom.
When it comes to the tyranny that I fear mostly, the phrase that I heard that resonates is technological feudalism.
When you consider the mounting bureaucracies and the incredible power that's being accrued by groups like Alphabet Google, because we are talking about monopoly, centralized power, I would like to reflect on how it feels to deal with these organizations directly.
If you find yourself in a spat or a concert tom with YouTube, you will find that the discourse is very unusual and anodyne.
We have had to censor your content.
You will have to appeal to the community guidelines.
A team member will get back to you.
It's very friendly.
It's very banal.
It's very sterile.
You get the sense that you're communicating with some peculiar, odd and inaccessible, insidious mist.
When we think about tyranny in the future, we should not think about 20th century modalities of dictatorship.
We should think of great writers like George Orwell, Audus Huxley, and Franz Kafka, who indicated that dictatorships in the future might be rather anodyne and friendly and here to protect you and keep you safe.
Some of you may have noticed that in the last five years, in order to protect your freedom, in order to protect your safety, in order to protect your health, certain measures were strongly recommended.
Certain conversations were forbidden.
Indeed, just think of the people that have been on the stage over the short period of time that we've been at this conference.
Bobby Kennedy, Strongly censored.
Edward Snowden exiled.
Julian Assange, while absent, was imprisoned and incarcerated without trial.
All for what?
To protect you.
To protect you from information that might harm you.
Or to protect you from microbes or viruses that might harm you.
God help us!
God protect us from these people that want to save us and protect us.
In their rationalism and materialism, they have sought right down to the microscopic level to replace God and to replace the authority of God with rationalism and materialism, to make rationalism the highest authority.
Having made themselves the highest authority, their edicts go uncontested.
There was a moment in September last year where I myself was at the very middle of a tundra A dark maelstrom of incredible power.
The kind of power that can only occur when big tech platforms, big media and government align.
The government in my country directly asked platforms to demonetise me.
A sitting government minister.
This is an extraordinary overreach of government.
Among the people and platforms that were bold enough to say, hold on, we have Principles around justice, around hearings, around innocent until proven guilty.
was Chris Pavlovsky at Rumble.
And of course, Elon Musk at X, who I know evokes complex feelings like many tech billionaires.
They're all fucking crazy, these guys!
They're all a bit weird.
They're not like normal people.
I've got to know tech billionaires now.
They sort of look at their phone too much.
They leave meals in the middle of a meal.
They'll just get up and go.
Essentially, they're monetizing autism.
Never mind mining Bitcoin, start mining the neurons of these lunatics that are coming up with this stuff, is what I would say.
But nevertheless, what we're finding in these unusual minds is the kind of bravery that comes from not centralising power, but from decentralising it.
Because the simple truth is, is no one should be mediating your connection to God, or your connection to money, or your connection to free speech, because no one knows better better than you, although there are high principles to
which we could have recourse.
It's even more insidious that the people who are going to be the ones to decide what
The monopolizations are happening both on every aspect of tech.
For example, you guys probably all remember the moment that Parler got deplatformed entirely by Amazon AWS.
And that happened for a complaint that that exact complaint was actually happening more so on the other platforms than it was happening on Parler itself.
So it was completely unjustified to do that.
And I think that was, like, crossing a red line in society when you have, like, an oligopoly in the cloud business.
You've got Microsoft.
You've got Amazon.
You've got GCP, Google.
And at that moment, Amazon decides to take out Parler, which was horrible.
And that was a big wake-up moment for us because we realized Rumble won't survive unless we have our own infrastructure.
On the infrastructure level now, Rumble can't just be a company that says, hey, we're going to uphold free speech and protect everyone's rights to having their voice.
We now have to build our own infrastructure.
So, what did we do?
We built our own infrastructure.
We launched the Rumble Cloud earlier this year, which is now available not only to Rumble, but the entire public.
That's based on the same principles that Rumble has, free speech.
But it gets even worse.
It not only is the infrastructure a problem, we solved the infrastructure.
Now the next thing we need to go solve is the advertising world.
The advertising world, the way they're working, and the way they're Colluding together to make sure that they only bring the advertising dollars to specific creators that have certain viewpoints is a major problem.
And we just saw in the release, I'm sure you've seen this Russell, is the Global Alliance of Responsible Media, as they call it.
They put it in nice names to make it sound really good, as you just mentioned.
That's the way they do it.
You can see the emails that the Judiciary Committee released with respect to that, and Ben Shapiro was talking about this as well when he was at Congress, and it's appalling what you see.
You see that they're actually constructing a boycott of putting advertisements on X and other platforms like Rumble to make sure that voices that they don't agree with Are not getting monetized.
Trying to strangle them at the monetization point.
And this is just one example, multiple examples, both on the infrastructure and on the advertising side of what we're up against.
We have ad cartels.
We have infrastructure.
We got governments.
We got states.
We're fighting multiple things at multiple different points.
But, you know, one of the good things is we're not alone anymore.
There are other companies starting to step up.
You have truth, you have X, and things are starting to move.
So question for you, do you think things are getting better?
Yes, actually.
I'm feeling almost overwhelmed with optimism in this actual moment now, because I know that we are streaming this on Rumble, there'll be people watching this on Rumble now, and a considerable audience are also watching elsewhere.
And I'm minded of the significant and oft-repeated maxim, attributed usually to Andrew Breitbart, that politics is downstream of culture.
Well, culture is evidently and obviously downstream of technology.
We have the technology for immediate proliferation and dissemination of not only information, but clearly a transactional technology also.
And what I find deeply heartening about this is the opportunity and obvious establishment already, because you lot are early adapters and adopters.
I knew about Bitcoin for ages.
I know all the subtle ones you've not even heard of.
I know all sorts of cryptocurrencies.
I've just made one up right now.
You lot know about this stuff already.
And one thing that institutions fear more than anything, I believe, is not the direct and martial attacks which John Lennon greatly and famously said they know how to deal with, but people moving away from their institutions, setting up parallel economies, parallel media, Of course my deep concern is that we remain in the thrall of commodity, commerce and material, when this could be so much more.
When this is a genuine opportunity for us to access something deeply ethereal and mystical, our own personal connection to the ultimate reality.
A personal and private connection to God.
A resource that we might utilise so that we are no longer in the thrall of prohibition and inhibition and systems of absolute control that might use the kind of patriarchal auspices of your health and safety.
They might use any measures.
My interest is this most of all, that this is not just a digital form of the gold rush,
but this is a set of systems through which we may bypass our atrophying, corrupt, hypocritical
systems of government, big tech, media.
The loss of moral authority that they are experiencing is deserved because we know that
lawfare can be used, that the judiciary can be used as a weapon, that media can't be relied
on, that the regulatory bodies that control big pharma are funded by the corporations
that they're supposed to be regulating.
You have known for some time that these institutions are not worthy of your trust and now you are beginning to have the means to bypass them and if they cannot be bypassed electorally For the corruption is so immersive, or the options so limited, now there is the genuine chance for your individual freedom of expression to exist both in terms of media and communication through platforms like Rumble and others, but also through the advance that you are at the very forefront of when it comes to transaction digitally.
So indeed I feel optimistic.
Not because of any great individual leader, although we have seen great individual leaders at this conference, but because what Bitcoin epitomises above all else.
Decentralisation, transparency, open communication and the possibility for new human relationships.
That is the deepest optimism of all.
That human beings aren't corrupt and ugly, aren't disgusting and deserving of shame, are beautiful and capable of again connecting with the sacred.
So, if Bitcoin can do that, surely I believe in it, and surely I am optimistic, Chris.
But the truth is, we've still got five minutes.
So have you.
No, I think the tide is so big right now.
Like I said, we were all alone on an island for a couple of years during COVID and all these from like 2020 to 2022 really.
And I think that tide is like unstoppable.
You have Bitcoin, which is a freedom movement.
You have companies like Rumble and X and Truth that are freedom movements.
It's kind of emerging everywhere.
You have infrastructure like RumbleCloud.
The parallel economy is really getting developed.
You have talent, like real important talent that are speaking their minds and really kind
of waking up to everything and telling the world what they think, like yourself and many
So I think this tide is so big right now.
There's nothing that's going to stop it.
And ultimately, the number one value that underlines everything here is freedom.
It's freedom of speech.
It's freedom.
It's transparency.
When you take a look at it, though, Right?
For the last 10 years, we've had a monopoly control the video space.
We've had an oligopoly controlling the infrastructure space.
The idea of having competition is a type of decentralization in its own right.
And that's what we need to have.
And, like, if there's ways to take things like Rumble and get them even more transparent and more decentralized, I'm all for it as the technology continues to evolve.
But like you have in the finance world, you now have Bitcoin, which is really taking hold and has an incredible future.
So this tide, nothing's going to stop it.
We are going to win in this war for sure.
One of the things that made me most excited about participating in this conference was the inclusion of Edward Snowden.
We've spoke to him on this show a couple of times and whenever you speak to him, you get the sense that this is someone with genuine humility, incredible insight and a set of values that's probably transcendent of the kind of backbiting, backstabbing and seething that defines modern politics.
It was really interesting to see him say that we should look at the political candidates that were present at Bitcoin, namely RFK and Trump.
as really just political figures with their own agenda and their own motives and that we should
remember that politics needs to be de-tribalized and certainly isn't a religion. That was among
some of the things I thought he was fascinating but Edward Snowden is of course uniquely positioned
to comment on both the technical and I suppose privacy related aspects of Bitcoin. Here he is.
Our lives have been increasingly intermediated by screens, by panes of glass, right?
right?
You are watching this either live on stage, because you registered through a smartphone, through a laptop, right?
Nobody went and sort of bought a ticket at the counter anymore.
That's not how the world works these days.
But in order to even set that computer up, to turn it on, to log in, to set up your account, To pull the smartphone out of the box, charge it, open it up, connect it to your Wi-Fi access point, you have to click OK to continue.
You have to agree to somebody else's terms of service.
You are made to pass through gates of permission that are owned and controlled by others that do not answer, frankly, to anybody.
You see Facebook, you see Google, you see how they've been abusing the trust Of everyone in every country, right?
You see, the EU tries to get a handle on them.
They're completely ignored.
There was the GDPR, right?
General Data Protection Regime, or regulation, that was supposed to fix all of these problems, and it didn't work.
They say, oh, we'll fine you, you know, 4% of global revenue, or whatever.
You break the rules.
That hasn't happened.
It's been years and years and years.
Whether we're talking about governments, whether we're talking about corporations, we're talking about the same thing.
We're talking about the systemization of technologies that are designed to order our lives to the benefit of the institutions.
They are trying to organize us to benefit them.
In some cases, we want this.
We want to be able to cooperate.
We want to be able to collaborate.
We need to be able to work together, right?
But we have to agree to this in some way.
We should need to.
And it's not like click OK to continue or say no and use the phone my way, right?
It's click OK to continue or you can't use your iPhone.
You can't use your Android phone.
It doesn't matter whether Samsung makes it, whether Google makes it, whether Apple makes it.
You play by their rules or you don't play at all.
And that should be changing.
We'll get to it a little bit later where we are making great strides in the context of money, which is why suddenly we see a lot of political interest in these audiences.
They understand that there is a new center of power that is rising, but there is a new There's a field of vulnerability that applies to all of us, including all of these luminaries that will be speaking on stage here.
And that is artificial intelligence, right?
I am not one of the guys that goes on the Internet and is like, oh, AI safety, AI safety, the robots are going to kill us, you know, you need to worry about this.
I say, in fact, I want all of them to dump all of these models out on the Internet where we can all use these.
OpenAI, which is not open at all and is a very closed model company, Uh, that wants to benefit themselves at your expense.
They want to train on your data, uh, but benefit, uh, themselves.
And they don't want you to have access onto the coverage.
They don't want you to be able to pull down the models, distill it, get one you can run at home, put it on your phone, do whatever you want with it.
They want you to have to go back to their watering hole, uh, pay them rents, uh, and to access all of this only through their ways, even if you did have the ability, technologically, hardware, just to run this at home.
The good news is it is becoming easier and easier to get this stuff in public hands to run this on home machines.
I'm not just speaking rhetoric here.
I've spent the last year using these models myself at home.
You can do this too.
Open source models, whether we're talking about diffusion models for generative imaging, right?
Sort of what you think of like the mid-journey, the nice web interfaces.
You can do that at home.
It's 100% free as long as you've got the hardware to run it.
And it's, again, it's getting easier and easier to do this.
Whether we're talking about large language models, Facebook, which, again, I've been throwing invective at for the beginning half of the talk, has actually been a force for good in this space.
Not because they love you, or they love us, or they love me, or anything like that, but because they're afraid their competitors, like OpenAI that I mentioned, are going to build a structure around them, ring-fence them, Uh, in a little plot that they can then tax forever.
And Facebook doesn't want to end up there, right?
So they go, well, what we'll do is we'll develop the tools and give them to everyone else so a monopoly can't form and be used against us.
Uh, self-interest more so than altruism, but I still applaud it, right?
And I'm no fan of Mark Zuckerberg, but he's done wonderful things here.
I hope he continues.
I know it won't last forever, but for the moment, while it does, I'll welcome the help that we can get there.
But why am I bringing this up, you know, at a Bitcoin conference?
Well, the reason why is that Bitcoin transactions are not private.
All of you know this here on The General Sense because it's 2024 and this is not, you know, back in 2013 where we're saying, oh, you know, Bitcoin is perfectly anonymous and it's money for criminals and whatever.
The only person who still believes that is Elizabeth Warren.
The reality is that Bitcoin transactions are permanent, they are public, and they can be tracked and they can be linked.
An enormous proportion of them are fully doxed, just not publicly doxed.
And this is because how do people move in and off of the Bitcoin network, any crypto chain really?
And it's through the on and off ramps, right?
Through these legacy exchanges that get licensed by all, you know, whatever New York State or whatever country, whether it's in Dubai, whether it's in New York, and they are sharing the information en masse with what we politely refer to as regulators, but what are plainly described as great powers, right?
People are not really focused on sending this stuff to the government of Barbados, but if they're worried about catching an indictment from that government, they will send anything that government asks for to them, and then they'll say, is there anything else you need while we're at it?
Well, there was still one saving grace, which was there were parts of that chain which were not Fully identified and verified, you could have private transactions, you could send $5 for your buddy for pizza, you know, as long as the on-chain transaction fees were low.
Otherwise, you wait to save it up.
But the idea here is that You could still engage in the network and presume that it would just age off eventually.
It's out there, it's on the blockchain, somebody has it, you know, maybe they'll prune it.
But it's not you.
It's not that everybody will know everything you did anywhere, all the time, forever.
Because when they have your transaction history, they have your life history.
They know what you read, what you buy, who you support politically, like where your donations went.
All of that is available to them.
They can Infer your thinking, they can infer your affiliations.
At the NSA, we called the kind of information that was not the details of a conversation, right, not literally reading like your texts, but simply saying that you texted someone.
And this was under their interpretation.
In my interpretation, it's a violation of the Constitution.
But in their interpretation, this didn't impact the Fourth Amendment at all, because it's not a search, because it's not reading your messages themselves.
It's simply tracking the flow of messages.
We called this kind of information metadata, right?
And that metadata padded out What was your pattern of life?
Metadata can be plainly described as activity records.
It's the same kind of thing that a private investigator would get if they just followed you around all day.
They don't sit behind you at the cafe and hear everything you say because you would wonder, who is this dude following me?
But they sit outside in a car on the street.
They see that you go in the cafe at this time.
They see that you sit at a table with this other person.
They send a guy to go, who is that person?
What's his license plate?
Who is he?
They know that you met.
They get the affiliation.
They see your work.
They see your store afterwards.
They don't see every item that you bought, but they see where you shop.
And as you pad these things out more and more, you get a more and more complete picture of an entire human life without ever having to go, oh, we need a warrant for this.
What held that back?
Well, cost.
You needed a human analyst to go and sift through this.
The metadata could be collected automatically by ingesting the world's internet communications through these machines, right?
But somebody still had to put their cup in the big bucket, pull it out, and, you know, lay it out on a desk and make sense of it.
Machine learning models are going to change this.
In my opinion, this is already being done.
We simply don't have evidence of it yet.
It's going to be testing.
It's going to be development.
We don't know how it's being applied, when it's going to be truly operational.
But it is fantasy to imagine that they're not doing this.
And there is zero regulation that I am aware of in the United States to prevent this.
Nobody is thinking about what these agencies are doing.
And we're not just talking about the NSA here.
We're not just talking about the FBI.
We're talking about the IRS, right?
And it's not just the United States.
It's every country.
You may go, oh, I love the United States government doing this.
I hope they spy on me as much as possible.
Well, what about China?
What about Russia?
What about North Korea?
What about Iran?
What about every little government that you don't like, that you don't agree with, right?
And suddenly, they can have every life of every person, every day, at every moment, on a live feed Being interpreted at machine speed.
And then you start feeding that...
Those inferences into a decision-making process.
This is the reason that I bring up the protesters at Columbia University, protesters in Canada, right?
If you stick out, if you stand out, you are going to become non-normative or rather anomalous.
What I am afraid is likely to happen quite quickly, right?
Probably not this year.
Within three years, it'll begin being done, I think, at some scale.
Within five to ten years, it'll be done absolutely regularly, routinely.
They're going to take all of the transaction information that they can get, and this is going to start with big banks going on their own personal data sets.
It's going to flow from there.
To people going, oh, where can we get this information publicly?
Well, the Bitcoin blockchain is available for anyone for free at any time, right?
And how do you train these models?
You need learning sets.
You need training data.
You need data sets.
So they're going to pull everything they can.
They're going to feed it through these things.
And they're going to try to teach them originally.
I think it's going to be easiest thing.
What does a normal transaction look like?
You know, what do 95% look like?
And then they're just going to go, what is anomalous?
What is strange?
What is unusual?
What doesn't quite fit?
And then they're going to go from that's a 5% probability down to 3% probability, then try to get it smaller and smaller and smaller, until they can just basically have people that are getting reports spit out on their desk, little, you know, chat messages to their terminal, basically.
They're saying, this just happened, this just happened, this just happened.
Do you want to continue?
And that banking officer is going to get a click OK to continue on your life, on your ability to transact, on your ability to trade.
It's not just going to be Bitcoin.
It's going to be Visa.
It's going to be MasterCard.
It's going to be everywhere.
It's going to be PayPal, right?
Whether you're subscribing to an OnlyFans account or something like that, which, you know, is a very common thing, but something that a lot of people aren't going to admit to.
They're not going to be proud of, right?
That's going to start making these institutions go, oh, do we want to continue our business association with these people?
Is there a brand risk, you know, on stage here?
And I think we really need to think about how do we secure the transactions on the Bitcoin network moving forward.
I have said this for 10 years.
I have been ignored for 10 years.
Well, we're running out of runway.
And again, right now, every time you're on this network, and I love this network, I've used it many times.
You are going to be adding to the data set.
Even if they don't identify you because you're the, you know, whatever mystic cyber ninja that knows how to protect yourself, who is the counterparty that you're trading with?
Are you sending it to your buddy?
Are they doxxed, right?
Are you sending it to a business that you're paying?
Are they doxxed?
And larger and larger parts of this transaction mesh, of this network, as they get identified, the space for everyone else to have any kind of private interaction diminishes.
Now, you might go, well, these big businesses, Visa, MasterCard, like, yeah, they have the transaction history for everybody, everywhere, all the time, and you don't know what they're using it for.
But they're not screwing you, right?
Well, AT&T, it was revealed this year, lost all of their subscribers' information, or an enormous subscriber's information, for a block of time.
I think it was something like six months.
For all of your text messages, all of your phone calls, all of the things that went through Routing network, including some cell site location information, which means which cell phone tower you were connected to, were stolen by hackers.
They haven't said who they are, as far as I know.
They may not have been identified yet.
Maybe they'll never be identified.
We don't know whether it's state-sponsored or whatever.
Maybe there's been ongoing reporting since then.
It's revealed.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
I'm sure somebody will be out there to tweet about it.
But the bottom line is this, right?
These enormous data sets are a liability.
We know they cannot protect them.
You cannot control them.
And they can have enormous influence over our lives.
All of these people who are coming up on stage and saying these wonderful things about how much they love Bitcoin, how much they love you, they're going to do all these wonderful things to make something better.
The United States is the only advanced democracy on the planet that I am aware of that does not have a basic privacy law.
We have the Fourth Amendment, right?
That only binds the federal government.
That doesn't do diddly squat to protect you against corporations.
And the government, for 90% of their work, probably 95% of their work in intelligence nowadays, they simply go to corporations and ask them for information.
It's hand-drawn around the Constitution.
And we have been able to suffer this, right?
Again, the game is too good to leave.
Not because we love it, but because we haven't had a choice.
Well, we're running out of time to fix this, and the consequences of ignoring it are about to get a whole lot worse.
Nobody sees this.
This is not Terminator, right?
This is not Skynet.
This is not robots descending from the sky to drag you out of your home.
That might come someday, but that's a long way off.
We're talking about some things that are much more banal, but much easier to do.
We talk about that concentration of power.
These politicians, right?
A lot of them probably don't love that they have to come up on this stage and give a dog-and-pony show to dance for the crowd that is suddenly much more powerful.
Well, the people that they have always been in control of are about to get a much tighter hold on the leash, not just of them, but of everyone.
The Internet is broken because institutions are competing against the individual, while the individual is competing against other individuals.
We need to shatter that design.
Because competition is everywhere, but it's only against the powerless.
We need to look back at the avarice of those princes.
And I don't just mean in the context of government.
I mean everywhere.
I mean, you know...
Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan.
We need to think about the systemic influences on our lives and how we can correct for them.
The people who throughout all history had the means to diminish the amount of metals in our coins, you know, which is inflation simply by a different name.
We're not using metal anymore.
We're using paper now, but the game is the same.
We in this room are using a technology that has taken the metal and the paper away from them.
And it is through this single lever that they have set flourishing societies on the path to inevitable poverties.
And I just want you to remember, every time you look at the grocery store's prices, that you are not alone, you are not isolated.
Everyone in that store is dealing with the same battle that you are.
We have to cooperate, we have to work together, and we have to make sure they do not reduce this country to the land of the fee and the home of the slave.
The only way we will do that is if we work together.
So please, by all means, cast your vote.
But don't join a cult.
There's a lot of work to be done.
Thank you.
One of the most significant speeches of that day was delivered by Bobby Kennedy, who I suppose up until the inclusion of Kamala Harris was making an incredible impact in the election and may yet rise again.
Who knows what kind of deals he'll be offered, what kind of relationships might be formed.
But the spirit of independence, clarity, authenticity, openness, a willingness to attack big pharma and big corporations more generally is certainly something that I would look for in a political leader and it's odd to think that just like 10 years ago Bobby Kennedy was a darling of the left because of his incredible environmental work and just two years ago he was taboo and couldn't speak anywhere.
Whatever's happening in our culture is changing radically and quickly and this speech charted just a little of that.
Have a look.
Many of you know my own introduction to Bitcoin, my own conversion.
I knew from my children about Bitcoin, but it seemed almost to me something like a fad or a novelty.
And then I saw what happened in Ottawa.
I was running at that time the Children's Health Defence, which was the premier advocate for medical freedom in our
country, and we had embedded with the
we had embedded with the striking truckers in Canada a reporter for our newsletter.
And she was traveling with the truckers from Alberta all the way to Ottawa.
And the truckers are very diverse in Canada.
They're Asian, they're black, they're white.
The truckers were doing something that all of us in our country take for granted.
They were assembling a petition in their government about something that they thought was important, which was the financial impacts of the mandates on their businesses.
And if you look at the videos of that event, it was like Woodstock.
People were giving out water bottles, they were picking up trash, they were playing music, they were being kind to each other.
But it was portrayed by the Canadian government as a right-wing, extremist, violent terror organization.
And the government began using facial recognition systems and other forms of surveillance To learn the identity of the truckers, looking at their license plates, etc.
And then it froze their bank accounts.
And it froze their $12 million PayPal account.
And when Canada did that, the premier template of democracy in the world besides the United States, it occurred to me immediately That transactional freedom was as important as freedom of
expression in the First Amendment.
Because if the government has the capacity, none of these truckers
were charged with a crime, much less convicted.
And yet the government was able to shut down their bank accounts.
They couldn't pay their mortgages.
They couldn't buy Diesel for their trucks.
They couldn't buy food for their children.
One trucker told me that he was going to jail because he couldn't make mandatory alimony payments.
And if a government is able to starve you, to evict you from your home, if you speak out against it, if you criticize government policies, then we are on the road to totalitarianism and slavery.
And I began at that time looking seriously for alternatives, and it was that instant that led me immediately to grasp the potential of this technology to provide transactional freedom and self-sovereignty.
Last year at this conference, I proposed that as your president, I would fight to ensure the right to self-custody Bitcoin around nodes in our own homes, To stop the federal government from usurping the First Amendment rights to open-source privacy-enhancing technologies, I pledge to prevent government officials from adopting CBDCs, which would inevitably morph into what we saw in Canada, a malevolent tool for surveillance and control.
Most importantly, I promise to secure the United States' position As the global hub of cryptocurrency innovation and entrepreneurship and investment and technology.
Now, I'm very happy to learn that I'm not the only one talking about Bitcoin in this year's election.
Nothing could make me more joyful than to see other political leaders now jumping on the Bitcoin bandwagon.
I've had over a year's head start to study, to understand, to articulate the potential of Bitcoin.
And my goal as the first Bitcoin president will be to enact policies that will make America the great world's greatest representative for Bitcoin and a proponent of its democratic values.
I grew up assuming that America would always maintain its status as the world leader, the leader of the free world.
But ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1993, we've paradoxically been moving in a declining spiral away from that role.
Hubris, military adventurism, and corruption have put America's political and economic power in precipitous decline.
Our dollar is rapidly losing its reserve currency status because we've weaponized it against other countries.
When we disagree with the policies of another country, we kick them off the SWIFT system and we debank them.
As a predictable result of that strategy, the BRICS nations are now in the process of de-dollarizing by getting off the petrodollar.
They realize that trading their commodities and other hard resources for money that is printed out of thin air is a losing proposition.
This trend will likely accelerate until we make the tough transition toward backing our debt obligations with hard
assets again.
I have a plan to strengthen the U.S.
dollar and lower the interest rates and neutralize our $34 trillion debt by backing U.S.
Treasury bills, notes and bonds with hard assets, including a combination of
precious metals and Bitcoin.
Backing US...
debt applications by collateralizing them with hard assets not only restores strength to the dollar, it reigns in inflation and it will usher in a new era of American financial stability, prosperity, and peace.
The world needs to believe that we have safely handcuffed our government and its ability to create money out of thin air with no proof of work.
The innovative strategy that I am proposing Leverages the scarcity and liquidity of Bitcoin, along with gold and other hard assets, to restore the dollar's dominance in global finance.
The world will rush to adopt an American-backed, decentralized currency that cannot be confiscated by governments, that can be traded and transacted on cell phones at the speed of light across every global border, with no banking fees or other transactional friction.
This incorruptible currency will immediately start pulling wealth and assets from every other nation around the globe back into the United States, restoring the strength of our dollar and repairing our balance of payments.
Six months before his assassination, My uncle, President John F. Kennedy, signed an executive order that put silver coins in competition with the notes issued by the Fed.
His intention was to rein in Fed discretion.
He had been a critic of Fed policy, and he hoped to end the discretionary monetary policy and the inevitable debasement of the U.S.
dollar.
He understood that a highly leveraged economy leads directly to the destructive kind of wealth inequality that is today eroding American democracy and generating violence and division and discontent and hopelessness.
Notably, after my uncle's assassination, the government immediately stopped issuing those silver coins and power returned to the Fed.
My uncle apparently understood the potential for the Fed to evolve itself into a tyranny.
Bitcoin has the potential to return monetary discipline to the Fed and to restore the dollar as the unchallenged global reserve currency.
President Nixon took us off the gold standard in 1971 to finance the Vietnam War.
Since then, the dollar's purchasing power has been in precipitous decline.
Eroding savings and earnings of everyday Americans.
The discipline of tying our dollars to hard assets like Bitcoin will also finally break our addiction to forever wars.
Fiat currency was invented to fund war.
As I pointed out just now, President Nixon got us off the gold standard in 1971 because printing fiat currency was the only way to continually finance the Vietnam War.
Tired of fiat currency, when a country ran out of money, the war would end.
Or, if a government wanted to fund a war, it would issue war bonds and borrow the money from its citizens, or it would tell them in advance, we're going to tax you.
They, governments, don't need to even ask that permission.
They just rent the money.
And then they fund the war with fake money.
If the world was on a Bitcoin standard, then there would be no war because the governments can't print Bitcoin.
I'm a proponent of Bitcoin because it can defund the military industrial complex.
That is bent, not on national defense, but on international global domination.
And I'll say this, you know, during the height of the Cold War, the military budget was about 500 billion dollars in Today it's double that.
Why do we need twice the money that we needed during the height of the Cold War?
Well, we need it because it has nothing to do with national defense.
It has to do with global hegemony and international domination that is actually counterproductive.
It's bankrupting us at home.
And...
It has destroyed our relationships and our moral authority across the globe.
Oh, let me say it again.
If governments couldn't print money with a couple of keystrokes on a computer, they wouldn't be able to fund wars that never end.
Again, fix the money, fix the world.
And make no mistake, one of the main reasons my administration will fix our broken money
is to defund the war machine.
To reach that goal, I'm going to support making direct ownership of Bitcoin tax-free.
The conversion of Bitcoin back into dollars will be a non-reportable transaction to the IRS,
not subject to capital gains.
We have to remember that the Fourth Amendment guarantees a right to privacy.
As a constitutionalist, I'm an adamant defender of our right to financial and transactional privacy.
When U.S.
citizens are required to report every Bitcoin transaction to the IRS, The government knows everything that we are doing with our money.
Governments have no business knowing your business.
You see, finally, President Trump has had four years, had four years to pardon Ross Ulbrich and Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
And he didn't do it.
And we need to ask ourselves why.
I've already looked into those cases and I plan on pardoning them all on day one.
Oh.
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