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Feb. 16, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:34:31

Freedomain Investment Roundtable 5: BITCOIN REVOLUTION!

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	And away we go.
	That's an old George Thorogood live.
	Who do you love?
	All right. I think we're live now, babies.
	Excellent. And let me just check over here.
	Stream is offline.
	Here we go. Here we go.
	Satellite radio. You all get hit with the boom, boom.
	Hi, everybody. Stefan Mullen, you from FreedomAid.
	It is the 15th.
	It's the day after St.
	Valentine's Day. And it's the St.
	Valentine's Day massacre for fiat currency.
	So, you know, just a pro tip.
	This is from a guy married almost 20 years.
	If you want to propose to your girlfriend, do it on the 15th when the flowers and chocolates are cheaper.
	That way she'll never know how cheap you are.
	And you'll also never forget Valentine's.
	So... I met my wife actually two days before Valentine's Day, and that was the only day we didn't go out because it's kind of high pressure for a very early dating situation.
	We're just going to wait for a couple more people to join.
	If you want to hit us with some questions right away, that would be great.
	There's quite a lot to talk about with regards to crypto this week.
	Maybe what we can do is just start with a quick around the table.
	I guess we can go clockwise.
	Jared, wake up. Sorry.
	One second. I'm checking the price of Bitcoin.
	I'm ready. Send me in, coach.
	Yeah, just go around and give us your vital statistics and anything you wanted to say by way of intro.
	Sure. My name is Jared Woodard.
	I've been in crypto for, I'd say I bought my first cryptocurrency in 2013 using like VeerWalks and Linden dollars.
	I've traded on some really obscure exchanges that don't exist anymore.
	But not just because you traded on them.
	I mean, it's probably something else.
	Yeah. I'm not going to say that's the case, but yeah, I've been in crypto for a long time.
	I've worked for a couple of exchanges, not for a great deal of time, but long enough to get in and see how they operate, stuff like that.
	I've never lost a significant amount of crypto, which believe it or not, when you're the only custodian of your crypto, when the buck stops with you, it can be easy to mess up if you're not incredibly careful.
	And as far as investment goes, I'm not mentioning this in any way, shape, or form to brag, just to qualify like if I'm...
	Talking about this topic, like, okay, well, what have you done?
	I've bought a couple humble homes and vehicles, and my regular gains are supplementing my income significantly, and it's helping me diverse myself to maybe buy some investment property in the moment.
	So I'm just like... I've done okay with crypto.
	So you're converting crypto to real estate and you want to be partner?
	I'm just kidding. I know, I know.
	That's so contentious, I know.
	I've got a good argument though.
	I'm sorry, virtual not real enough for you?
	Oh, I love the virtual.
	Yes. Is there a website or anything you wanted to mention?
	Thank you so much for bringing that up.
	That's something I need to do.
	I've been for years talking about just needing to set up an intro to crypto.
	I would say the number one rule, I'll go into that later.
	Thank you for mentioning that stuff.
	Not the moment, to come.
	Okay, to come. All right. Alexander, did you want to say hi?
	Yeah, for sure. Yeah, first of all, thanks for having me.
	I've been watching these roundtables for a while and excited to, you know, add my two cents in here.
	So my background, I've been in the crypto scene since 2014.
	I am currently a UI designer, UX designer in the space.
	My day job is at Float, which you're currently streaming to right now.
	So it's the alternative social network that has Bitcoin transactions built into it.
	So, you know, given everything that's going on in the social media space, definitely recommend your viewers check that out because we're all about You know, freedom of speech and not, you know, deplatforming our users for any...
	And just for those, that's at float.app.
	And I'm on there and have been for quite some time as a free domain.
	Yeah, and that's spelled F-L-O-T-E, not your typical way of spelling float.
	So you said you're a UI designer?
	That's correct. So the lowest on the coding ladder of expertise.
	The DLL designers, the people who opened up Parler, didn't Parler have a sequential numbering of DLLs, which is how they got all the data out, something terrible like that?
	And I think they're going back up today, but no, I'm just kidding.
	I was a UI designer and I was roundly marked by all the people who were doing the real coding.
	It's like, oh, so you're just doing the icing and we're actually building the bakery.
	Yeah, yeah, I get that too.
	But I also am the founder of a decent company.
	As you can see here, it's a crypto lifestyle brand specializing in what we call digital goods, so combining physical and digital NFTs and physical products, limited edition products.
	And I run a Drudge Report-style news aggregator website called decentreport.io, spelled D-C-E-N-T, report.io.
	That's updated daily. Fantastic.
	MK, you're back.
	You got rid of the somewhat embarrassing...
	Oh, wait, no. Oh, did you get doors?
	Dude! Are you just in a place with doors now?
	Different person. Different person completely?
	The distraction was my Princess Leia hair.
	That's the one. It was the Princess Leia chair, right?
	I mean, I just took the headrest off.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, because I felt that if I struck you down, you would become even more powerful.
	Oh, no, that's someone else in the movies.
	But anyway, go ahead. I'm Matt.
	I work in tech as well.
	Entire career in there.
	I was mining back in 2008-2009 in college in a dorm room using power from the school.
	I've probably lost more Bitcoin than I currently own, but it is part of my holdings and I'm not selling until it pays for a house.
	So there you go.
	Beautiful. Is there anyone here who's not, we call them the ghost chickens, the people who aren't showing video?
	Just kidding. No, it's totally fine.
	But is there anyone here on audio only who wants to introduce themselves?
	Sure. I'm Craig.
	I started trading a little bit back in 2017.
	Lost a little bit of money, made a little bit of money.
	Yeah, that's about it.
	All right. Anybody else? No.
	All right. So, okay, so literally within minutes before the show started, Bitcoin crossed $900 billion in value.
	Now, obviously, a certain percentage of that is held by the four people on this screen.
	I'm not going to go into how high a percent.
	Actually, no, it's obviously very low.
	But yeah, so it just crossed $900 billion.
	I'm sorry? Can we pause the stream?
	I have to make some transactions.
	That's right. I'd love to talk, but Daddy's got some scratch to make.
	So here's a little bit.
	And I wanted to get into the question of value about this because there is this sense of like, well, you can't use Bitcoin for anything else.
	Therefore, it doesn't have value.
	But let's do some news.
	Okay. Visa.
	Visa saying it's ready to embrace Bitcoin to help banks build crypto payment and trading services.
	So that's pretty important because Visa has got a whole Bitcoin and crypto banking roadmap.
	And they're racing to reach this network of 70 million people.
	Now, there's nothing better than a previous enemy's turnaround.
	You know, like every now and then I'll get an email from someone who's like, Hey man, I totally believe the lies about you.
	And then I looked into what you're all about and I'm totally sorry.
	And you know, that's nice. Nice.
	It's not the actual spreaders of the lies, but the people who believe the lies, which I can kind of understand.
	So Visa was, back in the day, a pretty implacable enemy of Bitcoin and crypto as a whole.
	And they're flipping, like a robot burger testing its wear and tear.
	So they have partnered with 35 various Bitcoin and cryptocurrency platforms in recent years, and they're going to help banks roll out Bitcoin and cryptocurrency buying and trading services with a Visa crypto software program set to launch later.
	This year, so First Boulevard, a Kansas-based, black-focused digital bank, I think that means focused on, like it's not their chi or anything, I think they're actually focused on lending to blacks, will pilot the APIs designed to help Visa Bank clients integrate Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.
	Bitcoin and crypto custodian Anchorage last month becoming the first U.S. national digital asset bank after it was granted approval for a national trust charter from the U.S. office of the controller of the currency will hold the Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies on behalf of Visa's clients.
	It's understood banks will be able to allow their users to withdraw and self-custody their Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.
	Visa rival PayPal.
	Are they actual rivals?
	I thought they were more complimentary than rivals, but Visa rival PayPal sparked the latest Bitcoin price bull run when it announced plans to allow its 346 million users to buy.
	Sorry, that's slightly less than 346 million users after they de-platformed me, but nonetheless, Just because they make one bad decision doesn't mean they can't make a good decision.
	And by the way, you know, you see the guy in his Viking helmet in the Capitol?
	That's what you get when you platform reasonable people like me.
	Those are the next people to show up, just so everybody understands that.
	And actually, that's kind of by design.
	You get the reasonable people out, you hollow out the center, you go to extremes, and then you say, oh my gosh, we need fascism because there are extremists everywhere, although they won't call it fascism.
	They'll call it... Protection, because, you know, there's two kinds of people in this world.
	People think the government will protect you, and then there are people who think.
	So they're going to allow 346 million PayPal users to buy and spend Bitcoin and a handful of other major cryptocurrencies in October.
	And that seems pretty good.
	As we all know, Bitcoin prices soared about 200% since October, and it's way north of 60 now.
	It's been hovering up and down a little, I assume 70 relatively soon.
	The blistering Bitcoin rally has been largely put down to institutional investors warming to the cryptocurrency and PayPal support.
	3% of Bitcoins are now held by institutions, which is a lot.
	And about 60% of people over the last year didn't move their Bitcoins at all.
	So we've got the hodlers.
	Is that how you pronounce it? I don't need to see it ever written out.
	The hodlers, the hold on for dear life people, is still the significant majority.
	Close to two-thirds of the Bitcoin holders are going to do all of that.
	Bitcoin's growing popularity among investors as a speculative asset.
	Oh, don't you just love that?
	It's a speculative asset, people, because we all know that money printing historically for the past, I don't know, 50,000 years.
	Like, I bet you there's some Polynesian island that used shells as a currency and then some doofus found a big hoard of shells and it wrecked the economy.
	Like, this is everywhere.
	This is everywhere. So the fact that we've had 50,000 years of the overprinting of money leading to economic collapse, but no, Bitcoin, it's just speculative because it's total speculation.
	The praxeological economics, the Austrian economics reality that inflation is inflation of the money supply, somehow it remains speculative anyway.
	And the hedge against inflation has reduced its perceived utility as an alternative payment method.
	So this is Visa's head of crypto, Kai Sheffield.
	He says, we see crypto assets as more like digital gold.
	There's less demand to spend Bitcoin.
	Okay, and that's true. If the price is going up, you want to hold on to it, but that's exactly why it's so valuable.
	So you'll notice this, and I remember this from being back in software, because you'd be facing all of these gray-haired, fuddy-duddy boomer dudes, and you'd have to say, it's like this.
	Like when I was in, I had a film at the Hollywood Film Festival some years back and you had to basically say, it's a combination of Saving Private Ryan and Jaws.
	Like you'd have to sort of tie it into some existing thing that they understood.
	It's, I don't know, you'd say it's the Poseidon adventure meets the towering inferno with Brad Pitt, you know.
	So you'd have to give them something they could reference to.
	A truly original film can't be made because you can't say it's like anything else and therefore nobody has a way of evaluating it.
	And it's the same thing. It's like digital gold!
	No, it's not. It's not like digital gold in any way, shape, or form.
	Unless digital gold comes with A, crypto limits on its expansion, and B, teleportation devices that have it move from one place to the other without any intervening transportation.
	So, no. It's not like digital gold, but that's what you've got to say to the boomers and all of that.
	Whenever you hear people talk about digital gold, they're trying to sell to boomers.
	And while it annoys me enormously, it's a really good thing because you and I would never be sold on Bitcoin as digital gold because we understand it at a much deeper level.
	But when you're trying to sell Bitcoin to boomers and the boomers are willing to have the meeting and maybe buy, the more you hear the phrase digital gold, the more the price of Bitcoin is going to go up.
	So much though the phrase is annoying, I welcome it enormously because it means that boomers are buying in.
	Or, you know, older people who didn't grow up with the technology who were kind of late to the game, right, are all of that.
	So that's pretty good, right?
	A couple of other things I wanted to mention.
	Oops, sorry, then we'll go all around and get people's thoughts.
	So yeah, Visa-backed debit cards have been around for a while.
	BitPay has an offering, but this announcement by Visa is different because it highlights the futility of fighting the market when the market chooses something better.
	The most important announcement of the week, in some people's opinion, Apple is allowing BitPay's MasterCard to be added to Apple Pay wallets.
	Google and Samsung, I'm sure, will be next.
	Mastercard, we mentioned this last time, followed Visa now saying it will allow a handful of cryptocurrencies to flow across its network.
	No less than three major pillars of the banking community gave up fighting the Bitcoin wave.
	That's very good. The Bank of New York Mellon announced custodial services for its institutional clients.
	They wouldn't be doing that, of course, if the demand wasn't there.
	This is from an article from Zero Hedge.
	Morgan Stanley's investment arm is now considering taking a position directly after buying up a ton of MicroStrategy, which is itself a proxy for Bitcoin.
	Much though I love Peter Schiff, he and I have disagreed, and this is well known because we had a debate on it many years ago, about what the value of Bitcoin is.
	And the idea that you need a dual use for something in order for it to have value It's kind of crazy to me because value is subjective, but that doesn't mean it's arbitrary.
	You know, I mean, taste is subjective, but that doesn't mean that most people prefer eating gravel to chocolate, right?
	I mean, there's a subjective element to taste, but there's general, you know, life, the value of life is subjective, but most people choose not to throw themselves off a cliff or invest in fiat.
	So while value is subjective, it's not arbitrary.
	And not everything, of course, that people value has to have dual use.
	What is the second use for a digital book?
	Well, you generally can't resell it.
	You're just going to read it and consume it.
	But does that mean it doesn't have any value?
	If you've had children, I assume you don't sell them.
	I hope you don't sell them, right?
	So what is the dual use for children?
	Yet we pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into raising children.
	And there's just so many.
	If you fall in love with someone, what's the sale value of falling in love with someone?
	Well, there isn't one.
	But that doesn't mean you're not going to spend money on dates, on a wedding, and so on.
	So this idea that something has to have a dual use in order to have value, just about everything that we treasure in our life.
	If you love Western freedoms and free markets, can you sell that?
	Well, not really. Not the preference alone, but that's why we have these things.
	So this idea that, well, Bitcoin can't be used in other ways like gold and silver can, therefore the value is completely arbitrary, is kind of missing the entire...
	Points of value that a lot of it is not dual use and the stuff we spend the most on is what is the dual use of a wedding?
	Weddings cost tens of thousands of dollars for a lot of people and you can't resell it generally, so what does it mean that it's not dual use, therefore it doesn't have value?
	Nassim Nicholas Taleb, do you guys remember that dude?
	I had a couple of tussles with him back in the day on Twitter.
	Kind of a salty fellow now.
	A bit of a salty fellow.
	It shows you that a lot of money can't buy you a reasonable temper.
	But he said, Bitcoin misfits share the monocellular brain and logical wiring defects.
	I just think that's delightful.
	When people get that angry about crypto, you just know that something else is going on, right?
	He's sort of paraphrasing or strawmanning the Bitcoin argument, which says, BTC is a good idea, therefore it will be the reserve currency, i.e.
	no other ideas and no other reserve.
	And he says, reserve does not equal volatile.
	It's not supposed to be volatile at higher prices, never found uses.
	Well... What can you say?
	Other than when you start off with monocellular brain and logical wiring defects, you know, there's some pretty smart people.
	Like, I disagree with Nassim on IQ and things like that.
	He's a smart guy. I would never call him an idiot.
	But the idea that Bitcoin is a good idea, that's the only selling point is that Bitcoin is a good idea.
	No, nobody just sits there and says, it's a good idea.
	You know, I've got a whole presentation, which I did way back in the day about Bitcoin going through all the use case scenarios and value scenarios and so on.
	And nobody has ever made the case that says, well, Bitcoin is just a good idea, therefore it will be the reserve currency.
	No other ideas and no other reserve.
	Of course Bitcoin is going to perpetually compete with gold.
	Of course Bitcoin is going to perpetually compete with other cryptocurrencies.
	Of course Bitcoin is going to perpetually compete.
	Well, maybe not perpetually, but it's going to compete.
	With fiat currency, as long as that lasts, it's also going to compete with barter.
	It's also going to compete with hodling.
	It's going to compete with a lot of things.
	And the idea that the volatility...
	You know, here's the thing, man.
	When the value of something keeps going up and up and up, and the 4 billion percent from early adopters of Bitcoin, the 4 billion percent return on investment...
	Please give me that kind of instability.
	Instability is just such a negative word.
	My child is going through puberty and getting taller.
	Oh my gosh! The height is unstable!
	It's like, well, of course you want the height to be unstable because you don't want a three-foot child for the rest of your life.
	You want things to be a little unstable.
	Back in the day when I was allowed to sort of grow the philosophy conversation by the powers that be, it was not a straight line up.
	It was not a straight line up.
	You wanted it to grow.
	I started off with one watcher, me, two, a friend of mine, and then went to three-quarters of a billion-plus views and downloads.
	That was not a straight line up.
	So would you sit there and say, I don't know, man.
	Steph's show, it's really volatile.
	Well, okay, it is, but not in the way that we would describe it.
	Of course, when things go up and become more valuable, the growth and adoption of the Internet was a very uneven up and down.
	You had MySpace, which was huge, which then completely toasted.
	There was You've Got Mail, AOL, which I don't know if it's even still around, but of course there was a lot of chaos and disruption.
	I mean, I was right there in the 90s in the software field and the whole epileptic Catherine Zeta-Jones mood swing, bipolar madness of the dot-com bubble and bust.
	Yeah, things were volatile because you're building...
	An entirely new economy.
	Of course, it's going to be volatile.
	So the idea that somehow Bitcoin, well, doesn't have dual use there for it, can't have value, nonsense.
	Everybody who looks at their heart and looks at what they really treasure and value in life.
	Like, you know what people really treasure and value in their life?
	Their health. Now, does health have a dual use?
	Can you sell your health?
	Well, no, you can't sell your health.
	I guess you could sell a kidney maybe if you're in some third world country, but you can't sell your health.
	Does that mean your health doesn't have any value because it doesn't have a dual use other than the value it has for you?
	So volatility, the straw man of there's never going to be any competition, the straw man of, oh, it's just a good idea and so on.
	It's, I mean, it's crazy.
	I mean, people will look.
	At a work of art, and they will say, well, there's only one Mona Lisa.
	There's only one of each of Anca's paintings, or there's only one of each of Picasso's paintings.
	Okay, so it's limited, and therefore it has supreme value.
	A copy of the Mona Lisa is worth enormously less.
	Than the Mona Lisa. And if you ever have dealt in the art world, and I'm no big expert in this, but I understand, of course, that you've heard of lithographs, or you have numbered and signed paintings, so the painter will create a painting, and then they will limit the amount of signed lithographs they put out.
	And now the original painting is worth the most, what's worth the next is the signed lithographs, and what's worth less than that is just straight up reproductions with no numbering.
	And no signature. I even have a computer in my house somewhere that only 5,000 of which were made.
	And it's numbered. So I don't know if it ever becomes valuable.
	It would be valuable because it's numbered.
	In other words, the economy works on limitation.
	Why does Brad Pitt command $20 million a movie?
	Because he's willing to do 4,000 sit-ups that I'm not willing to do, right?
	No, but Brad Pitt is because he gets that many of an audience.
	Now, Brad Pitt has a monopoly on Brad Pitt.
	And so it's a one dude, right?
	It's one dude. And so the fact that he's limited and has value is why he has the most value.
	And so when you have limited editions, a limited edition car is worth more than the general production, limited edition of anything.
	It's worth more than the original.
	So the fact that things are limited and in demand means that they have greater value.
	Now, Bitcoin is a limited edition currency.
	That's what people need to understand.
	It's a limited edition currency.
	Actually, I think I said last time 20% of Bitcoins had been lost.
	I also heard it was 10%.
	So again, it's something around those lines.
	But if we say it's 10%, there's 21 million, right?
	You got 2 million and change that have gone.
	So you got 19 million Bitcoins.
	It's a limited edition currency.
	Now, if you think, well...
	Limited edition of everything else where there's demand, limited edition of everything else is worth enormous amounts, but somehow a limited edition currency, which even gold isn't.
	I mean, look, you think gold is going to be some stable thing?
	You get some massive influx of gold, which could happen in any number of ways.
	It can happen three basic ways that we know of.
	One, a huge gold reserve could be found somewhere under the ground.
	Number two, you could have some way to produce gold that comes out of a lab, which would completely create the value of gold.
	Number three, I know it sounds silly, but it's not as far off as you think, space mining, asteroid mining.
	You know, for anyone who's played Galaxy on Fire, you know, that's a very obscure reference, right?
	But asteroid mining is a staple in space games, and it's a very real thing.
	There is a huge number of precious metals out there in the solar system.
	When are we going to go and get them?
	Well, you know, as soon as the government stops regulating the hell out of everything.
	And we've seen this before.
	If you look at Spain, when it conquered the New World, it scooped up all of this gold, and all of the gold flowed across the Pacific back to Madrid and flowed out through the economy as a whole.
	And it destroyed their economy.
	Because of the massive influx of gold.
	Hyperinflation and all the skilled people and the smart people, often the same category, they left Spain.
	And I'm not kidding about this.
	The Spanish economy went into a severe recession for 400 years.
	So don't talk to me about gold being some rock-solid thing that can never shift around in value as much as everything else.
	I mean, it could certainly happen with the technology that's going on these days.
	So I just wanted to sort of throw out those major points.
	And I think it's because I grew up so digital.
	You know, I bought my first computer.
	When I got an inheritance from my grandmother who died, I got $600, $700.
	And I bought my very first computer with its stunning 8K computer.
	I learned how to program on a computer with only 2K of memory.
	In other words, you had to really plan to not have too many lines of code because you would run out.
	Like every time you typed, the memory count would go down.
	So because I've grown up so digital, and I was, I don't know, 12 years old at that point, and then I was in the software field for 15 years as a coder, as a research and development guru, chief technical officer.
	And so I've seen the business, the sales, the computer side of things, the coding side of things.
	So I'm one of these just fortuitous, experienced guys.
	I don't look at the world as physical assets.
	I mean, the entire show here, we're all meeting digitally.
	It's all being transmitted digitally.
	Does that mean... And it's not sold.
	So the idea of something has to have dual use and be sold in order to have value, well, it goes against my entire business model for 15 years, which is to give away everything for free and ask for donations, fredomain.com forward slash donate, he said, putting a little asterisk in the conversation.
	So I'm just one of these fortunate guys who grew up with such a deep understanding of the digital business world that when Bitcoin came along, I'm like, yeah, this is pretty solid, man.
	And it's not a foreign concept.
	I don't think of it. As digital gold, any more than I think of the internet as a digital library.
	It's just, it's not the same.
	You can't analogize the internet to a library.
	You can't analogize Bitcoin to gold, any more than you can analogize an mp3 file to a live concert or a physical record or CD. They're just not The same things at all.
	And the teleportation aspect of things is really important.
	You know, for the analogy of beam up, beam down, you know, beam things all over the place.
	Well, you can beam a song from one place to another just using a file copy of the Internet.
	You can A book you can beam.
	All of these things are going out to eventually tens or hundreds of thousands of people all digitally.
	It's like we're teleporting into people's homes.
	And this teleportation aspect of digital currency is something that's tough for older people to understand.
	So anytime they try and tie a digital asset into a physical thing, they're missing the whole teleportation aspect which is foundational to its value.
	Anyway, that's my sort of little opening thing.
	I'm happy to have corrections, comments, issues.
	If you guys wanted to bring your tasty brain treats to the conversation over the last week, and we'll then take some questions.
	So I guess I'd like to chime in on the valuing digital things, digital assets, things of that nature, or arguing the subjectivity of value and the philosophy of cryptocurrency.
	The way I look at it is when people say, like, what is it backed by?
	It's backed by the behavior of other people.
	Like, there is something objective.
	It's backed by other people.
	It's backed by, now, more subjectively or more, you know, there's the value claims they make that they're going to hold to, and maybe they do, maybe they don't, but that's kind of on you to determine, you know, it's like, well, I value the value claims and the integrity of the people in crypto versus the people in Viot, you know? So that's the way I look at it is when that part of me is like, well, what?
	This is a little woo-woo.
	What's really backing it up?
	It's other people. And that is.
	That's concrete. And nobody says that about a piece of art.
	What is the value?
	Of a piece of art.
	What is it backed by?
	It's like, demand? What are you talking about?
	People are willing to give money for it.
	What else do you need? Well, what's it's dual use?
	I don't know. You could roll it and use it up as toilet paper, I guess.
	I don't understand.
	What's it backed by? First of all, it's not backed by a gun.
	Is that okay? Is that okay?
	Because right now, we've got currency rape and we've got currency lovemaking.
	Because the Fed is currency rape.
	It's enforced at the point of a gun.
	And then it's like, well, okay, can we at least say that voluntary sex is better than rape?
	Can we get to that place in society and stop, you know, like, it's all voluntary?
	That's a good thing, isn't it?
	Yeah, but what's it backed by?
	It's like, not a gun?
	Not a gun. Is that, you know, if some guy wants to rob you in the subway by putting a gun to your chest and some other guy is playing a song saying, give me five bucks if you like the song, can we at least notice the difference between these two things?
	One is voluntary and one is violent.
	And can we at least get behind the voluntary thing?
	That would be kind of nice.
	Amen. That's an argument I hear a lot of times.
	It's from people that say that you can't compete with something that's backed by the gun or backed by the force of the military.
	And I say, well, Bitcoin went up from $3,000 at a bottom not too long ago to where we're at now, $48,000.
	I think if you understand that level of Of increase, you're just going to naturally go that way because it's in your best interest.
	Okay, have you guys ever known a woman?
	I'm sure we all have known by women, right?
	Have you ever known a woman who was in a really abusive relationship?
	And maybe you were stuck in the friend zone before you realized that she was a lunatic you needed to back slowly away from.
	But the question is, if a woman's in a really abusive relationship, And you say, well, you can't compete with violence.
	You can't compete with a violent situation.
	Then that's basically saying that a nice, reasonable, peaceful guy can never get the girl.
	It's always the violent abuser who will get her.
	Because you can't compete with violence, man.
	You can't be nice and funny and reasonable and successful and affectionate.
	But if he's just going to beat her up, you can't possibly compete with that.
	I mean, come on. Come on.
	That's crazy. Again, sometimes the women will choose the abusive guy, but we don't think that that's a good thing, right?
	It's a value. And that's the perfect analogy to that argument.
	Yep. I honestly thought when you were talking about lovemaking, you were going to talk about the ECB's tweet today.
	That was a poem. Oh, why'd you read that?
	I thought that was great.
	Yeah. Roses are red, violets are blue.
	We'll keep financing conditions favorable until the crisis is through.
	Yeah. Who makes these decisions at the European Central Bank?
	How many layers does it have to go through to get approved something that completely retarded?
	Oh, it's actually just the social media intern is probably deciding the monetary policy too.
	Oh, that would actually be better.
	That would be better. Is there anything else that people wanted to add before we move on to the next topic?
	Go take some questions. I got nothing in the yearning burning.
	All right, Gio, but at the moment you do, and if it hurts to pee, just get that looked at.
	That's all I'm... Somebody says, if I would have listened to my friend and bought Bitcoin when he did and not cash any in, I would be worth half a billion.
	Ouchies. That's a lot of pizza.
	Ouchies, man. I've got a personal story on that one.
	Is it going to make us all cry?
	It makes me cry.
	2008, I was working as a poker dealer and making money hand over fist.
	I was in a really lucky place and making just Way more money.
	A lot of money. But I also quit that job because terrible life choices and terrible investment and so on and so forth.
	In no time, like when I heard about Bitcoin in 2011, if I had stayed in that job, I know me and I know what I would have done.
	I would have bought an obscene amount at like nickels.
	And would never, ever, ever have to work again.
	Right. Oh, yeah.
	Yeah, look, hindsight is 20-20 with this kind of stuff for sure.
	So if there's anything else, again, if there's anything, I've got more data here that I wanted to go through and sort of more analogies.
	But yeah, please, please, and listen, push back against people who are anti-Bitcoin.
	Push back hard, because look, it's not too late.
	To me, it's certainly not too late at all, as far as all of this stuff goes, so it really bothers me.
	You know, Okay, it's kind of personal, but let's be real about this kind of stuff, right?
	It really bothers me the number of people who were, in a sense, denied the chance for financial independence because they listened to people trashing Bitcoin or trashing other cryptocurrencies.
	I mean, this is the one-time hyper-coked-up gold rush opportunity of our generation, in my opinion.
	And all of the people who were out there saying to people, oh, you'll be a fool, it has no value, blah, blah, blah.
	Okay, they... I don't know where people's conscience is.
	If I had done that, if I had just poo-pooed it all and said it was terrible and you shouldn't get involved in it and there's no central planning and whatever, right?
	I'd feel really terrible because I would have denied many people The opportunity to get some sort of financial security, some sort of financial independence.
	So the people who are out there who have been pushing back against it, come on, you owe people an apology.
	I would apologize if I had done that.
	I would really apologize to people if I had done that.
	Because what I'd do is I'd be kicking myself, just as this other guy did, and I would be then saying, oh, not only did I hurt my own financial interests, but man, did I ever...
	Hurt other people's financial interests by taking a strong stance against what has turned out to be a fantastic investment.
	And somebody's making the comment on the chat.
	It'll be a million dollars of Bitcoin and people would just be saying, well, it's just a bigger bubble.
	It's like you need to be responsible.
	Look, if you have doubts about cryptos, I understand that.
	I really do. But you have to admit that you were wrong at this point.
	At this point. And holding on to this mirage, you know, you can always invent a reason as to why you weren't wrong.
	Trust me. I mean, I'm a public figure who makes a lot of pronouncement, makes a lot of predictions, and I get it pretty right.
	I was just reviewing this in my head the other day.
	I get it pretty right, but I also do sometimes get it wrong.
	And when I get it wrong, I need to apologize, and I need to sort of publicly say, and I've got a whole series called I was wrong about dot dot dot.
	But you need to apologize.
	You need to figure out what you got wrong and how you got it wrong.
	Because when you get something wrong, it's not an isolated thing.
	It's not an isolated thing at all.
	It's part of a general pattern of thinking issues as a whole.
	Again, if you get a lot wrong, it is.
	If you get one thing wrong in a while, that's just life.
	That's natural, right? But to me, I asked people Back in 2006, to take a chance, I'm about to burst into song here, take a chance on me, to take a chance on philosophy, to take a chance on my expertise, to take a chance on my arguments, to take a chance...
	And, you know, there was a lot of blowback, there was a lot of punishment, lots of people got called cult members for listening to philosophy.
	And, you know, I don't have a...
	PhD in philosophy from Harvard or anything that would give...
	I mean, I have a master's degree in the history of philosophy from a very good university, but, you know, that's not something I wave around and saying, this is why you should believe me.
	So I asked people to take a chance on philosophy, to take a chance on these arguments, and some people got a lot of punishment for doing so, probably none more than me, but nonetheless, it's still a shared pain.
	And so when I had the opportunity to recommend something to people that I thought would really help them achieve some kind of freedom, It's one of the proudest things.
	I mean, a couple of proud things I've done in my life.
	One was keeping Hillary Clinton, well, it's not like I kept her out of office, but at least doing a tiny bit to move the 2016 election because she would have started a bunch of wars and got a couple of hundred thousand or maybe half a million or more people killed in the Middle East.
	So keeping our lovely friends out in the Middle East, doing a tiny bit to help keep them alive is a pretty good thing.
	Half a million families stop hitting their children because of the show over the years.
	So that's two kids a family.
	That's a million kids not getting hit.
	Probably half a million of those boys not getting circumcised.
	That's pretty good.
	And another one, of course, is talking about Bitcoin very early on.
	And I went on tour.
	I spoke publicly. I did presentation after presentation and so on to get people interested in it.
	So if you push back against this stuff and you're kicking yourself, it is really important.
	You've got to look into that deep midnight of your soul and say, okay, how much money did I keep out of the hands of people I care about?
	Because you might need that financial freedom as things go forward or that financial security or something, right?
	Something like that. But I don't see a lot of mea culpa's.
	I don't see a lot of, oh, man, I got it wrong, you know?
	I don't see a lot of people, like, doing that.
	I think it's a real shame. It amazes me the number of people who kind of lament the situation we're in economically, financially, and blame the boomers in large part, and rightly so.
	Like, you know, we can't buy houses, and we can't, you know, we're just in such a much, much worse state.
	But when they're also someone who's Down on crypto.
	It's like, I have a hard time having sympathy for them.
	Like, this was your chance.
	You know, this was the chance and you could have been a part of not only that gain and covering and then some, the loss, you know, of what we could have had as an economy that was denied us by our...
	You know, by the boomers.
	It's really disappointing to see the people who are complaining about that also throwing crypto under the bus.
	It's like, are you just wed to misery?
	Like, what's the deal?
	Well, then, compared to what, right?
	Crypto compared to fiat?
	Come on. Sorry, somebody else had something they wanted to do.
	Yes! Oh, I was just going to say, it's who's invested in what, right?
	Like, you know, the boomers own most of these traditional assets, right?
	That's what they're invested in.
	I mean, if you believe that the CPI is running 2.5%, I think you have to be like over 60.
	You know, housing is going up at like 8% to 10% year over year in suburbs in the United States right now.
	Go to the grocery store.
	Everything's going up, right?
	So the people that are believing that you can put your money in the bank and you're going to have any protection from any sort of inflation, well, it's not going to happen, right?
	So you basically, that's the choice you have to make, right?
	It's like, who's going to lie to me less?
	And at this point, the crypto is not lying to me at all.
	So, yeah. Well, okay.
	And for themselves, the amount of – these are people that lament, like, this nihilistic state-run clown world, all that stuff.
	And, like, my heart goes out to them.
	Yeah, and I feel it too.
	There's actually a lot to be blackpilled on.
	This was a chance for some hope, all right?
	I remember being in 2014 with, like, virtually nothing.
	I can't wait to tell this story to my kids one day.
	Living on the side of a mountain in North Carolina in a camper trailer where it was so cold, I came home one day and my sink was a block of ice.
	Making $10 an hour and buying Bitcoin when it was $300 a pop.
	I had a lot to be miserable about, if that's the way I wanted to look at it, but I knew what I was investing in.
	I knew where I was headed, and it incredibly helped.
	So people in that position who are like, this is a chance for some hope.
	Your day-to-day may suck in some ways, but you've got a ray of hope, or you've got a ray of sunshine to aim at.
	I think there's like this normalcy bias.
	People think that, you know, this is the system that's been around for generations.
	This is the system that's going to continue to be around.
	And there's this new one, that doesn't make any sense, you know.
	I'm going to continue using the phone that's attached to my wall.
	Why would I need to go out and get a phone that doesn't have any wires?
	No, it's smoke signals.
	Yeah, it drops my call all the time.
	This is, yeah, it's a good idea, but it's not stable.
	Yep. Sorry, anybody else wanted to jump in there?
	I had another topic that folks have been bringing up if we wanted to transition.
	Do you mind if we...
	Can you hold that? Oh, certainly.
	Absolutely. Sorry. If we're going to do another topic, let's give some respect to the listeners.
	And not that you guys would see these questions, but...
	So people are asking, listen, I am hesitant to recommend how to store, where to buy, security stuff, because if I recommend something and then it turns out to be hacked or a problem, I would just...
	So if somebody said, any recommendations for wallets on iPhone...
	I generally would prefer if we stick away from specific recommendations for software or hardware because it's a dicey game.
	And if somebody listens and then gets hosed, it's pretty bad.
	So I understand that people want that and maybe you can contact these people offline, but all of that.
	So let's see, somebody said, most of us would sell when it went up to $100 since it's no way it's going to go higher.
	Yeah, well, of course, right?
	I mean, but the multiple effect, the network effect of Bitcoin is so huge.
	For me, you have to look for asymptotic or, I guess, exponential growth.
	Network effects are not like anything else.
	Network effects. The moment you have something that's digital, think of me having to go give speeches in person versus something online.
	Maybe I'll end up back to that in some old-school way.
	But everything that's digital, the network effects, it means it takes a long time to start, but once it starts going, it's through the roof, right?
	And I'll give you sort of an example of that just in terms of numbers.
	So this is, as of three days ago, Bitcoin is now worth more than JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo all combined.
	Now, Bitcoin returns over the years, right?
	Bitcoin returns over the years.
	This is the network effect, right?
	One year, it's gone up 364%.
	Now, I don't know if you've ever invested in average things.
	Average things, net 5% to 10%, pretty good.
	Okay, so we have 364%.
	Anyone want to guess these numbers if they make it more participatory?
	What's it gone up two years in percent?
	We were at 3K not that long ago.
	Yeah. So over two years, it's gone up 1,233%.
	Five years. Anybody want to take a stab at that?
	Big balloon of a number. Well, that puts us back to 2015.
	If you exclude 2017, I think it'd be pretty high.
	So the five-year return on Bitcoin is 11,873%.
	Anybody want to guess?
	Ten years! Can I hear ten, ten, ten?
	Can I hear ten years? Over a million.
	No, 35,000.
	Ten-year return on Bitcoin is 4,486,540%.
	Oh, God, yeah. Because you're buying it like pennies.
	Yeah, that's the whole lot of pizza argument that that guy lost out on when he bought that pizza.
	Oh, yeah. No, Bitcoin has both made happiness and broken hearts left, right, and center.
	So, yeah, and over the last 12 months, according to some, Bitcoin has appreciated almost 500%.
	So, you know, some people say 364, some people close to 500%.
	There was a lot of volatility along the way, including a 50% drop in a single day.
	I made this argument some months ago.
	The 50% drop is fantastic.
	It's fantastic because it's free advertising.
	Because somebody sells a bunch of Bitcoin and they usually go buy some stupid shit, let's be frank, right?
	Because they consider it found money.
	Like back in the day, this is a story that really influenced me when I was younger, which was, I don't know if you know about this story, it was called the $100,000 snowmobile.
	So the $100,000 snowmobile or the $100,000 whatever lawnmower was people taking their money out of something early and in this case it just happened to be Microsoft stock and it was people in Canada and they cashed out their Microsoft.
	Hey, you know, I invested.
	I'm going to sell my stock.
	I'm going to buy a snowmobile.
	Now, snowmobiles, you know, 5K, 10K or whatever, right?
	But then, of course, the stock went up 10 times or whatever.
	And now people look, and instead of looking at that snowmobile and saying, wow, that's really cool that I have that snowmobile, they look at that snowmobile and they say, I can't stand the sight of that snowmobile.
	I can't stand the sight of that snowmobile because I see minus $95,000, right?
	And there's an old saying in Alberta, Canada, Please God, please God above, give me another run on oil and I promise not to piss it away this time.
	You know, because when the oil price goes up, everyone in Alberta basically is licensed to print money.
	And so what they did, so when people sell a bunch of Bitcoin, drive the price down, what you're doing is they're going to buy usually a bunch of stupid shit, right?
	And then people sit there and say, where did all this stupid shit come from?
	Why do you have, you know, a gold garden gnome in your rectum or whatever it is that they're doing, like whatever stupid shit they're buying and usually, or they'll say, you know, maybe it's not stupid shit, although this would be stupid shit in another way.
	Maybe they're saying, oh, you know, I finally, I can put my three kids through college, no problem.
	People say, how on earth can you do that?
	Well, first of all, why would you do that?
	Because college, right? But, oh, Bitcoin, you know, so when the price drops 50%, That's fantastic.
	Asking for someone to jump up without first going down, you know, when you want to jump up, what do you do?
	You go down, you jump up.
	So asking for Bitcoin to go up without massive dips, like the other day, I was pretending to cry when you're talking about when Bitcoin went from 20k down to 3k.
	I hate to say it, I didn't care.
	I didn't care. I mean, occasionally I'd look and say, oh, I'm still kind of low, right?
	I didn't care. Because I know, I know, it's gone to 20K, it's proven its value, and because there's $17,000 of Bitcoin lost, it means that people took a huge chunk of money out and are talking about Bitcoin and are probably buying back in.
	And all it's doing is spreading the word.
	So when you look at drops, yes, you can look and say, and paper losses, who cares?
	Like paper losses, it doesn't matter at all.
	Paper losses are about as irrelevant as, oh, I printed the wrong page on my printer for one thing.
	Oh my gosh, what a terrible thing.
	It's just that you lost one piece of paper, who cares, right?
	But when the price goes down, when there's a big drop, it's just free advertising for the entire network.
	And people who are freaking out about the losses, first of all, it's paper.
	It doesn't matter. And that's why you don't gamble with your core money.
	That's why you don't gamble.
	Not that Bitcoin is a gamble, but don't gamble with your core money.
	Because if you can't take the losses necessary to grow the network effects, you're in too deep, in my humble opinion.
	Anybody else wanted to mention something about that?
	Or related to that?
	I was going to say it's kind of like value investing, right?
	Like, you know, if you've done your research on a company and for whatever reason it drops 25% and you were comfortable buying it before, like That's your buying opportunity.
	You go all in, right?
	Like, you know, that doesn't happen all the time.
	That volatility, you know, there's volatility in pretty much everything.
	It's like you were talking about that 8K of RAM. You know, we're awful volatile in the electronics industry.
	And look at where we're at now, right?
	Like, you know, I've got 32 gigs of RAM and more cores that I know what to do with, right?
	- Right?
	And the other thing too, like invest in something that has value that is not manipulated by a central entity.
	Not manipulated by, and of course the Federal Reserve clearly manipulated by a central entity.
	It's print your own money for the benefit of the ruling financial elites and at the expense of the common people.
	So decentralized is kind of a good thing, isn't it?
	I mean, if you don't have somebody who profits directly From Bitcoin outside of the holders of Bitcoin, that means that Bitcoin is going to more closely match an accurate market scenario, an actual market scenario, because it's not being pumped and dumped by a bunch of people who have particular institutional interests.
	So that's a good thing. Here's a great question from Milchorn.
	And I'll put this out to you guys so that I can claim your thoughts as my own later.
	Which major sector of the economy will get paid in Bitcoin first?
	Where is the first major domino going to fall, do you think?
	I've already been paid in Bitcoin working for exchanges.
	You are not a major sector of the economy.
	Abstract a little. The tech field.
	The city in Florida.
	Miami. I mean, I've heard a lot of car companies are going to be accepting Bitcoin or already are.
	I think Tesla is planning to accept Bitcoin for cars.
	I don't think that's a lot of car companies, but it is Tesla.
	Yes, the major sector of the economy, I mean, I think it's going to have to be a young run company, right?
	Because older run companies, they're just not going to get it as a whole.
	You know, there are some exceptions, but it's the gramophone principle, which I've mentioned before, where my mom still referred to a CD player as a gramophone, because that's just where her brain got fixed, right?
	Or people talking about digital gold, they need an analogy.
	So it'll be a company, you know, obviously Elon Musk is a young dude.
	And so it's going to be employees get paid in Bitcoin.
	Anybody with half a brain would put retirement savings in Bitcoin because, right, particularly public sectors.
	You know, this is my – I hate the public sector unions with a yearning, burning Dantean passion.
	But everybody knows, you know, particularly, you know, some of these Chicago-style homes.
	I remember doing a show, gosh, probably 12, 13 years ago with the guy from CalPERS, the California pension plan, about how ridiculously underfunded these pension schemes are.
	So of course the pension scheme should be putting money into It's funny because once people understand that Bitcoin is the conservative position,
	And the radical position, the extremist position, is investing in an M1 money supply that's gone up 40% in a couple of months.
	That is a radical position.
	There's investing in cough syrup, which is a conservative position, and then there's investing in cocaine futures, which is a radical position.
	And, you know, Bitcoin is the cough syrup and fiat is the cocaine.
	So once people understand that the fiat has become ridiculously unsustainable, and once more, let's take a moment to thank China for giving us the COVID pandemic, which has driven up the price of Bitcoin like you wouldn't believe.
	I hate to say thanks, China, but, you know, I guess it's in the vicinity of some kind of appreciation, but...
	So financial instruments should be the first to move this, but it's going to be young companies.
	It's going to be young CEO-run companies, and it's going to be once...
	I think that the pension funds, whether they listen to this pitch or somebody else making this pitch, pension funds have simply...
	If you have a conscience for how people in the future are going to get paid when you have...
	At best, 40 cents on the dollar to pay them with.
	And you can't just go tax more people, especially when the economy's been eviscerated by this virus.
	You have to get into Bitcoin, in my humble opinion.
	And if you are anywhere close to retirement, i.e., Breathing.
	Then you've really got to start looking into this stuff.
	So I think that we will actually, if there's sort of young hedge funds, we'll kind of get into it.
	Young companies will kind of get into it.
	But I don't think it's going to be a particular sector as a whole.
	I think it's going to come through a variety of sectors, but with younger forward-looking people looking at how to hedge against inflation.
	Let's see here.
	Lending protocols serve as a way for holders of traditional crypto to earn a small amount of interest or for holders of stablecoins to earn interest at rates often higher than through traditional savings accounts slash bonds.
	Do you guys deal at all with these lending protocols where you can yeet over your bitcoins to someone and get some interest back?
	I have.
	I have some stories about that.
	Good, good. Let's hear all about it.
	So I was participating in one.
	I can't remember exactly what the name of it was now, but it's now defunct.
	And the idea was it would be based on like reputation.
	Now, the challenge is when you're based on reputation and you announce that you're going out of business, Uh, there's not a whole lot of motivation for people to pay back their loans.
	So, uh, that was my experience with that.
	The returns are great until they announced that, you know, you could no longer get new loans on the platform.
	So. Right.
	Yeah, I did something similar back in 2014 on an exchange that no longer exists.
	And yeah, similar situation.
	You had all these open, reputation-related...
	Anyone could pitch an idea and you could put a little crypto here and there.
	And in the beginning, they were paying their returns and then it just dried up.
	But now, that's the old days.
	And I do think there are some more legitimate ones and entirely legitimate ones.
	I use blockchain.com.
	Gives 4.4, I think, interest on Bitcoin.
	You can hold with them.
	I do some of that. Can they actually go after somebody's credit score?
	Or is it just... No, I don't think there's any credit score type of thing included in that yet.
	I've heard of some companies that are building crypto credit scores for DeFi.
	So in the future, that may be a thing.
	Although I don't know how, because the DeFi DGEMs, they like the high risk thing.
	So they probably won't be too keen on that.
	Well, there's also like, that's leveraging.
	They're going to get into identity on the blockchain, a reputation network on the blockchain, which is something personally I would love to champion and see happen.
	I think there's fewer things in the world that would be more beneficial than an entirely open reputation network.
	That's a whole other conversation, though.
	Like what you're doing in China?
	It has to be decentralized.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	It has to be decentralized.
	Decentralized and voluntary.
	Distinctly different from what China's doing.
	Let me just mention as well, when it comes to lending Bitcoin, you have to, because I assume that there's some risk in lending it out and that it, you know, What's that old Seinfeld joke about money?
	It always kind of influenced me where he says, you know, people are always saying, hey, you've got to put your money to work for you.
	And he's like, no, no, no, I'll be happy to work because, you know, if you put your money to work for you, it goes out and gets a job.
	And you know what happens? Sometimes it just gets fired.
	And, you know, so if you're going to lend out your bitcoins...
	I don't know exactly because it's so decentralized and so oopy-goopy as far as tracing goes and so on.
	You really have to believe somehow, if you're going to get 5% return on your Bitcoins, that just holding them and watching them go up is somehow should be more satisfying, in my humble opinion.
	Something else people wanted to add to that?
	So right now, I use something called Nexo.
	It's not a decentralized solution.
	But right now, if you want to borrow money on Nexo, you usually provide about 200% of your Bitcoin or whatever as collateral versus what you borrow.
	So you can borrow, say, $10,000 if you give them control over $20,000 of your Bitcoin.
	So that protects them in a way.
	And I believe the decentralized versions may work similarly to that.
	Right. Okay. So somebody posted this, which I think is...
	I won't read them all because it's a lot.
	But somebody has... This is a website.
	It's called 99. That's the number.
	99bitcoins.com forward slash Bitcoin dash obituaries.
	So here's a couple of titles.
	December 2010. Why Bitcoin can't be a currency?
	The underground economist.
	When Bitcoin was at $0.23.
	May 2011.
	Why Bitcoin will fail?
	From App& War at $3.12 a Bitcoin.
	Tav's blog. Why Bitcoin will fail as a currency?
	$19.73.
	Here's a good one. Forbes.
	Forbes magazine. So that's the end of Bitcoin then.
	When it was $15.15.
	Why Bitcoin will fail as a currency from July 2011.
	Gizmodo, Australia, in August 2011 said, The Bitcoin is dying!
	Whatever! Wired, the rise and fall of Bitcoin when Bitcoin was $2.37.
	That's November 2011. Wired said, Wired tired and expired for 2012.
	Expired! Bitcoin was $13.30.
	Slate. Fool's gold.
	April 2013, Bitcoin was $131.
	The Bitcoin bubble has burst in April 2013.
	Sell on. Beware of this insidious new currency scam.
	I'm so sorry. These writers should just shamefully look in the mirror at how much wealth they denied to people when Bitcoin was $107.
	June 2013, Bitcoin is $105.
	New York Magazine said, Bitcoin sees the Grim Reaper.
	The Daily Paul, why Bitcoin will fail August 2013.
	Bloomberg View, the SEC shows why Bitcoin is doomed.
	Why Bitcoin is doomed to fail.
	Salon wrote in October 2013, Bitcoin is a remarkable innovation.
	Here's why it will fail. Business Insider, Bitcoin is a joke.
	Bitcoin is still doomed, Bloomberg, again.
	And it's just the New York Times, a prediction.
	Bitcoin is doomed to fail.
	You know, going against the opposite of the New York Times is usually the best way, other than this show, to find the truth.
	December 2013, Business Insider, when Bitcoin was $887, says, Bitcoin will crash to $10 by mid-2014.
	Reuters, an early obituary to Bitcoin.
	Fool.com, why Bitcoin is doomed as a currency.
	Wall Street Daily, February 2014, the exact date for Bitcoin's final crash to zero dollars.
	And this just goes on and on.
	Bitcoin's financial network is doomed, says the Washington Post, December 2014.
	Mother Jones, well, you know, a bunch of socialists, that's where you want to go for the people's currency, right?
	The great paradox of Bitcoin, if it ever succeeds, it's doomed!
	The Washington Post, Bitcoin revealed a Ponzi scheme for redistributing wealth from one libertarian to another.
	Just wretched.
	I'll just go to a little closer, a little closer, because this is all still going on, right?
	Newark Post, July 2018.
	Bitcoin was $6,600.
	Why Bitcoin may soon be worth nothing!
	CNBC, June 2018.
	The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belford on Bitcoin.
	Get out if you don't want to lose all of your money!
	Oh, my gosh.
	New Zealand Herald talk of Bitcoin's demise was on the money.
	CNBC, Fast Money's Bitcoin funeral.
	Oh, my gosh.
	Forbes said cryptocurrencies have failed and blockchain still has yet to be proven useful.
	Oh, man. It just goes on.
	And literally, you can just go on and on and on, even up to this year.
	Heck, this month. This month, you can find these people who say, what was it?
	Let's see here. Nassim Nicholas Taleb said, I've been getting rid of my Bitcoin.
	Why? A currency is never supposed to be more volatile than what you buy and sell with it.
	You can't price goods in Bitcoin.
	In that respect, it's a failure, at least for now.
	It was taken over by COVID-denying sociopaths with the sophistication of amoebas.
	It's funny he talks about volatility of buying and selling.
	Was he around in March and trying to buy toilet paper?
	No idea. Like, you know what I mean?
	Yeah. Oh, it's crazy.
	Or ammo. Well, you know, Warren Buffett, even last year, you know, called it rat poison squared.
	And, you know, but it's like he grew up in a completely different time period, right?
	Like he made his wealth when interest rates had been going down for 30, more than 30 years.
	In an inflationary environment, and it's just like, okay, you try starting out now, are interest rates going to go, you're going to get a negative 5% mortgage?
	That's the only way the house prices could go up exponentially more from here, right?
	Yeah, so people don't understand that the volatility of Bitcoin is a shadow of the volatility of fiat currency.
	If fiat currency was stable, Well, then there wouldn't be any particular demand, or at least not as heightened a demand for Bitcoin.
	So a fiat currency is ridiculously unstable.
	And that instability, people's fear of inflation, people's fear of their money overprinting and so on, that's a fundamental driver.
	To the value of Bitcoin, at least at the moment.
	And so the idea that Bitcoin's volatility is intrinsic to Bitcoin, but the volatility is measured by what?
	It's measured in relation to fiat currency, which is wildly unstable at the moment, and it's only masked up by guns, right?
	Medium said, the Bitcoin dream is dead when Bitcoin was at $37,000.
	Bloomberg, this is this month.
	Bitcoin has nil value.
	Okay. Entrepreneur Magazine.
	This is from January. Bitcoin is nothing.
	It's a vapor, a concept of an idea.
	It's so ridiculous, right?
	Oh my gosh.
	What is the value of Shakespeare?
	You know, I mean, it's digital now, so clearly it's got no value.
	It's just so funny, right?
	The insider says, yeah, the fundamental value of Bitcoin is zero.
	Now, the older investors have no excuse because they've all gone through the digitization of the economy.
	You know, if you sit there and say, well, email doesn't have a future because you can't sell stamps on it.
	It's like, oh, God.
	I don't know. Some of Buffett's businesses still use paper, right?
	The insurance industry is kind of at the lagging end of tech in some regards.
	You know, same with a lot of banking and finance.
	Yeah. All right.
	So I'm sorry, I haven't forgotten your point, Jared.
	We'll get back there in a sec here.
	And I just want to see if there's any other...
	Let's see here.
	USD is hugely risky.
	So compared to what? Yeah, the US dollars are hugely risky.
	You know, they're releasing 25,000 migrants into Texas.
	No COVID testing, nothing.
	I mean, it's crazy, right?
	So this attack upon...
	The demographics of the U.S. creates a massive amount of instability, plus it could get you another COVID spike and all that kind of stuff.
	So that's pretty bad.
	It's pretty bad. In terms of the U.S. dollar being more risky than Bitcoin, I was having this conversation with someone earlier today in that transition of explaining, getting them on board that, well, Bitcoin is at least as safe as the banking system we have now and what I'm used to.
	And then you make that transition to where when you understand the banking system and crypto in comparison, you're like, I want nothing to do with that thing.
	Yeah, the media's new angle on Bitcoin is the environmental effect.
	There was an article in the BBC about energy consumption on par with Argentina.
	Yeah, well, screw the BBC. Screw the BBC in every conceivable way.
	I mean, the BBC is a government programmed, government shill crapola of an organization.
	And so, oh no, Bitcoin, it consumes energy.
	It's like, you know what consumes energy?
	Mass migration. Taking people from low-carbon footprint countries, bringing them to high-carbon footprint countries, and giving them $100,000 a year in welfare and subsidies.
	But I've never once heard the BBC say, oh, you know, but mass migration is really bad for the environment, which it is.
	They won't ever talk about that.
	They don't care about the environment.
	They just want to serve their master.
	Sorry? The military-industrial complex.
	Military-industrial complex.
	National debt is terrible for the environment, as I talked about last time.
	Yeah, I'll take them seriously when they start measuring the carbon footprint of regulation and politicians.
	Well, how about the fact that the BBC spends a huge amount of money because people are forced at gunpoint to contribute to it?
	How about they say, well, you know, we're much bigger than we would be in the free market.
	And therefore, we should not take these government subsidies so we can get smaller and reduce our carbon footprint.
	They don't care about their carbon footprint and of how much of it is subsidized at gunpoint by the government licensing.
	So I don't care about it. I mean, just a bunch of garbage humans.
	I want to hear them chuckle at Dogecoin and what happened with it and its possible future.
	Also, talk about 500 billion inflation rate solution.
	I don't know. Wait, I got a better question.
	How to buy crypto simply with no personal info given?
	Again, particular places to buy and sell, I'm not a big fan of talking about, so you can look into that.
	Contrary to what was said a few minutes ago regarding interest rates, I think housing prices are on the way up due to immigration.
	Well, certainly Biden is going to drive up the price of housing, but because so many people are moving out of the cities, and, you know, the one thing to remember is that immigration, mass migration from particularly third world countries, is incredibly concentrated in the cities.
	Now, if people are leaving the cities and going to the country, both because of mass migration and also because of the work-at-home policies and so on, then country real estate is going to go up.
	But because people are moving out of the city, city real estate may not go up as much as it used to when people had to stay in the cities and compete tooth and nail for this kind of stuff.
	I do think it's great that that's happening.
	It's just I'm surprised it took this to be that trigger.
	What do you mean? Well, in terms of the stay at home, I think it's now like 33% of people say they won't take another job if it requires them to go into an office.
	Oh, yeah, absolutely.
	Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, one thing people aren't really talking about is how much of the COVID hysteria is driven by collapsing testosterone levels.
	We've all become Karen aunts.
	On Dogecoin, it's a meme coin.
	That's where it gets its value from.
	And I don't mean that hyperbolically in any way.
	Like, I remember selling Doge in 2014 on eBay, you know, as long as I could.
	They nixed that in the bud real quick.
	But... Well, yeah, it's a meme coin, so invest at your own risk.
	That's not advice, just opinion.
	It's definitely a distraction.
	I think its value is depending on how much Elon Musk is going to tweet about it.
	And it does a good marketing job for crypto in general.
	They do a great job at that.
	Somebody here says Dogecoin has an annual inflation rate of 500 billion coins.
	It is obscenely inflationary.
	Like you can sell like – or you can send like 50 million doge and it's barely nothing.
	Okay. Elon Musk is the only reason – and it's a doggy coin, right?
	I mean it was a meme coin from a dog gif, right?
	Or a dog picture. Yeah.
	I mean, I wouldn't put it past us.
	That would be, you know, in history books, if it went down as that was the reserve currency for 100 years.
	Yeah, or if it's like, I don't know, if it ended up being run by some central banking system to discredit cryptos as a whole.
	I can believe that.
	You know, what was it? The head of the Proud Boys ended up being an FBI informant.
	Who knows, like, what's going on these days with anything anymore, but...
	Okay, so sorry, Jared.
	Thank you for your patience. I just really wanted to get through the questions to make it more valuable to be live, and please go with your topic.
	Certainly, certainly. People have been mentioning Tether.
	And curiosity around that, some poo-pooing of crypto around that.
	Let me explain real quick what Tether is.
	Tether is a stablecoin tied to the US dollar.
	And so...
	I'm sorry. Aren't all stablecoins tied to the US dollar?
	Well, I mean, you could tie it to other currencies, other fiats.
	Yeah. In this particular case, it's tied to the US dollar.
	And it's the most widely used one.
	I think on CoinMarketCap, it is like...
	The fourth largest quote-unquote crypto.
	I mean, I don't know if I would consider it a crypto or not, but you know, it is what it is.
	And it is, there's lawsuits and there's questions and concerns around, do they, are they, are their books right or are they just, because they consistently like printing all kinds of tether out of nowhere.
	So people have the same concerns that they would about the central banking system and all that stuff good, but then it seems to me that people are also making the case that because that's the case, That crypto as a whole is doomed because so much of Bitcoin's liquidity is tied to Tether.
	In which case, I say, like, A, should Tether just disappear tomorrow or whatever, get found to be completely insolvent, there's many more, far more legitimate stablecoins that would take its place.
	Coinbase offers one.
	Many other exchanges offer them.
	It's easy to create these stablecoins.
	And also, I would personally, if that caused a 50% correction in Bitcoin, I'd kind of take that as a buying opportunity.
	It's not going to kill crypto, like Tether being, if it is, completely insolvable, which I have no idea.
	But yeah, that's just something that folks outside of these conversations has been bringing up, and I just wanted to respond to anyone that had any thoughts on that.
	Somebody says, look at Tether market cap.
	How do you explain that? Lots of people are using it.
	And yeah, maybe they're just magicing it out of nowhere, but they are using it.
	It is going somewhere. And I tell you what, the rare times that I've used Tether, you hold it for like two seconds and then you get rid of it.
	You're not holding your wealth in Tether.
	It's just a bridge. Like an instrument for traders.
	It's basically an open-ended kind of like mutual fund, right?
	Where the idea is for every tether, right?
	You've got the corresponding fiat that's backing it up, if you call that backing it up.
	But I wouldn't be surprised in about 10 years, like how we're talking about like, you know, like a stablecoin or like a tether or a dogecoin, that we don't just have coins for every single company that's just on, that's traded, right?
	And basically, the operating agreement just defines this is how many coins are in existence.
	You can trade them as much as you want, and you just have a market of all these coins.
	It just represents, like, here's Apple, here's Tesla, here's Google.
	There's going to be many solutions for this.
	Ravencoin already has this, already has the technology built out for this.
	You can buy whatever you want, whatever name you want, and You can issue your tokens, your shares, whatever, and you can set up so you can reissue or you can control them via that way.
	This technology already exists, and yes, I definitely believe we're headed there.
	Do you guys use basic attention tokens and Brave?
	I do. And you can, I think, tip on freedomain.com.
	Do you guys have any thoughts about that one?
	I personally haven't used Brave very much.
	It's just gone under the radar for me.
	I haven't gotten too much interest.
	It's a great idea to monetize...
	Essentially what they're doing is instead, you're being paid to look at ads instead of being the product yourself via Brave.
	And you can easily tip websites, I think, as well.
	Yes, yeah. And so you can tip the content producers you appreciate directly, which is really awesome.
	It's also integrated into Twitter, and you can tip content creators or users on Twitter in Brave.
	I've been using the browser for...
	A couple of years now.
	It's my primary browser and I actually have accumulated quite a bit of that just over that time.
	So it's a great system.
	You know, I don't mind seeing less ads and having a few ads pop up here and there and getting paid for it.
	So I think it's good.
	I think I'd like to see it become sort of the tipping token on the internet.
	I think that has the potential to be the kind of default tip token.
	We did touch on this.
	People have got questions about Monaro, which is one of the more private ones, if I remember correctly.
	And isn't there a bounty out to try and break its privacy?
	And so it seems to be a very much under the radar kind of currency.
	The IRS issued a bounty, if I recall correctly, 650K, which compared to the market cap for Monaro is a big joke.
	Yeah. I'm just bringing up Monero's website so I can add any information.
	I'm pretty sure anyone that knows enough about the network to solve that particular problem is probably making more money on the network.
	Oh yeah, let's just say that.
	Any particular questions about Monero?
	So from my understanding, the way Oh gosh, I need to get better versed on this.
	But the way Monero works is that privacy is the, like, you don't know who's got what balance where you don't have an option to send things non-privately.
	You know, so it's a very, you can't even tell how much of a balance a particular address has.
	If I recall correctly, I don't, you know, take me to the bank on that, but it is definitely the most privacy-centric coins.
	The name of the founder and lead developer is Fluffy Pony.
	I forget his actual name, but he's kind of, in the early days, he was kind of known as a troll in the crypto world, but obviously a very competent developer and coder because Monero has been very successful.
	And I do believe, from my understanding, Monero also uses the KaPow algorithm, which is K-A-W-P-A-W, I believe, or P-O-W.
	And that is an algorithm that Ravencoin came up with in order to be ASIC resistance.
	And ASIC sounds – I won't go over what ASIC stands for.
	It's a machine for mining crypto.
	But what they came up with this algorithm for is to resist people creating these machines specifically for mining this crypto.
	And the purpose of that being that instead of people creating these mining farms and those individuals – increasingly fewer and fewer individuals and interests controlling this mining power – instead, it's going to be distributed across more individual machines and more individuals.
	So there's less of a concentration of interests.
	Does that make sense, guys?
	Okay, cool. Yeah, I think that's good.
	A question that I have, which I haven't looked too much into, and I have to sort of lean on the collective intelligence of the group here.
	To what degree do you think...
	Crypto value is also driven by concerns about this, you'll own nothing and you'll be happy, great reset stuff that seems to be cooking along with a 2030 deadline.
	Do you want to give a bit of background to those who aren't familiar with the Great Reset, of which I would be one, and talk about whether people might be fleeing to crypto out of that concern?
	Okay, so from my understanding, the Great Reset mentality or idea comes from – please correct me where I'm wrong.
	I was listening to this book, Debt, the First 5,000 Years, from someone who was trying to argue MMT. In the community.
	And it seems like this thing for the people that believe that money is fiat and stuff like that, that every once in a while, these cultures or these communities would just have this time where they cancel all debt.
	So I guess it's something that's a cultural meme.
	I don't know. I don't get the modern argument.
	That's my understanding of what a reset is.
	It's where you just go out, you cancel all debt, you reset everybody back to zero, and start over fresh.
	Which, you know, screws the people who had, you know, made the wiser choices and didn't get into horrible debt in comparison.
	But... Well, what's worse is in, you know, now basically debt is an asset, right?
	So for every person that is in debt, that is a bond that's being paid to somebody who owns that debt.
	So basically it's just a giant wealth transfer because we don't have a stable currency.
	Yeah. It's like the postmodernist or the anti-rationalist versus the objectivist, the rationalist.
	How are they going to survive if they can't steal from everyone?
	Yeah. Because imagine that the pension fund is invested in student loans, and then you go and, you know, eradiate student loans, and now there's nothing in the pension fund that's going to pay back.
	So it's kind of a mess.
	But, you know, the elite, if you want to call them that, they don't believe in the Great Reset.
	Look at, you know, Bill Gates is collecting farmland like it's going out of fashion.
	You know, all these other things that are happening.
	You know, these are rules for us.
	So I think, you know, you don't want to stay in the lanes where they can easily get things from you.
	Yeah, I mean, a big issue that the elites are facing, which I've talked about at great peril on my show over the years, but, you know, the time for concern and conservatives in regard to these things kind of past, is that, and you want to check out the book, At Our Wits End, just about the declining levels of intelligence in the world, in the West, in America.
	Intelligence IQ points have been dropping considerably.
	One of the reasons they had to give up on the Concorde is they just didn't have engineers good enough to sustain it.
	One of the reasons why the The whole space program, NASA, why I haven't done that much lately is, again, you just got declining intelligence levels for a variety of reasons.
	Some environmental, I would assume, some might be genetic, I don't know, right?
	But it's a big problem.
	It's a big problem.
	You know, you have 10%. So, you know, people with an IQ 85, 83 or below, Really don't have much to do in this modern economy.
	And, you know, the U.S. Army is forbidden from taking people with an IQ of 83 or below because there's no scenario, even in the Army, where, you know, if it moves, move it.
	If it doesn't move, paint it. That's not that much complicated stuff at many layers of the Army.
	There's no scenario in which 83 IQ or below, the training expense remotely justifies any productivity that you can get out of that.
	It's 10% of the American population and growing.
	And so I think this is one of the pushes behind things like universal basic income, which I think Charles Murray and other people are sort of big fans of.
	It's that we just have a population that has not a huge amount to do in an increasingly complex economy.
	Plus, of course, as the economy gets more complex, simpler jobs get phased out.
	You know, like the McDonald's has big touch screens now rather than the teenagers who used to be there.
	And that is something which, because we can't talk about this IQ issue as a whole, regardless of whether you talk about race specific or not, you just can't talk about the IQ issue as a whole because it's a pushback against the economic class-based determinism of the Of the communists and the socialists, we can't have any discussions about what to do with this.
	And it is a big problem. My particular solution is let's let the free market rip.
	Let's have people understand that it's not people's fault if they have lower IQs.
	It's not any more than it's somebody's fault if they're short or have brown eyes instead of blue or whatever it is.
	It's not their fault. And we've got to have a lot of sympathy.
	A lot of compassion. But the best way to deal with this is to let the free market do its thing and educate people about this issue so that we can be kind and generous and sympathetic to people who aren't going to find much of a place to land in an increasingly complex economy, have compassion, have Understanding and charity, significant amounts of charity.
	Again, it's not that they did anything wrong or did anything bad.
	It's just the way that nature has shaken out and we got to have a lot of sympathy.
	But of course, because we can't talk about all of this stuff, what happens is, you know, the economy has a downward drag.
	The welfare state tends to do negative things to the population at that level as a whole.
	And then I think the Great Reset has something to do with, you know, in the past, You had a period of peace and free market stability, and what would happen is you'd end up with a pretty high population and the way that would bleed off that population to go to war.
	Now, you can't do war anymore because of weapons of mass destruction.
	I tried to lead the discussions on IQ and heritability and so on.
	Obviously, that was verboten to the leftists because they want to say that since IQ and poverty are pretty closely related, they say, well, the reason why people are poor It's because they're exploited, and they're stolen from, and they just rouse this general resentment against anyone.
	Factually, they are, but it's not by who they think.
	They're getting robbed the hardest by inflation.
	Yeah, and terrible schools.
	Why do you need a $15 minimum wage?
	It's to cover up the fact that the schools are producing economically useless people, but you can't fix the schools, so you just point a gun at the employers to pretend that the schools actually have value.
	Yeah, so I think the Great Reset has something to do with, you know, we just have people who can't get a whole lot done in an increasingly automated economy and we can't talk about it because you get deplatformed by the left or attacked or whatever it is just for bringing this basic scientific issue up.
	And so that is a big problem.
	And the longer we push off the knowledge of this stuff, the worse and more destructive and often more violent the solution is going to be.
	And of course, for the people who love violence, they want to suppress these conversations.
	So I think that's got something to do with this Great Reset stuff.
	How abusive is it for someone who...
	is on the lower end of the IQ bell curve to be holding them to the stand saying like, no, no, you should be up here.
	You should be able to be up here doing these things.
	And like, you know, for them having a hard time struggling with it and not understanding what it is.
	It's great. I don't watch these shows in general, which always sounds like a caveat for people who obsessively watch these shows.
	But seriously, I was just flipping through the channels once some years ago.
	And there was a, you know, these dance shows.
	It's sort of like American Idol, but it's for dancing.
	Now, I find, I don't know if this is a confession of being a complete philistine, I find dancing to be one of the more annoying things in life.
	Yeah. Because there's, you know, there's like six moves that you can twirl, you can jump, you can maybe spin a little bit in a different direction, but, you know, and it's always like the man dancing with the woman and this is the arc of their relationship and it's like, no, it's just... People with abs bending things.
	I find dance one of these...
	I mean, don't get me wrong. When I was younger, I would spend all night at the disco.
	I loved going dancing whenever talking heads burning down the house would come in or Billy Idol's dancing by myself or dancing with myself.
	I love that stuff. And I love dancing as a sort of fun social activity and exercise and all that stuff.
	But watching professional dancers, I just find it really annoying.
	And I've only sat through a couple of actual dance...
	Shows in my entire life and I'm just like, oh yeah, I get it.
	You've got big glutes and you can touch your knee to your face.
	Cool. Now, singing is a different matter.
	I think singing is great and plays, of course, as a whole.
	I was in theater school, but dancing, I just find one of these really annoying things about life.
	And I don't think they would even survive without government funding and dancers tend to be kind of insufferable as a whole and they're incredibly body conscious and often anorexic and smoke like chimneys.
	But anyway, so I was flipping through the channels and there was one of these dance shows and it was an audition of some guy.
	His mother was there.
	And you knew that this was the son who'd been promoted to the husband of the single mom.
	Like, you just knew that, right? She couldn't make any friends, she couldn't get any other boyfriends, so she just leech-like attaches onto the future jugular potential of her son and drains him dry.
	And the guy was terrible.
	I mean, I'm not a dance expert, but you can usually tell the people who are good from the people who aren't good.
	And he was terrible. And you knew that the mom had continually told him what a great dancer he was.
	And the judges were like, oh, you know, like, I'm sorry, like, you're not even good enough to...
	You really think you can win this competition?
	Like when you see these bad singers go up on American Idol?
	Have you sang into your phone and played it back and ever hear how you sound?
	And this guy was terrible. And his mom was fighting and arguing with the judges.
	They don't know what they're talking about.
	He's a brilliant dancer. And the judges were like, look, lady, you're not doing him any favors.
	You're not helping him by encouraging him in something that he's really bad at.
	Now, maybe if you hadn't encouraged him so much, he'd have realized how bad he was and worked to get better.
	Maybe he'd be in a different place, but he's in his late 20s.
	He's a bad dancer.
	It's never going to happen for him.
	And, you know, this is the Simon Cowell thing where Simon is like blunt or Randy Jackson could have been like, you know, dog, this is not your thing or whatever, right?
	Or, you know, Simon Cowell would be like, well, you may be good at something, but this is not it, right?
	And people think, oh, that's so cruel, that's so mean because people get kind of heartbroken in the moment, but...
	You got to be honest with people, like giving them this false sense of like, well, maybe you do have an IQ of 80, but if it wasn't for Elon Musk, you'd be worth a billion dollars.
	It's like, that's not kind to people.
	And it creates an incredibly frustrated life because people think, oh, I could be some captain of industry or some multi-zillionaire or whatever, but the system just hates me or the white people hate me or the capitalists hate me or whatever it is.
	And it just creates this incredible stress and frustration and anger and It's really cruel, and using people as a battering ram against the system that you want to destroy and take over, it's kind of inevitable, but it is really cruel, and it is going to create a massive amount of suffering.
	When the violence spills over and capitalism runs on peace, it runs on peace, it runs on serenity, it runs on security, it runs on trust.
	You start to wreck that kind of stuff.
	It's like all of the idiots who promote these riots in poor neighborhoods and minority neighborhoods.
	Okay, so then the pharmacies pull out, the convenience stores pull out, the gas stations pull out, the supermarkets pull out, and now these people have got to take three buses to go and pick up a loaf of bread, and you think you've done them any favors?
	I want to start on that whole thing.
	It's a bit of a sidebar, but...
	Yeah, I think that's another thing that's driving this great reset is, okay, what are we going to do with everyone?
	We can either talk about it with compassion and with understanding and with sympathy, or we can just suppress the discussion and let the shite hit the fan, which apparently seems to be the plan at the moment, which I strongly disagree with, of course, as you can imagine.
	All right, sorry for the long rant.
	I hope that was useful to people.
	If anybody wants any closing thoughts, I'm certainly happy to hear it.
	Closing thoughts on the rant or the show?
	No, no. Anything you want, man.
	I had my day in the sun.
	It's all yours. No, no.
	I appreciate that.
	I was going to say if you're interested in why we're becoming less intelligent, Edward Dutton wrote the book At Our Wits End.
	Why we're becoming less intelligent and what it means for the future.
	Anybody else? Going once.
	Even the people we can't see.
	Oh, somebody said something in the chat.
	Oh, yeah, yeah, thanks. Yeah, he was on the show, actually.
	He's a very funny guy.
	All right, should we close it off?
	Everybody give me this sign.
	Sorry, go ahead. Oh, you were talking about closing it off.
	Okay, I wasn't sure if you meant like the rant or closing off the show.
	No, closing off the show. If there's anything that people want to add, we've had a good old time in chat.
	Someone in the Discord asked if we could give recommendations on where to do research on wallets and things like that, so not a particular wallet, in which case I would personally say… Get in touch with someone you know and trust.
	If you're not comfortable going online and searching these things yourself, get in touch with someone you trust that you can have a conversation with.
	And actually, even better, get in touch with multiple people and cross-check them across each other.
	Go to an online community you trust and have a public conversation.
	Be very skeptical of anyone that DMs you, direct messages you with any ideas, information, offers, great investment advice.
	I'm an I'm going to interrupt you first to suggest that those people, before they do anything with Bitcoin, get a financial planner and pay them a small fee to come up with a budget so you know how much you can lose or invest or play with.
	That works, but not everyone can afford the financial planner.
	Then I would argue that the money would be better spent not buying Bitcoin right now.
	Well, I mean, that would have been the case for me back in the day.
	But then again, that was a different time as well.
	Yes. And also, don't forget to invest in yourself.
	Because we all think of investing in stocks, bonds, cryptos, whatever it is, right?
	That's fine. And remember, nothing we say here is financial advice, investment advice.
	Do your own research. We're not recommending anybody make any financial decisions on our sort of random bounce-around thoughts.
	But don't forget to invest in yourself.
	Like every article you read, every book that you read, I think listening to these kinds of shows, it's going to up your human capital, and that's really, really important.
	Don't forget that it's fine to invest in external things, but the first thing Capital asset you have is yourself.
	And really make sure to invest in yourself to get your knowledge section up and all of that.
	So that would be my other thought.
	Okay, any other closing thoughts people wanted to bring to the table?
	That's right. It looks like a round table, but we're all squares.
	All right. So thanks, everyone, for dropping by.
	A great chat. Please, when we send these out, send them to people.
	Like, the more people who listen to this kind of stuff, I think the better off people will be.
	And if you're kicking yourself now, don't be kicking yourself a year from now.
	You know, because since we first started doing these, I think this is the fifth one.
	Since we first started doing this, the price of Bitcoin more than doubled.
	That's not bad, you know?
	And so I don't think it's anywhere close to the end of its run, my humble opinion.
	So yeah, just share this stuff.
	And I really do appreciate everybody dropping by today.
	I appreciate everybody dropping by today.
	And have yourself a wonderful, wonderful evening, a great week as a whole.
	And keep your friends close, but your bitcoins closer.
	All right. Take care, everyone.
	Thanks. Bye. Mm-mm.
	All right. Yeah, that was good.
	Because the Discord thing, it's donator-based, the donation stuff is kind of closed off at the moment, and I also don't want people pinging Discord on the platform.
	I'm sorry. Oh, man.
	I should have mentioned it beforehand.
	Steph, I'm so sorry. I've always wondered, like, why you don't pimp the Discord more.
	I'm like, it's like... Because people can't get in.
	Because we don't want it to go away. Because Subscribestar is shadowbanned, right?
	Oh, I'm sorry, man.
	No, that's fine. That's fine.
	I'll cut it off the final one. But, yeah, thanks, guys.
	I really, really appreciate it. Have a great evening, right?

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