All Episodes
Previous Next
March 31, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:29:26
THE SHORT UNHAPPY LIFE OF FIAT CURRENCIES
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
I feel like we should just jump straight in, but at the same time, at the very same self same time, I feel like I, um...
I just need to say hi, ask you how you're doing, and what's new with you.
Are you guys ready to talk with deep, if not downright dastardly desperation about what is going on?
Yeah, let's cover this, S-H-Y-T-E, as they would say.
Yes, and don't forget, please, if you're just new here, like if you're new, hey, enjoy, do the live stream for free, but dear God alive, my finances are a mess.
There was the pandemic. There was no travel, no documentaries, no speeches, deplatforming.
And I didn't ask for any donations really for about two years.
So freedomand.com forward slash donate would be great.
You can of course join this fabulous locals thing.
The deal is still on 12 months for 10.
And I would really, really appreciate it.
Getting me back into, well, some reasonable fiscal territory would be a great advantage for me, for the show.
Let's not let them cancel us.
What do you say? Let's all pull together and do what we need to do.
So, all right. It's worth donating for the...
Yeah, yeah. There's lots of great stuff here.
Lots of great stuff. It's a really great community.
A variety of great communities. And I will tell you that if you donate now, just send me a message on Locals, and I will send you the private Telegram group as well.
Oh, I've got a book coming to you guys that will just blow your gourd right out of your armpits.
So, yes. Yeah, it should be available in hot cover, but...
Definitely, it'll be EPUB, audiobook, PDF, and read online.
It's really, really great stuff.
All right. Your life will change for the better when you donate to FDR. That is correct.
Any hint about the new book?
It's everything, man.
It's everything. Voluntarism, peaceful parenting, how we get there.
Boom! It's the whole thing.
Yeah, you can pay 50 bucks for 12 months instead of 5 bucks a month.
So, yes, it's a great book.
I am absolutely... And two free books out there right now, justpoornovel.com and almostnovel.com.
You can get that. Do you accept rubles donations?
Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much.
We can do anything. All right. Well, enough of the pitchy pitches and almost bloomy away.
Yeah, it's a great book, right? And I will say not too bad in terms of the acne chops for the reading, I would add, as well.
But look, let's get...
So hit me with a 1 to 10.
Just hit me with a 1 to 10 right here, right now.
Tell me what your knowledge is of, like, fiat currency and gold standards.
I just want to gauge what it is that I'm doing.
We got a 7. We got a 0, 7, a 9, 7, 7, 5, 6.
Right. It's like you're all rating my sex skills.
69. Well, that's close enough.
Isn't that what summer of 69 is really all about?
All right. So it looks like you're all fairly knowledgeable, so I'll just touch on it really briefly, and then we'll touch into what the Ruskies are doing, and we'll game it out.
We'll game it out. Hello, everyone.
And listen, again, I was very sorry.
I was gone for a couple months, but I'm back.
And I fought my way back to you guys as soon as I possibly could.
And it's great to be back.
All right. So let's get into it.
Real brief history as to why this matters.
And then we'll get into it.
Because Russia just made some moves that...
I think I'm pretty much going to rock, if not destabilize, the global psychotic fantasy system.
There's fantasy football and then there's fantasy currency, right?
So, real brief, what is currency?
Currency is a medium of exchange between disparate goods and services, right?
I remember reading this story when I was a kid, you know, like a guy wants a loaf of bread and he has a basket of apples.
But he goes to the baker and the baker says, I already have enough apples.
So then he's got to go to the fishmongers.
And the fishmonger says, yeah, okay, I'll take some apples.
I'll give you some fish. Then he takes the fish to the baker and the baker says, no, I don't like eating fish.
Fish is no good for me. So then he's got to find – so you get the whole thing.
You've got to trade and you can't have any kind of division of labor or productive or positive economy if you've got to do this kind of exchange.
So you need a medium of exchange.
Do you guys know the freaky things that people have used as mediums of exchange throughout the general course of human history?
Have you seen the freaky stuff that people have used?
Do you guys know what freaky stuff has been going on?
We have shells for sure.
Not the World War II kind, but on a beach with a conch shells.
There has been just a wide variety of crazy stuff that has been used because that's what people need.
You need something that everyone recognizes is valuable.
Aristotle said there are four characteristics of a currency.
I can never remember them all, usually at least, but, you know, something like it has to be divisible without losing value, right?
If you cut a computer in half, it's not particularly valuable, although two halves could serve as a Mac.
Boom! I don't know.
I like Thunderbolt. But anyway...
It's got to be divisible without losing value.
It has to be portable.
It has to be somewhat transferable.
People have to value it in general.
There's a lot of stuff. And traditionally, it's been bimetallic, right?
Gold for the expensive stuff, silver for the cheaper stuff.
You think of gold as a nice suit and silver as a steak dinner.
And throughout the course of human history, gold has bought you.
An ounce of gold has bought you a really nice suit and an ounce of silver has bought you a steak dinner.
That is pretty constant all throughout human history.
Now, the idea of a currency being constant throughout all human history is something that we, in the tumble-dry psychosis of central banking, just really can't understand.
When I came to Canada in 1977, you could buy one, count them, one candy bar for 10 cents.
Not too long after, it jumped to a buck, so you had a 10 to 1, right?
That's about 1,000% inflation.
It's really, really quite mental.
And trying to survive in this madcap psychosis of fiat currency is really nutty.
Durability, divisibility, recognizability, portability, scarcity.
Yes, thank you very much. Scarcity.
Yeah, you can't use sand as currency because it is too...
DDRPS. All right.
Thank you. I appreciate that. Yes, scarcity, of course, right?
I appreciate that. Thank you for the reminder.
Fantastic. So, here's the thing.
It needs to be, and also it's nice if it is hard to get and you get a kind of constant supply.
So the world's supply of gold increases, Bueller, by what percentage every year?
The supply of gold in the world increases by what percentage every year?
Oh, and by the way, is it the case that all the gold that has ever been mined in human history can fit into two Olympic-sized swimming pools or something like that, right?
Yeah, 2%, I've heard 3%, and it's kind of stable, right?
Because if the price of gold goes up, It means that there's scarcity.
And so people will mine more gold in order to bring it to the marketplace to keep it at around 2%.
If there's an oversupply of gold, then people stop selling it.
And because the price is down, they stop mining it.
So yeah, it stays around 2% every year, which in terms of the real growth of an economy is from ancient standard times, not too bad and all that.
So that is, yeah, 2% inflation over 17 years, your buying power is cut in half, right?
So all gold can fit into a baseball field cube.
But a baseball field is, oh yeah, I guess it's a diamond on its side as a cube, right?
Okay, so originally money was gold and it wasn't anything else.
And then, of course, you know, the crap coins of the late Roman Empire is when they started flushing all this copper and tin and garbage into the gold coins to the point where there was almost no gold left in the supposed gold coins.
There's also pyrite, also known as fool's gold, which is lighter and you can actually experience people can bite it and find out whether it's real gold or not.
When I was gold panning and prospecting, you got really excited until you found out it was pyrite because it just drifted in the water, kind of bouncing around like a wraith in a stream.
So gold is money or has been for most of human history.
Now, of course, gold, if you transport it and somebody steals it, that's pretty bad, right?
So it's also heavy to transport.
You can't hide it. So when you wanted to move gold, say, from Los Angeles to New York, you could either transport the bars across country, highly risky and dangerous, or what you could do was you could write a piece of paper saying, you know, this is equivalent to an ounce of gold or whatever it would be, right? And then you would send the piece of paper across, and if the piece of paper was lost, you'd simply cancel it.
And so this was a way of being able to work with gold without having to carry gold all over the place.
So that was a huge advantage, of course, for people.
And then what happened was the banks began printing more of these receipts than they actually had of gold, which is not the end of the world.
People get real mad at fractional reserve banking.
I don't have any issues with it.
It's just... You know, how much risk are you going to take?
Are you kind of the guy who vacations in the safest possible place that he can find?
Used to be a cruise ship. Now even the fully vaxxed triple deck of cruise ships are getting their COVID outbreaks.
Or you're the kind of guy who just wakes up to fry bacon in the nude and just see what lands on your nipples.
So depending on your level of risk, if you want to go with a bank that is going to lend out 10 times its reserves, that's fine.
It just means they're going to pay you more interest, but there's more risk of the bank going tits-up if people start to call in all of their loans, or they fail their loans.
Sorry, call in all of their, they want to cash out their bank account, or the case is that their loans fail, right?
So if you remember, a bank is making about 1% on every loan, maybe 2% in a good economy, a strong economy, which means if 1 out of 50 or 1 out of 100 loans fails completely, they've lost all that money, right?
It's really, really rough.
Which is why banks tend to be very conservative.
When I was an entrepreneur and I had occasionally cover payroll by signing my personal signature to the entire payroll of the company, it's really quite exciting and does not help your sleep.
Instead of counting sheep, you're counting years in debtor's prison.
Sorry, debtor's prison only exists for men who don't pay exorbitant child support.
They started using money, a paper, as a representation for gold.
But it was always supposed to be cashed in as gold.
You should always have been able to take every dollar, take it into the bank, and get an equivalent amount of gold for it.
Of course, governments can print money.
They can't print gold.
So, of course, as soon as you start to get paper currency as a representation of gold, governments want central banking, which means they want to be able to print as much money as they can and not tie it to gold.
But, of course, people have a strong suspicion.
I mean, if you remember, it was the continental dollar or whatever it was just went completely insane.
And, of course, the 1920s in Germany where you had – people would burn – Their money, because it was cheaper to burn money than to use it to buy firewood, you can also see pictures online of kids flying kites made out of currency.
It was all really nutty stuff, as you can imagine, right?
So there were lots of examples, and there was France, of course, is one.
I did an entire podcast on this back in the day, the incredible hyperinflation that happened in France.
Just absolutely appalling.
And there's an old saying about central banking, like if you can control the money's If you can control the country's money supply, you really don't care who makes the laws.
It's completely irrelevant because you're able to dial up and down the actual physics.
If you've got an incompetent person playing a competent person at tennis, but you can dial up and down gravity in a moment and you're seeing the whole game in slow motion, the incompetent person can totally beat the competent person.
You just dial up the gravity.
Would you rather be able to dial up and down gravity in a game or would you rather...
Be really good at tennis.
Well, it doesn't matter how good you are at tennis.
People can change the physics. And printing or withholding the printing of money supply inevitably means that you're controlling the entire physics of everything that goes on in the economy.
If something's happening to the economy as a whole, like if inflation is happening to the economy as a whole, it's the money supply.
Always, always, always.
Because that's the one thing that's common to each economic transaction.
I mean, if inflation is happening just in computers, which it never does, but let's say it did, it'd be because there's some particular shortage or something's happened in the supply chain in computers, or there's a sudden spike in demand for computers, that's local.
But when something's affecting the economy as a whole, then you have got to look at the currency.
Now, 1913 onwards, a similar case.
The First World War, in general, The First World War could not have lasted more than six months if countries had had to actually use their gold reserves.
So what they did was they jumped off, for the most part, they jumped off the relationship or the one-to-one relationship between gold and money, and they disconnected it.
They went on fiat currency.
Fiat, of course, means by command, by decree.
The money has value because you're ordered to use it, and primarily you're ordered to use it because you have to use it to pay your tax bills, and the government won't accept it.
Anything else. And they also compel everyone in the economy to use it.
So this is legal tender to be used for the payment of all debts public and private.
Or all costs public and private.
So there's...
I think it was 1935.
What did the U.S. say? It's $40 an ounce.
Gold is $40 an ounce.
And they kept this going for quite a long time.
A $35 an ounce or something like that.
And then there was two waves of gold confiscations happened in the 1930s.
And then in 1971, Nixon disconnected the U.S. dollar from gold.
And, of course, the U.S. dollar was going to go in free fall at that point.
Was it 35 bucks?
Yeah.
So the U.S. dollar was going to go into free fall at that point.
But Nixon worked out a deal with the Saudis and said, okay, you make sure that all of the oil settlements are in U.S. dollars, thus propping up the value of the U.S. dollar.
And will give you a military presence that will keep your kingdom safe.
And that has been going on.
Of course, it's one of the things that pissed off bin Laden so much was the presence of US troops in the Holy Land of Saudi Arabia and so on.
So that's really how it's been going on.
And of course, the rumors are, I don't know if they're true or not, but the rumors are that people like Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi who were trying to bypass the US dollar and create their own gold-backed or oil-backed or basket or commodity-backed currency, well, were kind of taken out and not in that fun American graffiti kind of way.
So, it is just wild what is going on.
Now, of course, the moment that you have control of the money supply, you want to print as much money as humanly possible within some limitations, right?
So, If you have an economy of a trillion dollars and you print a hundred million dollars, you may be okay if the economy is growing, right?
Because as the economy grows, you want the supply of money to grow so that there's somewhat constant set of values, right?
So a candy bar is always 20 cents or whatever it is.
But when you...
When you increase the money supply, let's say the economy is growing 10%, but you print $1.2 trillion, right?
So you have an extra $100 million in the economy.
Okay, well, that's going to mean that prices are going to go up 8% or 9% or whatever it is, right?
So prices are going to go up if you print more money than the value that is in the economy, right?
So what the government always has to do when they get central banking is they also have to control the interest rate, right?
Interest is simply the price of money given that human beings prefer things sooner rather than later and later enough means you can't get them at all because you're dead, right?
So human beings want things sooner and you pay to have things sooner rather than later and the price of paying for that is interest.
Interest is the value of having something now rather than next year or a year after.
So Governments don't like when interest rates are set by the free market because what happens is the free market watches the money supply and as soon as the money supply increases, they increase inflation to take into account, right? Because if inflation is running at 10% and you're getting 5% return on loans, then you're losing 5%, right?
So you always have to bake that into all of your loans.
And so if the money supply increases, interest rates go up.
When interest rates go up, then people prefer to save rather than borrow to invest.
And so interest rates would then go down.
Now, one of the reasons why, I mean, there's two basic reasons why governments like printing money.
One is that it presents the illusion that the government is adding value to the economy when it's not adding value to the economy, right?
So if you print an extra $100 million on a $1 trillion economy, it looks like, and you spend that, it looks like you've created value.
And, of course, governments are addicted to the fantasy or the illusion that they're adding value to the economy.
So if they can create money and then put it into the hands of people, then it looks like they're adding value.
And then people think, oh, the government's paying for stuff.
How exciting.
And they get this weird illusion that government is like, I don't know, crazy old mega wealthy Uncle Algernon who just loves showering presents on his nieces or whatever, right?
Now, but the way it works, why it's so incredibly valuable for people to be able to print money is that when you print that extra $100 million, what happens is you get to hand it out to your friends.
It goes into big banks.
And those people, they get that money at full value.
Because the inflationary pressures have not hit yet at the entrance of that money.
So the first person to spend the first dollar of that hundred million dollars gets that dollar at full value.
So the people who get the money first are stealing from everybody else.
And then the people who get that money last, which is usually the poor, the people at the real bottom of the barrel or long end of the stick or end of the wag of the tail of the dog of the economy, the people who get that money last, We're good to go.
They're the ones who – and that's the poorest, right?
This is why anybody who's a socialist or a communist or who claims to care about the poor that is not virulently opposed to central banking doesn't care about the poor, doesn't care about any of this stuff.
All they want to do is gain power, right?
It's a huge amount of power.
To be able to create money, hand it to friends and have them spend it at full value and get the poor, those on fixed incomes, you know, the old, the decrepit, the handicapped, the people on disability.
All those people really take it to the shorts when it comes to inflation.
So, sorry if that's a real quick thing about all of this, right?
So, what's going on?
Let's sort of jump forward here.
And just before I start this, right?
It is a really tragic thing in public policy these days that no one ever asks what's the downside.
I remember many years ago presenting a business plan and a corporation and a software Executable to a bunch of investors, right?
And the investors, you know, they hit you hard with questions.
They hammer your heart with questions.
And good for them. You know, it's their money, so they care about what happens to it.
You know, like, okay, how realistic are these objectives?
What are your competitors? What is the growth of the marketplace going to look like?
How difficult it is for other people to recreate this software?
What are your previous contacts in the industry?
Like, boom, boom, boom, just asking you like crazy to validate what it is that you're doing.
And if we had...
A not-dumbed-down population, and IQs have been dropping all over the place, right?
If we had a not-dumbed-down population, or if we had reporters who still did what they used to do, when the government was like, we're going to put sanctions on Russia, they would say, okay, what are the potential downsides?
What are the potential risks? What could happen?
What will Russia do?
Because they have clearly known about the hostility of the Western media against Russia for the last 15 years.
I think it's about 15 years that they went really nuts on Russia.
You know, China facilitates the release of COVID-19 by withholding person-to-person transmission and suppressing dissent and revelations about what's going on.
And of course, if...
And nobody sanctions Russia, right?
But... Sorry, nobody sanctions China.
But Russia, of course, acts defensively against the relentless eastward spread of NATO and everybody sanctions them.
So that's the big question, right?
And if we had...
Intelligent people running the conversation, they'd say, okay, let's game this out, right?
Before all of these decisions were made, let's game this out.
Okay, so if we sanction Russia and you're Russia, you're not just going to sit there and take it, right?
What are you going to do?
And gaming this out, I don't know if we've got too many superhero movies or Marvel movies or something like that, but it's almost like, well, you know, Russia doesn't have any kryptonite, so we're good, man.
We're fine. We're excellent.
We're ready to go. So, the gaming out of what happens, because the sanctions are like, we're going to cripple Russia's economy.
It's like, well, Russia's not just going to sit there and let that happen, right?
I mean, it's sort of like somebody nails up your front door and says, we've trapped them inside their house.
It's like, you know, there are windows and a back door and a chimney.
Just go out some other way, right?
So, the lack of gaming out, because this charge to war, this rush to sanctions and we're just going to punish them and we're the good guys and they're the bad guys and all that.
We have to look at the actual geopolitical implications of what's going on.
And again, I'm sort of peeling back the morality here because we're already in a situation of coercion, right, because of the invasion and because of the sanctions and so on, and because of the funding, the significant funding of the war effort in Ukraine by a lot of Western countries.
We're already in a situation of coercion, so we're way past ethics and UPB and moral philosophy, so we're simply doing an analysis of what happens, right?
So, I mean, everybody said, oh, we're going to cripple their economy, and it's like, okay, they're not dumb as a whole, right?
So they knew that that was going to happen.
They knew the sanctions were going to happen.
So what's their plan?
Well, they have, of course, been trying to make moves on their plan, and I haven't seen many experts say, gee, I hadn't predicted that.
I didn't know that was going to happen.
That's really bad, right? Of course, it doesn't matter.
They'll just claim to be experts on something else, right?
So, as everyone knows, the ruble was crashed for a couple of days.
But now, it's almost all the way back to where it was before the start of the war.
Right. So, what happened?
So, well, the Russians, whatever you think of the morals of the situation...
You've got to admire, at least from a gamesmanship standpoint, right?
This is the big international game, right?
So they've done some pretty good things.
So, okay, first thing that Russia did, well, I wouldn't do these all in sequence, but they're the things that Russia have done.
They demand payment in rubles.
When it sells natural gas to a group they've called non-friendly nations, right?
So the non-friendly nations are people who've condemned it, who are supplying weapons to Ukraine, who've, you know, snatched up yachts and frozen bank accounts and stolen money, so to speak, right, from private individuals, right, in the Russian system and so on, right?
Which is terrible as well.
I mean, you start freezing and, like, let's say it's Canadian dollars and you just grab a bunch of bank accounts with Russian oligarchs or Russian people's Money in Canadian...
All it means is that nobody's going to put their money in Canadian banks anymore and that's going to be a problem, right?
It's something that was...
I always thought about William Styron wrote about this in Lord of the Flies.
He said, a spear is a stick sharpened at both ends, right?
Put it in someone else, it goes into you.
And trying to find a way in an interdependent, globalized economy where you can shoot at someone else without anything ever happening to you That's not great, right?
I mean, it is. Basically, it's people having, you know, I'm going to sink you drilling contests when everybody's crowded into the same rowboat.
Like, it's just not going to work out that well.
So, when Russia demands that unfriendly countries pay for Russian natural gas in rubles, that's a straight-up directive from Vladimir Putin.
And his leverage, of course, is that Russia...
Doesn't have a strong environmentalist movement.
So because Russia doesn't have a strong environmentalist movement, they can produce, just as China, as India, and so on, they can produce a crap ton of energy, and then they sell that energy to countries with hysterical environmentalist movements, and it seems a massive lack of people who can explain to people that just because you ban a coal plant in your country doesn't mean that You've banned the production of coal,
you've just moved it to a less environmentally friendly environment like Russia or China or India or something like that, right?
So, yeah, Russia produces, what, 40% of Europe's energy.
So, Putin said in a televised government meeting, he said, I've decided to implement a series of measures to switch payments.
We'll start with that for our natural gas supplies to so-called unfriendly countries into Russian rubles.
The dollar and euro have been compromised by the West's seizure of Russian assets, right?
So, if the US dollar and euros are regularly stripped from Russian bank accounts or Russian-related bank accounts, why would you want US dollars?
Why would you want euros?
Right? It makes no sense.
So, by seizing assets, by putting sanctions on, they have incredibly reduced the value Of Russia holding euros or holding U.S. dollars, right?
And that's huge, right? Because remember, back in 71, to prop up the value of the U.S. dollar, all of these deals were made with Saudi Arabia and, of course, other places as well.
Now, there's another point.
This is from Zavalny.
If other countries want to buy oil, gas, other resources, or anything else from Russia, he said, quote, let them pay either in hard currency, and this is gold for us, or pay as it is convenient for us.
This is the national currency.
Okay, so this is really interesting.
It's really interesting. So they're saying, buy it in rubles.
Or, we'll take gold.
So, Russia will take your national currency, your lira, your ringgits, yuan or whatever.
Or, if you're in the unfriendly nation status for them, rubles are hard currency.
Now, hard currency used to mean U.S. dollars.
Of course, international reserve currency, there were more U.S. dollars circulating in Moscow than there were in America, I think, at one point.
So... So they've only added, the dollar ceases to be a means of payment for us.
It has lost all interest for us.
He said the greenback is no better than, quote, candy wrappers.
So that's going to really significantly drive down the value of the U.S. dollar, because if Europe has to buy rubles to buy energy from Russia...
Then Europe is either going to have to ship a bunch of gold over to Russia, or Europe is going to have to buy a bunch of rubles.
Now, if they're going to buy a bunch of rubles, what are they most likely to sell?
Well, Europe is not most likely to sell their euros.
They are most likely to sell their U.S. dollars, I would imagine, right?
So if they sell their U.S. dollars and Russia is no longer accepting U.S. dollars, that is going to drive down the value of the U.S. dollar, thus stimulating more inflation and so on, right?
See, if you have a largely national currency, then other people being less interested in your currency doesn't drive inflation as much because you're not shipping as many dollars overseas.
But if the value of your currency goes down internationally, then, and of course, when you have Visa, MasterCard, other credit card companies and banks and so on, all getting out of Russia again.
Those countries often would want to be paid or transfer or work with U.S. dollars.
So when you have a very much embedded global economy and the value of your currency goes down, it means inflation is going to hit you that much harder because you're going to have to pay more for overseas goods, right?
So those are the first of two things, right?
Number one, boom, got to pay in rubles.
Number two, you know, we'll also take gold.
And number three is pretty wild as well, right?
So The central bank in Russia has now fixed the value of the ruble to the price of gold for at least the next three months.
Okay. Baby steps, obviously.
Baby steps, but very important ones as well.
And nothing should be overlooked when gaming this out.
So what does it mean to fix the value of the ruble to the price of gold for at least the next three months?
Well, it means that as the value of the ruble increases, And if it's fixed, it means that you can buy gold for less, for fewer rubles, right? Because the value of the ruble is going up, right?
Because now it's bounced back to where it was before the invasion.
If it continues to go up, then what they're trying to do is they're trying to get, I would assume, tell me if I'm wrong here, but I would assume that they're trying to get their citizens to buy gold.
So, the Russian Central Bank will restart buying gold from banks and will pay a fixed price of 5,000 rubles, about $52 per gram between March 28th and June 30th, right?
So, what are they trying to do?
Well, they're trying to get a hold of and bring gold into...
The country. Russia's GDP is about the size of taxes.
Well, it really depends whether you believe everything that Russia is saying about its GDP. Because if you don't think there's a big black market in Russia, I got something to tell you, right?
But tell me, hit me with a why if you think that's...
Come on, USA still has the highest GDP? Come on, man.
I mean, it's believing all the government work, right?
And don't forget, right?
How much of America's gold is still in Fort Knox?
I did a show... Oh, sorry.
Hit me with, do you think it makes sense that the Russian Central Bank, by guaranteeing the price of gold while the value of the ruble is increasing, is encouraging Russian citizens to buy gold?
Would you say that's the case?
What do you think is America's real GDP? Well, so America's GDP is cooking around, what, 15 trillion a year?
There's close to 200 trillion in unfunded liabilities.
If you're not looking at the national debt and the unfunded liabilities, I don't really think that you're able to assess the American economy in any objective fashion.
So, and yeah, maybe Bitcoin as well.
You know, we'll get to the Bitcoin thing because it is...
There's a Canadian politician who wants to become the leader of the Conservative Party who says that Bitcoin is the way to go.
And how much of the $20 trillion of the US economy is based upon economic stimulation from debt, right?
It's like saying, I'm wealthy because I bought a $10,000 car with $12,000 of credit, right?
Isn't Bitcoin tied to the dollar?
In no way, shape or form is Bitcoin tied to the dollar.
So no, you've got to look at the real economy.
When someone gets sick in America, that adds to the GDP. When they open up a giant new government department, some new alphabet soup of eavesdropping, the economy increases.
So you have to really look at what is considered to be part of the real economy.
I don't know, of course, the exact answers, but nobody does.
But you can look at shadow stats for all of that.
So... I do believe that Russia is encouraging its citizens to get a hold of gold, right?
So, this is a...
Let me just...
I want to make... I want to show... I give the...
Okay, Everett Millman from Gainesville Coins told Kitco News.
I want to give this quote.
It's a good quote. I want to give credit where credit is due, of course.
He said, I'm reminded of what the U.S. did in the middle of the Great Depression.
For the next 40 years, gold's price was pegged to the U.S. dollar at $35.
There is a precedent for this.
It leads me to believe that Russia's intention would be for the value of the ruble to be linked directly to the value of gold.
Setting a fixed price for rubles per gram of gold seems to be the intention.
That's pretty important when it comes to how Russia could seek funding and manage its central bank financing outside of the US dollar system.
Okay, so Russia has what value of gold in its country?
What is the value of gold that Russia holds in its country, at least officially?
Who the hell uses grams?
Well, I assume grandpa with a blue pill.
Ooh! Highly inappropriate dad joke.
Well, more than you, I don't know if anybody really knows what's still under Fort Knox or what the heck's going on there.
I did a show many years ago about that, about the doubts of that.
20 billion! I got a 20 billion, almost 3,000 tons!
Sorry, I can't speak that fast.
Almost, but not quite.
Okay, so we've got to guess at $20 billion of how much Russia has in terms of gold.
So Russia has the fifth largest stockpile of gold in the world, valued at nearly $140 billion.
And that is really 2,300 tons of gold.
Now, how long have they been building that up for?
What do you think? How long do you think they've been building that up for, right?
I don't know if the US has been audited in a while, so I have some doubts.
No, so Russia, remember I was saying that it's about a decade and a half that the media in the West have just, you know, every villain is a Russian, every bad guy is a Russian, every, you know, evil group is a Russian and so on, right?
And, you know, the Russians have been blamed for simply everything, you know?
I got acne, it's the Russians.
Yeah. So, it's been about a decade and a half, so about the last 15 years, that Russia has been building up reserves of precious metals.
See, here's another thing you've got to understand about Russia.
You've got to understand. Oh, that's an arrogant phrase.
I apologize for that, but you know what I mean, right?
So Russia has a continuity of policy that we in the West can scarcely conceive of because we've got this, you know, bouncy castle of democracy where people are in and out of power every couple of years at best.
And so there is a longevity of policy that is occurring when you have an autocrat like you have in China, like you have in Russia.
So they have been preparing for this, this moment, right?
They didn't just wander into Ukraine, right?
They had been preparing for this, I believe, for 15 years.
They had been preparing to take on the hegemony of the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency for about 15 years.
Because it wasn't that hard to see this coming.
I mean, what was it? Back in 2015, Hillary Clinton was talking about, openly talking about, starting a war with Russia.
So... Yes, it is...
It is pretty wild, right?
So somebody's saying Russia's been dumping US dollars for at least 10 years, maybe around then.
Well, I think that they knew this fight was coming.
The confrontation with the leftists in the West.
Because the rightists in the West don't seem to particularly care about Russia, but the leftists in the West are really obsessed with Russia for a variety of reasons I've sort of talked about before.
So... Yeah, so this is pretty wild, what is going on over there.
So let's keep going.
And they also, of course, have a lot of large reserves of oil, right?
So oil and gold, the two things that are really powerful in the world at the moment.
So the sanctions, it's tough to...
Really get the value of its gold, right?
They want to accumulate the gold because London's gold marketplace, that's the most important world's trading center for bullion, banned all bars from Russian refineries, shutting it out of the global trade.
The U.S. Senate followed that with a new bill that would prohibit U.S. citizens from making any transaction that involves Russian gold, right?
So they're basically saying to Russia, you can't...
The left hate white Christians, that's why they hate Russia.
That could be, could be.
But... When you say to an entire country, we are going to harm the value of your gold, what would you push them into doing?
What would you push them into doing?
Well, what you would push them into doing is to raise the value of their gold in another way.
And the best way to raise the value of their gold is to tie their currency to gold.
You hit someone in the value of what they hold.
They will find some other way to increase the value of what it is that they hold.
Fifteen years, it's almost 2008.
Yeah, well, 2007-2008, Putin was saying, Ukraine can never join NATO. We need a buffer state.
Not going to happen. If it happens, we're going to have to invade and take over the eastern part, and we're going to have to make sure that Ukraine stays neutral.
So this is nothing.
Nothing new, right? So the USSR, and you can see the map of the eastward spread of NATO, And remember, NATO was put together to contain the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which had massive buffer states all along the west of Russia and the east of Europe.
So, why NATO would need to expand Doesn't make a whole lot of sense after the fall of the USSR. Because there's no longer a Soviet empire with intentional expansion into the world of the World Communist Revolution run by, you know, Stalin, Khrushchev, and so on, right?
There's no need for NATO. So then the question is, why is there a NATO? Would you guys like to know?
Hit me with a why if you'd like to know why there is a NATO. Sorry, I keep thumping the mic.
Hit me with a why. You want to know why there's a NATO? Y-M-C-A. Hit me with a Y if you want to know why there's a NATO. Okay, I will hit you with a Y. So, the reason that there's a NATO is to facilitate the welfare state in Europe.
Do you know why?
It facilitates... You know why.
You know why. You know why it facilitates the welfare state in Europe, right?
So, America will often...
Well, America and other countries, but particularly America, military-industrial complex, right?
So they get a lot of political support from the military-industrial complex.
Now, Europe, though, gets its support from socialized dentistry, from socialized medicine, from the welfare state, from migrant funding and so on, all that kind of stuff, right?
The reason why NATO exists is because NATO is the mechanism by which Europe gets significant portions of its defense spending subsidized by America so that Europe can spend all of its money on social welfare policies.
That's why NATO exists.
And that's why anytime anybody talks about the U.S. pulling out of NATO, it's like, ah, worst thing in the world, end of civilization, and so on, right?
So NATO is a welfare system for Europe so that Europe can indulge in a welfare system for its citizens and for migrants, right?
Yeah, foreign aid is taking money from the poor people of rich countries and giving it to the rich people of poor countries, right?
And also I did a show, gosh, back in 2007 called The Round Trip of the Foreign Aid Dollar, right?
Which is you give foreign aid in your currency, they have to come spend it back in your economy at some point, so that's generally the way...
That's generally the way it works, right?
So when Trump wanted to cut NATO spending, which of course he did, I mean, these countries in Europe have been leeches off the U.S. economic system for decade after decade after decade because when Trump would say we've got to cut back on all of this kind of stuff,
Europe would go nuts because if they didn't get all the free money for military spending from America, they'd have to then do it themselves.
And of course, because we have a significant portion of highly sentimental uber-leftists in Europe, the idea of shifting money from welfare to military spending is incomprehensible to them, so they'd rather outsource it to the United States and all of that.
So, yeah, that's why NATO exists.
And this is why NATO continues to expand.
Now, of course, if NATO continues to expand, then it will provoke a response from Russia, a military response from Russia.
As Russia has said, this is not out of the blue.
This has all been talked about by Putin for 15 plus years.
And, of course, in the 90s, when the USSR dissolved, there was a very specific agreement between the US, Europe, and Russia, right there in writing, saying, we're not going to pull the Eastern European countries into NATO. We're going to keep your buffer state and all of that, right?
So, now...
The idea, of course, that Russia is going to be treated roughly by Europe when Europe is entirely dependent upon Russia for its energy requirements, I mean, it's ridiculous.
I mean, that America and Europe would take on Russia, and in particular Europe, when neither Europe nor America are energy independent, it's crazy.
I mean, it's like when you're in chronic pain, trying to boycott painkillers.
It's just not going to happen.
So there's just a bunch of posturing.
Now, because of the hyper-leftism and environmental movement in the EU, which was to a large degree funded by, or a significant degree, I would say, funded by Russia, it's like, yeah, you can have all your sentimentality, you can have your Greta Thunberg screaming at people and so on, and you can panic you can have your Greta Thunberg screaming at people and so on, and you can panic about global warming even though all of the elites are buying waterfront properties they claim will be
You can have all of that stuff, and because the media is not leading people to any kind of sensible conclusions, they're saying there's a solution.
The solution to climate change is simply use less energy.
Well, you can convince people to use less energy, Without cutting off your supply, right?
Yeah, so Saudi Arabia has funded some environmental movements and all of that.
Do you think that the cancellation of the Keystone Pipeline was the catalyst for Russia to start the war?
I do not. I do not.
I do not. I think...
I don't know. Hit me with a why.
This is a very sort of philosophical question, I guess.
Maybe a personal question. But hit me with a why if you've ever had a fight that you know is coming and you just avoid it and avoid it.
And then when it starts, it's just like, oh, great.
Let's just get it over with.
Let's just rip this band-aid off and get it over with, right?
Everyone's had that. At some point in their life where it's just like, oh man, you know it's coming.
You know it's coming. What was that movie?
Oh gosh. California with a K. David Duchovny and Brad Pitt.
And there's a scene in a bar and Brad Pitt, who plays a psycho killer, basically says about...
Some bar fight. Oh, it's coming.
You get ready for it or not.
Or it's in The Godfather, but the guy's cooking up and says, oh, they should have stopped Hitler right at the beginning because the criminals all understood Hitler and all that, right?
So, yeah, I mean, you've had these kinds of confrontations you know is coming.
So with Russia and all of this, Talking Heads starts playing in my head.
Once in a lifetime, there was water underground.
Great song. China might start demanding payment in Yuan for its exports.
Well, I don't know.
See, I don't know what's going on between China and Russia.
My guess would be that China would say to Russia, you do the gold-backed thing, and we'll let your currency destroy the US dollar, and you and I will fight over the world afterwards.
That would be my guess. I have no knowledge about that, but that would be my...
If I was an evil guy in charge of China, but I repeat myself, then I would say, oh no, you're in the perfect position.
You got all the gold. Europe's dependent on your energy.
You've been planning for this for a long time.
We'll use you to take down the US dollar and then we'll fight over the scraps afterwards, right?
I think that would be the case, right?
So... Sorry, I'm just catching up on the comments here.
Oh, and of course, yeah, I mean, you can see now Western leaders now saying, oh, it's going to be food shortages.
Yeah, it's going to be tough. It's going to be a rough time, right?
And that's the price you pay for being like a bunch of headless zombies at all this war lust and just, oh, they're the bad guys and these are just the perfect guys and it's worth everything.
And then the moment the sacrifice starts coming from people, You know, what did somebody tweet out the other day about how, hey, if there's a draft, you can just, you know, conscientious objectors and so on and all that, right?
So, yeah, as soon as the sacrifice really comes along, people are like, oh, that seems to have cooled my war fever, but by then the war's already going, so.
All right. So, there's more that I wanted to talk about, but let me just pause here for questions or comments because I don't want to just record this.
I don't want to do this like I just recorded this on my end.
So, they're actually talking about a gold standard or it is just gold rubles for oil purchases.
Well, would you talk about a gold standard?
Right? Only the West seems to have this addiction to telegraphing its moves way ahead of time.
Only the West seems to have.
If you wanted to start a gold-based currency, would you announce that ahead of time?
No, you wouldn't, right? But they do seem to want to be accumulating gold.
And they are tying their currency to the value of gold.
Now, again, you can say three months or whatever it is, but again, if you wanted to do it permanently, you'd never say it's now permanent.
You'd say we're doing it for a couple of months and then you'd see how it would go and all of that, right?
Do you think this will eventually do other countries backing with Bitcoin?
Is Bitcoin too small at one-tenth the market cap of gold?
So, Bitcoin is destined to be the world's reserve currency.
I put every shred of my reputation on that.
Bitcoin is destined to become the world's reserve currency.
Now, there's going to be a massive fight between gold-backed fiat currencies and Bitcoin.
But the smaller countries, the breakaway countries, the countries who've been screwed by the IMF and central banking for decades are desperate to try and find some way to get off the control of other people.
So this is why there is...
Do I think the U.S. will move to gold in response?
No, I do not think so at all.
I do not think so at all.
I don't think that the U.S. can move to gold.
Because if they move to gold as a...
If they move to a gold-backed currency, then people will have to be able to transfer their dollars to gold at any time.
That's what a gold standard is.
You can trade in your dollars for gold.
I don't think the U.S. has enough gold.
And I also...
I mean, you can say that it doesn't really matter how much gold you have as long as you have a certain amount because you can just make it worth less per dollar, right?
But fundamentally...
The entire Western system is based on money printing.
And if you can't print money outside of economic growth and outside of your gold reserves, which is what a gold standard is, what's going to happen?
See, when you have fiat currency, I mean, when people look at some of this, there's insanity on the left, there's insanity on the right.
But the insanity is all driven by The psychosis of infinite resources.
Infinite resources. And the psychosis of infinite resources, the delusion of infinite resources, is driven by the printing of money.
I've said this before, but I'll say it again.
It's been a while. So if you believe that money is like air, then depriving someone of money is just an act of wanton, ridiculous cruelty.
Like... If money is as common as air, then denying money to someone for some reason is just cruelty.
Like if you lock someone up and deny them of air, you're a murderer because you hate them.
This is why everything's become emotional and personal and volatile when it comes to money.
Because in real economics, as you know, there's no solution.
There's only trade-offs. There's no solution.
What's the solution to air pollution?
Okay, well, you can have less energy consumption, but then people will die from a loss of energy consumption.
Or you can say, well, we won't have this NIMBY. We won't have it in my backyard.
Then it just goes and produces more pollution overseas and harms them and then eventually harms you as the trade wings bring the air pollution around and so on.
So sane, rational human beings don't imagine that they can have their cake and eat it too, right?
That you can eat the cake and still have the cake for tomorrow.
But with fiat currency...
It's like the replicator in Star Trek.
You make new stuff out of nothing.
You just make new stuff.
It was an old Steve Martin routine about McDonald's.
You know, it's not a restaurant.
They just have a vat of goo in the back.
Here's your Big Mac. Here's your fries.
Here's your cardboard box. Here's your change.
It's just, you know, just make stuff up out of nowhere.
So you have to understand that for people in these kinds of economies, mental illness is driven by the delusion of infinite resources because mental illness is when you never say we have to balance, we have to trade us.
What's the downside to what it is that we're doing?
In April of 2020, early April of 2020, like six weeks into the official pandemic, I said lockdowns are going to kill way more people than they say.
Turns out, of course, now the data is coming in that lockdowns kill more people than they say.
But nobody ever said, okay, so here's the benefit of lockdowns.
Let's test for that. But let's talk explicitly about the downside of lockdowns.
Because people who aren't too smart can't handle trade-offs.
Trade-offs where you've got to balance, they make people very uncomfortable.
People who aren't very smart...
Or at least aren't very wise.
They just want simple answers.
Well, Putin's evil, and we'll just smash the Russian economy.
Well, okay. And anybody who says, whoa, hang on, okay, so let's just game this out.
So if we try to smash the Russian economy, what are they going to do?
And, you know, the blowback for the deal with Nixon and Saudi Arabia was 9-11.
Okay, that seems kind of significant, right?
But, you know, there's not more than one people in every 10,000 that is going to be able to figure that stuff out, right?
Yeah, there's going to be food shortages in the Third World, which is going to have a massive influx of people from the Third World, particularly Africa, going through the smashed remnants of Libya across the Mediterranean into Europe and all that kind of stuff.
So, yeah.
All right, let me see here.
Let me just catch up here. Oh, jump to recent messages.
I don't know why it keeps doing that, right?
Alright, let me just see here.
Excuse me. Have you ever heard of the overnight phenomenon?
But enough about my wedding night.
I have not, sorry. Could flop Europe and cause the collapse of a continent?
Well, I mean, this is the whole question about migration, you know, in terms of, you know, when you can earn 10 times more on welfare in Europe than you can slave it under a hot sun in the Middle East, then you're going to go to Europe.
And the people, you know, if you've got a family, you've got five sons, you're not going to send your brightest kids to Europe because you need your brightest kids around to help you pay for your retirement.
You send your dumbest kids off to Europe.
So right now, the fiat currency is creating this Shangri-La of infinite resources that is drawing people into Western countries from all over the planet.
But if that falters, then you will see not just a lowering of migration into the West, but you will see going away stuff, right?
You will see voluntary self-deportation, I suppose you could say, or just leaving the country because there isn't enough Free stuff.
The current economy is dysfunctional for everyone except the super rich.
And so if the current economy goes through a transition phase, and of course we hope that it's shorter and faster and as least painful as humanly possible, but if the current economy is going to go through a transition, that would be for the benefit of things as a whole.
I know I'm in late, so sorry if you already touched this, but I feel the collapse of fiat is a necessary step.
But all fiat's collapse.
Again, I'm not saying you don't know this, right?
Of course you do, right? But we would study this in history.
The average age of fiat currency is about 100 years, right?
So we've got 1913 to 2022.
The average age of fiat currency is about 100 years.
Gold has increased in value since day one.
That's actual lasting value.
Bitcoin is a fart based on a fart.
Mr. Misentrope.
I'm going to invite you to up your thinking.
I'm going to strongly encourage you and invite you to up your thinking.
So if you think that the asset that in the entire annals of human history is the fastest to reach a trillion dollar valuation, which is Bitcoin, And some incredibly brilliant people are all...
I'm not putting myself necessarily in that category, but incredibly brilliant people are trumpeting the value of Bitcoin.
And when Bitcoin can process more value than Visa, and when Bitcoin can allow people to traverse the globe with millions of dollars of value in their head based upon a 24-word phrase they've memorized – You've got some value proposition there, my friend.
You really do. And so just thinking, well, Bitcoin is not based on anything.
What are you talking about? At least it's not based on guns like fiat currency.
Isn't that a good thing?
So if you're going to say, well, you know, gold is real and Bitcoin is not real, while at the same time you're not here in a physical classroom, but you're simply consuming digits thrown across the internet, which is what Bitcoin is, you've got a contradiction.
So... Bitcoin is crap, period.
Bitcoin is based on nothing, period, and so on.
No, Bitcoin is this incredible combination.
Let me tell you real quick what Bitcoin is incredible for.
The problem with digital is a lack of scarcity.
The problem with digital is a lack of scarcity.
So to speak, right? I mean, it's a great value, right?
These 750 million views and downloads, hundreds of millions of books of mine listened to and so on.
So the fact that I can replicate these talks and these conversations all over the world very easily, wonderful, right?
So that lack of scarcity is fantastic.
But when it comes to making a song, you spend, you know, six months writing, recording and perfecting and mixing your song and you put it out there and somebody pays a buck for it, they can just copy and paste it all over the place, right?
And it's virtually free to consume.
So you have digital.
The problem is there's no scarcity.
Now, Bitcoin solves that because Bitcoin has the convenience of digital.
But the scarcity of physical.
I understand this, right?
Bitcoin has the convenience, incredible convenience of digital combined with the scarcity of the material.
Now, it's even more scarce than the material because there will only ever be 21 billion, million bitcoins.
And what are we at? Like 19 million or so now, right?
Only will ever be 21 million bitcoins.
It's like the 19 million of the only 21 million ounces of gold that have to represent, in the long run, the entire economy have already been mined.
So, I really strongly suggest that you look more deeply into Bitcoin.
I've been talking about it, of course, since 2011, and it is the most incredible technology, and what an escape hatch to a descending system.
It was very much...
Unknown, right? All right.
Bitcoin is based on electrical supply.
Good to know. There are, what, 270 different cryptocurrencies?
But that's like saying that there's Stephen King, but there are 270 other writers as well.
So? Doesn't matter, right?
There's my podcast, and there are also other podcasts as well, right?
Can Bitcoin's cap be up to the future?
No. No, because everybody who's currently invested in Bitcoin and who runs nodes and who runs things doesn't want the value of Bitcoin to increase, or the number of Bitcoins to increase, because they've already based all of their economic calculations on there only ever being 21 million.
So, there is absolutely no way that the number of Bitcoins is ever going to be increased.
So, no. All right.
You can't airdrop Bitcoin into a random pallet, though.
Yeah, that's very true.
That's very true. Let's see here.
The Bitcoin Standard? Yeah, it's a good book.
What about Trudeau moves to seize assets of political dissidents?
Can target Bitcoin too unless people all run their own wallets?
Well, okay, look, let's be frank about the power of the state.
The state can always get your Bitcoin, right?
So, oh, well, it's not on an exchange and so on.
Well, yeah, but they're just, you know, if they want, they can just throw you in jail until you cough up your keys, right?
So, yeah, it's pretty rough, right?
Be careful keeping your cryptocurrency on an exchange.
Can be hacked. Yes, that is true.
And aren't they still running through the bankruptcy proceedings of M.T. Gox?
Is that right? M.T. Gox or whatever it is, right?
All right. I find it unbelievable that politicians and the media are demanding sacrifice from the population when this was typically avoided, like in 2003.
I think this means the situation would be worse than what we expect.
Well, this, of course, comes back to the question of, and I don't do politics, so I'll just touch on this real briefly, but why is the mainstream media in America suddenly up and talking about Biden's laptop now?
Why are they verifying it and validating what's been going on?
Matt Gaetz just read it into the congressional record, entered it into the congressional record, and now even CNN is talking about problems with the Hunter Biden laptop.
Yeah, something big is coming.
So keep your eyes peeled on that.
I'm not going to speculate as to why I'm sure it's pretty clear, but there's a reason why they're now turning on Biden, because I think his approvals are just too low.
So let's see here.
So without continuous electric supply, Bitcoin ceases.
No, Bitcoin doesn't cease.
When you turn off your computer, look, it doesn't have a continuous electrical supply.
When you turn it on again tomorrow, does it still have your data?
Sure does! At least I hope so.
So no, Bitcoin doesn't cease if there's no electrical supply.
Could Bitcoin be used as a mark of the beast, like global currency, like the Bible predicts for the end times?
No, it cannot.
Because Bitcoin limits power.
And the Bible is a document, the New Testament in particular, is a document that promotes universal objective morality.
And so all that which limits power, which is why Christian countries tend to oppose big governments, at least until mass migration, so...
No, fiat currency limits political power.
I did talks on this back in 2013.
You can't have wars of aggression if you have Bitcoin as your funding.
And of course, there are a lot of people who are trying, even politicians who are trying to get Bitcoin recognized.
Because people have given up, I think, trying to vote government to be smaller or trying to vote government to be more reasonable and so on.
And so I think there are a lot of politicians who are in the system who want the system to be more restrained and they feel that the only way they can get it is to raise the value of Bitcoin to perhaps have it as a viable alternative, which is why there are some countries that Sao Paulo now will accept in 2013...
Going forward will, oh no, Rio de Janeiro, 2023, sorry, going forward will accept Bitcoin as a payment on taxes.
Now, of course, the moment that Bitcoin is accepted as a payment on taxes, that is also going to diminish the value of fiat currency because that's one of the reasons that fiat currency has value if you need to get it to pay your taxes.
Let's see here.
Nonsense, Steph.
Of course, Bitcoin requires electrical supply.
Oh, did you hear the sound?
It's like... That was the sound of the goalpost moving.
Did you see how the word continuous was removed from that equation?
Bitcoin requires continuous electrical supply.
I disproved that. Nonsense.
Of course Bitcoin requires electrical supply.
I don't know, man. You've got to up who you're talking to.
If you can get away with this kind of stuff, it means that you're just not talking to people smart enough to catch you out on it.
Sorry about that. That's just kind of funny.
Oh, that's kind of funny.
Justin Trudeau will be in power until at least 2025.
NDP and liberals are aligned.
Canada is stuffed. Well, people get what they vote for.
Why can I tell you? This is not a mystery here.
He didn't switch gears, so to speak.
Seriously, Bitcoin is limited in numbers?
Why can't Bitcoin value change?
Its value is people limited like any other currency, and people do limit it.
I'm sorry that I don't understand your arguments.
So the core code of Bitcoin, which is all over the world, is 21 million.
So you can't increase it from 21 million because everybody who's running Bitcoin says 21 million.
Say, well, there are new people coming along who...
Okay, I'll tell you what. Come up with your own internet protocol.
Forget TCP IP. Forget IP addresses.
Come up with your own internet protocol and then just see if you can take over the world with your new internet protocol.
Okay? Come up with a new way of exchanging data that's not internet-based, nothing to do with the current internet, and just tell me how you're going to take over the world and then I'll tell you that maybe you got a chance with Bitcoin.
So, nope. Nope, nope, nope.
Not even going to happen at all.
So... Or maybe you can come up with a better way for train tracks.
You know, they should be wider or a little narrower and so on.
And then just tell me how long it's going to take for you to replace all of the train tracks in the world and convince everyone to change the width of their train tracks.
And then see. Or, you know, try Esperanto.
Set up your own language. All that kind of stuff, right?
So, yeah, no, it's 21 million Bitcoin, just 21 million Bitcoin, and you're going to have to stuff more and more and more of the world's economy into 21 million Bitcoins, right?
I mean, there are thousands of millionaires in the world, 21 million Bitcoins, so let's see here.
Do these altcoins hurt the value of Bitcoin?
Absolutely not. Altcoins are wonderful for the value of Bitcoin.
Because altcoins drag senselessly greedy people into that sphere, where they want to make 1,000x in two months.
It's like, okay, well, if you're not ready for the long haul and slow adoption and all of that, which is increasing now rapidly, of Bitcoin.
I mean, come on, people. I mean, my gosh.
Bitcoin's gone up 35% this year.
Like, a little over a year ago, it was like, what was it?
It's gone up 10 times in value?
Something like that, right? So, and it's still just getting started.
So, no, the altcoins or the shitcoins is fantastic.
It's fantastic. You know, I encourage people to look into it and if you want to, if you don't want to slow and steady wins the race where there's actual mines and metal behind it, go into the altcoins and that way your impulsivity won't discredit the Bitcoin situation.
All right, let's see here.
Stefan Molyneux declares that Bitcoin can continue without electric supply.
Some change in goalposts.
All right. Yeah, sorry, dude.
You're... You're just, yeah, you're just, you're too emotionally immature and defensive to, you know, if you can't admit that you're wrong, you just can never grow in this life.
You could just never grow in this world.
No, I never said that Bitcoin could survive with no electricity in the world whatsoever.
Yeah, there'd be no Bitcoin. There'd be no, you know, also 99% of the world would die.
So, you know, I think we've got bigger problems than a lack of Bitcoin if there's no electricity in the world, right?
That's really funny. All right.
Let's see here. Thank you.
I have to really hit the audience where the value is at the moment, again, to bring back the finances of the show back to some kind of sane situation.
All right.
Have you ever read David Graeber?
I have not. Okay, so we've got a little bit of time left.
I'm happy if you want to hit me with any other questions.
It could be related to anything that you want.
But yeah, this is pretty wild stuff.
This is pretty wild stuff.
So, here's the thing.
The sort of final speech that I will sort of mention here.
Obviously, get some food.
And... Get out of cities.
But anyway, so my sort of point here is that there is going to be a rush to stored or objective value in a time of significant financial restructuring.
In the past, of course, people tended to go to gold.
And nothing wrong.
Nothing wrong with gold. I understand it.
And it's perfectly valuable and so on.
But, you know, there were horses before there were cars.
Doesn't mean there's no value in horses anymore.
It's just that nobody buys a horse to get anywhere substantial.
So, if there is going to be, and I think there will be, a time of significant international financial restructuring and uncertainty and so on, You've got the choice, right?
You can invest in hard assets, which is not a bad thing to do, but hard assets can be tough to defend in a time of situational chaos or societal chaos.
But I think Bitcoin is not a bad thing to look into.
Again, I don't want to make a single, even the tiniest shred of financial investment advice, because that's not my gig, but...
If people are going to look for stored portable value, it's certainly worth looking into all of that.
All right. Steph, do you believe the ancient Israelites and Jesus were white?
I don't know. I don't particularly care about it.
All right. Peter Schiff talked me out of Bitcoin and all I got was this last stack of gold.
Well, of course, if there is going to be a gold-based or backed or whatever currency, then I would imagine that gold is going to go up in value as well.
Bitcoin is proven during times of war.
A Ukrainian man walked across to the Polish border with his life savings of Bitcoin on the thumb drive.
Yeah. How to handle a wife that does not communicate well and often prevaricates what she is doing.
For example, my wife got vaxxed a month ago but only told me this yesterday.
You may be in a pre-vetting situation, you know, like what do you do when you jump out of an airplane without a parachute?
Well, I would suggest that you serve as an example to other people making sure they check their parachutes.
So the question is, of course, why would you marry a woman who wasn't up front with you and talk to you about substantially important issues like getting vaccinated ahead of time?
What do you think is a reasonable amount of food to keep on hand?
There's no answer to that. That's objective.
So, it depends. Obviously, it depends on your location.
It depends on, you know, whether you have any other self-sufficiency issues or possibilities like gardens or livestock or whatever it is.
It depends how many people are in the household.
It's blah, blah, blah, right? So...
All right. Hammerbill says, anyone wanting gardening advice or other home food production advice, post a question on the forum.
Hydrovegetables, fruits, and even bees...
I can help with the right hybrids, etc.
All right. All right, all right, all right.
Let me just see here. What do you think about building the parallel society as is...
And I know it's typing, which is a drag, but you've got to ask me more specific questions than that because I don't really know.
What that means. So, I'm sorry, just with your wife.
Well, so, the best way to...
It's a Socratic question, right?
And you would say to your wife, okay, well, how would you feel if I made a major medical decision without talking to you and then hid it from you for a month, right?
So just try and get her to understand what it's like for you, right?
And I think that would be helpful, hopefully.
Stefan, tell us what you have done to prepare for the collapse.
I will not. No, I mean, because it's so individual to everyone that I don't...
I don't think it's particularly valuable to talk about what I've done because then people might think that what I've done is somehow the right thing to do and that everyone's different, right?
Let's see here.
Excuse me. Let's see here.
Oh my God, dude.
You are exhausting.
Stefan actually laughed at my statement that Bitcoin relied on electrical supply.
Thoughts on over 40 dating after divorce.
My ex-hitter IUD from me.
Well, I think it's supposed to be inside, so that could occur.
40 dating after divorce.
Oh, man. I was just talking about this with a friend of mine the other day, just how happy I am to not be in the dating market at the moment because, you know, the vax and unvax, the leftist insanity, the, oh, my God, the pronouns and stuff like that.
It's like, yikes! That is rough.
That is rough. Well, so the way that you date is you try to work to make yourself as attractive as humanly possible.
Get blue eyes, become bald, have a chiseled jaw, flat ears, sloped shoulders.
So, no, I mean, just work to, you know, get your teeth whitened or fixed and exercise and just try to be as attractive as humanly possible and that way you're in a buyer's market.
Or a seller's market, I suppose, if you're selling yourself or whatever, you're buying someone else, right?
So... Yeah, but I think dating apps are crap.
And so what I would do is I would, you know, work to be as attractive as possible.
And don't ever stop that when you're married.
Like, I still exercise and try to keep myself presentable and all of that.
And I would try to join a group that had similar interests to mine, shared interests to mine.
So I like athletic women.
So I joined a lot of sports groups and met my wife.
So... Tips on fighting personal passivity.
I know the things I need to do in my life, but don't feel as if I'm moving fast enough.
Oh, you are going to summon a speech from me, my brother.
You are going to summon a speech from me.
Okay, look, everyone's a hero.
Everyone wants to achieve incredible things in their life.
Everybody wants to be magnificent.
Everybody wants to leave a giant footprint on the planet.
Everyone wants to be skyworks and fireworks and the comet in the night sky that everyone looks and says, Oh my God!
Oh, that's inspirational. I can't wait to get.
Everybody wants that.
I'm not alone in that. You're not alone in that.
Everybody wants to be the protagonist in the story of the planet and to leave an imprint large enough to be seen from Jupiter.
You want to be the red storm across the culture that is going to be seen for a thousand years.
Everybody wants that. Now, it doesn't mean everyone can achieve that, but everybody wants that.
To think, to be passionate, to communicate, whatever you're going to do that's going to leave an imprint, leaves an imprint because it disrupts other people.
Whatever you do that leaves an imprint only leaves an imprint because it disrupts other people, right?
You can't plant a garden without pulling down some trees or removing the plants or the weeds or whatever that's already there.
So there's a battle in everyone's soul.
Everyone's life has this particular specific battle and the quality and happiness and glory or disaster of your life will be determined by A, identifying this battle, 2, delineating it, and 3, fighting the living shit out of it.
And the battle is this.
You... You want to have an impact.
You want to be great, powerful, magnificent, and glorious.
But everyone else around you and the powers that be and the existing structures that you're going to disrupt the shit out of, they desperately don't want you to do anything like that.
So you say passivity.
I don't think that's passivity at all.
It's not passivity.
That's insulting yourself for the pressure put on you by others to not disrupt their grift.
When I started a software company, I took business away from a whole bunch of other people who also wanted to help companies manage their environmental impact and be better at keeping the environment cleaner.
When I started my podcast, I disrupted a whole bunch of people who also wanted people to listen to them and not me, all the way from top-tier Mainstream media to other podcasters, right?
People were mad that I got a lot of eyeballs and a lot of ears, right?
Now, it's a bit more jazz than stadiums at the moment, but it's still a glorious thing to be doing.
So, you want to be great.
You want to have impact.
You want to be magnificent. And just about everyone else around you wants you to shut up, sit down, waste away.
Big companies don't want you to disrupt them.
People in your life who have the potential, as we all do for great things, also want you to sit down, shut up, and waste away.
You feel me? You know where I'm coming from.
It's not passivity.
It's the sergeant major, steers and queers guy in her head screaming to sit down, shut up, and waste the fuck away.
That's the paralysis. That's the fear.
It's not passivity.
It's terror of incurring the wrath of the structures around us.
Disrupt the structures and they will fight back.
They will harsh you out. They will attack you.
I mean, I know this. Come on.
Of all the people in the world, I know this probably better than anyone because I went from nothing to glory to blowback that was thermonuclear in scope, right?
So you have that. You've got to identify this.
You say, oh, well, I'm just lazy. Oh, I'm just distracted.
Of course they want you playing video games rather than disrupting their system.
Of course they do.
Of course they want you to waste your life clicking through season 12 of some bullshit show so that you don't disrupt their life.
Of course they do. Of course they do.
So passivity is just sit down, shut up and waste away.
Easy, live and quiet, die.
Slither your way into a grave like a good little subjective and subservient slug.
Because the people on top, the people who run things, the people who control things, the people who make trillions off your indifference and suppression, they don't want you waking up and getting up and doing anything.
Of course not. They...
You know, if you're an aging boxer, you don't want the young guy to train six hours a day.
It's going to leave your ear on the wall.
So no, it's not passivity.
It's not passivity at all.
It's a righteous and rational fear of the hyena predators of the existing structure ripping your nuts off if you threaten anything that gives them power, control, money and prestige.
And the structure doesn't have to be some big thing like the media or the educational system or whatever.
It can be everyone around you who already did the shit down, shut up and waste away routine.
Those people, desperately more than anyone else, don't want you to achieve to or amount to anything.
Because what they said, well, you can't win, don't try, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So if you actually...
Were to stand up and achieve something, they'll sit there and say, oh shit.
Sitting down, shutting up and wasting away wasn't wise.
It wasn't prudent.
I just wasted my short burst of sunfire known as the starshit of humanity called my life.
Just wasted it all.
I was given the most glorious gift in all of the universe.
Literally all of the universe.
100 billion stars in each of 100 billion galaxies.
Trillions and trillions and trillions.
All we know is the three pounds of wetware in the bone prison called our skull.
That is the most glorious thing in all of human existence and out of all of the useless shit in the universe that does nothing God is inordinately fond of hydrogen and beetles.
You happen to get coalesced into your noggin, the most incredible potential of all matter known in the universe, which is the ability to put the entire universe in your head by imagining it spanning from end to end and start to finish.
You've been given the most glorious gift and how many of us use it properly and how many of us just waste it.
Sit down, shut up and waste away.
It is an insult to the atoms that gather together to the glory of us to waste that time on the nothing burgers of nonsense.
You have your courage.
You speak your truth. Look, I'm saying this on the far side of the crater of my career, you understand, right?
I'm saying this years after massive deplatforming and attacks and lies about me.
Still all totally, totally worth it.
Totally, absolutely and completely worth it.
I'm telling you this, right? I'm telling you this, having gone from the top to knocked all the way down the stairs and having to rebuild from the bottom.
Okay? I'm telling you this.
I'm not telling you this in the height of my glory, filling the stadiums.
I'm not telling you this in the height of my tours, filling halls.
I'm not telling you this from the height of my impact.
With 100 million views and downloads a week, I'm telling you this from the far side of having kicked down so far down the stairs, I'm looking up to find Dante's lower rung.
I'm telling you this, all still totally, completely and utterly worth it!
Wouldn't change a thing!
Wouldn't not change a thing!
Totally worth it, totally glorious.
I mean, I'm Icarus who vaulted over the sun.
So no, it's not passivity.
It's fear of blowback for becoming anything.
The world is designed to keep you small so that the people on top can regard you as an ant and ignore your potentiality.
So... You know they say go big or go home?
Well, home is death. It's where we came from, non-existence.
Go big because you're going home either way.
All right.
Let's see here.
Steph, this honestly is one of the most important things you have said.
High standard, I know, but I feel this in my soul.
I am a servant of the secret fire.
It's not a secret! It's not a secret at all.
Yeah, they want you to have cats rather than babies.
They want you to have a career rather than a calling.
They want you to have programming rather than passions.
They want you to have reactions rather than thoughts.
They want you to have insults rather than praise.
They want you to have fear rather than glory.
They want to take you right down to the lizard brain and have you abandon the glorious post-monkey beta expansion pack called humanity.
Buggy as hell, but by God, it can process.
They want you to pierce yourselves rather than pierce through the truth.
They want you to get tattoos rather than carve from the hostility of the unjust a path to a glorious future.
Mmm! Yeah, baby.
You gotta know it.
You gotta know it. You gotta know it.
When I look for a wife, should I wait to have sex until after marriage?
I think that's a good idea.
I think that's, and for sure, it works.
All right, we've got just another couple of minutes.
Ben Shapiro says, facts don't care about your feelings.
I seem to want or value the feeling of happiness a lot, but I'm not sure why.
Do you have reasons why to want or value happiness?
No. If you don't know why you want to value happiness, you may not have actually experienced it in your life in a very deep way.
Once you have that deep spinal glory of existence, you don't look for meaning.
You know, you look for parking when you can't find a parking spot.
You look for meaning when you don't have joy in your life, when you don't have fun, when you don't have connection, when you don't have jokes, when you don't have warmth, when you don't wake up to someone and want to hug them all day, when you don't laugh deeply with friends about the absurdity of the universe.
You don't value happiness, I would say, because you have not lived powerfully enough to achieve it yet.
But you can, and you should.
Because happiness, deep joy, is the entire purpose of why we have this.
We're the only beings who can achieve existential joy based upon virtue.
Because animals cannot achieve virtue.
They just have pre-programmed tribal loyalties.
They can't, like most people for that matter, but they can't achieve the joy that comes from the exercise of genuine virtue in the pursuit of good and the spread of excellence in morality.
Nothing is greater than that.
And that is the basis of all the other love and joy that you're going to have in your life.
The pursuit of virtue and the spread of virtue.
Integrity, universally preferable behavior, honesty, the confrontation of hypocrisy and evil and immorality and amorality and laziness and indifference.
We're all blind because it's so fucking dark.
But you be a flair that people can see they're going to be scared by the monsters out there but they're going to find the weapons of truth, reason and evidence too.
The monsters are coming either way.
They can either get us in the dark or we have a fighting chance in the light.
Be the light that lets people find the weapons that gives them a fighting chance against the monsters that are coming in.
They're coming either way.
guaranteed alright this is amazing I'm so glad I caught this even though I'm late coming in I needed this. Thank you so much.
You are welcome. And this is why, you know, people nitpicking about, oh, you said this and that about electricity and Bitcoin.
It's like, is this where you want to live?
This is what you want to leave in the world?
It's just annoyance with nitpicking and refusing to admit that you're wrong.
Admitting that you're wrong is glorious.
Because admitting that you're wrong...
Like, oh yeah, you know what, I was being a bit of a douchebag there, kind of moved the goalposts, sorry man, I'll aim higher.
Do you know how liberating that is to everyone around you?
Because when you show, and this is why I've got a whole series of shows called I Was Wrong About, I Was Wrong About, it's why I apologize to people I've been wrong about.
Because it liberates you to be wrong.
Because if you can't be wrong, you can't ever be right.
Because all you are is defensive and hanging on to a position that's been force-fed to you by the media.
So, yeah, and people who are mad at Bitcoin now are just mad because they didn't get into it early up, right?
So I get it. You've got to downplay something because you missed the boat.
Still early. You don't have to buy a whole Bitcoin, you know?
Do you still play Among Us with your daughter?
Very occasionally, but we're playing some other stuff at the moment.
We're playing Catan lately, actually.
It's quite a lot of fun. Please say douchebag again.
It's really funny. No!
Do not order me what to do.
I will not say douchebag again.
Is your daughter your greatest achievement?
No, because that's to say that she is the result of my actions and choices.
I have helped her, shaped her a little bit here and there, but no, she is her own greatest achievement for sure.
I hate to complain. I think complaints are basically admissions of failure.
It's only a matter of blaming someone at that point.
Oh yeah, you could take your ownership of your life.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
I made the choice to get deplatformed.
Of course I did. Because I'm not going to stand in front of a camera for the next 30 fucking years and lie to everyone about stuff that I know is important.
I said everything that I needed to be said.
Found out that you can't say it.
The world will now have to navigate life without philosophers.
So that's the way it is.
All right. You have our support anyway.
Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.
Yeah, for real. You're the only fucking one, too.
Oh yeah, no, I knew what I was stepping into.
I knew, I knew.
I can't believe they let me last that long.
What are they crazy? So no, absolutely, I knew what I was getting into.
I own that. I'm not a victim.
Not a victim. I just, I mean, I had to stay silent my whole childhood and not tell the truth.
Fuck if I'm going to live life like that as an adult.
They want to silence me, fine, but I'm not going to silence myself.
I'm alone in my taking this on with you, behind you, behind philosophy.
Yeah, baby! The worst part is conservatives not having your back.
Yeah, well, but you find out facts about that anyway.
All right, we're done, I'm afraid.
We've got 90 minutes on this platform, so thank you so much for dropping by tonight.
I am very glad to have had this opportunity to chat with you.
I hope that you are loving...
The life that you have.
It is the best time in human history to be alive.
I know there's a lot of shit going down.
It is the very best time in human history to be alive.
And I hope that you appreciate that every day.
I know that I do. FreeDomain.com forward slash donate.
Please sign up at FreeDomain.locals.com.
I appreciate it so much.
I love you guys enormously.
I thank you so much for your support.
Have a great night. I'll talk to you soon.
▲
Export Selection