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June 22, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:35:52
HOW LOW CAN YOU GO? FREEDOMAIN INVESTMENT ROUNDTABLE
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Well, it's, you know, we'll talk about, well, we'll talk about the CCP, we'll talk about the banning of Bitcoin, we'll talk about El Salvadori, and all kinds of cool stuff today.
So, thank you very much, of course, for joining.
And this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain here with our good friends of the crypto community who are coming in to talk me, I think, off a cliff, off the edge of my happiness and thrill existence in humanity.
So, yeah, this is Stefan Molyneux.
So we do this every now and then, not particularly scheduled in any way.
It's a crypto roundtable, and we really buy it.
We just set it up to watch Herman's backdrop because it's just really cool.
And it's that kind of green screen technology that just has us all in awe.
It totally looks like a backdrop of a green screen.
All right.
So I'll just talk about me.
Me! Let's talk about me.
Yes, that's right. So I try not to have too dysfunctional a relationship with Bitcoin, but I'm not saying I'm succeeding at the moment because it's just kind of annoying.
You see, at most times in my life, the news has not been uniformly bad and there's always a sliver of hope, a sliver of God's radiant grace shining through the clouds.
That you can grab onto to ride your spirits up a little bit.
But now, COVID lockdown seemingly without end.
Vaccine passports coming in here in Canada.
Only 19% of people are vax hesitant and news piling up about heart congestion and myocarditis and things that are happening to young boys' hearts.
And Bitcoin still skirting to high 30s in Canada, which is what, the low 30s or high 20s in Canada.
The US, I can't remember what the exchange rate is at the moment.
So I'm looking for the ray of sunshine.
And of course, I know. I know I'm a big boy.
I know that it doesn't have to always have a ray of sunshine.
But I actually, I like once in a while.
And, you know, I guess the only ray of sunshine is that it does seem to be pretty clear for the blockchain as a whole.
That the long-term holders, the people who are holding on to Bitcoin long-term, are still accumulating.
The people who are selling tend to be six-month minus short-term holders.
So those who believe in the long-term value proposition of Bitcoin are still doing this thing.
But that's kind of what we talked about last time.
It's still the price. Right?
So we know it's a supply-demand thing, right?
The supply of Bitcoin is limited.
The supply of Bitcoin is diminishing.
And... The demand just is not there.
Now, the demand seems to be going through a whole bunch of shocks from people who think that Elon Musk is some sort of oracle of Delphi of future value, which he's not.
He's a semi-statist hack who did not exactly come from the poverty he claims to be and did not exactly have all the business success he claims to have and steadily sucks a regular diet of government cash.
So let's just say I'm not all in on Elon Musk being the sort of business genius of the modern age.
And so I guess people are writing that and then of course China, the Chinese Communist Party has done some semi-banning-y kind of thing in the realm of Bitcoin.
And of course, what that means is that if you're on the inner circle, you can still trade it.
If you can get a special license for trading Bitcoin, just as...
Satoshi intended. Then you can still trade Bitcoin.
But all it's done, of course, is it's driven the miners.
The miners just packed up their rigs and they've gone to Malaysia, I assume.
They've gone to a variety of other places.
The rewards for the Bitcoin miners goes up when the Bitcoin mining goes down.
It adjusts, what, like every two weeks or something like that.
So there's no particular harshness in, to me, if Bitcoin mining moves out of the realm of the Chinese Communist Party beyond their reach, yeah, no problem.
I think that's perfectly fine.
So I think, you know, my particular guess, and, you know, obviously correct me according to your views, but my particular view is that The supply is diminishing because going into cold storage, going off the exchanges, but the demand is simply not there to bring the price up, which means people are unwisely not panicking yet.
Given the amount of money printing that's going on on the planet at the moment, people should be terrified.
Given the fact that fiat currencies always die a painful, horrifying inflationary death should have people particularly concerned.
The fact that birth rates are down should have people concerned.
The fact that people are quitting their jobs in droves to stay home and suck the giant milky teat of government cash from here to eternity should have people concerned.
And the fact that El Salvador has now given Bitcoin legal tender status should have people excited.
Yet, yet, the price continues to trundle along.
Now, of course, it's still five times higher than it was this time last year or even this time 10 months ago.
But, you know, from 80k Canadian to 39 is a fairly significant drop.
And just goes to remind everyone, I suppose, that value is subjective.
Just because something has value to you, it may even have value objectively, doesn't mean that it will have enough value for people to buy it enough to buoy the price up.
That's my little intro.
It's just kind of annoying.
I think we keep making the case.
I think smart people are making the case.
Inflation is certainly up.
Inflation is certainly up.
My wife comes back from the grocery store clutching her heart and fainting like a Victorian couch heroine who needs smelling salts because she saw a man's ankle.
And it's just – why?
Gas is going through the roof.
Government debt is going through the roof.
The prices of everything is going through the roof, although I think lumber is back a little bit better.
Housing is completely mental.
Now they're saying, oh, you know what would be great if everyone in the West became a nation of renters.
It's like you get your pod, you get to eat your bugs, and that's what we're living with at the moment.
So I don't know exactly why.
Inflation, says somebody, I bought two steaks today for $46.
What inflation? Yeah, that's right.
So yeah, I don't know.
I don't know. It's a bit of a mystery to me, other than the fact I assume that 99% of the population is pretty much economics illiterate, and they're just buying and selling based on signals, and they think that somehow Elon Musk...
And the Chinese government can repeal the laws of mathematics or something like that.
So let's see here. Somebody says, I've noticed the price of food going up.
Taco meals used to cost me $20.
A month ago, it was $35.
A few days ago, it was $40.
Yeah, what's that joke?
I saw the internet the other day where there's this question in a job interview.
Somebody's got the half full glass of water.
And the hiring committee says to the potential employee, is that glass half full or half empty?
The guy says, it's totally full.
You're hired, it turns out to be like a Lay's chip-making company because, you know, you open the bag and it's like...
Barely half full. Shrinkflation is also a big deal as well, right?
Where the price may not have gone up that much, but the serving size has gone down, right?
What used to be 150 grams is now 125 grams, but the price may be the same.
So that shrinkflation is going on, and I don't think that is particularly taken account into with the sort of CPI and all of that stuff.
So yeah, the modern economy is now becoming largely a house of cards of paying people not to work.
We do have, of course...
No, it's enough for me.
Enough for me. So I guess we can go.
You know what? Should we just make it a free-for-all?
If you've got a yearning burning, don't forget to unmute.
Jump in. Don't give me dead air to edit.
Later, that's all I'm begging you, my friends.
How are you all doing with Bitcoin Planet or Crypto Planet at the moment?
Well, in my particular case, I've actually been losing interest in Bitcoin and Ethereum because I've been learning a lot about privacy coins, which have additional functionality, essentially they're data science proof.
Because one of the big weaknesses of Bitcoin and such is that it's a public database, which means literally anyone can access it.
So if you have Bitcoin and you're spending it, People can use your activity and other people's activity to identify you and what you're spending your money on, and that's very dangerous.
So what these piracy coins do is they still operate on the blockchain technology, but essentially it's impossible to determine who has what.
And the reason I'm so excited about it is because regular cryptocurrencies have the potential to kill governments' cheat code of inflation.
But from what I can see, privacy coins have the potential to kill the government's ability to tax.
Because if they don't know what you have or where it is, it becomes not feasible for them to do it.
So I think this is the best shot we have to achieve anarcho-capitalism in our lifetimes.
And that's why I'm very excited about it.
I'd agree wholeheartedly, man.
So there's a guy that I just started to do a project with.
I found him on the Freedman server.
And actually, for his help, I paid him in Pirate Chain.
And it's super fast.
And that was also some sort of reward for, you know, like I kind of explained to him the whole thought behind it.
It's just got a great model.
I mean, Monero is great, too. And they're all really good prices right now.
But yeah, I'm with you, man.
Yeah, PirateChain is the big one.
They're the most secure cryptocurrency on the market right now.
And they are making progress consistently, including other things like they're building their own operating system that has the highest possible security.
And make sure you can't get spied on by people like Microsoft.
I like how Jared's name comes up there.
You can't be spied on by...
Jared! Sorry, go ahead. Are you at Porkfest, man?
I am at Porkfest right now.
It was a torrential downpour, so I had to find and haggle for a place that I could potentially broadcast from.
That's also why nobody's out and about.
It was coming down pretty bad, but it did clear up.
I used to go to Porkfest quite regularly.
Do you say hi to the people there?
And tell them that Porkfest is the safest place in the world to leave your weed outside your tent.
That's one thing that's kind of cool about it.
Of course, the downside is the internet connectivity isn't always the very best.
Pretty nice.
The truth about Jared's internet connectivity.
Yeah, I think he's done all Minecraft.
I think you need to move a couple feet to the left or right.
That's usually how this works.
Yeah, yeah. Well, you guys are too young, but we used to do this thing where you'd have to hold the aerial a certain way to get a certain channel, and if you moved, it would get all snowy.
So somebody had to sacrifice themselves to be the rabbit ears holder on the TV back in the day.
Did Steph say weed?
I did. I did, of course.
Porkfest. Yeah, so Porcupine Festival, porcupine being a defensive animal, so it's a non-aggression principle.
And yeah, it's fun. I used to go there and give speeches, and I got roasted there one year.
That was a lot of fun. I actually had once, somebody signed me up to do stand-up comedy, and I had about 10 minutes to prepare, which actually ended up being quite a fun thing.
All right, so let's...
Wait, go ahead, Jared. That's got to be me.
Sorry about that, guys.
Yeah. Yes, sorry about that.
Well, you have her attention now.
Yeah, no? Alright, anybody else with a yearning burning?
Let's wait for Jared to find...
You can ask other people to stop using the internet in New Hampshire and I'm sure you'll be fine.
Alright, let's see how we do without it.
Yeah, go for it. Did you notice a tape measure in my box?
Jared's like minutes behind.
Like what we're saying and what he's hearing and what we're hearing him say.
This does remind me of the early days of the internet, of course.
Okay, Steph.
Sorry, I do have a yearning burning.
Okay, so Steph, because you're talking about that people aren't treating crypto the way it should be treated, which is this important life raft.
But what I kind of see a lot more is that people are treating it like a speculative asset.
They don't necessarily want to own it In three months or six months in a year, they're just in it for a short time because they see their friends are making money off of it.
As soon as the price stops flying upward, they totally lose interest in it.
I think they might be some of the biggest enemies of crypto.
Because I've seen plenty of people talk bad about crypto because that's what they see.
They see a lot of the speculation stuff.
And much like Stefan, I agree with him when he says he wants them to get the hell out.
Well, I think it's like a necessary stage that this has to go through.
Like, you have to go through the speculation stage.
And I don't think we're even close to out of it yet.
I think we're still probably...
Maybe half of its current value is just pure speculators who would drop it if they didn't think it would be up in six months or a year.
Do you think that those speculators...
Because the thing that's changed since we first started doing this thing, this beast, the thing that's changed is the fact that we have many, many more institutions in the system now than we had before.
So do you think that this sort of bumpy, upy-downy stuff is happening because of, you know, like guys in their basement speculators or is it the kind of programs I used to code for back in the beginnings of my software days when I would code for buy-sell signals for a large corporate, like for a large trading company?
Because, you know, like 95% of the trades that are done in the stock market for sure, I don't know what it is in crypto, they're just completely automated.
They're just looking for buy-sell signals.
They're looking for particular patterns and So I don't know if it's people in their basement buying and selling or if it's just like you've got the big guys in there now and they're just looking to make, you know, three cents on the buck from the buy and sell and you're going to have this bouncing around on the bottom for a while.
Yeah, well, I think it's definitely both, right?
So the fundamentals are getting stronger, but then there's still a big speculative component to it.
So we're still going to see giant swings up and down based on just...
It's like I posted it somewhere else earlier.
It's like a flock of birds moving around.
There's not really a reason for why it goes one way than the other.
So the price kind of moves a little randomly that way.
Alright, anybody else have any thoughts?
I mean, feel free to share your emotional experiences as well.
We are more than just meat and muscle and brain.
We have the heart as well.
I'm not mad at it or anything.
It's just like, oh, come on!
Do something! I feel like this doctor, like the patient won't live and won't die.
Anyway, sorry, go on. I'm not sure if this is like really directly related to this point, but I'm curious what you guys think about all this stuff going on with the cyber attacks and like how I think they could very easily be used in a way to, I mean, it's already been done to discredit crypto and kind of like you hear the word cyber attack and you hear the word like cryptocurrency.
They almost, if you're just a random person who doesn't know anything about it, you're like, oh no, I don't want to.
I don't want anything to do with those criminals, you know what I mean?
So I'm not sure how cyber hacking is making all this stuff really happen, and I'm not sure what the endgame of that is, but it seems like it's definitely fishy.
Do we have any security experts on the call here?
Because I... Maybe I'm totally wrong about this, but how on earth are people getting cyber hacked to this degree where their entire file systems are being encrypted?
Don't you have all these safeguards and firewalls and nobody can click on an EXE in a file and nobody can open up a zip file and run anything?
How on earth are people getting hacked this bad?
I don't quite understand it.
Well, I can't speak to those specific instances, but I do know a lot of institutions have ridiculously outdated operating systems.
Like a lot of hospitals are running on Windows 2000 or something absurd.
And so security is one of those things where people don't pay attention to it until it's too late.
I was reading about how there's like this ransom.
The city I live in, there was a meat plant that got hacked.
And then also there's all these shortages that they're saying.
There's a chain shortage, there's a meat shortage, there's this shortage.
And I think the cyber thing is kind of almost a way to excuse the fact that these shortages are almost planned because they want that scarcity mindset for all of us.
The supply chains are getting seriously disrupted right now, but I don't know if the people who are there are really being hacked by the outside, if it's kind of like they're letting it happen because, hey, we need an excuse because we're not ready to handle this stuff.
Maybe it's lack of workers. I know people are having a hard time because nobody wants to work anymore, but I'm sure it's a few things.
Somebody says here, some parts of the government are still running Windows XP. Wow, that's some ancient stuff, man.
That's some ancient stuff.
Sorry, we did have a security expert on here.
I'm just kind of curious, like, how is it possible to lose your entire file system to encryption?
I assume somebody sends, what, a batch file or an EXE file, and there's no quarantining, there's no scanning that just, like, roams around the network and does whatever the hell it wants?
I mean, what is it, like, Hillary Clinton's in charge of everyone's security?
I just find this really quite baffling, but if anybody knows, like, let me know.
You know, what's even worse, Stefan, I've heard a statistic that about half of people who get hit by ransomware get hit again.
Oh boy. And a surprising number of them never get their files back, even if they pay.
Well, we do have a security expert here.
Somebody was saying that Pirate Chain was the most secure coin on the planet.
So, whoever that was, let's have it.
I will form a committee to identify that person.
I'll get to the bottom of it, I promise you.
Somebody says here, too many people watching porn at work.
I wonder if that's it. Like if they set up some website that just grabs like, oh yeah, download this file and you get to see somebody doing something unholy with a banana.
I don't know. But surely they have filters on all these work computers and all this kind of stuff.
I don't know. It just seems kind of strange.
All right. If nobody has any answers to that, we will just put it on the great mystery side of the world, or just a general slowdown of just people not getting pretty smart.
Somebody says, I work in automation.
A lot of the practical things I do need an open network.
I'm sure the things that actually work fight security.
Well, yeah, I guess. Yeah, I guess.
All right. So anyone got other thoughts or comments?
Otherwise, we can take some questions from the audience.
But yeah, whatever's on your mind, let's get it out there.
I just think that the El Salvador news got a little bit brushed past.
Yeah, let's do El Salvador, man.
I mean, one thing the Bitcoin maximalists have been predicting for a long time is eventually adoption as a reserve currency for a country.
And we're not quite there yet, but legal tender is a huge step in that direction.
And if you look into the, I've read the actual bill that was put forward by the government passed by a person that was in a very, very high majority.
And I don't know the whole political landscape in El Salvador.
I'm trying to brush up, but it's very encouraging.
It's a Bitcoin only.
They didn't mention private trading, unfortunately, but it's a Bitcoin only proposal.
And the main thrust of it is to actually get usable Lightning Network Bitcoin in the hands of as many vendors as possible.
And fortunately, it's compelling people to accept Bitcoin, but they can instantly convert it between US dollars, which El Salvador is a dollarized country.
So people want dollars.
And now a lot of people are wanting Bitcoin.
Like in some small test areas like El Zante, people are preferring Bitcoin.
I think perhaps the best use case for Bitcoin is in the third world.
I think it's something like only 20% of the world has access to the modern banking system.
And so a lot of people in the third world are getting access to bank-like features by using Bitcoin.
That's amazing. But the bad news, I think, is that their politicians are smart.
They know that the dollar is the biggest con in the world right now.
And so they have an incentive to get on board because they want to maintain their purchase power for them and their people.
America has the opposite incentives.
Well, sorry, just go back to Red Pill songs.
The government is ceding some Bitcoin to people, right?
Aren't they ceding some...
Oh, there's not ceding any...
I thought there was like $150 or something that they were ceding out.
They're providing a liquidity float of about $150 million.
So if you want U.S. dollars and you don't want someone's Bitcoin, they'll swap it out for you.
So as a merchant, you're not forced with this Bitcoin you don't fully understand or want to hold.
And obviously, in a developing country like that, people aren't generally holding large cash balances.
The average person is surviving on a much smaller base of savings.
But they have now an alternative to the US dollar.
Because right now, when the US prints money, They're printing it and they're sending it to all the US citizens and different dole and such like that.
But if you're in a country that's dollarized like El Salvador or Panama or a myriad of other countries, you feel the effects of that inflation without getting any direct stimulus or any checks at all.
So the incentive, like Seth was talking about, the incentive structure to adopt an alternative or just an escape hatch is so huge.
And if another couple of countries end up adopting it, It's going to be very promising because we're going to be able to, in real time, compare, let's say, Paraguay and El Salvador that adopted Bitcoin versus, I don't know, Colombia that didn't, for example.
And if there's more than one or two countries, there's only so many countries that the USA could start problems with before it gets to be ridiculous to attack some peaceful democratic country just because they adopted Bitcoin.
Yeah, so hang on a sec.
Sorry, let me just mention something here because – so something that's happened with El Salvador as well is like – what is it?
A third of their population has fled to the US. So they're very much in danger of running out of tax cattle, right?
And the other thing too, of course, is that a lot of the people who flee to the US, they may get jobs, they may end up on welfare, and then they will send their money to El Salvador – And of course, the banking system takes a huge slice of things.
Like in the Bitcoin world, we don't really think of transaction costs.
A huge amount, a sum, but not a huge amount.
But the amount of money that gets sliced off when you're trying to send...
Money from a US bank all the way to El Salvador.
What is it? By the time everything's said and done, it's like 25% or 30% of the money has been sucked up by the banking system.
And so for them, I think going to a digital currency makes sense if they're getting a lot of their money from remittances.
I would assume Mexico is the same way.
In Mexico... Sorry, go ahead.
I was going to say something like 20% to 30% of their GDP is remittances incoming to El Salvador.
Yeah, yeah. And in Mexico, at least this was the case a year or two ago when I looked into it.
In Mexico, the remittances income is larger for the country than the entire oil trade in Mexico, which is pretty considerable itself.
I mean – and so that's one thing.
Now, El Salvador, as you know, like was like the murder capital of the world and then not too long ago, they got in there Bolsonaro.
They got in there Trump. I don't know.
I can't remember what his name is. But what happens is he's just arrested the cartels.
And he's like just – the murder rate has been cut – like the violent crime rate has been cut like 70% in a very short amount of time because it's just – it's the will to power, right?
It's just do you have the will to take on the cartels or to take on the violent crime gangs?
He's done it. And so what they're doing is realizing that they're bleeding people left, right and center and that they can't – if you've got a U.S. dollar denominated remittance economy, it's not going to work.
It's not going to – especially if the U.S. dollar goes tits up.
So the reality, I think, is that it is a fantastic experiment.
It's also going on, as we know, in Nigeria where significant proportions of the population are using Bitcoin now.
Somebody says here, Ecuadorian American here, when the dollar crashes, both my countries crash.
Ecuador has been on the US dollar for...
It is a really nutty situation for them and it's going to be absolutely fascinating.
As Red Pill Song says, the more labs we have of people trying this, the more best practices can be established.
Now, is it the case, you've read the bill, right?
Is it the case that you can pay your taxes in Bitcoin, you can pay property taxes in Bitcoin and so on?
It's a full legal tender and all that that implies.
So you can pay taxes, you're not charged capital gains on the conversion between US dollars and Bitcoin and vice versa.
And there is one thing that there's been a little bit of pushback from the Bitcoin community is like the compulsion, you have to accept Bitcoin.
But you were forced to essentially accept US dollars prior to this anyway.
So that is basically what a legal tender law is.
Yeah, you can't say no.
If somebody comes in with Bitcoin, you simply can't say no.
Yeah, now there's another kind of caveat to that, which is if you don't have the technological ability to do that, they're not going to hold you to that.
Your 75-year-old abuelo that's selling bananas at the local Mercado is not going to get rusted.
But it's a pretty forward-thinking bill.
And the people that helped the president with it and had insight on it are true blue, die-in-this-hill-type Bitcoiners.
Well, it also reminds me of what happened in Chile with what was called the Chicago Boys.
like old Milton Friedman's students went down to Chile during the time when they were fighting back and about to get swallowed up into socialism.
And they went down and they pushed back the communists and they privatized and they did pretty well for like 20, 30 years.
Now, of course, they got a socialist back in because times are good.
So we don't have to be economically astute anymore, according to the theory.
And you can do that with a country that's small enough where you know everybody's It's a 6 million population country.
You can do that there and you can give it a good go.
And I think right now the majority leader has something like Like an insane amount of support, 90%, something like that.
So everyone's behind him.
The Bitcoin thing, I'm sure a lot of people are still scratching their heads at, for sure, with an IQ average of like, I don't know, it's like 85 or something.
And also, it's not that high. But, you know, you've got a lot of hope entering the world when, you know, you couldn't save money before.
You could never save money. Now you actually can.
But this is the thing that blows my mind.
Sorry to interrupt.
This thing that blows my mind, which I think is so important, which is you don't have to understand Bitcoin to use it.
There's two things that bother me.
One is that everyone talks about Bitcoin and everyone thinks, well, man, I don't have $40,000.
I can't buy a Bitcoin.
It's like, no, come on, 100 million Satoshis.
You can buy one for a fraction of a penny.
It's nothing, right?
It's nothing.
So that's one thing.
The other thing is that I have no idea.
Like when I tap the visa or do whatever it is with a bank card, I don't know what bips and burps are flying all over the universe and where they're landing and where they're going.
It just plain works.
I mean, I didn't even know how all of this stuff is floating around the ether fundamentally.
It just works. So the fascinating thing about El Salvador is that people are just going to be like, oh, okay, I guess you get gifted to Bitcoin.
You maybe make a little bit of Bitcoin.
Just go spend it. And you don't know what's going on.
I mean, neither do I fundamentally.
I mean, there's a blockchain I hear.
I think it's probably more than a rumor.
And so you've got this, you know, you just tap your phone and it works.
And you tap your phone and you get paid.
And they'll just use it.
And just using it is going to break down a lot of the fearful superstition about it.
And that, I think, is going to be really powerful.
Yeah. And also the network effect that's going to pull into the country, being the first, it's going to attract people.
Like, let's say, I don't know, you have a couple million bucks of Bitcoin and you need a place to sell it without capital gains.
Why wouldn't you go and give it a whirl and invest into El Salvador?
Or Portugal. I think Portugal also doesn't tax capital gains on Bitcoin.
All right. Yearning burnings.
Anybody else with thoughts about El Salvador?
Well, it seems to me, correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I think this is likely to set off a kind of a chain reaction, right?
Because what the US has done, because we're the world's reserve currency and we're willing to blow up any country that tries to pull something to get off that.
But This is something that the infrastructure is already built for Bitcoin.
And so it's relatively easy for any country to say, hey, we're going to use it as legal tender.
We can't blow up every country that does this.
That's kind of a game changer.
So right now, this is early on.
This is very early. But there's a massive financial incentive for any country that understands economics to get off the dollar.
And all the infrastructure is already built.
They just need to get out of the way and let people use it without taxing them to hell or sending them to prison for using it, right?
And so because there's such a massive incentive, more and more people are going to do it.
And that's going to put the U.S. under more and more pressure, right?
So I see this as kind of the first step in a snowball rolling down a hill, and I think it's going to have major impacts down the line.
Does anyone have any guesses or know of any countries that are looking into doing something similar to what El Salvador does?
Who's next to the domino chain?
Paraguay's tabling a bill this coming week or two, next month for sure.
Wow. Somebody has asked me to confirm that Flea Domain will be based in El Salvador.
So for those of you who don't know, Flea Domain is an imaginary community where we get out of the status system and go and live someplace off the grid.
So Flea Domain, which is where the rescue ship helicopters are all apparently going to land, Right now, it is, of course, entirely in theory.
I will tell you this, though.
Fleet Domain will be based wherever it is.
It will be based, man.
Based. All right. And based it because I like my butter.
So, Panama, as somebody is saying, does anybody know anything about Panama as well?
Panama would make total sense.
They're like an econ junkie stuff, right?
Yeah. I've heard rumors that too, but I don't know if it'll actually pass because I don't think the person proposing it is that influential.
But, you know, who knows?
It's anybody's game. Well, I assume that they're going to watch what's going to happen in El Salvador for a while.
Yeah. It'd be really nice if somebody else tagged along and there's two countries.
But it would be a lot less trickier to go and invade them for freedom.
Yeah, and I would assume that it would be something along the lines of bribe slash threat of the people at the top.
But once it's already embedded in legislation, it's going to be...
Hard to undo from the outside.
It's worth noting that they haven't completely dropped the dollar.
They're still a dollarized country.
They've got one foot on the life raft and one foot on the Titanic, essentially.
We could do that. You couldn't just toast the dollar.
It's where people have got their savings.
If you did a forced conversion, that would be pretty rough.
Yeah. All right.
Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I also think that, like, Stefan, recently you've been talking about how there's an asymmetry sometimes when it comes to breaking stuff, where it's easy to break a bone, it's hard to heal it, or it's easy to break an economy and it's hard to get it going again.
I kind of think there's an opposite asymmetry when it comes to Bitcoin.
Once you get it out into the population and it starts being used, like, it's going to be very hard to try to stop that and pull that back in.
Once it's out, it's not coming back.
This is the big question with regards to the China thing.
Of course, what happens is people in the business world, if they hear China's banning something, they'll dump it.
Because China is such a huge marketplace.
I mean, I remember back in the day, the year 2000, I went from a fairly lengthy trip in Morocco to a fairly lengthy business trip in China with like one night in Toronto in between.
So I spent basically a month and a half not being able to read a sign anywhere in the vicinity.
And China was just emerging from communism back in the day.
I remember going to the market and haggling for a cool leather jacket and other things that I wanted.
And nobody spoke each other's language.
But you had a calculator and they knew what the numbers were.
So you just enter the calculator and you negotiate that way.
It was really kind of cool. But it was such a huge market.
And you hear all these entrepreneurs saying, well, if we could just get 1% of China's market, it's like, yeah, but that's easier said than done, right?
Right. So the moment...
I mean, did you guys see the blinking hostage video from John Cena?
Did you guys see that at all?
That's like pitiful. Oh, such a tough guy.
I'm not really a tough guy, but I do play one in the movies.
Because he referred to Taiwan as a country.
And I guess the fast and the furious, they need to be able to distribute it in China.
And this is why art is getting so dumbed down and you don't have any Shakespeare anymore because everything's got to be for a universal audience and all of that.
So... He did, I guess, spend a couple of days perfecting his apology in perfect Cantonese and it just spouted it off.
Why? Because if Fast and the Furious doesn't get to play in China, then the investors all lose their shirts.
So China is just such a huge deal, but I've said from the very beginning of what I do in the public square that violence always achieves the end of its stated goal.
We had all this violence to get rid of inequality in society, and now inequality is much worse than it's ever been in all of American history, in fact, in Western history as a whole.
The violence involved in feminism and so on through state programs, which were supposed to produce very happy and fulfilled women every single decade.
Women get Unhappier and unhappier.
Violence always produces, I'll kidnap my girlfriend.
She'll love me. It's like, no, no, no.
It's like she'll hate you and want to chew her way out.
So with China banning and subverting and getting rid of minors and so on, it's like, okay, well, then they just move elsewhere and they're not going to move back.
It's like the white farmers in Zimbabwe.
You can chase them off the land and you can chase them to Australia and England and America and then you can say, oh, actually, we're starving to death.
Would you mind coming back? No, I got a whole new life here.
Once the miners go, are they going to come back?
Probably not. To me, China banning stuff, it takes away this largely spurious but still compelling environmental argument.
Well, you know, we can't get behind Bitcoin because it uses as much power as a small country, all this crap that they talk about.
So getting it out of China gets it out from under the grip of the CCP, which you want sooner rather than later.
It's not going to work that much anyway.
Plus, all of the people with means are just going to buy their way to get a license to continue to do it.
It's just scaring people out who don't understand the fundamentals.
Also, what is it? China's banned Bitcoin like 28 times in the last couple of years.
I mean, it's one of these repetitive things.
Everybody who's new to the market freaks out, but it's kind of...
Kind of old. News for everyone.
Everyone else. Somebody says, John Chinas.
Oh, that's pretty funny.
The Weak and the Spurious, starring John Cena.
John Chinas' apology was in Mandarin, which makes it worse.
Cantonese is spoken in Hong Kong.
Anyway. So, yeah, I think people sell on these rumors, but I think the fundamentals remain even more sound.
To me, if the communists don't like it, I think that's a gold star in my book of economics and virtue, but I guess a lot of people are like, oh no, that's really bad, and so on.
Somebody is mentioned here in the chat.
What have we got here?
Where was it? Panama.
Oh, yeah. So Panama we got.
Oh, somebody. Tanzania.
Was it Tanzania? I think that was actually on Zoom here.
Did Tanzania? Are they also looking at it as well?
Did somebody post that? Don't know.
Yeah, somebody did, but they haven't elaborated on it.
All right. Premature elaboration is kind of my name of the game, man.
All right. Anybody else?
Herman, stay awake, man.
Give us your thoughts. How are you doing in the Bitcoin world or the crypto world or the investment world as a whole?
I just want a hug.
I just came here for a group hug from everybody.
That's pretty much why I'm here.
I don't have any thoughts.
I'm actually launching a crypto project, which has been paused temporarily by the people I'm working with.
So it's been a wild ride.
Anything you want to share?
No, I think I'll share when it's time.
I think I'll share when it's time.
So basically, it's a donation platform.
Go on. I'm sorry.
Really? Really?
How abstractly interesting to me.
Yeah, with a significant use case potential that leverages DeFi and NFTs and all that good stuff.
And we hit a lot of our funding goals.
And you go through this sort of launchpad rollercoaster.
And since everything dumped, some of that's been put on hold.
So that's all right.
The platform will be ready next month.
Oh, keep me posted. Keep me posted.
Anything to do with the NFT world that doesn't involve Ethereum, I'm very, very interested in.
So, yeah, just keep me posted about that.
Excellent. Somebody said here, which is, yeah, a recurrent, anonymous recurring donation service would be really nice.
China and India has the largest populations both talking about banning.
Well, yeah, but here's the thing too, right?
So we all know the Pareto principle, right?
The Pareto principle being that the square root of any productive group in a meritocracy produces half the value, right?
So 10,000 people in a company, 100 of them are producing half the value.
Of that 100, 10 are producing half the value of that.
So you get 10 people out of 10,000 producing fully 25% of the value.
The same thing, of course, is even more true in the crypto universe.
So if China and India were to ban Bitcoin, then the people who were the very best and brightest in the Bitcoin universe would simply leave for other countries and leave those countries in the dust.
And even if they had to smuggle their way out, because again, they could walk across the border with the phrase in their head and transfer all of their cash.
So they will simply lose all of the expertise, all of the economic gains, and then they'll try and lure those people back.
They'll realize their mistake and it will simply – it will move people from a less free market environment who are really good at Bitcoin into a more free market environment, which will accelerate Bitcoin even faster.
So I don't have any particular fear about any of that.
You don't ban Bitcoin.
You just ban your population from using Bitcoin as government.
Yeah, that's the other thing too, right?
People think Bitcoin is being banned.
It's like, no. You can simply stop people from trading in it or try.
Try as best you can because apparently there's no such thing as VPNs.
All right. What concerns me about China is that over half the mining is done there.
Not anymore. Yeah, I hope the mining gets out of there so it can move to places that are more free.
Half the mining pools are roughly located in China, but that doesn't mean that every individual miner is actually in China.
There isn't as much hard data on mining as you might think, as presented in all those fun articles.
There's a lot. I mean, you can mine anonymously and get anonymous Bitcoin and you could be in America and plug into a Chinese pool.
Well, did you hear what El Salvador is doing?
Because El Salvador is now, and they did this relatively quickly, is they're using their volcanic heat, their volcanic activity, to generate the electricity for mining, which, of course, the volcanic heat is, you know, it's natural, it's recurring, and so on, and it's going to release whatever's going to release into the atmosphere regardless.
So volcano mining is, I don't know, it's just, I mean, these times are quite exciting, but that's what they're heading for.
Let's hear from Lucy, says somebody.
Sorry, Lucy, are you with us?
Yes, I just joined, and this is the first time ever.
We just watched today, again, the story of your enslavement, and I've recommended that to so many people through the years.
So thank you for that work.
Well, thank you. That's very kind. What's your history with crypto?
Well, I just bought my first crypto, bought some Bitcoin, and then I changed it into R, a Jeff Berwick suggestion.
I happen to be the vice chair of the Libertarian Party of the state of Indiana, and I've run for Senate two times.
So I'm a little embarrassed to be this late in the crypto game because being an active Libertarian, I should have seen this a decade ago.
But, you know, I'm slow in some areas.
Right, right. Well, very, very good.
So the R is referring to pirate chain, right?
Pirate coin? Yeah, pirate chain.
I think you need to roll it a little more and a parrot would help.
Something like that. I have 10 kids.
I'm too tired to roll anything.
Actually, I heard libertarians are quite adept at rolling things, but I may be talking about something entirely different.
Could be. Well, welcome.
It's very nice to meet you. Thanks for the shout out.
Yeah, and thank you very much for referring the video.
I appreciate that as well.
All right. Other thoughts, questions, issues from the audience?
If the USA talks about banning, that would be the biggest hit.
The USA has the highest GDP and biggest companies.
I'm not a lawyer, obviously, but I would assume that if the USA talks about banning, that would be a problem because I think people could legitimately sue for evisceration of value.
If a product has been certified as legal and Bitcoin has been certified as a legal Then just suddenly banning it I think would provoke a lot of lawsuits for people saying, wait, you told me it was legal.
I invested. You're destroying that value.
I'm going to sue the government in return for that kind of loss of value.
So again, I would imagine there'd be something like that.
But again, all that would happen is it would give people the excuse to go elsewhere where things are more crypto-friendly and just set up things.
People aren't just going to give up on Bitcoin.
I mean, they really will fight really hard to maintain its value.
When I was doing my initial research about Bitcoin, I sort of assumed that Bitcoin would be able to survive the worst-case scenario, where if basically all the governments of the world put maximum effort into Trying to stop it, that Bitcoin would be able to do fine and succeed in that scenario.
So every second that all the governments aren't doing that, I'm like, well, this is good.
But if they did, I'd be like, okay, well, I already thought that Bitcoin could survive this.
So I wouldn't even be worried if they did do that.
Well, the other thing I assume with regards to China is that we know that top executives in the CCP, top politicians, and I assume some of the super rich, that they all own Bitcoin.
We know that because they're actually licensed to be able to do so.
The ban on Bitcoin is only for the proletariat.
It's not for the bourgeois, right?
So my assumption, which I said the very first time we all got together, my assumption is simply this.
Anybody who talks about banning Bitcoin, anybody who trash talks Bitcoin is simply driving down the price to buy the dip.
So when it comes to China, when they talk about it, I simply assume that there are a bunch of people at the top of the Chinese CCP. They want to buy a bunch of Bitcoin.
They're going to talk about trashing it.
They're going to ban it.
They're going to whatever. And then they're going to Buy a bunch of Bitcoin.
And lo and behold, they're going to reverse their ban.
It's happened a bunch of times before.
And then the price is going to go up.
And then the next time they want to buy some, I mean, it's just way too big a lever.
And of course, they're communists.
So it's not like you're going to rely on their respect for property rights or integrity of the market.
So I just assume all the trash talking comes out of a desire to buy the dip.
You don't think there's like a big crackdown coming?
Like, I think there is.
I think there's going to become a sort of existential, like a moment where they realize that crypto is an existential threat to government.
Because I actually think they're kind of similar systems.
Like, I know one's voluntary and private, and one's, you know, through force.
But they achieve the same thing, which is allocation of resources.
You know, the government...
Bitcoin, through force, allocates resources, and then Bitcoin, through the blockchain, allocates resources.
So they do the same thing, just by different means.
And then one's immoral and one's moral, but still they're doing the same thing.
So I think the government is going to have a moment where it realizes that if crypto grows, then they have to decrease That the government has to decrease.
And I know that's kind of hard to think about because the government isn't really a thing.
It's a bunch of individuals making separate choices.
But still, I have a hard time imagining that they're not going to react extremely negatively someday soon.
Well, look, we've mentioned this before, so I'll keep it brief, and nobody knows, obviously, right?
But this is sort of my particular guess.
My particular guess is that if they believe that the fiat system can last, they will try and take down Bitcoin.
The moment they accept the basic fact that mathematically the fiat system cannot last, then they'll need another place to land, and then they'll pretend to attack Bitcoin in order to get a hold of a bunch and buy a dip, and then they'll Jump to the lifeboats.
That's sort of my... I'm sorry, I'm just enjoying Dom's backdrop there, which is very, very vivid and reminds me that I'm a little packish.
And I want to eat a candy at this point because that's his head too.
So, yeah, I assume there's going to be a faux attack on Bitcoin when the ruling elites realize that the Titanic is going to sink and they need to get someplace else.
They want to drive the price down, get a hold of a bunch, and then they'll embrace it fully and maybe even abandon the central tenets of the fiat currency system and just jump ship, I assume so.
Well, to Tim's point, if that's going to happen anywhere, I imagine it's going to be in the U.S. We have the most to lose by far.
Everyone else has a lot to gain, so for them to ban it seems unlikely to me, or to see even as an existential threat.
Yeah, or just, I always thought that, like, just at the beginning, you know, I realized a lot of what I thought turned out not to be true.
So just because I thought something originally doesn't mean anything.
But I did remember that when I first was doing my initial kind of research, that I thought it was going to emerge in a third world country first, because it's just easier for them to adopt it somehow.
It doesn't seem like that's the case.
It seems like most crypto ownership is still happening in industrialized Western countries.
Well, I think that's an IQ, education, libertarian tradition, Austrian economics.
There's a whole bunch of stuff, I think, that contributes to that kind of stuff.
I think it's just average net worth, ultimately.
I think the average net worth of Western individuals is exponentially higher than a third-world individual.
But the average use case, especially for smaller transactional things, for a Nigerian or someone in El Salvador, it's quite compelling, especially with the Lightning Network, where it's basically...
Free to use, compared to a 25% remittance.
Plus, you've got to go to the local Western Union to get beat up by the gang to get your American dollars out.
Yeah, imagine being able to control your own money.
Shocking. Somebody asked, is the Lightning Network up and running?
Yeah, send me money on it.
I'm accepting money. So, yes.
Yeah, I mean, I know it was considered beta for a long time, but I think it's...
Will it run the entire world's economy?
I don't know, but it doesn't have to right yet.
But I think it's working fine for the use case scenario that it's been deployed on, right?
Yep. Well, I think that, just to go into it, I think the Lightning Network, the problem is that there's a lot of different definitions for what that is.
The way that it was originally defined, it's not at all like that.
So there's a thing that's working right now that they call the Lightning Network.
And then if you think that that's the same thing that they were talking about in the Lightning Network white paper, then you'd be like, wow, that's amazing.
But then when you look into what's actually happening, you go, oh, this is way different than what I thought.
What are the distinctions and differences there, Tim?
I guess the way that they originally said is that you're going to be able to go from You're going to be able to do payment.
You have all these payment channels to all these different nodes and then it's not going to be very difficult to do a routing through a bunch of nodes from one person to the other person.
But then instead what's happening is that there's a whole bunch of central nodes and everyone connects to those.
So, for example, the government can say, hey, we run a Lightning node.
Everybody can connect to our government Lightning node.
And then you can all pay each other through that.
And then, yeah, that works fine.
But the moment that the government says, okay, well, first of all, they're going to ask for KYC and AML on everybody's lightning channels.
I get what you're saying, but you can route any which way, and you don't have to route through a big node.
A regular Bitcoin transaction can create a Lightning channel.
There's no KYC involved.
So there's a non-KYC way to interact with the Lightning network quite easily.
A KYC for the uninitiated?
Know your customer.
That's generally an identification process that you'll have to run through, take pictures of your face, passport, anus, whatever you got to do to please the authorities that be.
I wouldn't recommend it.
Yeah, so like I would say, you're saying the Lightning Network has, you know, some level of functionality, and I'm saying it has something lower.
And then, you know, maybe you're right.
But, you know, it matters.
It's not that hard to use now.
And it's way easier than it was, say, a couple years ago.
If you tried it a couple years ago, it's actually come a long way.
Yeah. And then, you know, maybe it is more evolved than I realize at the moment, or maybe it soon will be.
But I'm not too worried about it.
But so just the thing is though, the definition of lightning That is changing a lot over...
I wouldn't agree. I think the basic technical thing that was proposed in terms of like, basically, I can pay Tim and he can pay Steph in a trustless way.
Basically, you could write a payment to each other through you.
That basic concept, which is the real backbone of the technical side of the network, that hasn't really changed and that does work.
The idea was that you wouldn't have too many...
The hope was that you wouldn't have a lot of centralized nodes where everyone's just connecting to one guy.
And that's generally...
You could argue to the degree that that's true, but it's not just one central node and everyone connects to one guy.
There is quite a bit more to it.
You can actually visualize the Lightning Network.
I'll try to find a link to it. But you can go on and physically kind of see it.
It's a huge cluster and it's pretty awesome.
There's many ways to get to any node.
But if you connect to Lightning Network and you only connect to one guy, well then, yeah, you're limited to just going through that one guy or girl.
Well, you always have one channel, right?
No, you have multiple channels.
You can open up like 35 channels with 35 different peers and they can all do the same.
So picture this huge interconnected web.
Or you can choose to connect to one person, in which case, yeah, you're limiting yourself to only having to go through Bob.
Okay. Somebody's asked, is fiat fixable?
If USA raises rates, wouldn't that fix inflation worries and be bearish for Bitcoin?
Who wants to take that one on?
Judo it. Roll with it.
Show it the matrix moves.
Survival case scenario for US fiat currency.
They adopt a Bitcoin standard and hard peg it to a certain amount of Bitcoin.
That would save it. No, but, you know, realistic political ones that could happen.
That could happen. It's not fixable.
I don't think we got any claim for how to do that.
Essentially, if they raise interest rates, we're screwed.
If they lower interest rates, we're also screwed.
Okay, give us the case for both.
How does it play out if they raise rates and lower rates?
Well, because we're a debt-ridden economy, raising the interest rates is death for us because we have so much insane debt.
If we lower the interest rates, the hyperinflation kicks in because all that free money stimulates the spending, increases velocity, and so then the inflation kills us.
I could be wrong about this, but I believe over half of U.S. dollars is owned by non-Americans.
So even if no one in America adopts crypto, which isn't the case, but even if it did, even if just people around the world started adopting crypto and started trading their dollars in, that could cause hyperinflation here.
So you would have to go around the world and prevent everyone from trading their dollars in.
Sorry, go ahead. Well, I was just going to say, the inflation, it's monetary heroin, and we are way past the point of addiction.
It's like, if we stop it, you know, the massive crash that would happen, there would be riots in the streets, even more cities.
We have capital cities burning to the ground as a result of that.
So it's like, we can't stop because it's political suicide to stop, but we can't continue because...
It will make the crash that much worse.
The longer we kick this can down the road, the more it's going to hit us in the head.
Well, but every individual politician has every incentive to keep kicking the can down the road.
And this is another thing, too.
For the first time, really, I think since the Great Depression, you have young, healthy, able people who are opting out of the workforce and just deciding to live on government money.
And what that does, of course, is now half of the American population is either completely or significantly dependent upon the largest of the government in order for their survival, in order to feed their kids.
They're dependent upon it. And people have let their health go on the promise of Medicare and Medicaid and all of that, and they haven't saved because of their retirement and so on.
So right now, any attempt to cut back on government spending is I mean, two things will happen.
One, you'll get riots, and two, because it will disproportionately affect blacks and Hispanics, you will get cries of racism, and it will just be hell on wheels.
And... I mean, the good thing about Bitcoin is it does give, for the first time in human history, a peaceful potential, peaceful transition, or at least less violent transition out of the collapse of a fiat currency, which we've never seen before, which I think is actually a pretty nice thing.
I kind of like ground Colombian coffee and not hunting squirrels for food.
I mean, if you touch any of the interest rates, like in any significant way, asset prices completely crash, right?
And like, you know, if you watch Jay Powell in the last Fed statement, there's a third, you know, there's an extra thing he's doing, which is monitoring asset prices.
And I don't think he's going to take any action that's going to cause asset prices to crash.
So, yeah, just to help spell that out for people who are, like, raising interest rates through the asset price crash.
The easiest way to understand this is, say you buy a house, right, and you take out a mortgage, and you can afford $2,000 a month, right?
So, you know, at an interest rate of 5%, you can afford less total house price than you can at an interest rate of, like, 2%.
So basically what ends up happening is people's incomes in the economy are relatively fixed.
So if you jack up the interest rates, say you went up to 5% or 7% to actually keep up with inflation, what would have to happen to house prices or other asset prices in the United States in order for those numbers to still work?
So you're saying it's like the opposite of what happened with student loans?
Where the government put all this money in and then prices go up, where here it's kind of the opposite.
Exactly. Yeah. So if you bring that interest rate up, you get that asset price going down.
And it's like a, it's marginally, like if you go 1% is like, you know, a 10% effect on the asset price.
So it's significantly leveraged.
So I don't think they can step this one back.
And the easiest, if the patient's going to die either way, right, they can either do it through deflation or through inflation.
Inflation is the politically sound, like they can just keep printing money.
Well, everybody blames the capitalists then, right?
The price goes up at the grocery store.
Nobody gets mad at the Fed. They all get mad at the grocery store and they take it out all on that.
Lucy, you wanted to mention something about real estate.
Yeah, I've been a mortgage broker since 1996.
And Dorne is my husband, so we're like in the same room.
It's hilarious that we're doing this.
But what I've noticed is exactly what the previous gentleman just said, is that your raw purchasing power on a mortgage is based on your gross monthly income, which is relatively fixed.
Especially with the problems we've had with inflation here in the U.S. And so by dropping the interest rates, you're able to artificially raise the amount that people can actually afford.
So that 5% mortgage that he mentioned might be on a $200,000 house, but at a 3.25, like I've got a couple of customers closing this week, they might be able to afford 350.
So this is very similar to what I saw in 2006, 2007, and 2008.
In the run-up to the last mortgage crisis, and what I saw was, for example, in California, where you had people that could literally no income, no asset loans, just simply write down the amount that they made.
So they could declare that they were making $250,000 a year as a manager at McDonald's.
And it would go through because their credit score was high.
And what that did is that artificially inflated the pricing because now you had $55,000 your people claiming to make $250,000 which allowed them to buy a $750,000 house.
So then everybody was buying the houses for $750,000.
And then, of course, when the bubble popped and the foreclosures happened, the poor people were hurt the worst.
And so I think that's what we're about to see is a collapse of pricing.
I'm looking at maybe the end of this year, maybe the beginning of next year.
There's going to be some huge price corrections.
So I've told my friends, hey, if you've got a lot of equity in your home, there's a lot of profit there.
Go ahead and sell now and then plan on renting for a year.
Because what's going to happen is, one, in the U.S., if you've lived in that house for 24 out of the last 60 months, you can sell now capital gains tax-free up to $250,000 per person, $500,000 per couple.
That's the IRS rules.
So this may be the time where you can grab that capital gain and not pay any taxes on it before Biden changes something.
And rent-free year, because I fully expect, because of the COVID vaccine, a whole bunch of people are going to be dead between now and then, and there's going to be a lot of estate sales and lower prices.
But that's just the optimist in me.
Well, I will also mention too, and a lot of people don't understand this if they don't know much about sort of the American market as far as that goes, because everyone's like, why are Americans so greedy for these big giant McMansions and so on?
And, you know, Lucy, correct me if I go astray at all here, but my understanding is that, I mean, the quality of American schools, the safety of American schools has a huge divergence.
And in general, if you can get into a more expensive house, you can get into a better neighborhood, your kids can be in safer schools.
So a lot of it has to do with chasing better education or at least safer education for your kids and not just like we need 12 bedrooms or anything like that.
People are just desperately trying to get to safer schools and that's one of the reasons that there's this leap towards these larger and more expensive houses.
That's been true in our family.
We stopped homeschooling when our oldest daughter reached ninth grade because she wanted to have the experience and the prom.
So we moved from a township in Marion County where Indianapolis is and To a county a little bit further north.
So the struggle was, you know, should we send our kids to a Christian school, you know, and live where we continue to live?
Or do we spend $75,000 more on a house and basically get a public education system that has the same overall test rates as the local private schools?
So we moved 30 miles away, spent $75,000 more, which on a monthly payment was less than sending those same kids to private school.
And then we ended up with a better equity position as well.
It's a highly Republican area where people protect the property values by keeping the public school test scores high.
I don't understand. Why do you think that the housing market is going to crash soon, or at least correct?
I figure if I was the government, I would just keep lowering interest rates.
I know we're pretty close to zero, but can't they go negative?
I've heard that. I'll give you a few things.
Just as total disclosure, I turned 50 this year, so I've been through a few of these cycles since I've been a mortgage broker since 96.
I saw the savings and loan crisis.
I saw the dot-com bubble.
I saw the The mortgage market collapsed.
So I've been through a few of these business cycles.
And about every 10 years, we have a major reset.
But you see, there's a couple of problems that we have here in the U.S. One is the Federal Reserve and the other is the IRS. They work in tandem first to print too much money.
And then the IRS's function, of course, is to pull the money out to hide the hyperinflation.
Well, with Bitcoin added into the mix, what people are starting to see is they're starting to see this inflation really affect them.
And as the housing crisis get inflated and so many people get taken out of the market, the big institutional investors, I think one of them might be called BlackRock, they are literally going into these neighborhoods like the ones that we sold our house in two years ago.
That $75,000 increase that I told you about, that meant a lot of equity when we went to sell.
So what's happened is these big private investment firms, understanding what's going on, they are now overpaying for properties.
The reason that they're doing this is because they're grabbing up all the single-family homes.
And I think it's actually more of a communist thing.
We talk about Marxism, that the government is going to own the housing that you live in, that you're going to rent everything.
There's going to be no private property ownership.
Klaus Schwab, the World Health Economic Forum, is that his name?
I always call him Satan Clause, but I think his name is actually Klaus Schwab.
He's talking about how you'll own a nothing that you'll be happy.
And so if you don't own it, who is going to own it?
I see all of these properties being bought up now with the fake money as just a way to take private property ownership away from people.
For the middle class, of course, that's absolutely devastating because what we've always done, being in the middle class ourselves, is we've always bought property, fixed it up and sold it, bought it, held it as a rental and sold it.
Or, you know, held it as a personal property to avoid the capital gains tax and then selling it.
So the main engine that we have for wealth in our family is about to be taken away.
And once that supply has been taken up by these big institutional investors, what does that mean?
It's like when Walmart comes into a small town and they wipe out all the local businesses by selling under market, then all of a sudden when all the local businesses are gone, they jack it up.
So we're going to see some really interesting things happen in the What I personally expect, and this is just me being me, is that I expect that there's going to be a lot of people that took the COVID vaccine and are going to die, just like all the ferrets died in the experiment.
And I think there's actually going to become more housing available.
And that's why I expect prices to fall.
So I don't know, you got to layer a couple of conspiracy theories on top of there to get to where I'm at.
But it's truly based on 30 years of being in these markets.
Well, and this is also happening just by the by.
A lot of the land along the southern border, which is basically undefensible now that Biden's not taking any action on the mass migration that's occurring from Mexico, a lot of the ranchers, a lot of the people who own the border land are selling.
And a lot of companies are swooping in.
A lot of them are Chinese-fronted companies or Chinese-backed companies.
So it could be pretty significant that China ends up owning significant portions of the U.S. border.
My best advice for people...
Sorry, go ahead. No, thank you for letting me interrupt.
My best advice for people is to find places where you can get farmland.
Because if you watch Christian with Ice Age Farmer, you start to understand...
Where, you know, the supply chain is breaking down, food's going to be an issue.
So if you don't already have a retreat for your family, check out home prices in Indiana.
I mean, you can literally get like 40 acres and a 2,000 square foot house for $400,000 in Indiana.
And, you know, something like, you know, our current house is three acres, 2,000 square feet.
It's only, you know, 160,000.
So most people moving from the coast, yeah, in Indiana.
And we're in southern Indiana, which is good.
You know, it gives you a five or six growing zone on the USDA, which is a little bit better than other places.
But yeah, I would highly recommend, if not Indiana, looking at rural Idaho, Well, maybe not Idaho.
That's too popular. Maybe rural Iowa, rural Missouri, rural Arkansas.
The prices are still pretty cheap.
And in the U.S. mortgage market, you can buy a second home with only 5% down if it's a single-family residence.
You can buy a duplex or a triplex, which is real rare out in the country, but you can get those for 15% or 20% down.
But you can literally get a $300,000 house with only $15,000 in your pocket.
You know, rent it out to somebody else if you need to until you're ready to move into it.
But you've got to have some sort of zombie apocalypse retreat for what's coming.
Sorry, Lucy, just to back up on the zombie apocalypse thing, because for those of you who don't know, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, Lucy, obviously, correct me where I've gone astray.
But for those of you who don't know what Lucy is referring to with regards to the animal experiments, and I may butcher this, so I'll just do it really briefly and then fill in the gaps where you see fit.
One of the reasons why coronavirus vaccines have not been developed is they've obviously been trying to develop them for many years, many decades in fact, but what happens, or at least has happened in the past, is that you develop these kinds of vaccines and you inject them into ferrets, you inject them into other mammals that are close to humans, at least in terms of immune response and then what happens is when they encounter a sort of natural coronavirus in the wild their immune systems go uh pretty pretty uh ape crap
and and end up attacking their own organs and did i get that roughly right just i don't want you to just blow past that because some people may not know that that history yeah i have a tendency to just do that so they may not know um if they go to bitch shoot or they go to odyssey or you know maybe even youtube there's a dark horse podcast with a phd evolutionary biologist i I think his name is Brett Weinstein.
And it's one T. Don't get confused.
It's one T. Brett with one T. But yeah, go ahead.
So you know him.
They just did a three-hour thing that I've actually been watching today.
And it's absolutely insane, the information that's there.
I'm very thankful we are a non-vaccinating family.
None of our 10 kids have had even one vaccine.
Most of them have been born with midwives and at home.
So we've had this more natural lifestyle for 30 years.
But the people that, you know, that have believed the mainstream media, that have believed that their doctors have their best interest at heart, as opposed to just being pharmaceutical salesmen, they don't know what they're about to get hit with.
And just today on Twitter, T. Barajas, I think is the lady's name, she disclosed that, you know, she's pro-vaccine, but her 13-year-old nephew just died three days after his second COVID vaccine.
Oh, sorry to interrupt. This is the woman who then said to someone else, oh yeah, still get your kid vaccinated, just watch their heart.
Like, oh my God, what does it take?
What empirical evidence?
Nothing, because the brainwashing is just too insane.
And also, I think a lot of, you know, I won't say a lot of it, but I think some people on that situation, they're saying, yeah, but go get the vaccine anyway, knowing full well they wouldn't do it themselves, simply because they don't want to be attacked and have that council culture hit them.
I've had cancel culture hit me lots of times because I'm a libertarian and I'm a public figure and I run for office.
I'm a lightning rod for that sort of controversy.
I just don't give to you-know-what.
I've heard about this cancel culture.
One day I may encounter it myself, but I remain optimistic.
I think they're trying to cancel you.
You're too smart. But here's the funny thing, too.
I mean, it does sort of strike me that you have this, you know, potentially dangerous scenario at the same time that they're really jacking up the inheritance tax.
It's like, hmm, if there's something related between these things, possibly.
I know we're drifting a little, but it's very, very interesting.
It's all interrelated, and we know what the end game is, right?
I mean, does everybody on this call, you already know what the Georgia Guidestones are?
They always publish everything in various forms before they do it.
So it's no mystery.
Yeah. And you have entire books written saying, you know, it'd be great if the world population was just a smidge less than it is right now.
And by a smidge, I mean quite a lot.
And that's – yeah, it's not a conspiracy theory when they have openly published it.
That's the weird thing, right?
Like I talk about how the communists said 100 years ago they want to do mass migration, import different races into Western countries, and then race bait everybody into civil war, then take over.
Like that's been a public – like they publish it.
It's not even subtle.
We're going to call anyone who disagrees with us a Nazi because projection.
And yeah, so it's not a conspiracy theory if you can point to the plan.
It's like saying that the menu at your local restaurant is a conspiracy theory when it's printed and on your table right there.
Yeah, because the Brussels sprouts lobby has...
It's just a conspiracy theory that McDonald's serves McDonald's food.
It's like, no, you go to McDonald's, ask them for the McDonald's food, they'll give you a menu.
No, it's a conspiracy.
No, no, no. It's a conspiracy if there's not proof.
If there's a confession, you don't need a trial.
Anyway, sorry. No, I love that.
But, you know, what you just said actually plays into something that I've been telling people a lot, and that is that, you know, the Chinese communists have done exactly what you said, and they plan on doing worse and taking over this country.
So what if you could kill, you know, 30% of the population with a COVID vaccine?
What does that leave open?
That leaves open resources.
It leaves open empty office buildings.
People are no longer working out.
It leaves open housing. I can tell you the community that we used to live in, which is a really nice suburb, it's so nice it has an Ikea there, if that tells you anything, in central Indiana, the only Ikea.
But the investors that are coming in, the investors that bought our house, were from China.
I have two friends in that area that rent from Chinese nationals.
So they're going to come in and they're going to buy all that up.
And when you have a vacuum, nature abhors a vacuum.
So what are we going to do when a third of the population is gone?
We're going to fill us all back up, probably with Chinese.
Well, and of course, the US Army will be too busy chasing people in Afghanistan and arguing about gender pronouns to actually defend America in any way, shape or form.
So that's good to know. You've suggested that 30% of the people who take the vaccine may die.
How certain are you on that particular figure?
I'm certain enough that I'd be willing to bet the contents of my bank account on it.
And I think that it will be happening within 180 days of their second vaccine.
So within six months?
Yeah, absolutely. Now, it won't be admitted to.
It will be all blamed on the new variant and predictably people like me that don't get vaccinated.
I would say.
Yeah, this is insidious.
And for me, it's spiritual warfare.
I take it up a notch.
And I don't know.
This is a great show.
Thanks for listening to me, Blabble.
No, no, it's very interesting.
And it's actually quite related to crypto as well.
In many ways, because if there's a loss of taxpayers and so on.
And the good news, of course, is that we'll know in six months.
I don't have enough expertise to evaluate these claims, but I'm certainly willing to wait and see what data comes in over time.
And I've not known anyone who's died of COVID, but I sure know a couple of people who died pretty quickly after the jab.
And that certainly does give me some pause.
All right. Let's wrestle ourselves back to crypto if people have questions or comments.
There's a question about whether when all these people die, crypto will go up.
But if they lose their wallet because they're dead, there will be an unchanged effect on Bitcoin, right?
That's interesting. Yeah, but if no one seizes the wallets though, like if people die and no one can access the wallet, that would be a deflationary force, wouldn't it?
Yeah. Make crypto even more valuable.
Well, it's what Satoshi said back in the day.
If you lose your cryptos, consider that a benevolent donation to everybody else's crypto value.
You've just upped everybody else's by reducing supply, so you're a very, very kind person.
I think I've certainly contributed in my own way from time to time.
Any other questions or comments?
I did have one more economics question.
Because, MK, you were saying how...
Asset prices rising is like a government program.
So the government is taking it on as their responsibility to make the stock market and real estate just go up forever.
And then the one tool that they...
They use immigration a lot.
But another tool that they have is they lower the interest rates.
And then the problem I think that they have right now is that it's basically zero.
But I've heard...
People speculate that they could go below zero and they get negative.
And that's happened a little bit in, like, I think in Germany and Japan.
But I was wondering...
You could do that before crypto.
What's that? You could do that before crypto.
Like, they could go to negative rates, but the problem is everyone's on to the game.
Right? And it works if, like, you've got all these central banks that are all printing.
It's like everyone jumps out of a plane and you're all, like, skydiving together.
Well, the other guy is, like, ten feet below you, but you're both plummeting to zero.
Right? So, the problem is they keep going, but When you know what inflation is, people aren't dumb.
They eventually figure out, hey, my food prices are going up 10% a year.
I can borrow money at 2%, but the math doesn't work out after you get to a certain point.
And once you see an asset that doesn't have this kind of built-in feature of theft, you're always comparing it to that now.
And you see how trash it is.
So I don't think they can do negative rates in the United States.
That worked in Europe, I think, but I don't think it would work in the US. A third tool to the toolbox is they print money and buy assets with it.
So that's another thing that's not as avert as manipulating interest rates, but it's still that same propping up of the economy.
Also, the more people you can get dependent on the government, the more they're going to be invested in...
I think we're good to go.
It's a crack from crypto.
So many people believe, and I don't know how much it's right.
It's an existential question.
They absolutely, completely and totally believe that they need the government to survive, to feed their kids, to get their insulin, to whatever healthcare they need, to get their hip replacements.
That is a potent force.
The good news is that they probably won't figure out the crypto thing until it's too late.
They really are addicted to – we have multi-generations of humanity that have adapted themselves almost biologically.
They've adapted themselves to fiat currency and government redistribution.
Crypto comes along and, you know, I'm a generous person.
I like charities. I help people out.
And I think it's wonderful, but I don't like a gun to my head in the process.
I like eating fish, but I don't like eating fish when someone's got a gun to my head.
I like tap dancing.
It doesn't mean you get the point, right?
So that entire contingent of people, when crypto starts to come along, they're like, well, can I vote myself free crypto?
No. Oh, no.
I don't like it to the point of burning down a neighborhood.
That's going to be a real challenge.
Now, of course, if Lucy's correct and the people who talk about the effects of the vax, if they're correct, there may be less to worry about, but there'll be other things to worry about in that scenario anyway.
And, of course, a pretty horrifying loss of life.
Yeah, the government is, what, giving out $3,000 per kid annually?
Oh, yeah, no, people getting $500 a week?
Just straight up, this is why, you know, there's people in the chat and people I've talked to, entrepreneurs and so on.
Like, they can't hire anyone for love or money.
Like, there's just people, hey, my restaurant can open up again.
It's like, yeah, but nobody wants to come and work for you because you'd much rather stay home.
You know, most of us, most of us have jobs that we like.
But most of us, you know, I don't think there's too many silver spoon people in the conversation here.
Most people, we've had those jobs where it's like, oh...
I love Fridays.
I hate Mondays. Those jobs where you just get up and it's either a grind or a drag or boring or you're surrounded by idiots or you've got difficult customers or unpleasant bosses because all the decent bosses move up pretty quickly and only the crappy bosses run the minimum wage service.
And, you know, if we have, you know, I mean, if I would do this for nothing, you know, I love these conversations, love meeting everyone and chatting with everyone.
But for most people, like you give them an out to not work and they're like, oh, praise the Lord and pass the fiat.
They're ecstatic about it.
And that's, you know, a vast majority of the population, I mean, would love to I asked this.
I go to a restaurant and, you know, hey, if you won the lottery, oh, man, I'd be right in there telling this guy where to go and I'd go to Aruba or whatever it is.
They're like, they're just out.
Just get right out, right? And so once the transition to fiat, I mean, politically, that's pretty – sorry, a transition from fiat to crypto, whatever it's going to be.
It's pretty rough, man.
It's pretty rough. Although, of course, being addicted to blood money, to pillaged, transferred cash from the unborn, I mean, that's a bad addiction, man.
But not everybody gets cured of their addiction.
Sometimes people don't make it in that transition, right?
It is incredibly healthy for people to not be able to vote for free stuff, but once they realize that gig is up, man, there's going to be some significant emotional and physical blowback, I think.
Yeah, I think the best case scenario is what they're going to do is they're just going to keep inflating at this rate where, yeah, it says, you know, 2% inflation, but it's really more like 7, 8, 9, and you just do that for a couple decades, and really what ends up happening is you just take the money from the stupid savers.
Right? The people that, you know, oh, I'm investing in my 401k and it's in diversified mutual funds.
It's like, well, no, it's just being, you know, evaporated.
So it's really, it's a tax on the boomers.
The boomers that don't know any better.
Well, the boomers are tax on everyone.
So I'm not sure I'm too upset about all of that because I'm one year shy of being a boomer so I can completely spit over that wall and feel completely justified.
No, I've said this before. It's a K-shaped economics in the future.
It's Brazil style, right?
So you get people who've got crypto, people who've got real estate, people who've got gold, people who've got fixed assets that are limited in scope and value – are limited in scope and therefore are more certain in value.
And everyone else gets like paper toilet currency UBI, which they can buy a diminishing amount with and hopefully they'll just decide to have fewer kids and the problem tapers off over time.
I don't like it.
I've been fighting for 30 plus years to avoid it, but it looks like that's the way things are going to go.
We go back to the aristocracy and the serfs.
We go back to the senators and the proletariat in ancient Rome, with the exception that Bitcoin is pretty moral.
But yeah, I think it's, you know, a limited value currency, sorry, limited value non-fiat currency wealth, whether it's real estate, crypto or gold or something like that, fixed assets for the elites and everybody else gets diminishing crypto and UBI and it's pretty bad.
All right, let's see if we've got any.
Feel free to throw in with your comments or questions.
Somebody asked, is there anything that could drive...
A true fail in crypto, like in Bitcoin, go back down to 100.
I don't think so. I think there's too many people invested in it at the moment, but again, nobody can tell the future for sure.
Yeah, if it can fail, we'll find out.
But other than that, I don't think there's any way to know.
Compared to what, right?
This is the fundamental question of philosophy.
Is there all philosophy professors?
Somebody said, how's your wife?
He said, compared to what?
It's a good question, right?
It's a fair question. And if you think that there's a risk-free scenario at any time in life, you're deluded, right?
You're absolutely wrong about that.
It is not There's no risk-free scenario.
So what you have to do is you say, well, okay, there's risk in crypto.
But compared to what? Compared to what?
Crypto has a future. Crypto has the efficiency of digital with the scarcity of a fixed resource.
And that is, I mean, about the best vector for stability and growth and all of that.
So there is no risk-free scenario at the moment.
Yeah, or I just, like, my base argument for why I think it's going to be successful is just because it's so amazing.
Like, when you learn about how, like, photosynthesis works or, you know, how light or fusion happens in the sun, you're just like, this is incredible.
And then that's what the feeling I get when I learn about how the blockchain works and how mining works.
I'm like, there's just no way something this incredible doesn't work and become the future.
It's the printing press of our time.
Absolutely. It's the printing press of the Aqueduct.
It's like you mentioned, a gunpowder for 2021.
It's like alien technology.
It just came down from...
It's the best technology with the best communities.
That's it. It's going to be successful in one way or another.
Do we think it's going to be the most significant technology for the next thousand years or next hundred years?
Certainly hundred. Now, I've got a listener call in a little bit, so I'm going to have to jump off soon.
Is there anybody who wants to go out on prediction land, on prediction peninsula, and see what kind of ground is under their feet?
Feel free to have this quoted back to you in mocking asides from now until the day your great-grandchildren go into the ground.
But if there's anybody who wants to go, you know, price, countries that are going to adopt it, value, spread, anybody.
I'll give it a go real quick.
Yep. So...
I don't know how sure I am of this, but I am concerned about China taking down and taking all these rigs that they might try some sort of attack on actually taking over the blockchain.
At least enough of it that would throw the currency into a devaluation.
If they could show that there's weaknesses in the blockchain itself by taking over enough mining rigs, it could Possibly skew the whole price to the point where half the world or at least a billion people in China have one blockchain and there's another blockchain going over there.
If they separate it for a month, how do you rectify all those transactions?
That's a lot of words to give a price prediction.
No, no, but hang on. So do you want to break that down a little bit more, what you mean by sort of like a fork and what that means and how that would play out?
This is to you, Nick. To my understanding, if China just sat there and said they're going to crack down, so they take over all these mining rigs, if they find some sort of weakness in reporting the blockchain and they get over 51% of the voting power, In their own local area.
They shut down the internet to the rest.
They then create their own blockchain within their section of the world.
Let it run for a month or two.
Then open it back up.
How do you rectify all of the missing transactions, the difference?
Especially if they find a weakness where they're taking over currency in different countries through their own blockchain and using it.
But then once it's reconnected, that would cause a huge issue, wouldn't it?
There's some technical kind of inaccuracies to that scenario.
So basically, if we're going to talk about the chain, there's only one chain.
We're all going to agree on that one chain.
That's how Bitcoin consensus works.
So you're either going to have China coin is the biggest and powerful.
It's going to have 51%. Or freedom chain or whatever you want to call it.
So if they start building their own private thing and hiding it, they have to get ahead of the other chain and then swap it at the end.
So there wouldn't be like, which one are we going to choose?
It would just be like, this is the one.
There's only going to be one. Unless they fork off and change it, in which case no one's going to go with them.
But it's like hijacking a plane.
You don't get two planes, right?
Yes. Yeah, totally.
That's a great analogy. All right.
Even if by some miracle they managed to pull that off, all they would do is make everyone go to other cryptocurrency projects.
They would spend trillions of dollars acquiring this massive asset only to destroy its value.
Or a hard fork.
But that's what they could do, is they can destroy it.
No, you just hard fork.
We've already been through this with Bitcoin Cash, right?
Woo! So...
Bitcoin network is the most massive computing network on the planet.
This is not something that they'll be able to just do.
You can't just will that kind of computing power into existence.
Well, and I remember this came up way back in the day when I was at a Bitcoin conference and I watched Antonio Antonopoulos go through this.
Oh, it could hijack and they spend trillions of dollars and everybody's like, okay, we just take it back.
And you got 10 minutes of control of the blockchain for a billion dollars.
Like, who cares, right? It doesn't matter.
And, you know, he's, I mean, that was just a long time ago, but I'm pretty sure he's certain enough to hang on to that.
Yeah. And that thesis that he presents in that video is even 10, 100x more true now.
There's way more computing power.
It's way more decentralized than it was back when he said that.
So, I mean, all this binding power moving out of China currently is only further decentralizing and further reducing the likelihood that any one person is going to be able to grab 51%.
And here's another thing, too.
Sorry to jump in.
But in terms of human motivation, right?
So the miners mine because they want Bitcoin.
And what that means is they don't want to destroy the value of Bitcoin.
So what they're going to do is they're going to have thumbprints and passwords to get into their mining rigs that, you know, if China threatened or there was anything or anybody heard anything like this, and you can't just do this like that, right?
There'd have to be some rumors or something happening, right?
And so what they would do is they would simply lock up their rigs because their bitcoins are worth more than their rigs.
So if you grab their rigs, you wouldn't be able to run them.
They would sabotage them.
They would have them self-destruct because the bitcoin that they hold is worth far more than their rigs and they simply would not allow those rigs to be taken over.
Now, if you wanted to buy and create all the rigs, that's a whole different matter and you'd be competing with the world's best and fastest and most established rigs.
they won't let that happen.
Also, there's a new technology.
I learned about it from PirateChain.
It's called delayed proof of work, where essentially you can use another blockchain to secure your blockchain.
So for example, to take over PirateChain, you would have to have 51% of PirateChain and 51% of Monero and 51% of Bitcoin.
So that's not happening.
So even if this was a real threat, they could use this delayed proof of work scheme on like Ethereum or some other big cryptos to make that virtually impossible.
Yeah, also, if there was actually a chance of them being able to do this, I would think that they would already have been putting a lot of effort into that.
They would have done it when it was smaller or when it went to ADK, right?
Yeah, or the fact that they don't even talk about it.
Like, as far as I know, no government is really talking about going after...
I mean, I don't know. Maybe there's a little bit going on in China recently.
Well, I mean, this has been a risk from day one.
And so the smartest community in the world has had 11 years and, you know, a trillion dollars worth of incentives to deal with this.
I'll bet on them rather than some numbnuts who didn't figure out Bitcoin running some government node on a ZX80. All right.
Okay, so anybody else with some projectiones?
I've seen 100k of Bitcoin, 100k value in Bitcoin by November.
Is that something people are floating around?
Make a prediction.
Lucy, go! I think the prediction is going to be that Bitcoin by December 31st is going to be down to 10,000.
Because as soon as people realize that there is no privacy, they're all going to buy pirate chain and my pirate chain is going to go up and I'm going to be rich.
And that value transfer is going to move.
Pump those bags, Lizzie.
Pump those bags.
That's right. And in fact, if you do have Bitcoin around, Lucy, later in the year, watch your back.
Watch your back.
She strikes like a viper.
Yeah. All right.
Anybody else? I had talked about 100k by the end of the summer.
I think that's going back a little ways.
I'd push that back a couple of months, but I'm still very optimistic about the upside.
Anybody else? 100k by end of year, and I think we probably will see 60k maybe December or November.
Okay. All right.
Now, end of year, is that a tax thing?
Is that just a convenience, right place around the sun kind of thing or something else?
Around the sun thing. I mean, if we really wanted to, I would say there would be the tax...
What could people put it in for this year so next year won't be Capital Games?
Right, right. Is it going lower soon, do people think?
It's going lower right now.
It's going lower right now.
Well, I know, but lower than this.
It's been lower before, right?
As we speak, it's only...
I'm blaming the show.
Stuff's causing it to go down.
I think we'll see a low of like 25%.
All right. And then bounce up from there.
All right. Well, listen, guys, really, really appreciate it.
I'm sorry it took a while to get another one set up, but a great pleasure to chat with you all, and nice to meet the new people, Lucy and others who came by.
A great pleasure. Lucy, you got much better reviews than I did, so I will now rage quit the entire show out of petty jealousy.
That sounds like a great idea.
People are like, she's got a great radio voice.
Bring her back. And, you know, Steph, bring her back and you don't even have to be there.
So that's very nice. Good reviews for Lucy.
And thanks, everyone, so much.
A great pleasure to chat.
Have a wonderful, wonderful evening.
And we will, yeah, shoot me emails.
If you've got stuff that you want to, if you've got stuff that's got burning in your brain and you really want to, oh, my God, I've got to get this out, just shoot me an email.
We can set these things up on a slightly more regular basis.
But this actually worked.
If somebody says, no, it's nothing without Steph.
Oh, thanks, Mom. I appreciate that.
All right. Okay, have a great evening, everyone.
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