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Oct. 6, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:28:15

BITCOIN UPDATE: TO THE MOON?!?

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	Hey there, how you doing?
	It's Steph. Good afternoon.
	How's, uh, how's everyone's day going?
	What's new with you?
	How are things? Oh, let me turn on the big chatty forehead.
	There we go. Yes, well, good afternoon.
	I guess a bit of a sudden live stream.
	It's two o'clock on the 6th of October of the old 2021 year of our COVID 1.8.
	So yeah.
	I suppose the individuals running the treasury of El Salvador are delighted, eh?
	Yeah, we see now that you know also why they dislike Bolsonaro in Brazil so much, because Brazil is also voting on adopting Bitcoin as legal tender.
	So there's that.
	Pre-search pre-token is up.
	Fantastic. Good to know.
	Good to hear. FreeDomain.com forward slash donate if you would like to help out.
	I'd appreciate it. But, um...
	Yeah, so first of all, of course, minor note of business.
	You don't take anything I say as financial advice.
	It's all theoretical.
	Don't make any decisions based on anything I'm saying.
	I'm not a financial advisor.
	I'm not giving you any financial advice.
	Do your own research.
	Make your own decisions. Just wanted to mention that as the cup rises to my lips to pay homage to one of the greatest albums in the history of the world.
	That's right.
	Wish you were here.
	So, oh, father-in-law passed away in hospital from COVID after being on a ventilator.
	He was vaccinated. I'm sorry to hear that.
	I am sorry to hear that.
	Well, a couple of hellos.
	Hello to everyone joining me.
	I hope you were listening over the summer.
	King Leo, thank you very much.
	Can't take you serious with your shirt on.
	Could be a very, very inky tattoo for all you know, right?
	Oh, first song I learned on guitar.
	Boy, the lyrics on which you would hear that song are just absolutely glorious.
	A walk-on part...
	Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lean role in a cage?
	Ah! Absolute poetry.
	Absolute poetry. All right.
	So, I haven't done updates in crypto for a while.
	Just hit me with a Y if you've got the only crypto that really matters, which is Bitcoin.
	Just hit me with a Y so I can gauge the knowledge and commitment level of ye olde audience, or I would imagine ye young audience.
	So just, yeah, hit me with a Y if you've got that stuff.
	Y, Y, Y, Y, Y, N. Y, Y, Y, baby!
	That's right. The world's making the Y. Like a woman's legs.
	But this is even more fertility.
	Fertility. All right.
	WeenieBitY, Monero, Y, lots of Ys.
	Okay, good. So you know what was going on.
	So if you remember, you know Bitcoin is like...
	95% of the world's railroads have a particular gauge, a width, of the tracks.
	And there are other people experimenting with different gauges.
	And if you're going to get involved in the railway industry, you probably want to work with the regular standard gauge.
	Like you could invent your own system of measurement outside of the metric or imperial, but you're probably going to want to work with So, if you remember the last thing that I talked about in my last Bitcoin update or crypto update was that the institutions getting involved In Bitcoin,
	we're going to work to stabilize the price over the summer so that they could maneuver it into client portfolios which have relatively conservative or moderate risk scenarios.
	So they're going to stabilize the price.
	It was going to go up, they'd bring it down.
	It's going to go down, they'd bring it up because they need to keep it within that window.
	So that all of the older people often, right, when you're young, you can have a more aggressive and exciting risk-based portfolio because it's going to even out over time.
	But when you get older, you get more conservative, not just politically, but you get more conservative because you have to really make sure that you have the money for your retirement.
	You can't be betting on tulip stocks or whatever, right?
	So, that is really important to understand.
	A lot of money is top-heavy in the age brackets, right?
	And so they need to reduce the volatility of Bitcoin, then they can start to bring it up.
	I mean, and so I said at the end of the summer, early fall, Bitcoin was going to...
	It didn't go as high as I thought, but I said Bitcoin was going to start to move.
	And of course, October has always been a great year for...
	A great month. Sorry, October has always been a great month for Bitcoin.
	So... Let's talk about what's going on.
	From my opinion, from my perspective, from my outside view, I don't have any access to inside information, just the power and depth of philosophy.
	Okay, so I'm just going to run through a couple of the relatively normie things and then we'll get to the philosophical things.
	Made a couple of notes here. So what do we got here?
	So, some analysts are optimistic that Bitcoin ETF approvals are finally approaching.
	So, you know, for a lot of older people, this is like my mom, right?
	I bought my mom a CD player many years ago, and she continually referred to it as a gramophone, right?
	So, usually, there's some point of technology where people just don't cross over, and Bitcoin seems to be with that.
	You know, your private keys, your wallet, your cold storage, I mean, it's all quite complicated.
	For people. Don't ask about the best place to buy or anything like that because I'm not going to talk...
	I'm not affiliated with anyone.
	I'm not going to recommend anyone.
	So you've got to do your own research on that kind of stuff.
	So an ETF, what that will do is...
	These are exchange-traded funds, right?
	So... Right, that's the best play.
	So ETF, this is from somebody else's text.
	ETF or exchange-traded funds track the price of an asset like Bitcoin or a basket of assets like pharma stocks and can be bought or sold via conventional brokerages.
	In August, SEC Chairman Gary Gensier seemed to signal his support for at least one variety of crypto ETFs.
	So, what this...
	Well, you know, but you see, if you're coming to ask the chat for things unrelated to the conversation, that's rude.
	Right? If you're just coming and saying, oh, I want everyone in the chat to stop listening to Steph and help me with my thing, that's rude.
	That's coming to hijack my chat to distract people from what it is that I'm saying.
	Don't do that. Please.
	That's really rude. So...
	So what's happening is if you can – a lot of brokers who obviously understand very complicated stuff, but a lot of brokers, they don't want to get involved in managing client wallets and keys and storage and making sure it's hack-proof and making sure there are they don't want to get involved in managing client wallets and
	Because if you buy a whole bunch of crypto and you hold something for someone, unless you're one of the really specialized exchanges that have been into crypto from the beginning, it's kind of tough to get into that space.
	And so what they want to do is they want to be able to buy and sell crypto without buying and selling crypto and holding it in wallets and so on.
	And the way that you do that, I mean, one of the ways you do that is with these ETFs.
	So if the market opens up to regular brokerage buying and selling without the technical hassles and problems, Of managing people's wallets and keys and backups and all of that kind of stuff, then they already have the infrastructure all set up for that.
	They already have the buying and selling systems all set up for that.
	So that will really begin to power what is happening.
	So let's see here.
	What else? Oh, yeah.
	So Jerome Powell... Clarified he has no intention to ban cryptocurrencies, right?
	So a day after Powell made the statement, he was doing an appearance before the House Financial Services Committee, everything went up 10%, right?
	Boomers need Bitcoin easy mode.
	Yeah, I mean, that's not a bad way of putting it, for sure.
	So, yeah, he has no intention to ban cryptocurrencies.
	I mean, they will regulate and all of that, but however much we may dislike that from a pure free market standpoint, it is an inevitability and a necessity for making the currency more viable in general.
	So, inflation.
	Right, so inflation has recently, by a lot of central bank gurus, inflation has, it's here to stay.
	It's brutal. I mean, brutal.
	Up here in Canada, I just filled up my car, and it was almost 80 bucks.
	It was almost 80 bucks.
	I remember when I first got a car, I didn't have a car until my early 30s.
	But like 20 years ago, it was like 30 bucks to fill up your car.
	Now it's two and a half times that, two and two thirds that.
	Does Bitcoin ETF have to be backed by Bitcoin, or does it just track the price?
	Well, I would refer you to an old Steve Martin comedy routine.
	I used to love Steve Martin when I was younger, all that frantic ukulele and mind-bending Monty Python-style comedy.
	Anyway, so he was saying how he tries to impress women with his investing, and he said...
	Yeah, I kind of end up investing.
	I bought cardboard when it was two cents a ton.
	Now it's four cents a ton.
	I bought three tons, so...
	You do the math. And, and, and I made a special deal where I only have to keep two tons of it in my house.
	It was a very funny guy back in the day.
	I think tinnitus, he got tinnitus, I think, from a gun explosion and Three Amigos, which I think has taken down his comedy a little bit, but...
	So you don't actually have to own the things that you're trading in.
	Maybe like pork futures.
	It's not like people have a big row of pork rinds or hinds or whatever they use, pork sides or whatever in their garages.
	I talked to computer science professors in university today and none of them understood or cared about Bitcoin or even knew anyone who does.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	So, of course, when inflation is hitting, people are going to look for currencies that outpace inflation.
	And given that Bitcoin is up, what, 407% over the last 12 months, well, it's a pretty good hedge so far against Bitcoin.
	Inflation. So, and what is it?
	Is it $4.5 trillion infrastructure bill?
	Apparently infrastructure is everything except building roads.
	But yeah, so, and here's the thing too, right?
	I'll get through the...
	Actually, no, I'll talk about inflation.
	So, one of the things, you know, when you know something deeply and you listen to a government chowderhead waffle on and be completely wrong yet have massive power...
	It kind of scares the jillies out of you, right?
	Right.
	Whatever jillies are, they are no longer in you.
	And so when you have Jen Psaki, it really sounds like you're coughing up a hairball.
	When you have Jen Psaki talking about, well, it's absurd and bizarre and incomprehensible and bad and naughty and nasty.
	And I'm paraphrasing a little here that just because we raise taxes on corporations that they would raise prices on consumers.
	It's like, you know, the corporate profits generally are in the three to five percent range.
	So if you jack up taxes on corporations, somebody has to pay for that.
	And she, you know, well...
	Socialists, I don't know if she's a socialist or whatever, but socialists don't understand economics, right?
	If they understood economics, they wouldn't be socialists, right?
	So when you have people who genuinely understand how supply and demand works and that if you jack up costs on a producer, they do have to raise prices.
	And it's not like they can drop salaries, right?
	Because usually there's a lot of negotiated stuff and all of that.
	So of course they have to raise prices.
	And so the fact that Jen Psaki is seemingly completely uncomprehending of this basic fact means that you have an administration.
	That doesn't understand economics.
	And not only doesn't understand economics, doesn't understand that they don't understand economics.
	And, you know, I'm not on the politics thing, and I haven't been for over a year.
	So I'm not talking about this in terms of politics, because that's all just boring late Roman Empire decay stuff.
	But, oh, does she wear a pink Russia fur hat with a hammer and sickle on it?
	It's just amazing. Amazing to me.
	Of course, everybody should be shunned for wearing a Nazi swastika, but you can wear the hammer and sickle, which killed more people, and it's totally fine.
	So when you have this, or when you have, what was it, Nancy Pelosi saying it's a $4.5 trillion spending bill, but it's not going to cost you anything?
	I mean... Whether they're pandering to an economics-ignorant audience or whether they themselves are fundamentally ignorant of economics.
	And of course, I mean, how could Joe Biden be aware of economics?
	He's never spent a day in the private sector.
	So, yeah. So, do you think that they don't understand or that they're counting on the population not understanding?
	I mean, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter in terms of policy whether they don't understand.
	Or whether they do understand but they're just counting on their audience.
	Because it's still whatever. The lack of understanding is conditioning their decisions.
	Whether it is their own lack of understanding or the voters or whatever.
	It doesn't really matter. It doesn't really matter.
	So that's important.
	The leaders of the world's top central banks...
	Indicated last week that inflation fueled by pandemic-related supply chain disruptions, which I was talking about, what, a year ago, will fuel inflation and that the inflation will likely remain elevated for months, and I would assume longer than that.
	In the U.S., consumer prices rose 5.2% in August over the previous year, and nations that use the euro...
	In nations that use the euro, inflation in September rose 3.3% year over year, the biggest gain since 2009.
	Yep. Now, the other thing, of course, is that the rapid adoption of the Lightning Network is helping Bitcoin scale, right?
	That was the whole big issue around Bitcoin being, you know, slower than, say, a Visa processing, because Visa processing is centralized, Bitcoin is decentralized, so that is...
	But, you know, when you have a trillion, now it's passed back over a trillion dollars worth of market capitalization, so if you have a trillion dollars worth of market cap, people can figure it out, how to make it work, right?
	So... So yeah, let's just do a little rewind here.
	About this time last year, crypto began...
	It's greatest bull market ever.
	Bitcoin racing from less than $11,000 to more than $60,000 in just five months.
	Kicking off the final quarter of 2021, contradictory signals abound, but crypto's fundamentals are arguably stronger now than they were a year ago.
	Most importantly, more people are using crypto than ever before and in more ways than ever.
	NFTs and DeFi to buying groceries in El Salvador.
	Now, there is something else that's important as well.
	Which is Brazil, as I mentioned, is voting on allowing Bitcoin to become legal tender, and that, of course, is a much larger economy, a much larger population than Brazil.
	El Salvador, and it is important enough, and Bolsonaro, to make it sort of reductionist, is kind of like the nationalist populist Trump of Central America, South America, and Central America.
	My geography is not great.
	I apologize for that. What will happen, of course, is they will try to get him out by weaponizing COVID cases and so on.
	And they've done that to some degree by pushing back hard against the adoption of ivermectin, which, again, I have no opinion on.
	I'm not a doctor, but they have.
	They want to mint a trillion dollar coin?
	Sure. You know, I mean, hey, Zimbabwe paved the way.
	Weimar Republic paved the way.
	Pre-revolutionary France paved the way.
	Late Roman Empire paved the way.
	Yeah, you're just cranking it up, right?
	Poland's National Bank raised interest rates today in a desperate attempt to slow down inflation.
	Yeah. Do you think there will be a crash in asset prices after the crypto and housing markets top out?
	Personally, I would hesitate to ask that question, if I were you.
	It's a fine question to ask, but I would hesitate to ask that question, because there's so many assumptions built in.
	Do you know that they've got a hamster in a wheel, and the hamster goes on the wheel, goes off the wheel, changes direction, and they've set up a monitoring device that figures out which way the wheel is going in, And what time, I think it's what time of day the hamster runs or whatever.
	And they've hooked that up so that the hamster buys and sells cryptos based upon when he gets on the wheel and when he gets off the wheel and which direction the wheel is going on.
	And that hamster on the wheel is outperforming the S&P 500.
	Right? I mean, it's funny.
	And I remember this from when I first got into trading.
	I don't do really much trading, but I first started doing it in my early 20s.
	And what happened was I read an article which said that if you throw – like you used to have the newspapers with the stock price.
	You put the newspapers, the stock sheets up on a couple of dot boards.
	You get the darts and you throw them at the dot boards.
	And you do about as well, if not better, than fund managers without the deductions, right?
	So – Don't try and figure out what these predictions are going to be.
	What is the top of this, that, or the other?
	What's going to happen to these asset prices?
	It's because you've got a bunch of variables, right?
	Is there a top to crypto and housing?
	And if there is a top to crypto and housing and then they go down, right?
	That's already trying to saying there's a top and it's going to go down.
	That's already one level of guesswork.
	And then what's going to happen to asset prices if there's a tumble in these two massive...
	of the economy.
	You've got so many variables there that you might as well just place bin de Wadler at that point.
	Pelosi still beat that hamster.
	Actually, she beats everyone on the market.
	Yeah, what is her return? It's like 60% to 70%, something like that.
	She is just amazing as far as investment goes.
	She seems kind of spaced out, obviously, on a pretty regular basis.
	But boy, oh boy, can she ever beat the market.
	It's just amazing.
	Will Bitcoin be the first crypto to become mainstream?
	I believe so, yeah. I believe so.
	When do you think the dam will break?
	The dam that the Democrats are holding back on inflation?
	Well, I mean, again, nobody knows, right?
	Because we don't have access to the inside information.
	But you have noticed, of course, that a lot of very wealthy people are buying bunkers in New Zealand.
	So, let's see here.
	The hamster is a great way to show the potential gains you can make during a bull market in crypto.
	Yeah, for sure. Okay, yeah.
	And also, aren't they putting in this rule in the U.S. that anything over $600, any transaction over $600 gets reported?
	So, yeah. I mean, that's going to be pretty exciting for people, and I think that's putting a lot of people into Bitcoin.
	But... Let's talk about some of the more philosophical aspects of what's going on.
	So, I will start off by telling you a story.
	I will tell you a story not about my uncle who I loved so much who got skin cancer and died.
	It's Elizabeth Holmes stuff.
	Are you following the trial? I find it quite interesting.
	But... I'll tell you a story about a guy I knew.
	He actually was kind of instrumental in introducing me to my current wife, sort of by accident.
	But he was, when I met him, he was going through a divorce.
	And it was a bad divorce.
	It was a rough divorce. Half the time on the phone with the lawyers and, you know, you could see the waves of stress, psoriasis pulsing up through his neck and stuff like that.
	And he said that he decided to get divorced when he went to a marriage therapist.
	And the marriage therapist, when his then-wife left the therapy office, the therapist said, well, hold on, hold on a second.
	Listen, I've been doing this for 20, 25 years, and I've got a lot of experience, so...
	Hopefully this will make some sense to you, but in my professional opinion, having talked to you and your wife, and in particular your wife for an hour, she's not going to.
	Like, you have to love her as she is.
	There's zero possibility she's going to change.
	And you said, well, why? He said, because she won't take any feedback.
	She won't take any criticism.
	And because she won't take any criticism or any feedback or any course correction, right, then she's not going to change.
	We change when we accept criticism, or at least the pain of our bad decisions is acceptable to our consciousness in terms of rejigging where it is that we're heading.
	So, and he said that really, you know, hit him like a thunderbolt, right?
	Like, okay, so I can't have a fantasy that she's going to change.
	The foundation of reason being...
	Lack of criticism, lack of feedback, lack of free speech around her, right?
	Lack of free speech. Free speech, I mean, it's sort of weird to say you'd have free speech if you're talking to someone in a language they don't understand, right?
	So free speech has to be the communication of ideas in a tangible and material and effective manner.
	And so you really don't have free speech around people who don't accept criticism.
	I mean, you have free speech in that you can say stuff, but you're speaking to them in a language they don't understand or won't understand or won't accept.
	It's like saying, do you have free speech around someone who's just going la, la, la, la, la with their fingers and their ears at the top of their lungs?
	Well, I guess you have free speech, but it's not going to do anything.
	It's not going to have any effect.
	So the reason that I'm saying that is because...
	Free speech in the West is barely alive, right?
	I mean, in terms of, you know, the legal right to say stuff, but, you know, the deplatforming, the attacks, the doxing, and all this kind of stuff.
	And so I think what people are getting deep down, and I think this is having an effect on crypto prices as well, I think what people are getting deep down is that the system can no longer reform itself, right?
	But the system can no longer reform itself.
	So in 2019, I did a documentary, and you should really check it out, freedomand.com forward slash documentaries.
	I did a documentary on California, and I went up to the LA City Council, and I just asked them what their plans were as to how they were going to pay for everything that they wanted to spend.
	And basically, I was politely or not so politely asked to leave, because you can't ask that question.
	In none of the presidential debates between Trump and Biden or the vice presidential debates and so on, I mean, none of this came up.
	There was never, how are we going to pay for it?
	And you can't criticize anything or any of the factors that are driving massive government spending.
	Can't be criticized, right? You can't criticize single mothers, which is basically the welfare state.
	You can't criticize the welfare state.
	You can't criticize the expenses of mass immigration.
	You just can't do any of these things, right?
	You can't really do much to criticize deficit spending, deficit financing, and so on.
	And so the system is now impervious to feedback.
	And when a system becomes impervious to feedback...
	You have to say that whatever trend, like you have to, logically, you have to say whatever trend the system is on will continue.
	It will not deviate.
	Like the therapist said to my friend, if you don't love her for who she is, it's not going to work because she's not going to change.
	It doesn't accept any feedback.
	So when there's no effective free speech, when there are no effective debates, then the system, the trajectory of the system, Will not change.
	It's like if you're on the Titanic and you see the iceberg ahead and for some reason your steering is locked, then you're going to hit the iceberg.
	So I think people are kind of getting deep down with the dearth or death of free speech that the trajectory of the system cannot be corrected.
	It cannot be changed.
	It cannot be altered. The arguments don't land or they're not allowed to be made or whatever it is, right?
	And so, oh, the California documentary was amazing, so eye-opening.
	Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I appreciate that.
	I've got three documentaries, Poland, California, Hong Kong.
	And it's so funny, right?
	So now the news seems to be out that China was buying up PCR tests and other things in the summer of 2019, which meant that...
	In September, October, basically in the fall of 2019, when I went to Hong Kong to talk about how dangerous China was, China was already apparently covering up a pandemic.
	God, I hate being right.
	I really do. I hate being right.
	That's philosophy, man.
	Philosophy always means being kind of depressed that you're right.
	So... Once you understand, as people do, in the absence of robust debate, then the system continues in its current trajectory without change.
	So another way of looking at it is that civilization is an airplane that's kept aloft by the engine of free speech.
	Free speech keeps civilization aloft.
	Like an airplane is an unnatural place for a human being to be, and civilization is a very unnatural place for us to be because most of life is barbarism.
	It has been and is still in many places around the world.
	So free speech. Is the engine that keeps the plane up, right?
	Because the natural tendency is entropy and decay and corruption and centralization of power and free speech resists that, right?
	Like the natural place of an airplane is to glide down to the ground, right?
	That's what's going to happen in the absence of a countervailing force.
	Free speech is the engine that pushes back against the entropy of the system, of the society, of the civilization.
	Now, if an airplane that's up in the sky loses all four of its engines, it's not going to crash immediately.
	But it's going to crash, right?
	I mean, because the countervailing energy, the controlled explosions of the jet engines, the countervailing energy is not there.
	And therefore, entropy and decay is the inevitable state.
	Now, you may not know exactly when it's going to crash.
	You may not know exactly where it's going to crash.
	In fact, you wouldn't. But you know for sure Without the engines, it's going down.
	It may go down hard, it may go down soft, it may go down on land, on snow, on water, but it's going down.
	And so I think that once people have really processed, and it's been a huge shock, really it's been like two years, like a year and a half for me, it was a little longer for Alex Jones, a couple of other people and so on, Milo.
	But I think people are just kind of absorbing that...
	The free speech motor mouths, so to speak, that were keeping society from crashing have been turned off, have been removed from the public square to a large degree.
	And so I think people are like, okay, well...
	Can't fix whatever's happening.
	Titanic's going down, plane's going down, and we have to figure out something's going on.
	I've seen all three of your documentaries talk about eyes wide shut.
	The Tom Cruise thing? Stanley Kubrick?
	That was very courageous stuff.
	Also the EU address, but it put you on their radar.
	Now, it's like a few get you all to ourselves.
	Yes. Thank you.
	I appreciate that. So...
	Scott Adams says, you need a way of looking at life that predicts the future and makes you happy.
	Any advice for the second one?
	Reason equals virtue equals happiness.
	That's all that, right? Off topic, I emailed you about my mom in the hospital with COVID. She survived.
	She was treated with remdesivir and blood there as well.
	Remdesivir is the IV one, right?
	It's really complicated and expensive to do, right?
	So... Yeah, so you need a way of...
	So Scott Adams is a pragmatist, he's a consequentialist, utilitarian, right?
	It predicts the future and makes you happy.
	Well, I don't know that the two would be the same thing, right?
	Sometimes you predict the future and it's pretty grim and it's a little hard to stay happy.
	I think we all face that from time to time.
	But... Yeah, I mean, I like Scott.
	I like Scott, but it's not a...
	He's not a philosopher, right?
	So... So, that aspect of things, that people are instinctively understanding that free speech is decaying, and therefore the system cannot be reformed.
	And I think we kind of understand that, that there has been...
	And listen, I've been working since my mid-teens to my mid-fifties, 40 years, 40 years in this field.
	And... I have a massive amount of experience in this field.
	I fought in high school in our model debates.
	I fought in university at three different universities.
	Oh, and theater school.
	I fought at the National Theater School.
	I fought at Glendon Campus of York University.
	I fought at McGill University.
	I fought at... University of Toronto and my graduate degree, and I fought in the business world for all of these kind of stuff.
	I got fired once for advocating that a particular company take a particular course that would have been challenging for their relationship with the government.
	So, yeah, I've been fighting and I've been, you know, public intellectual for 16 years, been fighting tooth and nail against, you know, massive expansions of unjust and brutal state power and so on.
	So, yeah, I just have a lot of experience at this point.
	Taken a lot of bullets, landed a few blows, and so.
	The system doesn't allow for reform or self-destruction.
	Well, a system that doesn't allow for reform will always self-destruct.
	Like, that's why free speech is so important.
	A system that does not allow for reform will always self-destruct.
	It's like a company that won't allow for the development of any new products.
	Well, it's going to go out of business, right?
	So that's important.
	All right. What else was I going to mention?
	I can keep this one relatively short.
	If you guys have any comments, issues, or questions, I would be happy to hear of it.
	But I just, yeah, I wanted to drop in and just give you a basic reminder, right?
	If there's an old saying that comes out of 1984, right?
	Which is, if there's a future, it lies with the pearls at the proletariat.
	If there's a future, it lies with the pearls.
	Well, for me, my particular perspective, which I've been talking about for 10 years now, if there's a future, it lies with Bitcoin.
	Bitcoin is the first opportunity that a society has to transition away from an inflationary fiat currency into a more rational and peaceful society.
	It's a way of protecting the poor, the vulnerable, the underprivileged.
	I know that those are kind of leftist buzzwords, but I grew up among the poor, the marginalized, the vulnerable, the underprivileged.
	I grew up in the Charles Bukowski style of human society.
	And the poor and the marginalized are in many ways poor and marginalized because their productivity gains and their hard work get hoovered up by the giant squid-sucking brain vacuum of central currency and the degradation of savings and income through inflation.
	So... I don't like that.
	That's really terrible.
	You know, again, when I first came to Canada, I could buy a candy bar for 10 cents.
	This is 1977, end of 1977.
	I could buy a candy bar for 10 cents.
	Now it's a buck and a quarter, right?
	So it's about a thousand plus percent inflation in a couple decades.
	Well, I guess more than a couple, but yeah.
	The other... Oh yeah, there's one other thing I wanted to mention.
	So... I did a little video.
	I don't know if you follow me in any of the places, but you should really follow me more than just here, right?
	But I did a little video when China banned Bitcoin.
	You know how governments ban drugs and then there's just no drugs, right?
	And then the government bans guns and there's just no guns.
	So, yeah, China banned Bitcoin, which it does every six months.
	Usually, I assume, because it wants to Because it wants to buy the dip, right?
	And so people were, of course, alarmed, nervous, scared, upset by all of this.
	And sorry, let me just...
	Sorry, I'm just going to hand out some lemons.
	So people were upset, and I said it was a plus for China to ban Bitcoin, to ban the mining, and to not allow banks to process the transactions or whatever.
	I don't know what they did, but something like that.
	I don't really, you know, get involved in this kind of stuff.
	But... I did say to everyone, you know, if a totalitarian regime doesn't like something, you understand that makes it a plus.
	If China loved Bitcoin, that would be pretty catastrophic, right?
	That would be pretty catastrophic.
	So I did say, yeah, it's fine.
	It's totally fine. And as it turns out, not having more of the fundamental liberty currency in control of a totalitarian regime has turned out to be better.
	For that. And so, again, you know, I'm just...
	Again, I'm never giving anyone advice, but I hope you listen to some of the arguments.
	That's all. That's all I hope.
	All right, let's see if we can hand out some lemons here.
	Distribute rewards. I certainly will.
	Take some lemons.
	Make the sour face. You have 26 seconds.
	Chest rewards. We'll distribute in 20 seconds.
	That's like when you're a teenager learning how to take off a bra.
	Okay. Did you guys hear about Twitch?
	Twitch? They banned me long ago, but Twitch, basically everything got opened up.
	There's 128 gigs of data.
	All of their payouts from 2019.
	The source code with comments going all the way back to the beginning.
	They say it's just round one.
	And, yeah, it's pretty wild, eh?
	It's pretty wild. So I keep going back to your presentation on the fall of Rome.
	It's some of your greatest work. I appreciate that.
	Thank you. Yeah, China should ban Bitcoin more often.
	Love these swing trades, right?
	Well, you know, so if someone's come up with a great counterfeit detection machine, and I've used this analogy a whole bunch of times.
	I use the analogy of a counterfeit detection machine because it's just so instructive, right?
	So the counterfeit detection machine, if someone comes up with a really great one, then the mafia or the counterfeiters or whoever is going to want to buy it out or bomb it out or they're going to hate that thing, right?
	They're going to want to find some way to make sure that the counterfeit detection machine right by the cashier isn't going to catch all of their fake bills, right?
	So the value of the counterfeit detection machine is to some degree measured by the hostility of the counterfeiters towards it.
	If the counterfeiters are like, eh, we don't care, right?
	I mean, I don't know what happened with the other blood testing labs with Theranos, right?
	So Elizabeth Holmes and the Pakistani guy Balwani, I think his name was.
	They said, oh, we can run up to, what's it say, 200 tests, or they said, we're going to be able to run up to 1,000 blood tests on a single pinprick of blood, and it's like, I shouldn't mean to laugh, but I'm sure that the other blood testing companies Who need, you know, the vials, right?
	You get your blood taken, right?
	They take vials, right?
	And it takes a while. And they, you know, you notice that they didn't...
	I don't think they did. They didn't sit there and say, oh my gosh, this is a huge threat to our business.
	This is the car to our horse and buggy.
	This is the internet to our mail.
	And we've got to invest in...
	They were like, yeah, we'll just wait for this to crash.
	I assume that's what they did, right?
	So if Elizabeth Holmes' fantasy technology of I'm a cute blonde, therefore money...
	If that had really worked, then all of the other businesses would have been trying to buy it out, or they would have infiltrated the company in some manner to verify it, and maybe they did, and maybe they found out that it was all smoke and mirrors nonsense.
	And it's like, well, Bill Jobs, Steve Jobs, he says, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
	Steve Jobs would sometimes exaggerate the capabilities of his products ahead of time.
	Yes, but he didn't just make up things entirely.
	He didn't just make up things entirely.
	So you judge something by how much it's opposed.
	I know this, of course, very personally, right?
	Because I was very effective and therefore I was very opposed, right?
	And so you judge something by how it's opposed and who opposes it.
	So if you're an investor and there is a counterfeit detection machine on the market and you find out that some shady Gambino family has put in a massive bid to keep it out of the market, then you assume it works because it's opposed by all the right people. then you assume it works because it's opposed by all It's the way you verify things.
	It's the way you verify things.
	I mean, sometimes you can figure out the shape of something just by looking at its shadow.
	I mean, if you imagine there was some invisible guy and you could only see his shadow for whatever reason, right?
	Then you couldn't see him, but at least you could see his shadow.
	So people who can't understand Bitcoin have unconsciously got that China doesn't like it.
	And if China doesn't like it, it's probably a pretty good thing.
	I mean, the Chinese government, of course, right?
	Individuated from the Chinese people who I actually really like when I... I actually did business in China in 2000.
	I was out there for a month or so doing business back when I was in the software.
	Industry and I found the Chinese people themselves delightful.
	It really was like going back in time in many ways because you would have literally a three martini lunch, which hasn't been done in the West since the 1950s, the Mad Men days, right?
	And I remember going out to a research facility and playing ping pong after they gave me two beers for lunch.
	I'm not much of a drinker, so...
	Playing ping pong and losing, as you would expect, a big-nosed foreign person.
	That's what they refer to, white people, big-nosed foreign people.
	So, yeah, it's – let's see here.
	Let's see here.
	When the dam breaks, will there be violence against Bitcoin holders, anti-Jab, conservatives, Trump supporters, should we leave?
	Again, I can't tell you any of those.
	I can't tell you any of those decisions.
	Let's see here. Are you still expecting the Bitcoin price to be managed so we don't see the past volatility?
	Well, yes, I would imagine so because, well, I guess so there's usually three layers of risk that is dealt with in the financial industry, right?
	There's risk, moderate, and conservative.
	Or, you know, you could get any number of ways of sort of describing this.
	Now, I don't think Bitcoin is going to get down into the super conservative stuff for a while, but I think they wanted to get it from people who want a lot of risk or willing to accept a lot of risk to people who could get moderate.
	So nobody minds, of course, when the volatility is going upwards, right?
	So as long as they can manage the price upwards and avoid a crash, then they can keep it in people's portfolios.
	So if they can get the price to go up in a stable manner, everybody will be happy.
	Would you have any reason to think Bitcoin could impact a country like Cuba even, or not possible?
	Cuba, oh my god, what a tragic situation.
	I don't know. What do you guys think?
	That's an interesting question. I don't know.
	The Holmes case is interesting because it reflects society's preoccupation with fantasy ideas that do not correlate with reality.
	All due to respect, Eddie, don't agree with you at all.
	I don't agree with you at all.
	I think that Holmes' case is interesting because there's no one who understood the kind of stuff that I've been talking about for 15 years who would ever invest in their company.
	I mean, philosophy would have completely saved everyone.
	And if you look at the number of powerful people who, you know, Kissinger and former secretaries of state and all these other big powerful people, Even when Steve Jobs, right-hand man, fled the company because they couldn't test anything objectively, you look at the number of powerful people who I think were all in government prior to that, just completely swallowed all of this crap and never thought of testing it and never thought of having an objective independent third-party verification or anything like that.
	Crazy. Crazy.
	Dang, I do wish I would have come across you and your work around ten years or so ago.
	My kids would have had better parents.
	Well, but when it comes to parenting, certainly better late than never, right?
	Going to read Almost? Yes, please do.
	Please do. I would love to write a new novel for sure.
	And amazing.
	Yeah, so you can go to almostnovel.com.
	Almostnovel.com is totally free.
	It's like a 30-hour, 35-hour audiobook.
	It's like Atlas Shrugged length.
	And it was like a year and a half of my life completely poured into the research and writing of this book.
	It's a novel and it's really a thing of beauty.
	It is an amazing, amazing book and you will love it.
	I had this when I was a kid.
	I don't know if you've ever had this. And if you have, let me know in the chat.
	It's like a bit of a by-the-by.
	Did you ever have books that you loved so much that you didn't want to finish it because you would miss the people in it?
	That's the way it was for me with writing almost.
	I absolutely, completely and totally still even now feel an ache that I don't get to be with the people I wrote about as characters because I thought they were just great.
	I think so.
	I think so.
	I think so. This may never be proven, or maybe or so.
	But I do think that the reason we have less to fear with regulatory crushing of Bitcoin is because the elites are closer to the actual numbers of inflation.
	I mean, they don't get, you know, maybe it's shadow stats or whatever, but they get the real facts about inflation and they get the real facts about unfunded liabilities.
	They get the real facts about debts and deficit and employment and people who've dropped out of the work.
	Like, they get the real statistics and then I think they get them served up on rice paper and then they have to eat them or something like that because they never want that stuff out.
	So somewhere there's a A darkened room filled with smoke and guys with green visors where they're going over the actual numbers, which is vastly different, I would assume, from the numbers that are given to the public as a whole.
	And so my guess is that a lot of the elites are looking at this equation, right?
	And the equation goes something like this.
	What does it look like when you try and jam the entire world's economy Into 22 million Bitcoin.
	Just mull that over.
	Just mull that over. What does it happen?
	What happens when you try to jam the entire world's economy into 22 million Bitcoin?
	Or they look at the number of millionaires there are in the world.
	A couple of hundred millionaires, 22 million.
	Bitcoin. And so the elites are saying, I think, we don't want to crush Bitcoin.
	We want to occasionally scare people in Bitcoin so we can buy the dip.
	But we don't want to crush Bitcoin.
	We want to scare people away from the lifeboats so we can get more of a family on there.
	That's my 21 million.
	Yeah, sorry, 21 million, not 22.
	So... Bitcoin is manipulated by whales, retail and otherwise.
	They're using Bitcoin as an inflation-safe haven.
	They'd also like to 100 times their investments, yeah.
	The island of Tonga.
	Tonga is considering Bitcoin.
	An entire one-third of their GDP is lost due to fees from sending remittances.
	Will there be a billionaire Bitcoiner anytime soon?
	I don't know. I don't know.
	What is the size of the largest Bitcoin holding?
	I don't know. Well, it's Satoshi, right?
	I think. Well, okay, so yeah, will they create a Fed coin or whatever it is?
	I mean, China's working on that kind of stuff, although I think it's not going very well.
	So yeah, they'll try that, but that will be to drive down the price of Bitcoin so they can buy the dip, because Bitcoin is the real deal.
	Alright, you know what I'm going to do?
	I don't usually do this.
	Let's see.
	What is that price?
	What is that price?
	Oh, yeah.
	Baby.
	$68,966.97.
	It's gone up over $5,000 Canadian dollars in...
	24 hours. So that's good.
	So that's good. I mean, it's still 11K from the 80 that it was earlier this year.
	But, yeah.
	Yes, that's a lovely thing to see.
	It's a lovely thing to see.
	And, of course, as I said, it really blasted past the $1 trillion market cap, right?
	So be kind to the moon.
	A lot of countries might follow El Salvador when their year-to-year GDP continues to increase at 25%, like last month.
	Well, yeah, I mean, so in El Salvador, they're up like 10-15%, right?
	So the other thing that I think that's important as well is that the U.S. dollar, as the world's reserve currency, It has particular value to foreign governments because they get US dollars in foreign aid, right?
	I mean, didn't they send foreign aid even to the Taliban?
	It's just completely mad, right?
	And foreign aid is one of the most corrupt things in a very corrupt environment.
	So a lot of the foreign governments are keen on the US dollar because that's how they get their foreign aid.
	Now, if the value of the foreign aid they get from the US government begins to diminish, right, because...
	The US dollar is inflating away or people are moving to other assets and so on.
	well, then those foreign governments will start to become more interested in Bitcoin.
	So this is what happens when the U.S. dollar begins to, if it does, I think it will, but whatever, I don't know.
	If it begins to lose some of its value, significantly, and I'm not talking like a couple of percentage a year, but more than that.
	So, of course, a lot of people from foreign countries go to the U.S. to make money or get money through welfare in order to send it back to their home countries.
	So remittances to Mexico, last time I checked, which was a couple of years ago, but remittances to Mexico are larger than their entire oil revenues.
	Like, remittances are just mad, right?
	Again, it's a kind of foreign aid.
	Money goes from the U.S. taxpayers to the government to the welfare recipients in a lot of cases.
	Some of them work, of course, but in a lot of cases, welfare.
	And then it goes to the foreign countries.
	And... That remittances thing is a wild.
	It's one of the reasons why large financial institutions like mass migration, because they get to make a huge amount of money from remittance fees, which they wouldn't make under Bitcoin.
	But the way it works, of course, is that if you can't get that easy-peasy, nice-and-easy sleazy money from the state or from your work and send it back because the value of it is diminishing, then a lot of people will probably return back to their home countries, right? So, what's it, Puerto Rico, the U.S. protectorate?
	There's 5 million Puerto Ricans in the U.S. and only 3.5 million, I think, left on the island, along with Peter Schiff, I think.
	Anyway, so...
	I would say that it's going to be interesting because when you can't get free money, do you stay in the country?
	Maybe. But if your home country has adopted Bitcoin and the economic activity is starting to accumulate in your country because of the legalization...
	Of Bitcoin, are you going to stay where you're not getting much or much in value of money from the government or from your job if there's a huge amount of economic activity sparking up in your home country, whether it's Brazil or maybe Mexico or El Salvador at the moment?
	Are you going to stay in a place of diminishing returns when there's an escalating value opportunity in your home country?
	I would think that a lot of people are going to return to either where they came from or where their parents came from or something like that.
	So I think that could be quite a fascinating thing.
	And of course, countries, if they can't get foreign aid.
	So this used to happen between the USSR and America, that they would both be vying for the hearts and minds of the third world by handing out money, right, to buying allegiance and so on, right?
	Now, that's still happening to some degree with America versus China.
	But I do think that if the governments can't get the free money, they may say, well, that fun ride was fun, but now we're going to move more towards Bitcoin because it's more stable.
	Yeah. Is there an index that compares the history of the price of goods in U.S. dollars compared to now?
	I don't know. Again, how would you trust those numbers?
	Let's see here.
	Mexico loves XRP, is that right? .
	Another reason they keep printing money here in Germany, if the state subsidies dry out, riots are going to happen.
	Well, I mean, that's a huge issue, right?
	To me, it's very cruel, and maybe purposefully so, but it's very cruel to import a lot of people from other countries into a situation which is unsustainable.
	I mean, because then they come and they settle down, they have their kids, and a lot of them rely, of course, on welfare.
	And if the welfare runs out, now what?
	You know, if you know the ship can't make it from New York to London, why are you inviting everyone on unless you're just kind of cruel, right?
	Bitcoin also might be easier to adopt in countries of the lower average age.
	Too many confused technophobic boomers in the West.
	Could find an old grocery store catalog and compare the prices to now.
	Yeah, I mean, you can find all of that stuff online.
	It's pretty easy. I remember going with a friend of mine to McDonald's with $2, and it's both eating like kings.
	You know, it's like that movie Euro Road Trip or Road Trip or something where they count all their money, and they're like, oh my god, we only have like $11.
	But then they realize they're in Eastern Europe, and they can basically buy half the country and all of that.
	Steph, my father owns an apartment building for $2.6 million.
	Do you think it's wise to refinance that and buy Bitcoin?
	Yeah. I guess you didn't hear the part where I don't give financial advice.
	I can't possibly tell you that.
	Depends where you are in life.
	Here's the thing, right? So I read an article.
	It was a book, The Undercover Economist, not even that long ago.
	I don't know, 15, 16 years ago.
	And it was an economist ripping an article which said, well, of course you should buy a house because that way you have property.
	And you're not wasting your money on rent, right?
	And so, of course, everyone should buy a house and not invest in the stock market unless they already have a house, right?
	And the economists got really angry.
	It was really passionate. You know, economists not known for their volatile William Shatner moods.
	They're all Spock and no Shatner.
	But he was getting really mad and he said, okay, But what about the down payment you have to put down on a house?
	Let's say you've got to put $100,000 down on the house.
	What if you put that money into the stock market and use the profits to rent?
	Then you have a place to live, and it's going to continue to appreciate in value.
	All you're doing is you're comparing all of the pluses of buying a house to all of the minuses of buying stock, which is retarded.
	There's no solution. There are trade-offs in economics.
	Morality, there are solutions, but in economics, there's no solution.
	What should you do with your money?
	There's no answer. Nobody can tell you.
	This is why I don't tell anybody, right?
	Nobody can tell you what to do with your money.
	Should you buy a video game or a book?
	I don't know. Maybe you've been reading a book a day for the last two years and some new game has come out that would give you great pleasure.
	I can't tell you that. Should you invest in education or join a gym?
	I don't know. I can't possibly tell you.
	Because that's to say that there's a right answer in economics.
	There is no right answer in economics.
	So... If Bitcoin goes up and the apartment building gets confiscated by the state because you've got an unvaccinated person hiding in the stairwell, I don't know, then you should have bought Bitcoin.
	If Bitcoin goes down and the value of the real estate goes up, then there's no answer.
	And you've got to pry yourself out of this because I get these questions flying at me.
	Should I do this? Should I do that?
	But there's no answer to any of that.
	There's no answer to any of that.
	I can't tell you. Some people...
	Okay, let me give you an example, right?
	Heath Ledger. Okay, so Heath Ledger, the actor famously known, his last role, which he got a posthumous Oscar for, was the Dark Knight's Joker, right?
	And he was good. He was good.
	And... So Heath Ledger, a young, very talented, good-looking guy from Australia.
	And he achieved some success in Australia, and then he goes and does movies, I think, 10 Things I Hate About You.
	He did A Knight's Tale. I don't know much about what he did, but he was a good-looking guy.
	I don't just say that because people think when I was younger I looked like him.
	Objectively, we're both fantastic.
	Now, so you said Heath Ledger, he's your friend, right?
	Let's say Heath Ledger is 15 or 16 years old, right?
	And he says, I don't know, mate.
	I really feel like I could be a movie star.
	I don't know. I've completely lost the accent.
	So he says, I really feel like I could be a movie star if I could get out of this place.
	And, you know, you see him act a little and he's like, he's good and he's charismatic and good looking and you're like, hey man, you should totally be a movie star.
	It would be fantastic for you.
	Right? Okay, so he goes and becomes a movie star.
	Gets addicted to something and apparently dies of a drug overdose.
	Brittany Murphy style, right? Oh no, Brittany Murphy didn't have any illegal drugs in her system, but I think some guy lured her to the States and abandoned her when she was pregnant.
	I can't remember, but anyway. So you would say to these people, oh yeah, you should totally be a movie star, which leads to his death.
	Or you should say, now it's an empty, what's it Marlon Brando said about acting?
	It's an empty and useless profession.
	So, no, you shouldn't.
	You should do something more meaningful with your life than pretend to be other people in a very corrupt environment.
	So what's the right answer when he's 15 or 16?
	Because you don't know what's going to happen in the future.
	That's the whole point. It's the fog of the future, the fog of war, so to speak.
	Is it good for Heath Ledger to go and become a movie star?
	He made a lot of money, became very famous, and to prepare for playing the Joker, he locked himself in a hotel room for, I don't know, weeks or a month or two or whatever, and just scribbled dangerous, crazy things.
	He just really dove into the role, and it could have been that role that killed him.
	You're talking to Freddie Mercury, back when he was Farouk Bulsara from Zanzibar, and he's unloading luggage at Heathrow Airport, and he says, like, I really want to be a famous singer and a songwriter and a musician, right?
	Okay, well, he then became famous enough that he banged everything with a vaguely breathing orifice and ended up tragically getting AIDS and dying in a horrible, extended, painful manner.
	there.
	You know, but you've got such a gift, right?
	All of the people, a lot of people who succeed, and I remember someone talking about this many, many years ago, a mental health professional saying that, you know, one of the problems with artists, successful artists, is they can get addicted to drugs because they've got lots of money, they've got no fixed schedule, they don't have to work.
	all day, they can write.
	Whereas if you've got to get up and go to work, why is it that so many writers and so on become alcoholics?
	Well, because they don't have to write.
	They get money flowing in from their previous books and it's not a necessity.
	Whereas, you know, you have had jobs.
	I've had jobs, of course. You've got to get up at 7 o'clock in the morning.
	I had a paper route. I had to get up at 6 o'clock in the morning.
	And it's hard, right?
	So you just can't go out.
	Late at night because you've got to get up in the morning.
	So if you're not that successful and you've got to get up and go to work and pay your bills and get up and go to work, okay, there's some things about that that are a real drag.
	And you dream a lot of times of having all this money and so on.
	But people who win the lottery, almost always their lives become completely catastrophic because they didn't earn it, right?
	And so what's the right answer for Heath Ledger or Farouk Bulsara slash Freddie Mercury or Brittany Murphy?
	What is the answer?
	If you look at Corey Haim, Corey Feldman, the hell that they went through as children.
	If you look at Macaulay Culkin from the Home Alone series and other movies, he was in a movie with Uncle Buck, I think, with John Candy.
	He was very good in that. Okay, so he's a child actor.
	You'd think that'd be fantastic.
	Millions of dollars, fame, blah, blah, blah, right?
	But he ended up in a really rough place in life.
	Whitney Houston, yeah, boy, you know, an amazing singer, beautiful, beautiful woman, amazing singer, amazing performer.
	I mean, I literally could spend half the day watching her Star Spangled Banner, which she did live at some Super Bowl.
	I mean, acrobatic, glorious, gorgeous, easy, beautiful vocals, just incredible stuff.
	So... What does it mean to be successful?
	This is the big fundamental question, right?
	Does being successful mean that all restraints, like you understand, as a species, we're built for restraints.
	We're built for scarcity.
	That's all we're built. All animals are built for scarcity.
	Our bodies are built for scarcity, which is why when we have too much food and a soft couch, we get fat and it's ugly and unpleasant and bad for our health, right?
	So all human beings are built for scarcity.
	Yet we thirst for abundance.
	We desperately want abundance, but we're built for scarcity.
	Which is why when you have abundance, it all becomes about self-denial.
	It all becomes about self-denial.
	When you have enough food that you can get fat, what do you have to do all day?
	You've got to say no to your food. What are you going to do all day?
	When you don't have to be a fighter or a hunter and you don't have to exercise, what do you have to do?
	You have to say, go to the gym, lift some weights, right?
	Last night I played a game of Goose Goose Duck and I was on my bike machine just grinding away.
	It's boring as hell, but at least the game makes it fun, right?
	So you've got to say no to your food.
	You've got to say yes to exercise.
	All of these things which normally nature would do for you.
	Because nature would say, well, there's no food to say no to, so go hunting.
	Oh, okay. Well, that means I don't have to say no to food, but I do have to say yes to exercise because the rabbits aren't going to jump into my pot.
	So there's the paradox of abundance.
	We desperately want it.
	Totally not built for it. We're built for scarcity and movement.
	Scarcity and movement, the two things are related, right?
	You want the harvest, you've got to do the work.
	You want the food, you've got to go hunt, right?
	So scarcity and movement. And modern world, what does it give us?
	Access and stillness.
	That's what it gives us. Access, food, and no need to move.
	So, this is something that you really need to think about, particularly those of you who are into crypto, right?
	Maybe you've made a couple of bucks, right?
	And you're happy about that.
	I'm not saying don't be happy about it.
	I think it's wonderful. But, but, but, but, you know, there's some guy, some guy who's been buying the dip for like five years, and he's 300 pounds, got cheeto dust on him and doesn't know what the hell to do with himself.
	And he can't even travel now.
	Easily, right? So, really, really, really, you know, I've had from the very beginning of my show, I've had an absolutely consistent mantra, I don't tell people what to do.
	I mean, don't kill yourself and all that when I have people who are suicidal in the call-in shows, of course, right?
	But no, I can't tell people what to do.
	So if you're asking other people to tell you what to do, should I buy this?
	Should I sell this? Should I do this?
	Should I do that? If you're asking other people to tell you what to do, you're missing the basic fact that there is not an answer to these things.
	I don't know if you should buy crypto.
	I don't know if you should sell.
	You know, there are some people who just say, well, sell everything you own and buy crypto.
	Right? I don't think that's a good answer.
	Because you're saying there's, well, just having more crypto, that's all it is, man.
	That's all it is. Okay, well, what are you going to live in a shoebox?
	You know, what if you live in a shoebox, you catch pneumonia and you die?
	You're taking a sort of silly example, right?
	But it's like, well, if I have the choice between buying a new pair of shoes and buying crypto, I'll buy crypto.
	It's like, well, why? Why?
	What if your shoes are falling apart and they're not providing any arch support and you have sore heels and you now have additional numbers on the screen and you can't walk without pain?
	I mean, just silly things like that.
	I don't know. I don't know what the answer is.
	Maybe you should sell everything you own and buy crypto.
	Maybe you should sell all your crypto and enjoy it because life is short.
	I don't know. I have no idea.
	I have no idea what you should do.
	And that humility is foundational to a free society.
	When you ask people what to do, what should I do?
	Should I buy my crypto?
	Should I sell this and buy this?
	What you're doing is you're subscribing to a totalitarian mindset.
	I don't mean you are a totalitarian, but it's a totalitarian mindset, which is that there's an answer as to how you should live.
	And of course, if there is an answer as to how you should live, Then you'll elevate a guru.
	You'll elevate some particular personality.
	You're offering up your sovereign individual free will and power to somebody outside of yourself to tell you what to do.
	That's dehumanizing to yourself.
	I know I'm really going hard on this, but it's a really, really important point because this has come up a whole bunch of times in the chat, and I really wanted to address this for a while, so you get the full caliber of this, right?
	Imagining that there's an answer as to how to live creates a hierarchy and usually a political one.
	Right? Were the vaccines the very best possible way to deal with the pandemic?
	I don't know. I mean, I think it would have been helpful to know that five to six months afterwards, for some of them, the protection they offer you drops massively.
	But you see, thinking that there's an answer out there about how to live, should I be a movie star?
	Nobody can tell you that.
	Michael Hutchins, very charismatic guy, skinny as a rail, great singer, great front man for NXS, appeared to have hung himself because he couldn't get Tiger Lily out of England for Christmas.
	I mean... Or, I don't know, was it auto-erotic asphyxiation?
	But it wasn't good.
	It wasn't good. It always strikes me, like, people like Jim Morrison of The Doors, right?
	The last 24 hours is like this series.
	Jim Morrison, fantastic-looking guy, not a great singer, but a powerful frontman and a great vocalist, if that makes any sense.
	Could a guy, just about any woman he wanted, ends up with this Monster.
	Of a woman.
	Died of an overdose.
	Jim Belushi. Were they successful?
	I mean, you look at Freddie Mercury in his Live Aid glory.
	Yeah. Like Mussolini with a falsetto.
	Were they successful?
	They got what they wanted and it destroyed them.
	So don't go out asking people what you should do with your life.
	You have to confront that existential angst that there aren't any answers.
	Now, what you shouldn't do with your life, there are answers.
	Right? Don't initiate the use of force.
	Don't cheat. Don't steal.
	Don't rape. Don't murder.
	Yes, there are things to not do with your life.
	But what should you do with your life?
	With that bare minimum, I'm not a sociopath standard satisfied, no one can tell you.
	You have to own that yourself because the moment we all start owning our own lives and stop looking for answers, we stop elevating people to have power over us and tell us what to do.
	The same energy dissipation that comes when you ask someone, should I sell this and buy Bitcoin?
	It's exactly the same energy when people say, oh, the vaccine is the only way to deal with the pandemic.
	Okay, wow, there's an answer.
	Because you're already asking everyone in authority or with knowledge or someone you're willing to defer your free will to.
	to, you're already asking them for the answer, which implies that there is an answer, which justifies centralized coercive control.
	See, somebody brings a ton of iron out of the earth, right?
	How should it be used?
	You know the answer.
	Nobody knows. Nobody knows how that ton of earth should be used.
	Should it go into a locomotive?
	Should it go into a computer?
	Should it go into a cell phone? Should it go into girders?
	Nobody knows. Absolutely nobody on God's green earth knows how that ton of iron should be used.
	Nobody has a clue. Yeah, Chris Farley, Prince of 57, Hendrix.
	Make swords! Right.
	So if you really want to make the swords from the iron, because you're a LARPer, Then you will bid higher than everyone else.
	And then you will...
	But nobody knows in advance because nobody knows how high you're going to bid.
	Because if somebody knew how high you were going to bid, somebody else would just bid one penny higher and get it instead, right?
	But they don't know how high you're going to bid, so at some point they drop off.
	It's like poker. Should I have been an actor, a writer, a poet, an academic, a software entrepreneur, a philosopher, a podcaster...
	Should I have been a Twitch game streamer?
	Well, it might have been slightly less controversial.
	What should I do with my life?
	No one can tell you, and having the thirst for someone to tell you Is masked and covered up sorrow for an undirected childhood?
	Ooh, ready to go deep?
	You ready to go deep?
	Because you didn't have anyone guiding you as a child.
	You're looking for people to guide you as an adult, but that which is appropriate for a child is enslavement for an adult.
	That which is totally appropriate for a child is an enslavement for an adult.
	When my daughter has conflicts, she will come to me and say, this is what's going on.
	And we will have great chats about it.
	I may have some valuable or useful things to say.
	She has some valuable or useful things to say.
	I still don't tell her what to do.
	I may make a suggestion, maybe this or maybe that.
	How does this, right? But, you know, when she was little, we baby-proofed the whole house.
	Toddler-proofed the whole house, right?
	She couldn't stick forks into sockets.
	She couldn't fall down the stairs. You make things safe.
	Because she's a toddler.
	She's two. She's three, right? Mobile enough to get around, but not sensible enough or mature enough to not fall down.
	So if you grew up in a lord-of-the-fly, state-of-nature, neglected, bullshit, non-parented environment, then you've got this hole in your heart where you weren't told what to do in the right way and in an age-appropriate way.
	And so because you had shitty parents, you're always looking for a new parent.
	You're always looking for someone new who can tell you what to do so that you feel taken care of and secure, but you're not taken care of or secure.
	You're exploited. Look, it's no secret I have some crypto, and if I was to tell everyone, just drop everything and buy crypto, you understand?
	I can't say that impartially.
	I can't. So I won't.
	I won't. I won't.
	You want an authority figure to be benevolent towards you because you didn't get it as a child.
	You didn't get guided as a child.
	You didn't get loved enough that people sat down with you, figured out what you wanted, figured out good strategies to help you achieve it, guided you along the tough and thorny upward hill, twisty, turny, Mobius strip path to a wise and mature adulthood.
	You were untended, you grew to seed, and you're looking for just about anyone to tell you what to do because you have this hunger for being told what to do because you had to invent everything for yourself as a child.
	I understand that.
	Look, I understand that.
	I really, really do. Giving up somebody telling you how to live is a very hard thing to do in this life.
	I don't think it's hard when you...
	I raised well, I think that's just a natural progression, a natural path upwards towards self-autonomy.
	But if you're raised badly, if you're abused, neglected, both, whatever, and the schools are even worse in many ways these days, then you're going to have a giant wound, like a giant wound in you, that you just had to feel your own way forward with no guidance, or whatever guidance you got was terrible.
	It was the wrong way, the wrong thing to do.
	So you're desperate for some angel to come down into your life and say, oh, here's what to do.
	I care about enough to invest in your life, to figure you out, to figure out what you want, to figure out what you need, and to give you a roadmap to achieve it.
	You understand why the state has to shred the family because then it creates a hole for authority that people want to fill the state in with.
	It stung, right?
	I'm trying to sting you.
	I'm not at all.
	I'm trying to identify the wound that you have because you'll never be happy as long as you're deferring to others.
	You may have some relief.
	Someone's going to tell you what to do. Oh, take this job.
	And you take the job and it turns out to be fine, but it'll just turn to ash in your hands because you didn't make the decision.
	And of course, every time you take someone's advice, oh, take this job.
	Oh, I took this job. Wow, I'm kind of happy.
	Well, all that does is reinforce that you have to go to other people for your decisions, which means they're not your decisions anymore.
	Somebody says, so true, my parents still don't know how to provide any advice.
	Yes.
	That's what the CDC does to the world, but for adults, right?
	Lashky kid, I had to figure it out on my own for the most part.
	Yeah, same. This is now a therapy session.
	You're not comfortable with it, man.
	I'm sorry that you're still so immature that you've got to try and deflate these kinds of conversations.
	I'm just talking about facts and history.
	Almost sounds like me because I had no guidance and was abused.
	I'm sorry to hear about that, Jim.
	Yeah, we all do.
	We all do.
	Still do, but I'm discovering more and more things that I want on my own.
	Wonderful.
	Somebody says, Dad was chasing skirts, so Mom was always at work and the creek raised me.
	Commies ruined my family before it could even begin.
	Huh.
	You're 100% right about my childhood's death.
	Thanks. Spot on, Steph.
	Listen, I appreciate that. And I say this with immense amounts of love and respect for this audience.
	Like, it's one of the nice things about having the jazz club as opposed to the stadium is I can speak with a directness that is manifested by my deep admiration and respect for you as somebody who listens to this, particularly live, right?
	It means you understand the value of philosophy and...
	You can handle it, right?
	Whereas if I was talking to a larger group, it would be, I'd have to dilute and be tentative and all of that.
	So it's great that you guys can take the virtuoso speeches that the general public would simply find confusing and alienating.
	And that's great. You know, there's a real plus to all of this stuff.
	But no, don't, don't.
	Let people tell you what not to do.
	Don't do drugs. Don't, don't, don't.
	Don't be a criminal. Don't be violent.
	Don't write. But you understand that the absence of fathers in the home is directly causal to the medical absolutism being foisted upon us.
	People aren't getting guidance as children and therefore they want to take orders as adults because they don't want to confront the pain Of an unguided youth.
	Of an unguided childhood.
	They don't want to really figure out that their parents, your parents maybe, just didn't care about you enough to sit down and figure out what's the right way to live.
	I remember as a kid, I was 11 maybe, I had, I think they're still around, probably not as much now they're online, but I had one of those car racing sets, like they've got the single track in the middle and you kind of whip the cars around with electricity.
	And they're really frustrating.
	They don't fit together too well.
	The cars used to always fly off and all of that.
	But, you know, it was interesting, right?
	So, anyway, I had this one curved piece that I needed to fit together to make the racetrack.
	And it just wouldn't fit.
	It wouldn't click together. And I got so mad that I twisted it.
	And it broke. I remember sitting down with my mom and I said...
	I got so mad at this little bit of racetrack that I broke it.
	And now I can't...
	I can't fix it.
	I can't... Now I can't play with my car set at all.
	Is that... Is that...
	That doesn't feel like the right way to do something, but I don't know what else to do.
	Now, going to my mom for advice on how to manage your temper was like going for me...
	Going to me for advice about a mohawk.
	So... It's hard to know, man.
	It took me until probably my mid-twenties to rein in my temper and to find a more productive and positive way to approach the world.
	So, yeah.
	Grew up in a single-mother household, but I never had any male influencers, only a semi-functioning alcoholic mother on benefits.
	Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so now the authoritarianism of the state comes to a lot of people as kind of a relief because they don't have the muscle to lift the heavy weight called adulthood.
	So they're just, oh, great, somebody else lift it for me.
	Somebody said, I had a crazy temper until about 24.
	Somebody says, I listen to it.
	Sucks being good, Colin. I grew up with indifference.
	acknowledging that is helping.
	Yeah, so last thing I'll say about this, and I appreciate you guys letting me sort of wrench this to one side from a Bitcoin talk, but...
	There's great creativity and opportunity in growing up untutored, right?
	So do you remember how I was saying earlier the guy, the economist, who was like, well, if you compare all the pluses of buying a house with all the minuses of investing in the stock market, you're not saying anything sensible at all, right?
	It's like, should I go to work or should I go to the beach?
	Well, if I go to the beach, it's sunny and fun.
	I'll have a great time. And if I go to work, I'll just be stuck in a cubicle.
	Well, by refusing to give both arguments sufficient weight, you're just programming yourself and you're avoiding free will, right?
	So you say, well, I can go to the beach.
	That'll be fun. But I really do need to make some money because I've got rent to pay.
	Okay, that's a more complex and nuanced.
	And you need free speech for that, right?
	You need free speech for this. Otherwise, you can just get programmed with all this propaganda where all the positives are going to the beach compared to all the negatives of going to work.
	It's not a decision anymore, right?
	All the positives of the vaccines are compared with all the negatives of everything else.
	It's like we haven't made a decision, really.
	You just programmed people into subservience to subject themselves to your will.
	But when you haven't been tutored, when you haven't been guided, it's painful.
	But all you're doing is focusing in all the negatives.
	Of not being guided. And not the unbelievable positives that are available to you just by reaching out the hand of thought and grabbing them.
	Right? Yes, there are significant negatives to not being tutored as a child, to not being instructed, to not being raised.
	but also absolutely massive opportunities for creative and original self-definition.
	I'm sure that you can look in the mirror and see aspects of that.
	I know that I can. Could I have been as original thinker as I am?
	Could I have been as original a thinker as I am if I had been tutored?
	No. No. Not a bit.
	The people who teach themselves how to play an instrument often end up far better than those who go through some sort of formal instruction.
	The people who go through formal instruction are good at playing other people's pieces.
	The people who explore the musical instrument and themselves on their own generally end up more creative.
	They can write songs rather than just play them.
	Because here's the thing. If you go around asking other people what to do with your life, you avoid the pain of confronting being untutored and the lack of caring that people had about you.
	But you also avoid the incredible possibility of self-invention, of self-creation, of originality, of clear thought.
	If you're a blank slate, it's very painful because everyone expects there to be writing on there because having writing on your slate means that someone cared about you enough to jot down a few things you should do.
	But if you've got a blank slate, you can look at that and say, God, I need someone to write on that, because otherwise I feel like shit.
	It's just an abandoned empty slate in a garbage dump.
	Nothing. Nobody cares. It doesn't matter.
	I don't exist. Nothing on that slate.
	It's humiliating.
	Yeah, I get that. I get that, man.
	But a blank slate is only agonizing if you don't pick up a mocker.
	You pick up that marker and you write on the blank slate of your untutored existence.
	You're free of the past.
	You're like a time traveler from a future where ideals have actually mastered the mammal power grabs of falseness known as contemporary existence.
	You pick up that marker and you start writing!
	What you want. What's right.
	What's true. What's honest.
	What has integrity and consistency and universality and morality.
	You write on that slate.
	And then you look back and you say, thank God I wasn't tutored.
	Because all the tutoring would have put me in some place where I'd have to erase half of it anyway, and that's really hard.
	So look at the positives of being untutored, and you won't need anybody else to tell you what to do.
	Somebody says, turned into a functioning alcoholic with two kids of my own, but I work hard every day, even if or when my head is swimming.
	Stop drinking, man. Stop drinking.
	Stop it. Stop it right now.
	See? Here I'm telling you what not to do, which is drink.
	There's no such thing as a functioning alcoholic with two kids.
	That's a total lie you're telling yourself, or rather a lie that the people who want you drunk rather than thinking clearly want you to believe.
	No. There's no such thing as a functional alcoholic when it comes to kids.
	Figure out what's at the root of this.
	Figure out who wants you drunk. Whenever you have a dysfunctional habit in your life, just figure out who it benefits and you'll be able to solve it like that.
	All right. What do you say about Tudors should remind you of Benjamin Franklin?
	No college was entirely self-taught.
	Yeah. Well, and Socrates, original thinker, Jesus, original thinker, some of those powerful thinkers in history.
	Alright, I should probably bail because I have a show to do tonight as well.
	And I want to make sure that I'm prepared for that.
	I've got a bunch of stuff to do in between.
	Guys, thank you so much for dropping by.
	I love you guys so much for being the most amazing and wonderful audience in the world.
	It sounds pandering, but I absolutely completely and totally believe it.
	And let's figure out what we close off with here.
	Oh yeah, that's good. So 69,120 for...
	The bitty coins! Not a bad day's work.
	And thanks so much everyone for dropping by.
	I will see you tonight at 7pm Eastern Standard Time.
	Maybe I'll do a call-in and we will take you from there.
	Thank you so much for dropping by today.
	Such a great pleasure. Such great questions.
	You really, really do bring out the very best in me and I appreciate that more than I can say.
	So have yourself a fantastic afternoon.
	I will see you tonight at 7pm.
	Lots of love from my peer. I'll talk to you soon.

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