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Feb. 3, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:33:57

Freedomain Investment Roundtable 1

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	Thanks, everyone.
	It's nice to chat.
	This, of course, is just an informal chat about ideas regarding investing.
	It's no advice, nothing like that.
	I guess if you guys could maybe just tell me a little bit about your thoughts and sort of history with investing or anything like that.
	Obviously, I don't have to say anything in detail about your current status, but I'm just curious what level of experience we might be dealing with.
	I guess I'll start a little bit.
	I'm an economics student.
	So I'm surrounded by Keynesian economics and it just astonishes me that they think it has any implications on the general economy.
	It completely breaks down if you look outside of the West.
	And then they try to spin that and give me investing advice, which is very odd.
	They present arguments like the bond market and interest rates are crazy low.
	So if you look at the price-earning ratio of S&P 500, it's still actually reasonable.
	But if you look at the amount of money being printed and the inflation in the asset market, it doesn't feel reasonable to me.
	So I'm looking for cheaper countries, especially Russia.
	Russia is very cheap because they're not very favored in the global economy.
	So they have price-earning ratios that are a lot lower than the West.
	Right. Are most of the econ students interested in that kind of stuff?
	Um... My classmates seem very closed off.
	The only thing they seem to be able to do is to fill in the Keynesian formulas and to think for themselves.
	It's very odd. Like I asked a few of them, they don't even know the difference between the Chicago school and the Austrian school.
	Well, that I don't doubt.
	I mean, the fact that they've been shielded off from both those schools seems to be kind of almost inevitable.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, we don't even talk about how the M3 money supply has been inflated by like 80% in one year.
	Yeah. Yeah, the whole work earnings thing has just been completely shattered these days because now it's like, well, why would anyone have a job?
	I mean, we do really, really well with the economy shutdown.
	It's just kind of a weird thing.
	Like the guy, like your neighbor who sits by the pool all day and you don't sort of get that he's building up, like just running up his credit cards and you're like, hey, well, I'm a sucker for going to work.
	Yeah, it's really funny.
	So you've got Peter Schiff, and he's been kind of beating the war drums on inflation for about eight years.
	Smart guy. Yeah.
	But I feel like he's actually missing something.
	Because when the economy collapses, they're going to have to write off a lot of debt.
	And in this modern economy, debt is actually money.
	So they'll be actually destroying a lot of money when the debt gets cancelled.
	So I think when the economy goes down, it could take many more years.
	Who knows, they've kind of mastered being able to keep this going at this point.
	Okay, so I hate to sound overly retarded and destroy my reputation as a remotely intelligent guy, but I've never been afraid to, you know, explain it to me like I'm five years old.
	So debt is money.
	I mean, I've heard that and I sort of get the general idea, but, you know, you're fresh off the econ stuff.
	So can you break it down?
	Again, you know, imagine that I'm explaining to my daughter when she's half her age.
	Well, I'm not done studying for my test yet, but I'll try.
	Oh, this is the test, man.
	This is it. There's nothing else.
	So what happens is when you take out a mortgage, the money doesn't exist, but you go to the bank and they approve your loan, like $400,000 of new money is just created.
	So if you were to default on your mortgage, the $400,000 you borrowed from the bank actually gets destroyed.
	So the new monetary system, I forgot the term in English, but they actually see taxation as destroying money and spending as creating it.
	Right, because you go to the bank, you say, I want $400,000.
	And then they say, here's your $400,000.
	But it's not money that they have, that they have from other depositors, which is like the old way of banking, right?
	Or the sane way of banking.
	They just say, oh, here's your $400,000.
	So what are the mechanics by which it's created?
	I mean, I assume they don't just type whatever they want into their own account.
	I mean, what are the legal mechanics or the, I dare say it's probably not physical, but the mechanics by which the debt is converted into money?
	That's a really good question. I don't know it in detail because I'm in Europe and here it happens through the European Central Bank and they approve it to the national banks and it gets put on those banks' balance sheets and it's guaranteed by the European Central Bank.
	So it's just, you say, I want a $400,000 loan, and then they just say, oh, you now have $400,000 as an asset, and I assume that the asset is also the interest, with some probably discount for the potential for defaulting, but they just say to the bank, oh, you now have a $400,000 asset, which is the money that this guy now owes you, but the bank didn't subtract anything from their asset ledger in order to lend the money, right?
	Because if I want to lend a friend $1,000, I have to subtract $1,000 from whatever I have.
	And give that friend the money.
	So by lending my friend $1,000, I haven't actually increased my net wealth.
	But your argument or what you're saying is that when the bank lends $400,000, they don't subtract it from anywhere else.
	It just becomes an addition to their asset.
	Exactly. That's exactly how it works.
	I got it. Okay. So when the economy goes downhill and all the debt gets destroyed, that's going to lead to massive deflation.
	Maybe the deflation actually is only local on the asset market, but it could transfer over to the rest of the economy.
	All right, so we're now at the fuzzy edges again for me, so sorry to be completely retarded.
	So, okay, let's say that the guy can't pay back the $400,000, right?
	So he defaults. And this happened, of course, in 07, 08, right?
	So he defaults on the $400,000.
	So now the bank has to subtract that as an asset, right?
	So it got a free asset by lending $400,000.
	The asset can't be paid back.
	Let's just say it's the first month or whatever to make it simple.
	So, they now have to subtract $400,000 as an asset, right?
	Because they can't collect the loan, is that right?
	Yeah. But they haven't actually touched any of the money they have from real depositors at this point, right?
	The fake money was created.
	The fake money is now destroyed.
	And I suppose that has an effect on reported GDP or whatever it is, but it's not like the bank's original assets or the money that's put in.
	Yeah, but don't they have to have, as part of their loaning, a certain amount of assets to be kept as a proportion of that loan?
	I know sometimes it's pretty low in terms of percentages, but it has to have some relationship to their actual deposits, right?
	Yeah, so it's a very small percentage.
	So for every, like, $100 they can print out of thin air, they actually need to keep around, like, 33 cents.
	Is that right? Yeah, something like that.
	So when they don't meet that coverage...
	0.3%? I thought 3%.
	I was going to say 3%. Oh, that's too low.
	That's got to be for trading houses or whatever.
	But it's 0.3%?
	You can't take me as fact because I've learned about so many different banks in so many different countries.
	I can't actually remember which one it is.
	Yeah, low though. My knowledge is not good though.
	So in one country, it's that.
	And they continuously go below it and they don't really do much about it.
	But when the central bank pokes them like, hey, you need to have your coverage ratio, they just borrow more money to reach it.
	From the central bank? No, from other banks usually.
	Right. No, this is like I did a presentation years ago on the European Union about how, well, in order to be in the European Union, you can't run deficits of, I can't remember what it was, some percentage of your GDP, 6% or something like that.
	And, of course, everybody just blew past that and no one did anything about it.
	Absolutely. It's crazy.
	Now, the Keynesians, they think this is perfectly sensible, right?
	This is good management. This is good stewardship.
	Yeah, so what I recently learned is, so we've got a GDP formula in the Keynesian world.
	It's like saving minus investment plus consumption plus export minus import plus government spending.
	Wait, is this going to be in the example?
	Okay, we don't need to remember anything, actually.
	I just need to know whether I can gap out on this particular part or whether I need...
	Sorry, go ahead. So we just have this GDP formula and it's algebra, basically high school algebra with just variables.
	And so what the Keynesians did, they played around with the algebra and simplified the formula down.
	So government spending equals consumer savings.
	So they did a bunch of algebra to change the formula, and they said, okay, mathematically this is sound, so government spending with minus something equals consumer savings.
	But playing around with economic variables, it's crazy to assume that it has any causal explanatory value for the real economy.
	Because think about it, the government spending more money will not make you save more or less.
	Like, it's ridiculous. It doesn't make any sense.
	No, so when I was in the business world, I used to just call this spreadsheet business plan.
	Yeah. Which is, well, you know, my investors would like it if we could make $10 million this year, so let me create this complicated spreadsheet that gets me there.
	Exactly. And it's like, um...
	And let me studiously avoid any input from the people who actually produce the product we sell.
	And people tinkering around with spreadsheets and thinking that they have anything to do with actual tangible reality has always struck me as a completely platonic, deranged, dissociated exercise in fraud and manipulation.
	Just to be perfectly honest about it.
	Because what would happen is the business idiots would do their spreadsheets.
	They'd hand them over to the people who represented the investors, and then I would be on the hook for delivery.
	And they got lots of bonuses, and I got lots of 80-hour weeks.
	And, yeah, chasing spreadsheets or thinking that the spreadsheets define reality is pretty rough.
	Yeah, that's very common to see.
	Right.
	So what about other people?
	I mean, you can just listen in, or if you wanted to jump in.
	I'm just sort of curious what people have in their experience back.
	What are your resumes? Tell me.
	So, have you guys been following this WallStreetBets GameStop thing where they're trying to do these short squeezes and the silver question, which seems to be kind of open-ended at the moment?
	Have you guys been following that at all?
	And feel free to jump in if you've already talked and nobody else is talking.
	That's totally fine. I've...
	No, go at this.
	Yeah, so they're saying, oh, the Wall Street bets guys are going to totally drive up the price of silver to shaft the big banks and the big trading firms.
	And it turns out that the big banks and big trading firms are the ones who actually have the positions there.
	So they're just using that rumor mill to try and drive up the price of silver, which seems to be working.
	It's up like 11% today.
	But if it's a predatory or manipulated market, Piece of disinfo, it seems kind of not ideal.
	Yeah, and I've certainly been following some of the chats, and it does seem to be the case that the...
	And it's hard to know who's who, obviously, right?
	It's the fog of war, right?
	But some of the Wall Street guys are like, no, no, no, silver is a distraction, it's a piece of disinfo, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	We don't want to have anything to do with that, and...
	Of course, everybody's jumping in to talk crypto, which is not really what they want to be doing right now because crypto purchases or sales don't really do the kind of damage to the large firms that it seems that they want to do.
	But yeah, it does seem to be kind of disinfo that the Reddit crowd is taking an aim at silver at the moment.
	What do you guys think? It's just as bad as a disinfo campaign as the election.
	Well, hey, hey, let's not get too personal about that, because that's pretty heavy guns, man.
	It's important as the election. No, do you think it is?
	Yeah, I spent a lot of time on Reddit tracking this, and no one talked about Silver.
	And then on Sunday, they start beating the war drums on Silver.
	Meanwhile, Melvin Capital and Citadel owns options on Silver and some other things.
	It's crazy.
	Absolutely, everyone on Reddit disagrees.
	There's even posts about, hey, they're baiting you, hold GameStop.
	And AMC they're still talking about, right?
	Yeah, AMC is a part, but their attitude on Reddit is they want to focus on GameStop because, yeah, it's kind of like fighting a two-front war against the establishment that's...
	Very tricky. I just want to mention the morale on Reddit is absolutely insane.
	I usually think looking at the morale is a pretty decent indicator of who's going to win.
	All the people on Reddit are pumped up.
	They're spamming emotes, posts, memes, everyone's holding.
	It's absolutely crazy. Everyone's joining in.
	No one seems to mind their losses anymore.
	It's literally just a Joker movie watching it burn.
	That really does seem to be the case.
	And it's like vengeance for the destruction of their father's and family's livelihood in the 0708 thing, as I sort of talked about on a show the other day.
	That seems to be pretty, you know, I'm willing to burn.
	It's like the economic suicide vest, so to speak, right?
	That they're willing to blow up even their own small assets or value in order to take down some of these larger firms, right?
	Exactly. The economic suicide fest term actually gets used quite a bit.
	Then it usually gets talked about in relation to the person whose life was destroyed who's living in his mother's basement spending his 2,000 COVID check taking down the establishment.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Yeah. No, it's...
	Sorry, somebody else was going to say something? I thought I meant somebody else pop in.
	Yeah, you can't win against...
	I wouldn't even say it's nihilism.
	I don't know exactly if there's a good word for it in English.
	There probably is in German.
	But you can't win against that kind of stuff because the people at the top have a huge amount to lose.
	And the people at the bottom have nothing to lose and have a visceral hatred.
	You know, the people at the top have a love for money and power, but the people at the bottom have a visceral hatred and nothing to lose.
	And it's the...
	It's the religious fundamentalist versus the sensible capitalist, so to speak, in terms of how far they're willing to go.
	Or you could really say it's the atheists versus the Christians in a way, or the atheists versus the Muslims, or whatever it is, because the atheists are like, well, there's nothing for me after death, so I'm going to be pretty careful about staying safe, whereas...
	Some of the more religious people are like rush gloriously into the arms of my deity and they have a certain less regard for survivability.
	And in that conflict, it tends to be the most dug in or the people who care about their resources less.
	And it's interesting because it's going to be fascinating to see which wins out.
	In other words, is it going to be...
	The nothing-to-lose revenge-driven crowd who win, though they have no access to political power, or the profiteers who win who have access to political power.
	In other words, is political power going to be enough to overturn the ideological nothing-to-lose motivation of the rhetoric crowd?
	It's going to be really interesting.
	I think it's up to the moral standards of the SEC. Oh, no.
	No, no, no. Please don't say that.
	No. No.
	Hang on. I just have to take my head out of the toilet for a moment.
	It just happens when you say that.
	Oh, yeah. Because the SEC doesn't...
	They don't even... As far as I know, all of this paper silver...
	You know, that there's many, many, many, many multiples of silver being traded.
	Apparently, this is not allowed, but the SEC never enforces it.
	And, I don't know, the SEC, I mean, the entire apparatus of the government seems to be going after meme makers, not this.
	So, that doesn't seem to be.
	But I think, from the Redditor's perspective, it seems to me that One of the reasons they can't lose.
	They literally can't lose because let's say that the Wall Street goes to the regulators and to the government and gets all of this stuff shut down and all of that.
	Well, they still won because then, even though they've lost money, which they don't particularly care about, it's not like you can't get a whole life started with $2,000, right?
	All you can do is stave off the inevitable decay and I think a lot of people there understand that $2,000 is coming from nothing anyway, so it's not even real money.
	It's just going to Drive up inflation or whatever.
	And so I think they can't, because they've already won, because now people are saying, oh, well, when Robinhood and other places stopped the buys and only allowed the sells, that was market manipulation.
	So even if they lose everything, which isn't that much, they have exposed the corruption of the market in a pretty powerful way.
	Right.
	I also think it's and hopefully you guys will not think it's too insane to say this could be.
	There was a possibility.
	But I also think that this is a strong reaction to Trump's failure to control mass immigration.
	Because everybody knows that mass immigration is driven by the money printing, right?
	Because people come here for free stuff or come to the West for free stuff and the free stuff is only kept available through the corruption of the monetary system.
	And if they take down or do significant damage to the economic system...
	It's the wall part two, or the wall, the backup.
	There's plan B for the wall, if that makes any sense.
	In other words, if you can't create a barrier, you can reduce the incentives, if that makes sense.
	I think there's quite a few people who think that way.
	The subreddit is very apolitical though, but it might be a part of it.
	Well, it's interesting that it comes right after the loss of Trump, right?
	Yeah, very interesting.
	However much we want to put that loss in quotes, right?
	It is interesting to me that this strategy comes right after the, I mean, right after the loss of Trump and right after, well, it really starts in around Biden's inauguration and all that.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	The setup seemed to have been there for a long time with the excessive shorting and the information.
	But I think the morale and the subconscious of people was kind of in the right mood for this to take off with Trump losing.
	Does that make sense? Oh, absolutely.
	So Trump loses.
	You can't discuss any potential election fraud.
	Free speech is destroyed, like people like me and others, and I guess even Trump being completely deplatformed.
	And so the time for arguments passed, right?
	Okay, so then what do you do?
	What do you do when you don't believe that there's any political solution or any voting solution to get what you want?
	Out of politics.
	Well, you know, if you can't fix the house, you go for the foundations, right?
	Yeah, you grasp at the straws.
	Right, right.
	And if that's the case, then people will go to financial extremes to ensure they get what they want.
	Because, you know, the system doesn't work anymore.
	And with suppression of free speech, what a lot of people perceive as suppression of voting and that Biden was installed by the deep state, as people think, then, yeah, I think that this is the next...
	This is the next step. And of course, you know, I mean, the idiots and criminals who did this ridiculous storming at the Capitol, it's not like that's not a path anybody wants to go down who's got half a brain.
	So I think that this legal, I mean, this is kind of like an ostracism, right?
	This is just finding the way that the system benefits the rich and colluding to have it benefit someone other than the rich.
	And of course, the Marxists should be loving it, but of course, they hate it because you need this kind of crap for the money to go to the Marxists.
	A very interesting point I've been thinking about is all these hedge funds and giant companies at the top, it's kind of weird how it works because a big part is just people's 401ks.
	It's a giant part of the ownership.
	So because the ownership is so diluted, it's actually the managers of those companies who have the control and who are siphoning the productivity, not even the owners directly, although there's plenty of that too.
	Can you break that down a little more?
	I got the first thread and then dropped the second, so if you could just do it again.
	Okay, so the largest shareholder of something like McDonald's is just ordinary people with 401ks, pension funds.
	Yeah, 401ks and pensions funds and private investment, those are the ownership of the giant companies.
	Sure, there's a lot of rich people in there, but they don't seem to go past the 51% ownership anymore.
	So when you hurt a hedge fund like this, you actually hurt a lot of pension funds and a lot of people 401ks.
	But people now realize how corrupt it is anyway.
	They don't care for even a single percent how much they hurt people 401ks or pension funds because it's bullshit anyway.
	Okay, so that's where I sort of missed what you were saying, and I think you're right, but I would say that if you're going to look at ownership, saying that Joe Blow down the street owns McDonald's stock because he participates in a 401k that has some ownership – I don't think that it's particularly valid to say that he himself owns the stock because he's not buying and selling that stock.
	It's the 401k manager, right?
	It's the hedge fund manager.
	It's whoever, right? It's that dude or dude-esque who's up there making the buy and sell decisions.
	I wouldn't say that. He probably doesn't even know down to much detail what the composition of his 401k is.
	Exactly. The people don't know.
	And that's why I said the managers have the power now.
	Right, right. I see. Now I understand.
	Yeah, so it's the people who are buying and selling on behalf of the millions who have that real power, right?
	And they make a lot, man.
	If they shave a percent or two or three off the buying and selling, I mean, that shaves down a lot of profits in real terms, and they're making quite a fortune.
	They're really rich. They're almost like in a new elite class, the managerial class, so to speak.
	It's the new aristocracy, right?
	Yeah, although above them are like the wills, the people's names, we probably don't know.
	Yeah, yeah. No, and because we know how hereditary IQ is, and that you'd need some high IQ for this kind of stuff, it's almost like they're a hereditary aristocracy to some degree.
	I mean, I know there's regression to the mean and all of that, but nonetheless, regression to the mean can be counted quite a bit with good contacts and the right schools, right?
	Absolutely. That's completely how it works.
	That's basically the Ivy School MBA track.
	I only, this is sort of way back in my business days, but there was a guy I worked with.
	He was sort of a contemporary of mine.
	And he just, I mean, there's not a lot of people that I meet and just viscerally just really dislike.
	You know, the pompous and windbaggery and all of that.
	Tommy Lee Jones did a great job of portraying that kind of guy in the old Harrison Ford movie, The Fugitive.
	But... Oh no, maybe he was playing a lawyer.
	Anyway, so anyway, I just didn't know anything about this guy.
	I just really, really disliked him.
	And again, that's actually kind of rare.
	I have a positive view of most people, but this guy just...
	There's only been a couple of people in my life.
	And... The guy who managed us both, he got that I didn't like this guy, and I guess the guy, maybe the guy didn't like me or whatever.
	But he demanded that we go out for lunch and get to know each other.
	And, you know, normally when you get to know someone, maybe you see a bit of the rough edges come off or the things that you just...
	But I actually walked out of this guy at this lunch disliking this guy even more because...
	dangerously empty person who was propped up because he'd been to Harvard and he came from a very wealthy background.
	But he just didn't have anything intelligent to add.
	In other words, he was coasting on his credentials to the point where he thought the credentials made him smart and he didn't actually have to work, whereas I was in the software field with a degree in history.
	And so I knew that I had to work really hard to make my opinions valid and all of that.
	And so this credential stuff, I've rarely met anyone quite that dense, somebody who had Or somebody who has had such a high opinion of himself based upon so little.
	I mean, I have no problem with people who have a high opinion of themselves if they've based it on real things.
	But yeah, this guy was...
	This credentialism stuff, that's just something that popped into my mind just how really...
	To me, it's like a sign of a negative now.
	Like if somebody were... Yeah, this credentialism stuff,
	it is the new aristocracy that you can Kids are likely to be smarter than the average, and no matter what, though, you can usually buy them into elite schools, which give them some sort of cachet with the masses or at least other elites as a whole.
	And now, of course, to me, the credentialism stuff is a complete mark.
	That you're just not original.
	You're absolutely not original.
	Because if you were original, if you did think for yourself, they'd never give you that degree.
	In fact, they barely let you anywhere near the campus.
	So to me, it's just a rubber stamp of ultimate conformity and an empty person stuffed full with the vacuous syllables of endless propaganda.
	So anyway, so it's a totally side rant here.
	But yeah, that credentialism stuff just reminded me of that guy.
	And he didn't actually last particularly long.
	Because I kept, you know, when I dislike someone, what you do is you just keep track of their failed predictions, right?
	Every time this guy makes a prediction, you note it down.
	And then the next meeting, if that prediction hasn't come true, then you say, so in the last meeting, you said this.
	This is what actually happened. Can you explain?
	The gap between these two things, right?
	And you just keep hammering people, and his predictions would fail.
	Like, in the same way the Keynesians guys' predictions would fail.
	And you just keep hammering that until he just started to lose his temper more and more.
	And because I was calm and curious, he looked crazy and I looked sane and he got fired.
	So anyway, that credentialism is pretty rough.
	And that's what's so fascinating about This Reddit thing, there's no credentials in there, right?
	Nobody even knows who these people are, let alone what education they have.
	And they usually have a pretty good way of explaining things.
	And they have a way of whipping the troops together, right?
	Like, hold and stay strong and all of that.
	There's a great meme where the woman is wailing, you know, sell GameStop, we can be millionaires.
	And the bearded guy is like, no, they must pay.
	And man, it's tough to fight that stuff.
	It really is.
	Do you know, so if there's anything else people wanted to mention or talk about with that topic, I'd certainly be interested to hear.
	But I also did want to divvy over a little into the Lando Crypto.
	So are you guys over in the Lando Crypto at all?
	Thank you.
	I just wanted to say that this Reddit morale thing reminds me a bit of Gamergate.
	But as for crypto, I'm not in it.
	I don't really understand it.
	I know why, but I don't know the mechanics behind it.
	It's very complicated. But that's not at all.
	Now, do you mean all crypto or just like the altcoins or whatever?
	No, just crypto.
	Does somebody want to take a stab at explaining to our new friend here the Lando crypto?
	Yeah, hey Steph, I wanted to chime in.
	I'm sure there's a lot of people that have more experience and are more successful than I am in crypto, and I'm happy to take a side steed if they step up, but I've got a lot of experience and I'm happy to help any way I can.
	Go for it. Well, I mean, does this gentleman have any question, or I can go over kind of my history?
	I would say just intro to crypto as a whole.
	Oh, okay. Well, I guess for someone in general, an intro to crypto, I would say that it's a voluntary monetary system as opposed to an involuntary one.
	That's the biggest selling point.
	I know when it comes to the MMT stuff and the way people are describing what money is, you know, I come back to personally like, you know, Was money supposed to be something that transfers value?
	I'm like, okay, well, how can you value something, or how can it be something of value when you've got a gun to your head to use it?
	So is it really money at all, or is it some kind of negative value or anti-value that we're forced to exchange in?
	But, I mean, that's going into a little more the philosophy of money stuff.
	Okay, so if anyone has any questions, please chime in because I'm trying to think of how I could be helpful in describing crypto in this way because I've been in the world so long.
	I kind of assume that everyone's got a general or some kind of exposure and understanding of it.
	No, no, I think this is why I wanted to have a conversation with people because having some comprehension of the crypto world I think is pretty important because when it comes to the fall of fiat, You need resource that's valued, that's divisible, that's transferable, and limited.
	Now, crypto, and I speak mostly to the Bitcoin side of things, but crypto, so Bitcoins are created by solving mathematical problems.
	And every time Bitcoin is created because a mathematical problem has been solved, that mathematical problem gets harder.
	And so this is why they call it crypto mining for Bitcoin, right?
	Because you need, and it's usually GPUs seem to be pretty good at solving these algorithms, but you need to invest electricity and hardware into creating Bitcoins.
	And then at around 22 million Bitcoins, the equation becomes impossible to solve.
	And that's it. That's it for new Bitcoins.
	Bitcoins, of course, are infinitely, well, not quite infinitely, but for all practical purposes, they're pretty much infinitely divisible.
	Yeah, it's a public blockchain, a public database.
	And people make money by validating Bitcoin transactions and they make money by mining Bitcoins.
	And my guess is that the last Bitcoin probably won't ever be because it would just take so long.
	But it definitely is limited.
	It definitely has value to people, of course.
	It is divisible. And, of course, it is amazingly transferable because if you know your Bitcoin passphrase, you can saunter around the world and always have access to your Bitcoins with nothing written down or anything like that.
	Okay. No, that's incredibly helpful.
	That gives me an idea of which direction to stab on.
	So I can think back for myself.
	What were the first couple things I found out about Bitcoin that got me really excited about?
	When did I make that switch?
	I was like, oh, I get this, and I trust it.
	It's not just a bunch of...
	It's not someone doing it for the lulls on the internet, and they're going to laugh about taking my money.
	So one of the aspects of Bitcoin that really...
	And crypto in general that gave me a lot of confidence and it was finding out that the code, the technology behind it is open source, which means that, okay, so someone like me can't go and open up the code and understand what's going on there, but...
	So anyone who's competent in the coding world can review this code themselves and line by line find out exactly what it's doing, what it should be doing, and things of that nature.
	Yeah, it's not a black box.
	Absolutely. So the people writing this code could either be malicious or they could be incompetent or just well-meaning but missed something.
	Like when you're writing this kind of complicated software, yeah, it's easy to make mistakes.
	As a matter of fact, inevitably… I just wanted to point out as well that the more value is embedded in Bitcoin, the greater and higher is the incentive to make sure that the code is on the up and up.
	So given that there's so much money in Bitcoin now, it seems impossible that a fundamental bug would escape.
	Absolutely. Absolutely.
	You could look at it as like there's what?
	There's hundreds of billions of dollars in Bitcoin.
	Well, now, there's – okay, obviously, it's not hundreds of billions of dollars because as soon as someone compromises it, the market will find out.
	And because they'll see the Bitcoin just appearing out of nowhere, and then people will immediately target that and figure out what's going on.
	But long story short… If someone could compromise Bitcoin, there is a hundreds of billions of dollar incentive to compromise Bitcoin.
	And the fact that it hasn't happened only validates Bitcoin even more as being something – or crypto in general as being something incredibly secure and resilient.
	Well, and of course, if you're concerned about compromised currency, fiat is the last place you'd go, right?
	Amen. Amen.
	Okay, so the fact that it's open source is one of the things – That gave me a great deal of confidence in it.
	There's that, and compare it to fiat institutions.
	How open source is that?
	How much do you get to have an understanding of what goes on?
	No, listen, to be fair, for $800,000, you can have Janet yell and drop by your place too.
	Good. Fair.
	So, alright, so the fact that it's open source, trying to think back, like, what were the things that really, really hit it home for me?
	Sorry, I had a thought a little while ago, but I lost it.
	So, oh yeah, no, no, I remember what I was going to say.
	If you are, on your own, looking to invest in crypto...
	I would absolutely make sure that it's an open source project.
	I have seen, and I thought that it'd be like common sense, nobody would do it, but I've seen plenty of times that people got hoodwinked by getting involved in projects that were not open source or said they were, but really weren't.
	So that's just, that's one point to make sure you're checking for and understanding if you are deciding to invest in a particular cryptocurrency project.
	Let's remind people as well about some of the limitations of Bitcoin.
	Because the blockchain is so big, it can take a while to get transactions done.
	It's not a coffee and a donut and a currency, as far as I can tell, which is one of the reasons why Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, and other things with smaller footprints were sort of developed.
	So it's... I sort of think of it like a really nimble dinosaur in that, yeah, it's transferable and so on, but even a nimble dinosaur that's very big can't turn corners too quickly.
	And so there are some limitations, particularly for the smaller transactions, if I remember right.
	Absolutely, absolutely.
	So the Bitcoin fork happened in 2017, and that was a big divide in the Bitcoin community.
	And that was kind of personally significant for me.
	I was on the other side of the divide.
	Just tell people what the divide is first before we get into the details.
	Oh, sorry. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you.
	So there was a divide in two different ways of solving that problem of Bitcoin.
	The transaction's costing too much, because basically there's only so much space on the blockchain to record these transactions, like who's sending their Bitcoin from who to who.
	And essentially, one party wanted to increase the amount of space on the blockchain.
	And the other party wanted to move those transactions to another layer, to where they're not actually being resolved on the blockchain.
	They're being resolved on like a separate mechanism and then solidified back on the blockchain.
	And if I'm not explaining this well, anyone, please, you know, jump in and take over.
	So they call that layer two solutions, or in this case, the Lightning Network for Bitcoin Core.
	Now, Bitcoin Cash said, like, no, no, no.
	And these are coders. They're like, there's a really simple mechanism we can do here.
	And we can just do this and increase the amount of transactions on the chain.
	It's incredibly low risk.
	It doesn't require all this complicated stuff.
	And we can keep going on as normal and focus on other things.
	And essentially, they're making the argument that...
	Oh, so the Bitcoin Core side says...
	That's not the way we do it in the technological world.
	We tend to not try to affect the base layer of something.
	We move it off to another layer, another mechanism, and then resolve it there and bring it back to the base layer.
	Sorry, that's getting a little complicated.
	So Bitcoin Core didn't want to increase the blockchain size.
	And I've got some good arguments like, look, we're going to be recording these transactions essentially forever.
	So it kind of makes sense that this is one of the most valuable things.
	You want to record your transaction forever on the blockchain.
	You might have to pay a little bit for it.
	Whereas the other side is like, no, the technology exists to make it less than a penny.
	We can do this.
	It's not that difficult. I'm sorry, just to hang on for a second and tell me if this analogy is way off.
	I like direct analogies.
	So if you've got a highway with a traffic jam, you're either going to widen the highway or you're going to create service roads, right?
	So to try and bleed the traffic off from the main traffic highway, right?
	So Bitcoin, it was traffic jammed.
	It would take hours and hours to complete a transaction and it was pretty expensive.
	And so I think that one idea was, well, let's get traffic off the main road, off the highway.
	We'll build some side roads and service roads and so on.
	And the other was, well, I was just wiping the highway.
	And that's not a perfect analogy, but that's sort of roughly where I got it in my head.
	Yeah, that's kind of a good one.
	Maybe another way of putting it is, you've got this highway here.
	Let's create another means of transportation, you know.
	But yeah, it's kind of hard to make.
	But yeah, no, the service roads analogy works.
	One side, let's wide the highway.
	The other side says, no, let's create this other – let's create an underground railway system.
	Take care of it. So – For me personally, I remember getting into Bitcoin and it being advertised like for pennies or less than a penny, you can move this much value across the world.
	And now all of a sudden, it's costing me like $50 for a transaction, and it doesn't go through for hours and hours.
	Now – and what really kind of got my gall is that this could have been prevented.
	They absolutely knew how.
	I'm sure they had their reasons they didn't, but it's like they just didn't listen to customer feedback.
	Yeah. Well, the people who were shaving value off the transaction, I imagine, would have the economic incentive to keep those transaction costs high.
	I mean, now it can cost thousands of dollars to do a large Bitcoin transaction.
	And the people who are making those thousands of dollars, they don't want the system to change because it's profitable for them, and I assume that there was that.
	And they would tend to be the people most embedded in the architecture.
	I don't know. I don't think that it would cost thousands of dollars for an individual, but potentially someone processing that cluster of transactions could make thousands of dollars.
	I don't know that exact detail.
	Right now, I would expect to pay...
	$3 to $5 for a Bitcoin transaction.
	In general, if the network's getting jammed, good luck.
	You're paying an obscene amount to get your Bitcoin through.
	And of course, someone on the Bitcoin core side will say, well, no, you can use the Lightning network.
	It is practical and usable if you're a dev or if you're someone who's a little technically inclined to know what you're doing.
	You can use the Lightning network.
	Or you can offer more money to have a transaction go through faster.
	Absolutely. Absolutely.
	And I guess from personally, the other side where I come from, it's like why are we doing these hoops and loops when you can just open – you can increase the size of the blockchain.
	And our technology will catch up to cover the fact that it costs a little more in hardware to handle that.
	Like we know, like Moore's Law, things of that nature.
	We know technologically we're going to get cheaper, bigger hard drives and better networking and things.
	So it kind of seems like the old oil argument, like we're going to run out of oil.
	It's like, no, we're going to find different solutions as time goes on.
	Does that make sense?
	Thank you.
	It does, but still, I mean, for a larger transaction, I don't know, like a couple of hundred thousand, for it to take an hour or two and cost you some money, it's usually not the end of the world, because Lord knows, unless you're applying to some ransom demand, you probably don't need that money transferred in 12 seconds or something.
	So, but...
	But Bitcoin is not good for the coffee and donut scenario.
	That's my contention.
	So the consumer side of Bitcoin is not going to work in its current formation.
	Like the idea that you can just go, I want to pay a toll with Bitcoin.
	It's like, okay, wait till tomorrow and you're good to keep driving, right?
	So That I think is one of the challenges that other cryptos are trying to solve.
	Some of those cryptos are derivatives.
	You're talking about the 2017 fork.
	That's when Bitcoin Cash mirrored Bitcoin, if I remember rightly.
	And people used Bitcoin Cash, much lower transaction fees, much faster response.
	Is that right? If I recall correctly, it resolves in about the same amount of time.
	Sorry, I don't know that detail.
	But it is faster.
	I'm sorry, it is a lot cheaper.
	That's a contradictory statement.
	It's also the same amount of time, but faster.
	No, no, no. Sorry, I misspoke.
	It is cheaper for every transaction, like less than a penny.
	So that could be a coffee and donut scenario.
	So Bitcoin at the moment remains generally a store and transfer of larger value items.
	And of course, remember... Just for people who didn't see my sort of famous presentation from back in the day on Bitcoin, that Bitcoin is not just about money.
	It's like saying that the internet is just about text.
	Well, of course, originally it kind of was, a hypertext markup language and all.
	But Bitcoin is a public ledger.
	Bitcoin can include contracts.
	It can include ownership scenarios.
	It can be programmed so that If your obituary shows up in a particular website that your bitcoins are automatically transferred to your next of kin and so you can copyright stuff, establish your copyright ownership on the public blockchain.
	So it's a lot more than just cash.
	It's a whole public ledger. Steph, so I remember that video.
	It was a wonderful video.
	I appreciate it. It helped even more make me confident in crypto and jump in.
	This is here comes the but, right?
	But! But! But I don't know that that all is necessarily the case because that's back when Bitcoin was the crypto and it was going to be… More things like that.
	And now it's like, no, this is the store of value kind of thing.
	Oh, so they tossed aside the Internet of Money stuff and now it's just bucks, baby?
	Yeah, I don't want to say that that's certain, but if I recall, they removed some of the opcodes or some code related to that stuff.
	Oh, good to know. So someone, please correct me.
	This is one of the things that kind of disappointed me.
	So now I'm like, crypto is going to do it.
	Let a thousand flowers bloom.
	Please forgive the commie reference, but I think you get the idea, the sentiment.
	Crypto is going to do it.
	I don't know that there's going to be – I don't think that there's one in particular that they've all got their part to play.
	Well, my guess is, and I appreciate that update because I haven't delved into the architecture of Bitcoin in a while, but I imagine that if there was not much demand for it and it was significant overhead, then simply supply and demand would shave those features and functions off the blockchain.
	Sure, sure. Yep.
	But it was... Bitcoin is...
	Sorry, Bitcoin is not super private, to put it mildly.
	So, I mean, there's ways that you can do it.
	I think there's algorithms that can have you scatter Bitcoin purchases and then aggregate them for transfers and stuff like that.
	But, you know, if people know you're Bitcoin Addy, they can see and trace every flow.
	So it's to some degree, depending on whether you make...
	Yes, I have.
	Like, I've worked for exchanges, and I know the software they have.
	And yeah, they can look at the blockchain and see, you know, people's names associated with different accounts and stuff like that.
	So it is not that hard.
	Bitcoin is not private unless you are going to great lengths to make it so.
	Yeah, and even if you are, I mean, I don't know.
	I would just generally, my particular assumption, I mean, this is my particular assumption in general and has been ever since the beginning, I assume that every single email, everything I do at some point may become public.
	That's all. You know, I just always speak like everything's public.
	And so from a blockchain perspective...
	I would just make the assumption that it's pretty public.
	And again, unless you're some deep criminal, in which case you're probably not on this call.
	I'm sure you aren't. So yeah, I would just say just remember that it's not privacy-centric, to put it mildly.
	Yes. Yep. Yep.
	So, yeah, there are some particular coins that offer different features for privacy and some are better than others, of course, and some seem to succeed pretty well.
	Like recently, Monero is one of the most popular privacy coins.
	Yeah, Monero is pretty good for privacy as far as I know.
	Yes, and the IRS issued like a $600,000 reward for anyone who could crack Monero, which is kind of laughable given Monero's market cap.
	But that just shows that's an admission that they can't – or at least it seems to indicate that they can't break its privacy.
	So – and I'm not saying that is or isn't the case.
	Like, you know, do your own research.
	If you – I've been in this for years, and I've been looking at it for years, and I wouldn't pretend that my crypto is private like that.
	But now one of the big things about Bitcoin, and this is important to the fiat distinction and taxation, is it is quite true that you can remember a 12-word phrase.
	And that 12-word phrase will be essentially the key to the bank or to the vault that holds your Bitcoin account.
	And you can cross – you can go around the world and move virtually – millions of dollars, thousands of dollars, however much in Bitcoin, and no one's there to check what you have on you.
	No one's there to look at the – Fiat bills in your suitcase or the gold bullion.
	That's something new in civilization, that someone can do that.
	They can move a vast amount of wealth with only the codes in their head, only a couple words in their head.
	Well, and just remember that the entire modern world was built out of currency as opposed to land, because land is fixed and unmovable, and land was the source of the wealth of the aristocrats.
	Once capital came along, capital could be moved relatively easily back in the day across borders, and therefore countries had to start competing for better business.
	More friendly business environments, and that gave birth to modern capitalism in many ways.
	So the mobility of wealth, the more fixed wealth is, i.e.
	land, the more repressive the regime.
	And this is why, of course, people like to restrict the movement of their citizens and tax them all over the world or make it really difficult to switch locales because citizens are the new livestock and have to be kept chained to the tax farms.
	Yes. This mobility of wealth is just an amazing thing.
	The only other precedent I can think of is to transfer from land to capital in sort of the 18th century.
	Which is like an exponential change, and yeah, this is what we've got now, or at least the change between capital and crypto.
	Well, there was a big change, sorry, there was a big change, as you know, between capital and central banking, right?
	So capital being wealth stored up in both fixed capital equipment to factories and so on, and gold and banks with real currency assets.
	which is very transferable, but because it's not tethered to anything real is so ridiculously corruptible.
	So I think that the Bitcoin thing comes out in response to the corruptibility.
	And it's kind of a funny thing because the same tyrannical impulses that drive things like deplatforming and so on, and the same tyrannical impulses that have people be willing to give up their freedoms in exchange for debt, right?
	Because people are giving up their economic freedoms in exchange for money created out of debt.
	But it's those same forces that are driving up the value of crypto because large institutions are looking down the tunnel of time and seeing the on rushing train of the fall of the US dollar as the reserve currency of the world, which is kind This is kind of how it goes historically.
	And I think people are moving into crypto because of that.
	Well, every time there's something economically goofy, I watch Bitcoin's price go.
	So I remember back when I think Bitcoin was either below 100 or below 1,000, and Cyprus, the Cyprus banks, had some problem, had some deficit or whatever, and they went in and removed like 7% of the balance in everyone's savings account.
	I remember that. As soon as that happened, I'm like, okay, well, Bitcoin's going up, and within the next – it wasn't that long after that, you got a big spike in Bitcoin.
	And so, yeah. And that to me – sorry to interrupt, but that's really – just before I forget, I mean this is a very interesting question, which is why I wanted to kind of talk to you guys, is that – If this populist revolt against Wall Street goes, is the primary beneficiary going to be those in stocks or those in crypto?
	And I would lean towards the latter, but I'm certainly – I mean, obviously, if you hold specific stocks and buy at the – sell at the peak, you're obviously going to make a lot of money.
	But I think that if the financial system is under a populist assault, so to speak, economically speaking, then – I think people are going to say, well, this system has now become unpredictable and unstable.
	And yes, maybe I can make some money if I follow this populist thing.
	But the moment people start to try and profit from this Reddit rebellion, this Reddit rebellion will simply change tactics.
	I mean, there's this call-and-answer thing that goes on in every particular form of combat.
	And so, is the safe haven going to be...
	Getting into stocks, I don't think bonds so much anymore, or is it going to be getting into more crypto?
	And I guess that's the question I wanted to sort of point out, though.
	What do you guys think? That is a great, great perspective on it.
	Sorry, there's one point I wanted to make real quick with – With arguments against crypto.
	So let's say someone says crypto is a threat to the state.
	Why would they let it exist?
	Why would they let it exist?
	And essentially because when these people steal the money from the citizens, they're going to want a secure asset to store it in that they themselves can flee.
	That's one argument.
	Not to say that's foolproof because it certainly isn't in the interest of states, but that is at least an incentive in the other direction.
	Where people fleeing China will use crypto, whether it's corrupt officials or not.
	They'll use Bitcoin to move their value.
	And if they were to bar general citizens' participation in crypto, it would lose most of its value, and therefore they'd be shooting themselves in the foot.
	That's one side of things. Now, another side of things, which is quite interesting, and this is going off my memory, so forgive me if it's gone somewhat astray, but I remember some years ago, some politician in South Korea was looking to restrict or control crypto in some particularly statist manner, and he just kind of wound up dead.
	Yeah. Because there are a lot of very...
	I mean, listen, let's be frank.
	There are bad people in every currency, and there are some very bad people in crypto.
	Like, there's a reason why, if your files get encrypted, you have to send your money through crypto, right, to get them unlocked, if that ever even works.
	I don't know. But so there's some very bad people who have a lot of money in crypto, and if politicians...
	Start to mess with crypto, they really are going to be facing a kind of blowback that's going to get pretty personal, in my opinion.
	I think we've seen that before. And I think that people are pretty aware of those threats.
	And, you know, so on the plus, it's always a stick and the carrot is the best motivator for people who are amoral, right?
	So the stick is, yeah, bad people will target you or your family at a very personal level if you screw with their cryptos.
	And B, you can transfer your wealth into the crypto, which will survive a currency collapse with great aplomb.
	Thank you, Jared.
	The destabilization of the system is underway, and the Reddit thing is just one part of it.
	Because it's kind of a crusade, so to speak...
	It's not going to stop.
	And they've also tasted victory, and they've got the serotonin and endorphin rush of victory in their goals.
	So I do think that they're going to keep working and trying to find chinks in the system, and Lord knows there are tons of them, right?
	Sorry, go ahead. I do have a thought on an argument for crypto in this.
	Do we go to stocks or do we go to crypto in this current situation?
	Yeah, just an argument.
	Yeah, don't wait for permission, man.
	Just go for it. Oh, you got it.
	Okay. So, all right.
	Stocks versus crypto. Oh, my gosh.
	Come back. It was there. It was just with me.
	Come back. Oh, you got hedged by your own brain, man.
	Seriously. There's a little competition up there.
	So, stocks versus crypto.
	Stocks versus crypto. Where did we go?
	Oh, yes. Go ahead.
	Yeah, sorry. I am being betrayed.
	No, no. Do you know what?
	The number of times this happens to be in a show is ridiculous.
	Like, when I'm actually doing a show, I wonder so far afield, I'm like, what the hell was my original point?
	And every now and then, my brain would just be like, no.
	You screwed me. I'm screwing you back.
	I'm not giving you the inspiration back.
	Too bad, man. Too bad.
	Too bad. I know that intimately, that feeling.
	Oh, yeah. So, yeah.
	So, stocks versus crypto...
	I mean, it's funny because if you go into the stocks based upon the Reddit stuff because you want to make money...
	Then the Reddit stuff will fail, right?
	Because the whole point of the Reddit thing is you have to be an insane investor, right?
	Because the whole point of the stock market is to assume, in general, sane actors.
	Now, nobody looks at GameStop and says, well, this stock should be 4,000% higher, right?
	I'm sorry, that's just not it.
	And so the system is not built for insanity from a financial standpoint.
	And of course, these guys aren't motivated by, quote, sane, practical actors.
	Empirical money-making concerns.
	They are motivated by ideological vengeance purposes and so on, right?
	Like no sane person detonates themselves at a crowded square, right?
	But if there's an ideological or religious purpose behind it, that's a different matter.
	And so I think, and this is another reason why, I just wanted to talk to you guys and get your thoughts on this, but I think that the failure of The populist MAGA movement has shifted the energies, again, whether it's conscious or not, I don't know, but it's shifted the energies to, well, if we can't fix it, you know, we'll just tear it down.
	Like, have you guys ever owned a car so long that it's just completely impractical to keep owning it?
	Like, no matter what you do, you just, like I said, my first car I had for like, I don't know, 13 years or something like that.
	I literally drove that thing into the ground.
	I mean, I had to push it into the...
	Into the dealership to get a different car.
	And I think that right now, you know, like you, and what happened was I drove, it was a 98 Volvo S70 that I originally got as part of a sort of, I had car allowance from the company because I had to have a nice car to pick up clients.
	And I dropped it off at the dealership because the engine light was blinking and they said, oh, it needs a new this, it needs a new that, it needs to do the other.
	And this like 13-year-old car needed like $3,000 or $4,000 worth of work.
	And there were already a bunch of things that weren't working with it.
	And I was just, you know, like the half the door locks didn't work.
	The aerial was broken off.
	And there were various lights and burps that I just kind of lived with.
	And it was like, okay, well, there's no point, right?
	So I do think that where the MAGA movement is or the populist movement is, is, hey, you know, we gave it a good shot with Trump.
	And for a variety of factors, some of which were under Trump's control and some of which weren't, the populist movement failed in its goal.
	And so I think, like me, you drop the car off for repair, which is kind of like getting Trump voted in.
	And they come back with a $4,000 bill and you're like, oh, forget it.
	I'll just get a new car. And I mean, it's a silly analogy, but I think that's kind of where a lot of the populists in America are, which is, you know, hey, we dropped democracy off at the shop, right?
	And the bill came back Biden.
	And I think they're just like, okay, well, we just need a new car, you know, car being the economy, America, the financial system, whatever it is that you want to call it.
	So if that's the case, then they're going to work to continually exploit any weaknesses or susceptibility to the system.
	I guess the GameStop short being the first one.
	It doesn't seem to me that they're genuinely moving on silver, but we can sort of talk about that as well.
	But if their goal is to continue to act as agents of disruption, then you can analogize that I think?
	Then you could write the coattails of this kind of movement and make some money on stocks, in my opinion, but you will, in a sense, be undermining the purpose of what it is that they're doing, and you may be acting against your own self-interest in that if they do want to disrupt the economic system, which we know can't last forever, statistically, then you might make some money, but I'm not sure it would be...
	You know, like there's proud money, money that you've earned and you sweated for and you deserve.
	And then there's money like, oh yeah, these guys are really trying to do a revolution.
	I'm not going to help them, but I'm going to profit from it and help the enemy.
	I'm not sure that that would be squeaky clean money in your conscience, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, totally does.
	I remember that thought I'd lost there.
	It's relevant to this.
	I follow Bruce Fenton, who is someone who's been – he was in Wall Street for 20 years, and he was also part of the Bitcoin Foundation.
	I think he maybe even started it.
	I want to say back in 2011, 2012, something like that.
	So he's been intimately involved in crypto since the beginning, and he also has – Decades of experience in Wall Street, like he grew up around Wall Street, and that's where he successfully made his professional life.
	And as soon as something more moral came along, he jumped into crypto for philosophical liberty, freedom reasons.
	So he's a good guy.
	His take on this situation was in two directions.
	One, he's been saying for years that the stock market needs to go to a decentralized system.
	The stock market needs to be resolved on a blockchain so that it is more secure.
	Just to say a little bit more about the decentralized stuff, I'm sorry to interrupt your thought, but the decentralized, you mean like no stock brokerage, no stock brokerage, no central place to buy and sell, just anyone can do it.
	Yes. So a decentralized system would be something essentially like Bitcoin in the sense that there is no head of directors.
	There is no board. There is no company.
	There is no individual institution that owns Bitcoin or any blockchain.
	Wait, wait, wait. I'm sorry.
	No board? Wait. No board?
	No board of directors? Do you mean at the company level?
	Because then who would be issuing the shares?
	No, no, no. I'm sorry. I was referencing Bitcoin in that sense.
	Like any blockchain, any decentralized system, nobody owns that network.
	There's no New York stock exchange that you have to buy a seat on in order to be able to buy and sell shares.
	Anybody can do it, right? Yes.
	With Bitcoin, you don't go to the Bitcoin stock exchange and talk to a registered Bitcoin buyer and seller to blah, blah, blah, right?
	Precisely. Or to transact it.
	As a matter of fact, if you had the means, you could transact it yourself.
	You could process the transactions yourself.
	You could do the same thing with issuing and resolving stocks, which actually Bruce Fitton did become part of the Ravencoin project, which does this itself.
	It was a cryptocurrency made for issuing and transacting securities.
	And it's not a very complicated system and situation.
	It is not that complicated to handle this.
	And so his big take on this was since he's been championing this for years, he's like, look, and especially when these companies went in and did their shady things, he's like, you can't trust this anymore.
	This is a great betrayal of this stock system I took part in for years, the way they're handling this.
	And so essentially the way I would take that is that crypto is the play to make.
	If you want to make moral money and money in general in a much safer fashion, crypto would be the play to make because that's where this stuff will get settled on in the future, that technology.
	Eventually the stock market will be resolved on a blockchain.
	Well, let me give you another layer to that strategy.
	And again, none of this is any recommendations.
	These are just my thoughts on the issue, right?
	So what if, if you really want to, there's a case to be made, that if you really want to drive up the value of Bitcoin or cryptos, that you should join the Redditors in storming the shorts of Wall Street, right?
	Yeah. Because as you destabilize Bitcoin, The stock market, more money will take refuge.
	Well, where is it going to take refuge?
	Is it going to take refuge in real estate, right?
	So there's a bunch of traditional places, the safe havens, right?
	Real estate, precious metals, maybe some basket of commodities, oil or whatever it is, right?
	So traditionally, when people are afraid that the financial system is becoming a part of the seams, they go to real estate or precious metals.
	Those are the two main ones.
	And in precious metals, we can include that basket of commodities thing.
	Which is all generally tied to some fixed asset that's hard to produce or whatever, like oil.
	So where do you go?
	Well, gold, I think, would have been the traditional place to go.
	And that, of course, to go. And that's the case that people like Peter Schiff and others have made.
	But tracking gold, the seizure of gold that's happened on a regular basis throughout human history, it makes people a bit nervous and also nervous.
	I think we're good to go.
	So the other place that people would put their money if there's institutional or systemic disruptions in stocks is to go into real estate, but I'm not entirely positive about the real estate thing at the moment for a couple of reasons.
	One, this is not so much the case in America, but because there's going to be this legalization of probably 20 to 30 million people or past citizenship in time for the next election, but The value of real estate has been driven up by mass migration.
	Mass migration is an increasingly tough sell.
	In a COVID lockdown environment, right?
	Like people are out of work, they're locked in their homes, but hey, let's, and you know, we got to close the borders, but let's let a million people in to come and work when there's no jobs and everyone's locked at home, right?
	So if mass migration takes a hit through the COVID lockdowns, which I think it will in many places, then the value of real estate is going to go down because it is the mass migration that has been – the baby bust has been filled up in terms of demand for real estate through mass migration, which could be slowing down or perhaps even stopping for a while in certain which could be slowing down or perhaps even stopping for a
	And of course, a lot of the power that the governments want has been given to them by COVID as opposed to the slow trickle of people voting for the left who tend to come in from other cultures and other countries through mass migration.
	So they kind of got what they need without the mass migrants.
	But I think that real estate is going to become a problem.
	And if the hard left begins to gain more power, they don't tend to have any respect for property rights.
	And so there is that concern.
	And so if the more destabilized the stock market gets, I think it's fair to say the higher value crypto will be.
	And so if you join in the Redditors in destabilizing, in other words, you're willing to burn some money on these short things, you might make more money through cryptos than you lose through following the Redditors in the charge to the short squeeze, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, I would say if you want to plant a crop to go into crypto, if you want to go to war, Join the Redditors.
	And depending on where your life is at, that's – because as you were mentioning earlier, people that have nothing to lose, the situation they're in, well, what if their lives are miserable and they are in pain every day and that's what they have to lose?
	That is kind of an inspiration for self-sacrifice.
	Oh, you mean anything is better than this?
	Like Andy Kaufman late in his illness just going to Mexico to voodoo doctors or whatever.
	Like anything is better than what I've got.
	Worse than that. Death is worse than this.
	Or sorry, death is better than this.
	That's why self-sacrifice is kind of a positive proposition.
	Yeah, I think that most of them, they probably thought that life wasn't worth living until they took on Wall Street and won, and now they're incredibly flush with probably the first major success they've ever had in their life, and I say that with no hint of contempt or negative judgment.
	I mean, I didn't think of it, and I think they've done a lot of good in exposing it.
	Because the stock system is so based upon the exploitation of weakness and ignorance, when you have – and I hate calling them autists because that's, I think, an insult to a lot of the real brilliance that's going on there – But, you know, the Borg mind of people who have but one mission, they're going to scour.
	And the whole stock system is set up to exploit ignorance and exclusivity and, you know, wrinkles in whatever, right?
	So they're going to be scouring this whole system.
	And, you know, of course, the obvious thing is to look for shorts, but they'll look for a whole bunch of other things.
	Maybe they will target silver at some point.
	But you have, you know, hundreds of thousands of people who Who've got their first dopamine hit from victory who want more.
	And they're going to be scouring the entire system.
	And these guys can do this, you know, 12, 14, 16, 18 hours a day on the steady conveyor belt attendees as far as I understand it.
	But they're going to be scouring the system for any weakness.
	And the system has not faced that.
	I mean, there's been a competing system, which is crypto, but crypto hasn't been sniffing out for all the weaknesses of the existing fairly corrupt fiat slash stock market system.
	So I do think that in the decentralized, highly committed ideological hive mind of the Redditors versus the politically connected but complacent to a large degree and never having faced this kind of attack before mainstream Wall Street people, Where do you put your money, so to speak?
	Well, I think that there's a case to be made when you look throughout history that people closer to the state get soft and lazy, right?
	You think of sort of me versus a government teacher, right?
	I mean, so people who get closer to the state get soft and lazy, entitled, belligerent, and they tend to be brutal and heavy-handed in their responses because they're not nimble enough to – and they can't fix the cracks in the system because cracks is the whole way they make money.
	So to fix the cracks in the system is to cut themselves out of an income to a large degree, right?
	So I don't know.
	I think it's interesting to see.
	They do seem to be holding.
	They do seem to be pretty driven.
	And I think it's also given people who – you've got to remember too – people are pretty isolated these days.
	And we are a tribal species.
	And I'm really, really impressed – By the hold, the hold on for your life strategies, right?
	Like, these guys who've been pretty isolated through video games, through pornography, through lockdowns, through shutdowns, through lack of job opportunities, through not feeling a future, they're now part of a team.
	Like, that's incredibly heady for people.
	And as far as, like, well, do I want $1,000, which doesn't get me anything, doesn't, you know, maybe have me...
	Buy a couple of copies of Cyberpunk or something like that, but it doesn't really get me anything.
	Or do I want the thrill of victory in taking down people I perceive to be pretty malevolent and be part of a team, be part of an army, be part of a movement?
	That's incredibly heavy.
	And this movement is probably supplanting the MAGA movement.
	And I know some people are trying to move to sort of take over the GOP in a similar sort of vein.
	And now that the stuff about, what is it, Weaver and Lincoln Project is coming out, I mean, the level of moral disgust.
	The GOP, I think rightly so, is pretty high.
	So I think if you were to say to these guys, well, you can keep a little bit of this funny money stimulus stuff, But you lose your thrill of victory.
	You lose your moral crusade.
	You lose your camaraderie.
	You lose your companionship.
	You lose your army. You lose your tribe.
	I mean, no one's going to take that deal, or very few people, I think.
	And some people will cash out, and then what they'll do is they'll say, you know what?
	I missed the fight. I missed the excitement.
	I missed the camaraderie. So I've cashed out, and that's given me more money to put into the next one, because they'll miss all of that.
	And I think that's highly motivated for people.
	A thought on my lived experience with investing in real estate.
	So I got tired of waiting on crypto to go back up, and I decided I wanted to buy a property and fix it up and let that be my home and maybe rent out because it's a multi-unit.
	And as I've looked at that and thought, okay, this is pretty successful so far.
	Let me move on to the next one.
	I, without missing a beat, had that thought as soon as Biden won.
	The country is headed in a socialist direction.
	Do I really want to be somebody owning multiple properties?
	It could get taken away.
	Or you're the first person targeted in society.
	You're one of the fat capitalists.
	Or when you have a Biden administration or you have a Democrat administration, they're generally going to side with tenants over landlords.
	And so there's going to be a lot of preferential legislation.
	There's going to be a lot of you can't evict people.
	There's going to be a lot of people feeling they can do whatever they want to your property.
	There's no repercussions. And you can see this already, of course, with people being unable to be evicted even if they're not paying rent.
	And of course, the landlords still have to pay their bills.
	So it's not just, you know, is the property going to be threatened?
	But I know that under Obama, and I assume this will continue under Biden, there's going to be a move to get poorer people into more middle-class neighborhoods, and that could really wreck property values, and it'll cause people to abandon those neighborhoods because...
	They're concerned about maybe violence in schools or something like that.
	So I don't know. Real estate is a real dice roll.
	For me, again, no advice.
	It's just my thought. I think real estate is a real dice roll at the moment.
	And I think a combo punch of Reddit support plus cryptos seems not the worst thing to think about.
	I've already seen properties on the market that were very affordable and already had multiple tenants in the properties paying rent to where, like in any other time, this would have been a no-brainer.
	You buy this and you're making money already, like hand over fist.
	And I look at that and I'm like, okay, why am I not buying it?
	Oh yeah, because I can't evict those people right now.
	If I wanted to try to evict them in COVID, it's a nightmare.
	So yeah, at least on paper, it looks like a good deal, but the reality is, I know that's my personal decision, why I chose not to purchase what would have been a no-brainer in the past.
	Right. Now, you and I have been talking a lot, and if it's valuable to other people, fantastic, but I did want to make sure that we had room for other people's thoughts about this kind of stuff.
	If there's something you wanted to add or subtract or contribute, I'd be thrilled to hear.
	Yeah, I'm going to take a step back.
	Thank you so much, Steph. Oh, thank you, brother.
	Great, great info. Yeah, no, I'll just make a quick note.
	I know I'm up here in Canada and we have the same issue where a couple of my friends have issues with landlords and the tenant board's been closed for over a year now.
	The tenant board, so do you want to break that out so people know what you mean?
	Yeah, so here in order to evict somebody, you have to first get a Court order from the landlord-tenant board, and it's been on hold since March last year, March-February, so nothing you can do.
	So you can't evict anyone for anything, including property damage, ISC, or illegal activity?
	Yeah, the only thing you can claim is illegal activity, but even though that's kind of tough to prove.
	Well, and the courts are moving at a snail's pace now too, right?
	Well, yeah, they closed.
	They opened temporarily about a month or so ago, and then was shut down again with this most recent shutdown.
	Yeah, so real estate is dicey, again, other than maybe personal residences that you're going to use or whatever, but I don't know that people are going to feel that real estate is the way to go.
	I think the automatic rise in real estate may be diminished to some degree.
	All right, did you want to add more?
	more is there anyone else you wanted to add stuff hey I just wanted to pop in real quick As far as real estate, it's probably owned a lot by the boomers, and considering that they own most of the real estate and the government handers to them a lot, do you think that'll at least keep real estate somewhat safe in the short term?
	Well, but the boomers, in terms of real estate ownership, it's a difference between personal homes or not, right?
	So I don't think the government's not going to come in and start taking away the boomers' personal homes, but we're talking about real estate as an investment.
	And as an investment, that generally means, I mean, obviously, there's the two big categories.
	There's commercial and residential, right?
	Commercial real estate is a hollowed out monstrosity compared to where it was a year, a year and a half ago, right?
	Because people are all working from home and the Cities have hollowed out and, you know, once people have made this big adjustment to working from home, it's going to be pretty tough, if at all possible, to get them back into working in a centralized office location.
	And so once people have solved all the problems of remote work, and there are considerable problems of remote work, then the commercial real estate is going to collapse.
	I mean, as far as office space.
	I mean, there'll still be some people and all of that.
	It's not going to vanish. But in my view, the demand for commercial real estate post-COVID is not going to rebound in the way that it is.
	You know, like when there's a recession, there's a lot of deferred spending.
	Oh, we'd like to get a new TV, but we can't afford it.
	We'd like to get a new car, but we'll just pour money into the one we have or whatever.
	We'll just drive it for another... I don't think that's the case with commercial real estate.
	I think that people are going to adapt to working from home.
	And certainly when the kids go back to school, it'll be easier to work from home.
	And the amount of money that gets saved, again, I had to foot bills for commercial real estate when I was in the business world.
	And I mean, it can be mind-bogglingly expensive.
	And also, people dislike commuting so much that, and again, the technology, the Zooms, they just find ways to try and get people to be as productive in-house as they are at home.
	So, I don't think post-COVID there's a big pent-up demand for commercial real estate that there would be if it was just a recession.
	So in a recession, people say, well, I won't start the business.
	And then when the recession ends, people say, oh, I'm going to start this business.
	They rent a bunch of real estate, commercial real estate and all that.
	I don't think, in terms of office space in particular, I mean, there's some businesses that you have to have people in, like factories where people make stuff.
	But in terms of just office space and having people in the same general environment, I think most of the productivity problems either have been solved or will be solved by the end of the lockdowns, if they in fact ever end.
	Who knows, right?
	But so as far as commercial real estate goes, that's pretty bad.
	I talked about that with Peter Schiff just last week.
	Now, as far as residential real estate, so there's residential real estate that people use for their own personal houses and that's not really investment.
	That's just home ownership, right?
	You can make money from it, but it's not fundamentally an investment.
	But people who are investing in real estate...
	Who are investing in residential real estate, you know, apartment buildings or houses that they would rent out and so on.
	I think the concern there is that you have a leftist government in power, you have COVID, you have sympathy to people on the street and so you just kind of evict people and they won't be, even if they don't pay rent and you can't really survive.
	So commercial...
	Office space, I think, is kind of toast for however long it's going to be, in my opinion.
	Residential real estate, okay, so in terms of investment, where's the money going to go if stocks become unstable or the whole stock market becomes unstable?
	Where's money going to go? I don't think it's going to go a lot in the middle of a pandemic where people can't pay rent and you can't evict them.
	I just don't see money going into real estate investments that way.
	Does that make sense? Yeah, I think that makes sense.
	And even as far as commercial real estate, if people don't want to lease out those buildings commercial, a lot of those commercial spaces may turn, which increases by bringing down rents for residential real estate.
	I'm sorry, you just cut out there for a second.
	Could you repeat that last statement?
	Oh, yeah. Commercial spaces may be converted into residential spaces, which would bring down the rents for residential.
	Well, it could be.
	They'll have to do something with those spaces, I assume, but converting them to commercial real estate at a time, again, where you can't – unless you sell them as condos, right?
	If you sell them as condos, there's a whole different set of rules that apply, and that may certainly be the case, that they would convert them.
	Yeah, that will drive down the value of condos as a whole, but you certainly wouldn't be converting them to rental units because, again, you can't evict people who aren't paying rent.
	I assume that would not be top of people's list.
	Yeah, that makes sense.
	All right, good.
	And sorry, if there's more you want to add, please do.
	If there's anyone else who wants to jump in, that would be great too.
	I would like to make two small points.
	We don't allow small points on this show!
	I'll draw it out with four analogies.
	Here in Europe, commercial real estate is taking a giant beating.
	The only thing that is keeping the commercial real estate companies' prices up is they are registering the capital gains on their commercial real estate as income, not as rent income, which is very destructive because as soon as you try to sell your… Oh, sorry. You lost me there. I'm so sorry.
	The capital gains on their rental income for commercial real estate… All right, so they have a bunch of offices and they go up in value.
	Just not rent income, they rent income, they just go up in value and it increases their asset balance.
	Yes, but not during COVID, right?
	Oh, well, they are going up due to COVID because of all the money printing.
	I assume there's much less demand even in Europe for in-person office real estate, right?
	Yeah, the demand is crazy.
	The rent is dropping. There's vacancies, but they just keep...
	I mean, it might have something to do with the appraisers getting a bribe.
	So this may not necessarily be market prices, but this is like book value, estimated value of the office space?
	Okay, sorry. I just wanted to make sure we didn't have a case where prices were going up during a significantly lower demand phase and the laws of economics were being violated.
	Okay, so this is just estimated value in the same way that the government says, oh, your real estate has gone up in value because we can property tax you more or whatever.
	So it's just an estimated value rather than pure market.
	Is that right? Exactly.
	I might have misspoke a little bit.
	No, no. I just want to make sure I follow what you're saying.
	So please bear with me.
	Go ahead. Great.
	So the problem with that is, as soon as you try to sell them, of course, you're going to be subject to market prices, and the income of your company drops dramatically, the asset sheets drop dramatically, then your stock price is just nonsensical.
	So all those companies are suffering a lot and taking on more debt.
	Yeah, you had a call-in show with someone from South Africa.
	Very sad to hear about that.
	Yeah, it got worse for him after the call, but he's okay now.
	Sorry, go ahead. So I met some people who had a company in South Africa about 20 years ago, and they left after they were forced to give a part of their company to black share owners.
	And I was wondering, maybe with all this diversity in America, maybe they'd start redistributing the 401ks to different racial groups.
	They might, but for certain, they're redistributing board seats, they're redistributing high-paying, high-value jobs by demanding these diversity quotas, right?
	Like I think in California, like half of the board members have to be women now and so on.
	And so whether it's the actual physical shares or simply the high-value occupations, I mean, that redistribution has been going on for many years, artificially raising the wages of people who vote for the left, the minorities and women and so on.
	Yeah, that's been going on for a long time.
	It may get more direct as well, but that probably won't be for some time because for South Africa, they really had to wait until blacks became a fairly significant majority and then it kind of snowballed from there.
	Yeah, the thing I was thinking about that, that could throw an enormous wrench into investing if they make it worse than it already is.
	But will America stay intact long enough for that to be viable?
	I'm not sure. Oh, man.
	Well, I got to tell you, I mean, secession is a whole other topic, but it would be the highest value states that would most want to secede.
	And as the highest value states, the incentive for the federal government to let them secede would be the most negative, right?
	In other words, they would not want to let the most valuable and profitable states go, but it would be those who'd want to most leave.
	So who knows?
	That would probably not be anything too particularly civilized should it ever get off the ground.
	And certainly there will be that. That impulse.
	But to me, it's all a race against the destabilization of the financial system that seems to be underway.
	So, yeah, we'll see.
	We'll see. I don't know. We'll see.
	What the hell would happen to the stock markets in a secession?
	Like, that's crazy. Well, what would happen to the stock markets in a secession, and this is another reason why a secession would be so highly opposed, but what would happen to the stock markets in a secession would be that...
	Let's say Texas, right?
	It could be Wyoming, it could be anything, right?
	Let's say Texas. It's not going to be Hawaii.
	It's a welfare state, right? But let's say that Texas wants to secede, and let's say it looks like it's actually going to happen.
	It would be kind of similar to Alberta and Canada.
	So then what would happen is Texas would say, gosh, you know, we don't have to pay all this federal stuff.
	In Alberta, they wouldn't be part of this whole redistributionist plan that generally goes to Quebec.
	And so they would say, okay, what are the odds that Texas would be a more friendly business environment should it be able to secede and not have to pay the overhead of redistribution of stuff through the federal government?
	And of course, it would no longer be on the hook for defense spending for America as a whole.
	And therefore, it would only have to spend money on its own defense.
	And given how well-armed Texans are, I don't think anyone's going to invade there anytime soon.
	So I think that people would look and say, okay, the overhead of government is going to go down enormously.
	Obviously, they're pretty committed to free markets.
	They can control their own borders now, and they can have a sane immigration policy if they allow any immigration at all in particular.
	And so I think that you would see a huge amount of capital move towards that kind of environment in the same way that capital moved to Hong Kong, not China, for many years when China was more totalitarian.
	It's still pretty damn totalitarian, but I think that there would be a capital outflow to the more business-friendly environments, which is kind of why they would also want to oppose that, 'cause it would take away value from the rest of the country.
	as they would say. Exactly.
	Great point. Thanks. All right.
	Anybody else? Speak now.
	Speak now. Going once.
	Going twice. Well, let me just ask you this.
	Did you guys... You don't have to speak.
	You can just throw it in the chat.
	Did you find this valuable?
	Did you find this useful, interesting?
	Should we try and make this a regular-ish kind of thing?
	Yeah. Unless everybody fell asleep, in which case...
	That may be the answer.
	Yeah, I do this more regularly.
	I think so. Let's work to keep each other informed about these kinds of things because Lord knows I think about them a lot and I think it's fun to chew this stuff over.
	If it's valuable and it's useful, I think that would be great.
	Maybe not middle of the day kind of thing, but maybe we can set up something on a more regular basis.
	Go ahead.
	Sorry. No, we did talk of If Texas wanted to separate, that kind of brought up my thoughts about what happened with Catalonia and Spain.
	I know you did that presentation a couple years ago.
	Right, right. Or Yugoslavia, for that matter, right?
	So, okay. All right.
	Well, good, good. Well, give me your feedback in the chat and let's toss this out to the board and see what people think.
	I think it's fun.
	I think it's interesting. And I think it's stuff that we all need to be kind of aware of.
	And, you know, we're a whole lot smarter together than we are necessarily separately.
	So I appreciate everyone's time today.
	Have yourselves a fantastic afternoon.
	Bye. Talk to you soon. Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest Free Domain show on philosophy.
	And I'm going to be frank and ask you for your help, your support, your encouragement, and your resources.
	Please like, subscribe, and share, and all of that good stuff to get philosophy out into the world.
	And also, equally importantly, go to freedomain.com forward slash donate.
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	So thank you so much for your support, my friends.

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