The Money Gains Podcast
Welcome to the Money Gains Podcast, where we talk all things money and how to grow your bank balance. Hosted by Sammie Ellard-King, Money Content Creator of the Year 2024, we chat with the sharpest minds in personal finance to give you real, actionable advice – no fluff, no jargon.
Whether you're skint, smashing it, or somewhere in between, we’re here to help you make smarter money moves.
The Money Gains Podcast
Ex-Goldman Sachs Banker Exposes: The Real Reason We Feel Broke (Joe Bryan)
Everything feels like it's getting worse but is there a way to change it? 💸
Get The FREE 10 Step Checklist That Grew My Portfolio To Over £160,000+ 👇
🔗 https://upthegains.co.uk/investing-checklist
---------
In this episode of the Money Gains Podcast we welcome ex-Goldman Sachs banker & economist Joe Bryan to the show.
Joe exposes how government money printing is the hidden root cause behind every major crisis we face today, from housing affordability to the obesity epidemic and from wealth inequality to the breakdown of families.
Today, we uncover the mechanics of how monetary policies steal from citizens and what tools we have at our disposal to separate money from state control.
---------
👉🏼 Get a FREE FRACTIONAL SHARE worth up £100 when you deposit £1 with Trading 212
🔗 https://www.trading212.com/join/MGP
If you don't receive the free fractional share - head to the menu and put the word 'MGP' into the promo code section.
(Capital at risk when you invest)
---------
👉🏼 We're delighted to welcome TIDE as a sponsor for the show.
OFFER - Get £100 Cashback when you deposit £5,000 within 30 days (T&C's Apply)
🔗 https://www.tide.co/offers/gains/
---------
Joe on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-bryan-/
Joe on X https://x.com/satmojoe
What's The Problem? on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtFOxNbmD38
---------
✅ Why Government money printing is the root cause of ALL major societal problems
✅ How Bitcoin represents humanity's first tool to achieve "perfect money"
✅ Why you don't actually own your money in banks
✅ How inflation manifests in three different ways
✅ Why the pension system is mathematically insolvent
---------
DISCLAIMER:
This video is meant for educational purposes and should not be considered financial advice. When you invest your capital is at risk. Past performance is not a guarantee of future success.
This video description contains affiliate links - if you click on one and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. This does not alter our suggestions and there is no charge for you.
Take the FREE Money Personality Quiz 👉🏼 https://upthegains.co.uk/quiz
Get The FREE 10 Step Checklist That Grew My Portfolio To Over £160,000+ 👇
🔗 https://upthegains.co.uk/investing-checklist
In today's world, we are being squeezed left, right and centre. And is it a problem with money itself in the way that we see it? Governments have the ability to print money and it is feeding down, but there is a solution. So
SPEAKER_00:joining us today is economist Joe Bryan. Joe, welcome to the Money Games podcast, man. How are you? I'm good. Thank you, Sammy. Thank you for having me on. Honestly, you may feel like I might say this more than I actually do, but I am actually very excited for this. I bet you say that to
SPEAKER_01:everyone I bet you say that too generally I don't say that to everyone maybe I say it but I don't necessarily mean it I do actually mean it because I came across you from a good friend of ours Alan Smith and I've been down the what's the problem rabbit hole and so I think this conversation today is probably one of the most important ones that we all ever have and I mean it wholeheartedly because it's changed my entire viewpoint on
SPEAKER_00:money and finance and the way that the world is structured and what currently working in the short space of time in six weeks, which I think we can cover most of that today. So when I say to you, what's the problem, what does that actually mean to you? Well, for those who don't know, I produced a 35, 40 minute video in January and called what's the problem which is a story which helps everybody from whatever background you come from with whatever experience understand what the core problem with the world is from an entirely logical basis and come out the other end of that understanding what needs to change and the core problem is there is a big red button that the government has that allows it to manipulate the money. And nobody should have a big red button to manipulate the money. Nobody should be able to print for free what you have to work for. Nobody should be able to remove your access to your money. And so the financial system is extremely inaccessible, even for the people who work within it, let alone for the people who work in any other sector. But you can think about the entire financial system as just being abstracted away to just being a big red button that government can compress whenever they want to change any aspect of the money, whether it be the amounts in the supply or the censorship resistant nature of it to some degree. And so this story takes you through and helps you build a skeletal mental framework for understanding what good money is supposed to look like, what perfect money is supposed to look like. And then it explains the way the world is today. So all of the issues that we see around ourselves are all downstream of the fact that money is broken. So whether it's obesity crisis, wealth inequality, homelessness, addiction, know 50 other things they're not independent issues they are all because of the money the money is broken and it causes all of these things and once you see it you can't unsee it again but because it's a story you understand it you follow it every step of the way and it's pixar characters you know It's not complex. The accumulation of the steps is complicated. You would never be able to probably start at the end of or see all the list of problems and figure out where they came from because they're one, two, three steps removed from the big red button. But if you run it the other way around and you say, well, let's start in a position where you put two sides of an island and one side doesn't have a big red button and the other side does have a big red button, what happens when you press the big red button? and then you see that side of the island just evolve and evolve evolve in a super negative way until we end up with a world that just looks like today and then all of a sudden you're like okay now I understand now I understand why we have all these problems around us but I also recognise that It doesn't have to be this way. What if you had perfect money? And if you have perfect money, don't necessarily remove completely all of these problems because humans are humans and we create problems, but they're not on steroids and some of them don't exist at all. And so that is the overview of the video and I would encourage anybody and everybody to watch it and then share it with people they care about because you only have to see it once and humans remember stories. I'm not even joking, I've probably put it in about 20 different WhatsApp groups. Stop
SPEAKER_01:what you're doing and watch this because it gives you the explanation. But can we start at the sort of core beginning of the story,
SPEAKER_00:which is the reasoning between good and perfect and imperfect money? Yeah, well, I mean, we are very used to these days having, combination of paper money and that's declining and soon will be non-existent or digital money and that digital money is held on our behalf and it's just numbers on a screen somewhere And so perhaps the starting point is to think about what characteristics of money should be there if it was perfect. You would need money to be limited in supply. Perfect money would be absolutely finite in supply. No one would be able to create for free what you had to work for. It needs to be portable. You need to be able to move it easily. And at low cost, it needs to be divisible. So you can pay for small items, the smallest items. It needs to be readily acceptable by everybody everywhere. So people can both send and receive. You also need to be able to hold it yourself. And it needs to be fungible. between one pound and any other pound, there isn't any, right? Because you can just interchange them and it makes no difference. But that previous one about being able to hold it yourself, we sort of take it for granted now that someone else holds our money. But that's bonkers.
SPEAKER_01:If
SPEAKER_00:you think about it, I'm going to go and do some work and someone's going to give me some money and I'm not allowed to keep it. I have to go and give it to somebody. I have to put it in a bank account, right? that money is only mine if the government says i can have it and the bank says i can have it if i go to the bank and ask to withdraw my money the answer won't be yes it'll be why
SPEAKER_01:yeah
SPEAKER_00:or no sorry If you try and make an online transfer to someone, you'll be asked a ream of questions and chances are it won't go through. It's happened to me. It happens to all of us, but it's for our protection. It's absolutely not for our protection. It's to introduce frictions into the banking system. We do not have any ownership of our money. The money is not real. It is monopoly money that someone else can create for free. And so... Money needs to... We have had a separation between currency and money over time, which today just feels natural, but wasn't always the case. So I think most people at home would... I'd be surprised if someone had the opinion that gold wasn't valuable. We've grown up with gold. Gold is the reserve asset, not the reserve currency. It's the reserve asset in the world. It's probably the most valuable thing. But we would say that's valuable because it's... takes a lot of these boxes for money. Gold is a good-ish money. It's not perfect, but it's good-ish. It's limited in supply, but it still grows every year above the ground because people dig it out. You can hold it yourself as long as nobody puts a gun to your head and takes it off you. You can use it in transactions, but you can't send it over the internet. Nice. You can't pay for a bag of crisps in gold. How would you do that? How would you even get change? You can't verify it's real. Someone gives you a bar of gold. How do you know that's gold? It could be plated. It could be plated. And lots of gold in central banks over the past, as we've seen, is just pretend gold with different metal inside and gold wrapping on the outside. And so gold clearly fails on being perfect money across the character. characteristics that matter and the reason you know the final validation of that is that we don't use gold we use paper money because when we used to use gold no one wants to carry around a bag of gold you get attacked right so you put the gold in the bank and the bank issues you paper in receipt of the gold so give you you've deposited one gold coin here's a paper piece of paper that represents one gold coin and you go and pay with commerce in commerce with that people would end up trading paper that was convertible into the gold but the gold just stayed in the vaults the gold never moved and so eventually you just exchange this paper but then the bank issues more paper through loans or the government issues more paper through loans they realize no one ever comes and asks for the gold you're meant to have the backing of your paper with the gold meant to be one-to-one convertible but if no one ever asked for the gold you should create more loans you just issue more paper and no one ever knows and this is what happened in the 70s or in the 40s 50s 60s In the US, and then the French called the bluff of the United States and says, we don't believe you've actually got the gold to back this paper. How about you have your dollars back and you give us the gold? And the US said, no. We're breaking the convertibility of the dollar into gold. And that was in 1971. Is that President Nixon? Yeah, Nixon overnight. He broke the convertibility. And so since 1971, so for all of the lives of most of your viewers, we've lived in the fiat world. The fear is by decree. So we use paper we are forced to use under the threat of violence. If you don't use it, if you don't pay your taxes in this make-believe paper, you go to prison. Okay, so you're forced to use it. It has no economic backing anymore. And it can be printed for free with the click of a keyboard. the government and central banks can just constantly inflate the money supply. So they have access to a big red button that allows them to print for free what you have to work for. And that is the root cause of all of the issues that we see. And this is very obvious, and everyone knows it inside, they just haven't perhaps connected the dots and verbalised it. But if you just think about... your everyday behavior. If you go and do a day's work and you get paid in pounds, you put those pounds in the bank. If the money was good, you could rely on the purchasing power of that over time. Because it's a representation of your effort, your economic contribution. It's your time and energy. It's your life, right, in monetary form. But we all know in a year's time, two years' time, ten years' time, it's going to be worth less and less and less, so it's worth almost nothing. That is theft. That is theft of your money, and it's theft of your time and energy, and it's theft of your life. Because you're spending your life working for something that is melting. And it's melting because someone else is printing it for free. They don't have to do the work. You have to do the work to get it, but they don't have to do the work. And, yeah, so on one side of the island, Fiatello, who's the leader on that side, he is... well he's a politician he wants to get re-elected and he has a budget deficit much like we have today yeah constantly this could have been filmed at any point in the last 30 years and he would still have the same response oh yeah so just for context there's an island there's an island and there's a wall down the middle there's an island there's a wall down the middle and there's two sides one with run by Satoshi who uses perfect money okay so it has all those characteristics and he can't he doesn't have a big red button those characteristics Characteristics are locked in for perfect money.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:So it's, whereas Fiatello, he starts with perfect money as well. Yeah. But he has a big red button that he promises never to press, which would allow him to change any of the characteristics at any point in time. And he starts with good intentions. He'd never need to press it. But the fact that you have the option to change anything about the money means you will exercise that option in the fullness of time. Inevitably. And this is what we see this is what we see today and so maybe it would be helpful to run through what printing money actually leads to yes please because people people have this sense that something's not right and they can see everything deteriorating but connecting the dots is really really hard okay so the first thing is when you hit the big red button and you print some extra money for the government that money goes into the pockets of the government and that could be because they need to pay their bills or well it initially goes because they print the money it sits in their account they then need to do something with the money so if they're paying their bills they're spending that money in the economy with people connected closely to the government who are providing good services or whatever to the government that's why they need the money and when they spend that money in the economy it starts to distort the pricing signals. And this is obvious because if you think about just basic economics, when you have in a free market, and just to be clear, we absolutely do not live in a free market. We live in a heavily abused market by the government because we've got rules and regulations everywhere. And with the level of money printing we have already had, the prices are already distorted. But imagine you did live in a purely free market. Then the only reason any price would change for any goods, any good or service would be a change in their demand and supply. So something becomes more in demand and supply doesn't change, the price would go up. But if the supply goes up and the demand doesn't change, the price goes down. This is basic stuff. We all know this. Whereas in the example where the government prints the money and it goes into their pockets, they spend it with people connected to them. That looks like demand. but it's not demand, it's just extra money. And so the prices in the areas closer to the government start going up. And when you have a free market, the purest signal to everybody operating in a free market is the price. So people who are not connected to the government see the prices going up in the areas connected to the government, and they think, well, they're more profitable. I'm going to stop doing what I'm doing over there, and I'm going to compete for this extra demand, this extra profitability close to the government. And so they move closer, they increase the supply, and the price comes down a little bit, but they're competing for additional profitability. But it wasn't real demand, it was just extra money. But you've pulled the most... entrepreneurial people first the most active capital from the rest of the economy closer to the government to fight for something that's not real so you've undermined the productivity of everything else the prices stop going down in those areas of the economy and they start to go back up because the supply is being reduced and all the areas are being made less efficient so the government destroys the productivity gains of the free market by producing printing extra money for itself. So hopefully that bit's clear. It might be worth touching on why prices stop going down in a free market because everyone's like, when have prices ever gone down? And prices have never gone down because we don't live in a free market and the government's been printing money for 50 years. But what should happen in a free market? And again, this is very obvious. So let's go to an Ireland example where we're all on a roll on the deserted island and I'll use the example from the video and we're using perfect money so no one can print it for free when you first arrive on the island nobody has anything but we all need to survive and so each of us are fishing for our food we're cutting down trees to make firewood and building materials and we're building our own shelters some of us are better at some things than others but we're all just sort of scraping a living doing a bit of everything and just survival but even because even when we have perfect money we're not really trading with each other because it's just self-sufficiency but what happens is like you're better at fishing and i'm better at cutting down trees so you do the fishing and i'll cut down the trees and we'll be twice as efficient we can produce twice the output in half the time and suddenly we have excess and when you have excess prices fall And it means we trade with each other. And someone else is a home builder. I need you to give me the word to build the house and suddenly we're moving. Exactly. I can't eat wood. I need your fish. You're forced to trade with each other. And we're not the only people on the island. There are other people fishing and cutting down trees and specialising. And we compete with each other. And everyone's making a decision on what to spend their money on, on a combination of price and quality. I want the highest quality at the lowest price. So what happens to prices? They go down. What happens to quality? It goes up. This is what happens in a free market when people are just left alone. So when people think capitalism is awful, et cetera, et cetera, no. Capitalism is just what humans create when they're left alone. It's natural human action. It leads to lower prices and higher quality. And if you think about what that means for everybody else in that little society, even if if you're not productive but you're using perfect money I do a day's work even I get paid a small amount that buys more tomorrow than it does today yeah I buy better fish I can buy a nicer wood for the house or whatever that might be I accumulate savings yeah I'm not my money isn't melting anymore it's accruing and purchasing power yes and so the money benefits from the productivity of everybody and the more people specialise so I've been quite cutting down trees for five years now. The quality is amazing. I'm creating extra, I'm freeing up my time because I'm more efficient, which means I can plan for innovations. I can design new machines. I can create new types of furniture. I can do all these. Greater fragmentation, specialization, greater variance of products, lower prices, technological innovation drives it down lower. This is all obvious. Everybody at home listening will be nodding. Of course. Yeah, of course. But then why doesn't the world look like this? The natural outcome when you leave people alone with perfect money is prices fall and quality goes up. And standard of living for everybody increases, whether you are productive or not.
SPEAKER_01:You have the example of it going up by 3% a year and productivity increasing, right?
SPEAKER_00:Exactly, because that's the productivity is accruing to the money. And so you can store the energy that you expend by doing that days at work for whenever you want to spend it. And when you wait to spend it, it's more valuable this is the way the world should work but in in the world that we experience around ourselves today prices go up and quality falls which is 180 degrees the wrong way around but why If the natural state is the opposite, why have we ended up in the situation we have? And it's because of the big red button. So if we think about that first issue, the prices should have been, were declining. The government prints the money. They distort the price signals. They undermine the productivity and the price signals to the entrepreneurs in the market. And the prices stop going down.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:The second thing is as the businesses who have received the money first, this new money first, start spending it in the rest of the economy, gradually that new money works its way through the rest of the economy. Business A spends with business B, business B spends with business C. And you have the same effect. It's not real demand, it's just extra money. And it slowly washes over the rest of the economy. But these businesses also spend money on people and inputs and raw materials. So every business in the economy starts to see their input costs going up. People become more expensive to hire. Energy becomes more expensive. All the inputs to running a business become more expensive. And so every business owner now is faced with a choice. If you think about why does somebody run a business? Running a business is not risk-free. You've got to spend your time and energy, employ people, risk your own capital. No one's bailing you out unless you are of a certain size. We can come back to that later. But you're taking a risk. The alternative is you don't start your own business. You go and work for someone else who's taking the risk. but with anything in life. You only take the risk if the reward is there. And so all the entrepreneurs need to make a certain amount of profit to justify the risk they're taking. If all their input costs start going up, their profit margins are getting squeezed through no fault of their own. It's purely because the government printed some extra money. And so each of these entrepreneurs is now faced with a choice. It's like, I can either close the business and go work for someone else, in which case, you know, the economy starts to shrink. Or I can find some way to reestablish my profit margin, not because I'm greedy. but because I need the profit margin to justify the risk I'm taking. I have no choice. I'm trying to re-establish the profit margin I had before the government started to steal it.
SPEAKER_01:And
SPEAKER_00:so if you think about an individual product, the easiest thing to do would just be to pass on the price change. So I'll keep the product the same size, the same quality. It's now just more expensive for the customer. And that's what we would perceive as inflation. Prices go up in the shops. That's visible inflation. Some businesses would say, well, don't really want to put the price up. I'll keep the price the same, the quality the same. I'll just make it 10% smaller, right? And then hope people don't notice. And this is- I've been noticing. We are. We all notice. We all notice gradually over time. We did a shrinkflation post about chocolate fingers. It's mental in two years. There's now seven, yeah, no, the end video is seven chocolate fingers less than two years ago. Wow. You're getting, which is just obvious. I'm not, surprised we see this in crisps it's more and more air exactly yeah you know i bet the chocolate fingers maybe even be a little bit smaller themselves as well
SPEAKER_01:yeah
SPEAKER_00:you see it everywhere and once you start looking for it you notice it yeah you really do you really notice it and sometimes they're in combination the price will go up and the package they'll redesign the packets there's less in them
SPEAKER_01:yeah
SPEAKER_00:but because it's a different design or a different configuration it's less obvious but that is that's just shrinkflation but that's sort of semi-visible sometimes you notice it sometimes you don't but both of those things make the consumer poorer because they're either spending more for the same thing or they're spending the same and getting less so they just have to buy more like if you're making a cake you need 400 grams or something if you get 300 grams you need to buy another 100 grams yeah it's not toilet roll whatever that might well be you need to use some of these things exactly yeah exactly but it's semi-visible inflation because it's not always captured in the inflation statistics either because they're shrinking the product so those are the first two but the the third one is to say i'm going to keep the price the same the size the same but i'm going to compromise something about the product to be able to make it more cheaply to re-establish my profit margin again and so you make the product worse and if it was a physical product it now is made with worse components so it breaks sooner so the thing that you bought and it usually lasts two years it now lasts one year You have to rebuy it in a year's time. That's still inflation. It's just not instant inflation. And then the second aspect of that one is the things that you consume once. So a product you could use multiple times until it breaks, just breaks sooner. But if you consumed it once, then that's... Inflation manifests itself in other ways. And so if you just think about the food, think about the quality of the food, we see food quality deteriorating because the food manufacturers are pushed to use lower and lower quality ingredients to protect their profit margins because of the money printer. And so we as a population are starting to consume more and more things we should not be consuming. And we all know this. What we all know is there's less and less real meat and sausages. There's less and less healthy ingredients in a lot of stuff. Turn the pack around. Turn the pack around. Have a look. But again, that's not in the inflation statistics. The product is the same size, same price. The inflation is manifesting itself into something else and it's unhealthiness. And this is why we have an obesity crisis. We're consuming stuff we should not be consuming. And that's addictive in a lot of ways. And it's addictive. So you try and make the food taste better, but it's lower quality. Yeah. And a lot of these other aspects fold into this as well. But we have visible inflation, prices go up, semi-visible shrink inflation, and we have hidden inflation, which is quality compromise. And so from that, you get the obesity crisis you get health crises right and all and you also get unemployment because businesses if you want to cost you fire people but you compromise on the human cost of your product production you're using lower skilled people fewer people there's greater errors greater issues lower quality in products which put more pressure on the government right so by the government pressing the big red button it drives inflation through all these different aspects And most of those aspects don't get talked about because the government only will talk about the prices going up. They don't talk about the other aspects. But we feel them. We feel them every day. And the consequence is it puts more pressure on the government because now you've got more unemployed people and more unhealthy people. And, you know, the third... The third aspect of inflation, the third core, the first is the price signals get disrupted, which erodes the productivity. The second is you get consumer inflation, which you just talked about, in all its various forms. And the third is asset inflation. So as the government's printing money, it's diluting the value of the money. So if you think about, for example, a game of Monopoly, most people have played Monopoly, right? Imagine all the houses are bought on the board and there's a certain amount of money in the game. If the person who's the banker takes the same amount of money again out the box and puts it on the table, the prices at which the houses would change hands on the table doubles. Nobody is going to sell the house for the same price they would have sold it before he took that extra money out of the box. Because that money is in the game. Everyone can see it's in the game. The asset prices go up. So houses. Houses go up. The stock market goes up.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Speculative assets go up. And they go up for a number of reasons. One, there's extra money flowing around the system since it's been printed. People have earned money and then they invest. And this is why you get a lot of very rich people who work in American politics. You only get rich after they start working in American politics. So the money comes directly from the greatest investor of all time. Those find their way into assets because they get the money first. And those are the reasons that they can manipulate policy and all of those things. But if we just think about pure money, they get the money first, they buy the assets, the assets start going up in price. As people realize more and more money is coming into existence, they don't sell the assets. They try and buy more assets. And when the assets start going up, people begin to speculate as well because they never go down. So they never go down. You should be buying them is the mentality. It's like if I'm not buying them, I'm missing out. And so you get more and more leverage coming in as well. And then people go further and further out on the quality curve to really speculate of assets like nonsense crypto stuff. But there's another core driver there that's is the decision-making of the everyday person. Because if you're getting hits in the shops with the consumer inflation, you're earning an amount each day, week, month, year, which is underperforming the rate of inflation or the rate of actual inflation as opposed to what the nonsense figures the government tell you, then you realise you are getting poorer.
SPEAKER_01:That starts to manifest in many different ways.
SPEAKER_00:It does. It does. But you realize you can't leave the money in the bank.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Because the money is melting. So what does that mean about your decision making process? You can't save. So you try and spend it. You don't keep money in the bank because you know it's not going to be there. So you try and buy the assets because they're a better store of value than the money.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And so you start to see the monetization of assets as a proxy store of value because the money's broken. So people buy a house. They take out more debt to try and buy a bigger house or buy a second house because they never go down and they go up over time. But they only go up when measured in the thing that they're printing. And you get more and more debt then coming in from the banking sector because they make fees and more loans and these sorts of things to drive this speculation. But what happens for your everyday person, you can't buy a house. You can't buy a house on one salary anymore. There's a gap that starts to happen, right? You get massive wealth inequality happening. Because those who own the assets see the assets going up when measured in the fiat currency. So when measured in pounds, they're going up. They're not going up. in real terms, they're going up because they're printing more money. So if you buy a house, you see the price of that house go up, you feel wealthier. you are not actually wealthy. Your share of the total pie has gone down. So the rate at which they're printing money exceeds the rate at which the assets are going up in price. So you feel like if you look at your wealth as a number on a piece of paper, you think I'm richer.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Happy days. You're not. Your slice of the pie is shrinking because you're still being stolen from. You're just not being stolen from at the same rate as if somebody had kept their money in the bank. Because the asset is appreciated in value when measured in the thing they're printing. Plus you've played the taxes, the administration, the headaches, all of these things. So you're just losing at a smaller rate. But you have then an acceleration of the wealth gap between the asset holders and the non-asset holders. But that's not... That's not the battle to fight, Gary. The battle to fight is the money printer. It's because of the money printer. That is a symptom, not a cause. So when we see in the press and all over, given Labour are now in, about wealth taxes, all of these things, that is the worst possible thing to do. It's just the worst possible thing to do for for many, many reasons, and I would encourage anybody who thinks it is the right thing to do to watch the video and zoom out. You do not solve the crisis we are in through pitching one set of the public versus another set of the public. You solve the problem we are in by taking away the big red button. It's the fact that government can print money for free and the central bank can print money for free that is driving wealth inequality. Yeah. Because of the downstream impacts. That is it, Gary. You need to watch this video and understand you are wrong. Yeah. Okay. You need to understand you are wrong and have the humility to recognize that. And I would just encourage everyone to watch this because it's just so obvious if you zoom out. But then you get the further downstream impacts as well. Because you can't buy a house on one salary anymore. You need both parents working, especially in London. I mean, it's almost impossible in London now. But in most parts of the country, you need two incomes to afford a house. Oh,
SPEAKER_01:yeah.
SPEAKER_00:To afford a house, 100%
SPEAKER_01:these days.
SPEAKER_00:And so what do you do? What happens if you have two parents who are working full time? You have less time together. You have more stresses, more financial worries. You have less time for children and you can afford fewer children. You have to make an economic decision. decision we can have a house or we can have children
SPEAKER_01:yeah
SPEAKER_00:right and you try and have both it just means you have fewer children because the mum can't stay at home or the dad can't stay at home almost unbearable exactly exactly yeah the cost of child care outstrips the the cost of you going to work and then you're not spending time with the child so you get the breakdown of the nuclear family um you get massive demographics change. There's fewer children now coming through. And aging populations. Aging populations. People are living longer because the health care is, cost of it is socialized and there's no rational testing. The amount of young people coming through is constantly declining and they don't own the assets. And so the government now finds itself in a situation where the pension system is completely insolvent. Not only is the government insolvent in itself, which it is, we're only solvent because we print more money, but the pension system's insolvent. And again, everybody knows this because every few years, the age at which you can retire gets pushed back. Slowly increases,
SPEAKER_01:yeah.
SPEAKER_00:The tax breaks are constantly removed. The quality of life outcome you will have in retirement is constantly watered down until the point it will just be stolen it will one day the pension system will be removed the public pension system and the private pension system will be stolen from to bail out the government this is coming this is coming the people who are working now will never get to retire because the UK pension system is a one in one out you pay in now to pay out somebody who's already retired the demographics have already changed shifted that is untenable it will run out and then they will scrap it or they will print money to paper over the cracks which steals from everybody and further exacerbates all the issues the whole system is broken and then when you have when you have people under pressure from a cost of living perspective under pressure from a health perspective under pressure from a family from a life perspective or feeling like indentured servants because they've got to work for 50 years to pay off a mortgage just have somewhere to live and they weren't able to have the children they wanted because of it you see mental health crisis leads to today not tomorrow today not tomorrow and like you know I'm talking here about people who can maybe afford a house many people can't you know if you're stuck renting I mean, I would hate to be 15 years younger now, 10 years younger now and not have bought a house because you're, how would you plan for the future when you don't know when the landlord is going to put a price up and he'll put it up eight, 10%, 15%. I don't know what will kick you out. So you plan less for tomorrow and more for today. Yeah. 46% since 2020 in London. There you go. It's nuts. But what happens is your decision-making changes. It's like, I'm not, i can't plan for more than a year two years i don't think i'll ever be able to buy a house so why bother trying to save I'm going to live my best life. I'm going to go out every weekend. I'm going to go and buy coffee every day. I'm going to go on a holiday. I'm not going to save. And what happens then? You put off sacrificing, investing in yourself. It's about enjoying yourself, not sacrificing for the future. You put off getting married. You put off having children. It further drives these demographic shifts. Yeah. And also less entrepreneurial spirits and no more businesses. So the problem with businesses goes down and then the government has to print money to fix those problems. Exactly. Exactly. And then you have people who are worse off than that, who are sort of struggling living paycheck to paycheck, just trying to feed themselves and their families, home themselves and their families. And just life always gets harder because they're printing money. Yeah. And making everything worse. Benefits and things like that, right, as well. Yeah. Yeah.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And it just leads to addiction. When you're on a path of terminal decline, at some point you just snap. You give in or you snap or your decision-making is compromised. And so you make bad decisions. And so you get addiction, you get all these things which further drives the health crisis. All these things lead to more call on the government to step in and try and solve them. Which means more money. Because they've got to print more money. So they hit the big red button again, which prints more money and it just the whole thing repeats yeah over and over systems grow and it's just yeah suddenly it's untenable right it's been untenable for a long time it's just the government What happens is the government can stay solvent longer than you think because they can just print their own money. They will never go bankrupt because they owe pounds. They can just print pounds. What is going to happen is the currency goes to zero faster. And everybody knows the pound is going to zero. You cannot keep pounds in the bank and expect them to retain their purchasing power. And so over 10 years, they'll more than half, or let's say they're half. What about 20 years? What about 50 years? Goes to zero. Effectively just goes to zero, constantly declining. It will buy next to nothing in 50 years' time. The money is broken. It is melting. You cannot save your economic energy, your life's output in a melting ice cube. So you have to own... something they cannot print so can we go to this part where at the moment about
SPEAKER_01:what we're seeing with this because we've seen within the presentation as well what we're seeing
SPEAKER_00:over the news is obviously government debt levels from the UK the US is just a ridiculous number 37 trillion or something like that now which is mental I mean a trillion years ago I think Alan said this like 30,000 BC so the amount We can't even understand how big that number is. And it's growing. And since 2020, it's almost like a straight line, which is dangerous, right? But what's the causes of that now and what we're seeing in society? We are living in the Weimar Republic. At school, people get taught about hyperinflation in Germany and after the First World War. We are going through that. It's just in slow motion.
UNKNOWN:Right.
SPEAKER_00:Because if you give someone the ability to print money, they're going to print money. They never have to balance the budget because they can just borrow and they can borrow because they can always pay it back. So we just print more money. And so the US is a prime example. They're 37 trillion in debt. They spend about six trillion a year and lose two trillion a year. Yeah. You have the flow chart. It's mind blowing. It's mind blowing. And so you think about your family finances. If you were, if you were losing 2000 a year in your savings, you were living 2000 a year above your means and you were already 37,000 pounds in debt. That's an untenable situation. You're effectively, you are insolvent. You should be paying incredibly high borrowing costs to continue to borrow money. The US doesn't. No, they carry on. Because they have a central bank. They can issue more debt. They can guide the markets to where those interest rates are. They can buy their own debt, which allows them to print money entirely for free. It's just grant themselves money at the expense of everyone else. And this is what drives inflation. It drives everything else. It is just theft.
SPEAKER_01:And that's what we've seen recently with Rachel Rees
SPEAKER_00:buying gilts at extraordinary levels, right? Yeah. rates are high yes I mean people are starting to wake up to it in the UK but the UK doesn't we're in a worse situation because we are run by labour as well and there is zero economic understanding that I mean any government is a bad government if they have access to the big red button but some governments are worse than others and this one's absolutely just dreadful dreadful But even the explicit debt that the countries have is not the full story. So, for example, the US is$37 trillion in debt. It owes another couple of hundred trillion. In promises it's made, it just hasn't had to deliver against them yet. So Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, all of these things. It's exactly the same for us. We've made commitments into the future for pensions, NHS, all of these things. We just haven't had to write the cheque for it yet. And so the country is broke. And what happens, the only outcomes here in a fiat system is... Well, one of four things. The first is that you have sustained inflation and potentially hyperinflation, because the only way for the government to pay back their debts nominally is just to print more money, which drives up, which debases it for everyone. And so everyone loses their wealth through inflation. The asset holders are somewhat protected, but less so. And we can talk a bit more about the protections asset holders have, because not all assets are the same, and most of them will be stolen. The second is theft, outright theft. Given all the money is in the banking system, as we've talked about already, you don't own your money. You own your money with the permission of the government and the permission of the bank. And you can be separated from it like that. You express the wrong opinion, especially now with all these new laws coming in around what you can say, what you can't say, the de-encrypting of private chats, all of these things. Privacy is not a crime. Privacy is not a crime, but it's been made a crime. Financial privacy or communication privacy. We've seen it recently as well, haven't we? They stopped the transfer of money quite recently, 2013? was it? It's becoming harder and harder all the time. The limits are being lowered. Yeah. The thresholds are being lowered and we're moving towards a central bank digital currency in many jurisdictions and we can talk about that as well.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But you are separated from your money completely unless you are lucky. Yeah. When Rachel Reeves or some future UK Prime Minister wakes up one day and realises we We're all in it together. They'll bail everybody in. The choice is print more money and steal it gradually or more gradually. That was at Cyprus 2013. Cyprus in 2013, yeah. So again, not big news over here, but during the fallout of the Greek crisis following the Eurozone crisis in 2008, it took a while to play through Europe, but Cypriot citizens were bailed in. If you held over a certain amount of money in the Cyprus banking system overnight 45% of that went to the government overnight because it's not your money it's not your money you got bailed in to bail out the banks decisions you had no input in no control of was taken
SPEAKER_01:from you
SPEAKER_00:and the decisions that were stealing the purchasing power from you anyway they were stealing from you then got over their skis needed to bail out so they stole from me to fill the hole this happens everywhere and it will happen everywhere it happened in America in 1933 but they did it with gold instead so the US for almost 40 years made gold illegal in America which no one ever talks about now because it's very much a black stain on the US just generally but in 1933 they made it so that the personal holdings of gold were made illegal and if you were caught with it you were given a$10,000 fine and you can imagine how expensive a$10,000 fine would be was in 1933 I don't like millions maybe or 10 years in prison yeah and so they didn't confiscate the gold but they lined up the punishments for holding gold to such a degree that people handed in voluntarily right in exchange for the paper exchange for the paper and then they printed more paper yeah on a fixed exchange rate so basically they stole all the gold for worthless paper and this happens over and over and over again and the Unless you own something they cannot take from you, you are not wealthy. You own assets with permission. You have zero wealth. And so the second of the four options there is you get stolen from. You get bailed in. Yeah. The third one is you have extreme political outcomes. Which we're definitely seeing. We are already seeing the fact that we've lurched to labour is an extreme outcome. I mean, it's against... It was more... vote against the Conservatives I think and I don't I don't I dislike them all equally um But it was a lurch away from the Conservatives as opposed to everyone wanting Labour, I think. And we're likely to see the pendulum swing the other way now. And we've seen that in America. We've seen that all around Europe and other areas. That's right. But the reason is people don't understand what's happening. No, they want something to blame. And so these
SPEAKER_01:parties give them something to blame and give them the fuel to feel something
SPEAKER_00:about it. And there is something there for them. Hiding and masking the facts that are the cause of the real issue. Exactly, exactly. And it tends to be to the left to start with. Because if you think about what's happened all the way through, is that every time the government prints money, it causes issues. And the issues need to be solved, need to be solved by more money printing. So you print more money and the government gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger involved in everything because they can't stop printing. Pressing the big red button Otherwise they go insolvent. And further crises then require that to happen and the government then gets bigger to feed that crisis, that mini crisis that are springing out everywhere. Right. Exactly. And so everyone's solution is just, oh, well, the government needs to solve this. So you need more and more government involvement. And we'll lower
SPEAKER_01:your taxes, we'll make life better, we'll solve the problem.
SPEAKER_00:No, well, there's more free stuff. More taxpayer funded. It should never be free. We should replace the word free with taxpayer pair funded, it would be viewed totally different. But the state becomes so big, everyone looks to the state to support them. And that just is a shift to the left, it's a shift away from free markets, it's a shift towards socialism and ultimately communism. And this is why you see the rise of the call on the wealth taxes and Gary's stuff. It is just socialism. And socialism, the only thing that lies in that direction is two things, poverty and death. They're the only things that come from socialism. And you have to feel those before you snap back the other way towards free markets. The only way you can do that successfully is removing the big red button. And so everyone is trapped in this system that is fundamentally being abused by the government. But the government points its fingers at everybody else as being the source of the inflation. They want that divide within the nation because actually it's a beneficial to them. And it's about staying in power. It's about getting elected. Of course. Yeah. No politician wants to not press the big red button because they don't press the big red button. There's some pain. Well, they don't
SPEAKER_01:meet what they
SPEAKER_00:said they were going to do, even though they never do anyway. way but they don't they don't even get close and they've got to look like they got close they just lie to people now we're past the point of any sort of integrity in politics people just lie yeah and they never get called on it everyone knows they're lying it's just taken as the way it is unfortunately which is a indication of how far society is corroded but all of this corrosion is just the money it's all just downstream of the money so what's the fourth wall right civil or both fallout yeah everything yeah so it's like you're picking off a menu of four things and they're all terrible and all fiat and currencies and societies end in this way. So which one are you going to choose? Neither, please. Neither. None. But that's where we're going. That's where we're going. But for the very first time in human history, we have an alternative. So after all of this... Yeah, I realise that's going to be potentially quite depressing, but I would grab at it by saying I have never been as more positive about the future as I have I am today and well that's good and this is in light of what I've just explained and hopefully you know people can agree with most all of maybe all hopefully all of that you know some people hold different political opinions my position here is not to say one is right or one is wrong they're all they're all bad some are just worse than others but But ultimately the future is very bright. It's just the appreciation of the future is not evenly distributed yet between everybody. So in the presentation, the wall is in place.
SPEAKER_01:However, the wall starts to break and it starts to crack.
SPEAKER_00:So, yes. So the wall separates the two sides of the island and the side that what we've just been talking about is the outcome on one side of the island. So the outcome on that side is today, is today with all of these issues. on the other side they've been using perfect money the whole time they didn't have a big red button so when the election came round and there was a budget deficit they had no choice but to raise the taxes or cut the spending to balance the budget he lost the election and there's a small amount of pain but then people understood there wasn't just free money and it was a free market and prices adjust and then you start to get back to prices falling and quality going up in a free market and the productivity accrues to the money. And governments don't grow or overspend because they can't. Because they can't. Because they're not funded. They can't unilaterally fund themselves by printing for free what the population works for. When you do that you are stealing the purchasing power of everyone to fund the government without their approval. When you have perfect money and you can't do that you can't do that. You are funded by taxes people are prepared to pay for. And if you're asking for too much, you get voted out. If you're inefficient, you get voted out. And so over on Satoshi's side, we're seeing the 3% increase continue. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Whereas on Fiatello's side, it was down 7%. So it
SPEAKER_00:started at prices falling by 3%, and so he started printing money, then the productivity got eroded, so it went to zero, and then he started printing more and more money. And so the money was losing 7%, 10% a year, which is what we are today and so the wall down the middle of this island over time starts to crack and for the first time people see what life is like on the other side of the island and they can begin to trade with each other and interact and on one side people are holding fiatelos it's the currency that is used on fiatelos side which is melting and And on Satoshi's side, they use Satoshi's. And this is increasing in purchasing power. And so what's the logical action for the people on both sides to take? Why would I want to save my economic output in something which is melting and being constantly stolen from? No thanks. I'll sell my Fiatellos and I'll buy Satoshi's. So the Fiatellos decline further in value. because no one wants them. And that causes more budgetary and currency crises for Fiatello to then deal with. So he has to press the big red button again. But this time he can't just print money because there's a hole in the wall. If you print some more money, it goes out the hole faster. So he has to change something else and he changes the censorship resistant nature of the money. So when you have perfect money, you hold it yourself, which is obvious. Why would you give someone else your money? That's imperfect the perfect money is holding it itself so he announces one day that now everyone needs to keep the money in the banks because the banks are going to keep everyone safe there's money laundering or there's terrorism or there's whatever some excuse for centralising everyone's money not in their own possession but in the banking sector and the banks will then check every single transaction to keep the Fiatello population safe and then they'll reject some and especially they'll reject them if someone wants to buy Satoshi's because that's really risky. You should protect you from buying Satoshi's. And so he effectively blockades the Fiatello financial system, either explicitly by saying you're not allowed to do it or by giving rules to the banks and threatening them with legal action. Happened to me very recently. So they implement draconian solutions to stop people using Fiatello's for things that they shouldn't be using Fiatello's for. And so he removes the censorship-resistant nature of it. But people find a way, like humans always find a way, but no one wants to work for the fear-tellers, they wanna work for the Satoshis, and it's just very clear which side of the island do you want to be on. And so it's those two aspects of money, they're sort of the two core things that people should be thinking about. Don't want to save in something someone else could print for free. That's obvious. You all know it's true. You just haven't perhaps articulated it. And second, you don't want to save in something you don't actually own because you don't own it. And so if you come to those two realizations and you're thinking about protecting yourself, your purchasing power into the future, protecting your family to create a better life for your family in the future, you are now trying to solve for two things. protecting my wealth and having access to my wealth unilaterally. And so you think about that matrix of all possible assets. And everything you can possibly own is somewhere on there. So if you own, you might think, well, to offset the debasement of fiat currencies, I'm just going to buy a stock market index tracker. And that's easy. There'll be volatility, but it goes up roughly 8% a year. Same, funny that, as they front 8% a year of extra money. But then you pay taxes, obviously, whenever you sell it. So they get to steal some of it back through taxes, which is another benefit of the government. You inflate the money supply. make everyone's assets go up and then you charge them for making money through the taxes. And they feel like they're wealthy but they're not. Exactly. So they're underperforming anyway and then you take a slug of it for yourself and then when they die you take the rest. Take the rest, yeah. And so when laid out like that you realise we're just serfs in a system. We don't actually own anything. But if you were... owning an index tracker, that would offset largely, certainly much better than cash, the debasement. So you see the value go up, but you don't own it. To say like, I own a share in an ETF or a tracker or something. Yeah, on paper you do. but you wouldn't be able to tell me which institution that share is even in. Could you withdraw that? No. What if you wanted to sell it and take the money out? Maybe. If the government said it was okay, if all the institutions involved said it was okay, and then your bank said it was okay. Someone willing to sell it to you as well. True, true. He hadn't really thought about that one, but yeah, it's subject to market conditions as well. But if you're assuming a normal market, you would still require at least three levels of permission to get the value out.
SPEAKER_01:You
SPEAKER_00:don't really own it. You own it with three levels of permission. If you take another example, if you bought a bicycle, you kept the bicycle at home, you own the bicycle. You don't require permission to use the bicycle. Someone can arrive, put a gun in your face and take the bicycle, but that's a slightly different risk than holding it in a financial institution. but it's going to rust. It's going to lose its value over time. And so even if it's a high quality bicycle, you look after it, the maintenance plus the deterioration cost is going to make it underperform as a store of value. So that's not going to work either. I'm just picking a bicycle as an example of a physical thing. And so everything is somewhere on this matrix. And it's like, when you go down the thinking of like, where can I actually hold my money? Well, I can put it in ETFs or maybe I could buy gold. or a house if I bought gold I keep it at home I'm worried about someone breaking in. What if I own a bit too much gold? I need to put it in a vault now. I need someone else to look after it. And they give you a piece of paper. You don't own the gold anymore. And how do you even know it's real gold? You don't own it. If the government says it's okay, the gold vault says it's okay. One stroke of the pen. There's exactly, as you said, there's too much. Can't keep it here. Yeah. It's dangerous. But you think 1933, Rachel Reeves says we're making it a million pound fine or 10 years in prison if you hold gold gold vaults will hand it over in a second you'll get a piece of paper a worthless piece of paper you don't own it you don't own it what about a house you buy a house buy a second house okay you've got to manage the tenants you've got to pay the council tax sometimes you've got to keep the maintenance oh and by the way they're putting on property taxes now right and if you want to buy a second home or you sell a second home the tax rate is now massive You can't leave the country because the house is attached to the ground. They're all compromised. All these assets are compromised somewhere on that matrix. And so you go down the chain of thinking like, what is it I can actually own that is beyond the reach of anybody and retains its value better than everything else? And there's only one answer. There's only one answer and it's Bitcoin. Bitcoin is perfect money it's rules without rulers It's neutral, independent money for the world beyond the control or the influence of any individual person, state, combination of states. With finite supply. With absolutely finite supply. It's the only absolutely scarce thing in the universe. And you can keep it yourself. You can keep it in your head. It's just 12 words. Or you can write 12 words down and keep them somewhere secret only you know or your family knows where they are. Keep them in different places. No one can prove you have it or don't have it. No one can stop you sending or receiving it to anyone, anytime, anywhere in the world. It moves across the internet at the speed of light. It's perfect money. And so you think about, we settled on gold as a civilization, as the best form of money. But that was compromised. We put the paper on top and then the government screwed everybody. Yeah, but also you could mine gold if you found it. Well, this is the thing. And a lot of people struggle to get to the realization that Bitcoin is valuable. Because they just say, oh, well, it just doesn't exist. It's digital money. But there's two things. to say there. We live in a world of digital money anyway. When you see the numbers on your phone app, that's not a bundle of cash sitting there. Let's see. The town. The Bitcoin as a form of value, right? Because you can't trade it at that point. Bitcoin is decentralized all around the world. Yeah. Tens of thousands. The movement of it would be. No, the ledger. Tens of thousands of independent nodes everywhere in the world. Yeah. Nobody knows who they are. You can run one at home. You can help keep money decentralized. So the argument that Bitcoin's not valuable if the internet goes. The internet will have to go everywhere in the world forever for Bitcoin to not be useful. And if the argument is we lose electricity forever everywhere in the world, we've got bigger problems, right? Because that's just not going to happen though. It was always going to be somewhere, especially now we're putting satellites in space that bring internet to the entire world 24 seven. It's not a credible, it's not a credible thing. And just to throw, like looking at devil's advocate on that side of it and just being able to say why or what, because the internet is required and large, you know, factors of that currency being traded right so that's true but the same is true of everything else in life yeah if your central solution is we go back to physical barter because electricity no longer exists then you should be making very different decisions about your financial management right you should be buying a place in New Zealand and stocking up on guns probably yeah and so yeah it's an argument some people use but it's more sort of clutching at straws to try and find a an angle where they think Bitcoin doesn't win. To think that you haven't lost all your bank, all your value, all your money in the bank at that point is, you know, that goes first, clearly. Yeah, two reasons. So digital value. Most value is digital. We just see it in a banking app. And we don't question that that's money. Bitcoin is no different. And secondly, people have no issue that gold is valuable. And if you realize gold is valuable, you're going to love Bitcoin. Because what is gold? Gold is decent money. It's like hard money. with soft edges, so hard is fairly limited in supply, but it's scattered throughout the earth, and it's infinite in the universe, just so we can't access it. It's economically inaccessible. It's precious metal, really. But how do we bring it into existence? We mine it. And what is mining? It's the expenditure of energy to bring a physical commodity into existence, into accessibility. We also have Bitcoin mining. So this is the is the analogy yeah so if you have if you don't have any issues that gold is valuable because of its finite supply its monetary qualities and the fact that you need you can't print it because you've got to expend energy to get out of the ground you're going to love bitcoin bitcoin's absolutely finite you have to expend the energy to bring the remaining pieces into existence and it's a global free market to do so and it's got all the qualities of perfect money it's it's the final stop in monetary evolution after gold. There is nothing after Bitcoin. It is the perfection of money.
UNKNOWN:But
SPEAKER_00:It's very inaccessible to people, but that's just, I think, a natural consequence of a technological adoption cycle. Because it's 16 years old and it started life as a PDF on an email. And so to go from that to representing the value of the entire world, there's a lot of steps required there from accessibility, education, technological ease of use, storage, all of these things. And with the passage of time, it just becomes easier and easier and easier, more and more accessible. But even just the understanding of why it's valuable. It's hard. I stop a hundred people in the street and say, why do we need Bitcoin? If one person said to separate money and state, I would be amazed, right? Because they wouldn't. We're just not at that level. But once you understand what problem Bitcoin solves, you then understand why it's valuable. Bitcoin is the only tool we have ever had in human history to be able to separate money and state. We can remove the big red button and from the state, which is causing all of these issues by adopting Bitcoin. Okay. I have so many questions.
SPEAKER_01:The first is...
SPEAKER_00:we're in this position now where the wall has come down and where people are realising
SPEAKER_01:that we need perfect money and that we need the separation of
SPEAKER_00:state and the big red button. That to me screams of an extremely violent and tumultuous time ahead to get that transference away because isn't the fear teller going to want to hang on for dear life and not let
SPEAKER_01:you out?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, absolutely. But Not necessarily. Okay. Bitcoin, you cannot fight Bitcoin and expect to win. Bitcoin is an idea. It operates in a free market accessible to everybody in the world. And so it's like planting millions of seeds around the world and watching them germinate in real time. They accelerate in some areas over others. Some areas are more receptive than others. But once you understand why we need Bitcoin, you don't go back. You can't unsee it again. And it's like a positive virus. It's like once the penny has dropped, you'll never go back to thinking the way it works at the moment is correct. No, this has been my last six weeks after listening to you. It's dropped, it's changed. And that's now never going to change.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And so what are you going to do? You're going to talk to somebody else.
SPEAKER_01:and
SPEAKER_00:talk to someone else, then they're going to talk to somebody else. They already have. And so eventually, everybody understands. but it doesn't happen overnight and so to think about that the only
SPEAKER_01:problem though I had is a couple of the people were like yeah cool I get it but fuck me mate I've got serious problems over here at the moment I've got to worry about my Fiatelos like right now
SPEAKER_00:like cool come back to me when we're nearly there kind of thing which is a problem is a problem and I would encourage people and obviously nothing here is financial advice etc etc you know we wouldn't want people to actually be able to store their wealth in any way other than have it stolen by the state. But everyone should just get started. Start learning about Bitcoin. Start reading it. Find out a way to buy it if they are happy with it. But use your own critical thinking. Don't buy it until you understand why. And then once you understand why, you never stop. But we are very, very early in the adoption of this. And you can tell because 99 people on the street wouldn't be able to tell you the answer. And to come back to your question so you just think logically around how this plays out knowledge spreads gradually between people and then conviction builds gradually that's when they hear it from the second person and the third person that when they might start to change their viewpoints on it yeah and you know they hear a conversation they hear another conversation begin to piece these things together they watch what's the problem and then gradually put other things around it these This building of conviction takes time. And that means it's a gentle transition of understanding and therefore action by individuals. And now once you understand why we need Bitcoin, and once you understand that fixing the money is absolutely the most important thing we could possibly do in the world because everything else is downstream of fixing the money, then the people who have realized that, They make active decisions to change things. They build technology. They educate other people. They vote as single-issue voters. And you don't need a large block of single-issue voters to begin to influence politics. That's
SPEAKER_01:for
SPEAKER_00:sure. If you guarantee 2% of the electorate vote for the person who is most pro-Bitcoin, you could tip the next election. And that's what happened in the US. And so you get governments that gradually become more aligned with Bitcoin because also in part, if you take the opposite view, you lose. And so I'd encourage people to think about Bitcoin as a civilizational change technology. And there's only, you don't get them very often. I would equate it to gunpowder and the internet. And both of those things, you don't win by opposing them. It's like when gunpowder gets invented, you can maybe not like it. But if you don't adopt it, you get killed. There is no neutral strategy for gunpowder. You have to adopt it. It's the same with the internet, the information. If you prevent the internet in your country, you massively underperform. And it's the same with money. And once people realize that, the logical strategy is to engage with Bitcoin. It gives you a competitive advantage in everything that you do. And therefore, that overlaid with a gradual education curve and a gradual monetization of the world curve. And Bitcoin is 0.2% of everything. It's like nothing. 0.2% of everything. which shows you that most people don't understand yet. Yeah. Yeah. Those things are very gradual. You can see that because when it comes to the actual adoption of it, they see it as a cryptocurrency and it's pulled in with Ethereum and Solana and Dogecoin and yeah, unfortunately that Trump coin and all this. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:But it is right.
SPEAKER_00:It's seen as a high, higher risk asset for fiat currency to purchase it with the introduction of Bitcoin ETFs and, uh, government institutions being able to buy it through your ISIS or whatever that might end up being right and you're not actually owning it in a token format right you don't own any of this stuff Unfortunately, we are still at the education stage. We're still at the stage of Bitcoin understanding by the media that I would equate with morning breakfast show hosts sat on a sofa in the 90s laughing at this internet thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're at that stage. Okay. Because there isn't the understanding of why it's important. And so when I say Bitcoin is perfect money, it's perfect money. The rest of crypto is just fiat. it's just fiat. They all have their own individual big red buttons that some, somebody can change something somewhere. And the supply is infinite. And the supply, including the supply, including the centralization, including, you know, a hundred different things. Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Yeah. They are all just, you should, you should mentally separate them. I think the mental picture I would expect many people to hold and apologize if this is mis represents what you have in your head if you're watching or listening but on one side you probably have normal world and then the other side you have crypto world of which bitcoin is a part
SPEAKER_01:it's very much the way i saw the world until six weeks
SPEAKER_00:ago yeah and that's wrong that's wrong so put that put that in the bin the right model is fiat world on one side of which cryptocurrency is a part and on the other side bitcoin Cryptocurrency is just fiat. It's a hyper-volatile speculative form of fiat currency. Speculative technology looking for product market fit. And it's somewhere on the scale of outright fraud to speculative technology looking for product market fit. Somewhere on that spectrum. It is not perfect money. And so do not buy anything, any cryptocurrencies whatsoever. Whatsoever. ever unless it's bitcoin the rest is just it's all going to zero when measured in bitcoin okay joe
SPEAKER_01:this has been good
SPEAKER_00:I've enjoyed it so thank you it's
SPEAKER_01:been amazing I mean I literally have another like 50 questions for you but I'm just conscious of time like
SPEAKER_00:we're going to have to have you back if that's alright I'd love to come back I think it would be awesome because I've what I would say to people is get back to the beginning what's the problem first and we'll leave a link to it in the show notes below get on that but then also on your website right there is I've been down that rabbit hole last 40 hours. I really enjoyed it. There's all of the introductional pieces and then there's more advanced stuff, right? Yeah. And I should say, I have these conversations because I want people to understand what the problem is. Not because I'm trying to sell something or anything. There is no commercial model here. There is a website that has the video and it has some other materials to help you learn about different aspects of Bitcoin. Just to be clear, you won't say this, but you're an extremely successful businessman and head of trading desks from some of the biggest banks in the world. So you're doing this for education. There is nothing to buy. There's nothing to buy. I just want people to learn about Bitcoin. I think
SPEAKER_01:it's important to make that clear because people live in that world as, oh, he must be selling us a crypto course. Just to be paramount clear, this is not for that
SPEAKER_00:straight education here 100% clear the way we fix the world is to separate money and state we separate money and state when everyone's learned about bitcoin so watch what's the problem then go on the website what's the website well there's two there's now whatstheproblem.org if you just google what's the problem it's there which is amazing it's like generic words on google and it's right at the top of the first page a little pixar character but on the website there is links through to five or six other videos covering different aspects of bitcoin just to get people started and some other podcast interviews which discuss different aspects but then just join join the community read order a book start learning about it listen to more podcasts it is Everyone needs to do a little bit of work. And the video will give everyone the skeletal mental framework as to why this is important. And it's on that skeleton. They will gradually put the rest of the learnings. We don't need them to start with. Just if you can answer why we need Bitcoin with the separation of money and state and you understand why the world is the way it is, then that's a massive win. And much like you've gone down the rabbit hole over the last six, six, eight weeks, I hope many more people will do after today. Yeah, I just think it's obvious when the penny drops about the importance of it. It doesn't mean that fiat currency suddenly you have to ignore it. You have a job. You still need to do your job. You still need to go to work and do all of these things. We live in a fiat currency world. Unfortunately, it's just the way things are. However, there is an educational piece and a movement that can be brought in to essentially make your life better over time. Absolutely. And one thing I would say is that Bitcoin's volatile. Extremely. Extremely volatile, but that's a good thing. It's a good thing because it can only fall 100%. but it can go up forever when measured in the thing they're printing and so I would absolutely not say to people go and buy bitcoin or put lots of money into bitcoin don't just start learning about why you need to understand Bitcoin, why, hopefully then get started and match the amount of Bitcoin that you own with your conviction, which will gradually grow over time. And trust your gut. If you do own Bitcoin and the price falls and you're worried, you own too much. Okay, that's a really good point. And I think we haven't had... We were talking about this earlier. We haven't had a deep conversation about cryptocurrency because of its dangerous nature and because Bitcoin is so separate from it. And so... you are the perfect introduction to this from an audience perspective, but equally as well from a society perspective where we have a problem with money and state. And so I have loved this. I'm
SPEAKER_01:probably going to geek out and listen to it back a few times. Might have to mute myself. Yeah, Joe, it's been class, man. Thank
SPEAKER_00:you so much. And yeah, I honestly encourage everybody to get involved, get onto learning about Joe's resources and I look forward to having you on again soon. All right, lovely. Thanks, Sammy. Thanks, mate.
