Stay Free - Russel Brand - SPECIAL: What NO ONE NOTICED About Trump’s Bitcoin Move - SF 423

00:00:00.000 so so

00:01:50.000 so brought to you by fighter

00:02:18.000 In this video, you're going to see the future.

00:02:30.000 Hello there you Awakening Wonders!

00:02:31.000 Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand where we are talking about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and how decentralized economic models might be a significant part of liberty and freedom in so much as anything that's able to bypass corrupt institutions affords us greater opportunities for interpersonal transaction and I suppose parallel economies.

00:02:54.000 I learned a lot about Bitcoin while I was there at that conference.

00:02:58.000 First of all, I want to show you a little bit of Donald Trump's speech.

00:03:02.000 A lot of people thought we would go further making some of the Federal Reserve be held in Bitcoin.

00:03:07.000 But nevertheless, is it important just to see speakers of that magnitude and gravitas appearing at a conference for something that just a few years ago was a very marginal peripheral Let's start off by looking at Donald Trump.

00:03:23.000 We'll be on YouTube for the first 15 minutes but then we'll be exclusively available on Rumble simply because we are part of the set of parallel bodies and organizations that will potentially form part of a new movement that might be able to bypass all these old atrophying models.

00:03:42.000 Let's have a look at Donald Trump first of all and see if what he said there was an indication that cryptocurrency is indeed the future.

00:03:51.000 This afternoon I'm laying out my plan to ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world.

00:04:01.000 And we'll get it done.

00:04:06.000 If crypto is going to define the future, I want to be mined, minted, and made in the USA.

00:04:13.000 It's going to be.

00:04:14.000 It's not going to be made anywhere else.

00:04:17.000 And if Bitcoin is going to the moon, as we say, it's going to the moon, I want America to be the nation that leads the way.

00:04:24.000 And that's what's going to happen.

00:04:27.000 No, you're going to be very happy with me.

00:04:28.000 You're going to be so happy.

00:04:31.000 You're going to say, he's the greatest guy.

00:04:35.000 That's why I'm proud to be the first major party nominee in American history to accept donations in Bitcoin and crypto.

00:04:45.000 For three and a half years, the current administration has waged a war on crypto and Bitcoin like nobody's ever seen before.

00:04:52.000 For those who work in this industry, they target your banks, they choke off your financial services.

00:04:58.000 Have people seen that?

00:04:59.000 Yes?

00:05:01.000 Yeah, they have plenty of hands up. 0.78

00:05:04.000 They block ordinary Americans from transferring money to your exchanges.

00:05:08.000 They slander your, they slander you as criminals.

00:05:12.000 But that happened to me too, because I said the election was rigged.

00:05:16.000 He said the election was rigged.

00:05:18.000 He should spend the rest of his life in jail for making that statement.

00:05:21.000 Of course, they say it about us and it's okay, right?

00:05:24.000 No, and by the way, we're doing very well on the election.

00:05:27.000 You know, we lost a candidate recently, rookie Joe Biden.

00:05:33.000 And and I thought we lost this wonderful person.

00:05:37.000 And it's actually a terrible human being, if you want to know the truth.

00:05:40.000 So don't feel sorry.

00:05:41.000 The problem is that Kamala is worse than Joe is worse. 1.00

00:05:46.000 She's a radical left lunatic, defund the police, all of the different things. 1.00

00:05:52.000 And so far we're doing, she's got a little honeymoon going on right now, but when people hear about her, and she's against crypto by the way, and she's against it very big, so I just want to let you know, you gotta get out, you gotta get out and vote!

00:06:05.000 It should be no surprise that these same totalitarians are hell-bent on crushing crypto and obliterating, and that's what they want to do, and that's what they are stated.

00:06:16.000 Well, I mean, they're there right now.

00:06:18.000 You have the SEC, you know what they're doing, obliterating Bitcoin.

00:06:23.000 The reason could not be more clear because Bitcoin stands for freedom, sovereignty, and independence from government coercion and control.

00:06:33.000 I pledge to the Bitcoin community that the day I take the oath of office, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris's anti-crypto crusade will be over.

00:06:43.000 It will end.

00:06:43.000 It'll be done.

00:06:44.000 It'll be done.

00:06:48.000 They're going to keep their hands off crypto.

00:06:50.000 They're going to let it grow.

00:06:51.000 We're going to let it grow.

00:06:52.000 On day one, I will fire Gary Gensler and appoint a new SEC chairman.

00:06:59.000 I didn't know he was that unpopular.

00:07:10.000 But I'm not unpopular.

00:07:20.000 Well, I didn't know he was that unpopular.

00:07:25.000 Let me say it again.

00:07:28.000 On day one, I will fire Gary Gensler.

00:07:32.000 Whoa! 0.71

00:07:34.000 Applause I will appoint a new SEC chairman who believes America

00:08:01.000 should build the future, not block the future, which is what they're doing.

00:08:05.000 I And no longer will your government sit by and watch as Bitcoin jobs and businesses flee to other countries because America's laws are too unclear and too tough and too angry and too stiff.

00:08:20.000 We will keep Each and every Bitcoin job in the United States of America.

00:08:27.000 That's what we're going to be doing.

00:08:29.000 Those who say that Bitcoin is a threat to the dollar have the story exactly backwards.

00:08:35.000 I believe it is exactly backwards.

00:08:36.000 Bitcoin is not threatening the dollar.

00:08:39.000 The behavior of the current U.S.

00:08:42.000 government is really threatening the dollar.

00:08:48.000 The danger to our financial future does not come from crypto.

00:08:52.000 It comes from Washington, D.C.

00:08:56.000 It comes from trillions of dollars in waste, rampant inflation, and open borders while giving welfare and free health care to all of the illegal aliens that are pouring into our country by the millions and millions and millions. 0.99

00:09:11.000 It comes from printing hundreds of billions of dollars to fund endless wars overseas while our cities are like combat zones here at home.

00:09:21.000 We had the greatest economy ever, and we will soon have it again.

00:09:25.000 Under the Trump administration, the typical middle-class family income rose by $6,000 a year.

00:09:32.000 People don't like mentioning that.

00:09:34.000 America had more money to save than at any time in many decades.

00:09:38.000 As a result, during my four years in office... Now, you have to listen to these numbers.

00:09:44.000 These numbers are, like, beautiful.

00:09:46.000 And I don't want to repeat myself.

00:09:49.000 Listen to these numbers.

00:09:50.000 As a result, during my four years in office, Bitcoin surged by 3,900% from $898 the day I took office to $35,900 the day I left.

00:09:59.000 from $898 the day I took office to $35,900 the day I left.

00:10:10.000 That was the biggest jump, I guess, in just about any industry.

00:10:18.000 Think of that.

00:10:19.000 Now compare that to just after three and a half years of Biden and Harris adjusted for inflation, Bitcoin is up 50%.

00:10:30.000 Now 50% sounds good, but not when you're comparing it to almost 4,000%.

00:10:36.000 Right?

00:10:37.000 50%.

00:10:37.000 You know, normally you'd say, oh, that sounds pretty good.

00:10:40.000 Let's not put that into the speech.

00:10:42.000 No, 50% is not good.

00:10:45.000 When people can't afford groceries or rent, they have no savings to store in Bitcoin.

00:10:50.000 This administration caused the biggest inflation in the history of our country.

00:10:54.000 And that's what's happened.

00:10:55.000 Our people are being wiped out.

00:10:57.000 From the very first day we take back the White House, we will replace the Biden-Harris economic stagnation with a brand new Trump economic boom.

00:11:05.000 You're going to have a tremendous boom, most importantly for our citizens.

00:11:10.000 We will end the inflation nightmare that this administration has created, and we will end it quickly.

00:11:17.000 It's got to end.

00:11:17.000 It's destroying our country.

00:11:19.000 You know, inflation is a country buster.

00:11:21.000 You can go back Many, many years to Germany, and you look at what happened to Germany during their huge period of inflation.

00:11:30.000 Destroyed the country.

00:11:31.000 It's a country buster.

00:11:33.000 The Bitcoiners, and I say to you that you recognize the dangers of inflation long before most others did.

00:11:40.000 You understood inflation, frankly, better than anybody else.

00:11:43.000 You know that, don't you?

00:11:46.000 If only they had listened!

00:11:48.000 They didn't listen to you.

00:11:50.000 They didn't listen to you.

00:11:51.000 The trillions of dollars in ridiculous waste approved by our opponents resulted in the very inflation disaster that Bitcoiners had always predicted.

00:12:00.000 Twenty, thirty, and even forty percent of the value of every dollar was wiped out and wiped out quickly.

00:12:07.000 You understood that, but a lot of other people didn't.

00:12:09.000 The life savings of millions of Americans was rapidly destroyed.

00:12:14.000 And very simply, uncontrolled inflation is a stealth taxation of the middle class.

00:12:20.000 It really is, it's a stealth taxation.

00:12:23.000 I call it the Biden tax, now I call it the Harris tax, or the Harris-Biden tax, or whatever the hell we're gonna call them.

00:12:30.000 But it's a disaster.

00:12:32.000 It's a tax of 50%.

00:12:34.000 It's a 50% tax.

00:12:36.000 Inflation.

00:12:38.000 Think of it.

00:12:39.000 It's a 50% tax on people.

00:12:41.000 5-0.

00:12:42.000 This is a human tragedy, and it's destroyed people.

00:12:45.000 It's a national disgrace.

00:12:47.000 It's destroyed everything in its way.

00:12:49.000 It must never be allowed to happen again, and it won't.

00:12:53.000 Many Americans do not realize that the United States governor is among the largest holders of Bitcoin.

00:13:00.000 Does anyone know that?

00:13:02.000 How about that?

00:13:03.000 The federal government has almost 210,000 Bitcoin, or 1% of the total supply that will ever exist.

00:13:11.000 But for too long, our government has violated the cardinal rule that every Bitcoiner knows by heart.

00:13:18.000 Never sell your Bitcoin.

00:13:20.000 Right?

00:13:21.000 That's right, isn't it?

00:13:28.000 That's right.

00:13:30.000 How did I figure that one?

00:13:32.000 Never sell your Bitcoin!

00:13:34.000 And so, as the final part of my plan today, I am announcing that if I am elected, it will be the policy of my administration, United States of America, to keep 100% of all the Bitcoin the U.S.

00:13:50.000 government currently holds or acquires into the future.

00:13:53.000 We'll keep 100%.

00:13:54.000 I hope you do well, please.

00:13:58.000 This will serve, in effect, as the core of the strategic national Bitcoin stockpile.

00:14:05.000 And so, as I take steps to transform that vast wealth into a permanent national asset to benefit all Americans, today I repeat my pledge to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht to a sentence of time served.

00:14:21.000 It's enough.

00:14:23.000 It's enough.

00:14:25.000 With your help, we will save our nation, we will restore a republic, and we will make

00:14:34.000 America and Bitcoin bigger, better, stronger, richer, freer, and greater than ever before.

00:14:42.000 Thank you all.

00:14:43.000 Have a good time with your Bitcoin and your crypto and everything else that you're playing with.

00:14:50.000 And we're going to make that one of the greatest industries on Earth.

00:14:54.000 Good luck and God bless you all.

00:14:56.000 Thank you.

00:14:56.000 God bless you.

00:14:57.000 Thank you.

00:14:59.000 My own participation in this conference was largely about liberty, freedom, freedom of communication, the importance of demonopolization and how monopolies necessarily lead to censorship and exploitation.

00:15:15.000 I spoke with Chris Pavlovsky, the CEO of Rumble, about those subjects and as well tried to manage an audience of I think five, ten thousand people while ultimately trying to have an intimate fireside chat.

00:15:27.000 Have a look at that.

00:15:29.000 One of the undergirding principles of Bitcoin that I'm learning a lot about today, because I am something of an ingenue, you know, this is quite new to me, is the significance of decentralization.

00:15:42.000 And if you decentralize power, something beautiful happens almost automatically.

00:15:48.000 That there is something almost inherent in monopolies that leads to corruption.

00:15:54.000 It seems that what's happening with Rumble, and in particular Rumble's evident David and Goliath struggle against YouTube alphabet, their evident and obvious attempts to censor, control, possibly participate in surveillance, certainly facilitate some extraordinary operations, their odd Our relationship with a group called the Trusted News Initiative that seem to be interested in further centralizing and controlling the flow of information has some obvious correlative with the monopolization that happens in the financial industry.

00:16:30.000 It seems to me that what I've been learning is that when you decentralize and make transparent the very business of transaction, authenticity and integrity almost automatically appear.

00:16:43.000 In fact, they are a requirement.

00:16:46.000 What I suppose I find pretty encouraging about that, Chris, is the suggestion that individual... Because an event like this, there's people that are right heroes.

00:16:54.000 Edward Snowden.

00:16:55.000 What an incredible hero, what an amazing sacrifice he made for America on behalf of his ethics.

00:17:01.000 Bobby Kennedy, another heroic individual.

00:17:03.000 Tomorrow, the extraordinary spectacle of Donald Trump, just fresh from his resurrection, just one earlobe down.

00:17:13.000 We are only going to be on YouTube for another 30 seconds.

00:17:17.000 Click the link in the description to join us for a conversation about new modalities and models that could ultimately replace the sets of institutions and ideas via which control is established and asserted.

00:17:32.000 Click the link in the description.

00:17:33.000 See you in a few seconds.

00:17:35.000 Not the first man to nearly be annihilated by the dreadful phenomenon of slopey roofs.

00:17:41.000 A threat to all of us anywhere.

00:17:43.000 There could be a slopey roof around us now.

00:17:48.000 And like it's very easy to fall into the adulation of individuals that seem heroic or perhaps alternatively condemn them, loathe them, despair of them.

00:17:59.000 But what it seems to me is available in blockchain technology is the regulatory principles that occur when individuals are empowered.

00:18:07.000 And indeed, Rumble has comparable principles because a commitment to free speech does not favour or bias towards a particular type of free speech.

00:18:17.000 It encourages all of our free speech and has a kind of, I would say, acceptance That universally, through discourse, we will arrive at conclusions that are positive if we're not prohibited, inhibited, censored, controlled by institutions that claim that they care while actually practicing control.

00:18:38.000 It seems to me that there is something quite beautiful in learning that individuals, when trusted, will reach the right conclusions.

00:18:47.000 And that is antithetical to an era of elitism that we appear to be living through.

00:18:52.000 Because what is the central principle of censorship?

00:18:55.000 We are a moral authority.

00:18:57.000 We know more than you.

00:18:58.000 We are smarter than you.

00:19:00.000 And similarly too, when Rumble first came out, what did they first say? 0.95

00:19:04.000 It's disgusting. 0.93

00:19:05.000 It's filthy. 0.87

00:19:05.000 What did they say about Bitcoin? 0.87

00:19:07.000 It'll all be used to trade drugs and pornography. 0.99

00:19:11.000 And I bet some people have done that, Chris.

00:19:14.000 But ultimately, when people are allowed to live deregulated and free,

00:19:18.000 what emerges are something closer to our higher nature and our higher principles rather than our lower.

00:19:25.000 You sum that up perfectly.

00:19:35.000 What's happening right now is that you have all these entities that are controlling and now they're fighting for control.

00:19:43.000 They're losing their control.

00:19:44.000 They're losing control to companies like Rumble, Truth, X. They're starting to actually fear that their narratives are going to change because for once, There's not someone with an agenda telling Russell, hey Russell, you have to say this.

00:20:01.000 Has that ever happened with us?

00:20:03.000 Never.

00:20:04.000 No, only the voice is in my mind.

00:20:08.000 So now what you're having is that you're having like true authenticity start to come out and true opinions start to come out.

00:20:16.000 Things that we would have at our dinner tables that apparently we couldn't say online and we still can't say online on the incumbent platforms.

00:20:25.000 So, like, YouTube, for example, for the last, I would say, eight years, has just been moving the goalposts and moving the goalposts, creating new terms, sometimes on a monthly basis, sometimes on a weekly basis.

00:20:40.000 Something is changing constantly on YouTube to try to Say that you need to say something specifically or not say something at all.

00:20:48.000 They're trying to control speech in many different ways.

00:20:51.000 And when Rumble came along in 2020, late 2020, where we actually had prominent figures start joining our platform like Dan Bongino, Congressman Devin Nunes, we started to break that fold.

00:21:04.000 And that's what created a shift happen.

00:21:07.000 Everybody Picked aside.

00:21:09.000 This is exactly what happened.

00:21:11.000 Everyone actually picked aside, and Rumble just stayed in the middle.

00:21:14.000 Our policies didn't change in any meaningful way in the last 10 years.

00:21:18.000 They've been relatively similar, but everyone else's did.

00:21:21.000 And they left us all in the middle, and what happened?

00:21:24.000 They all picked aside, and then the middle started coming towards us.

00:21:29.000 Why?

00:21:30.000 Authenticity.

00:21:32.000 People get to hear what you're really thinking, and they know that you're not Saying, doing or saying something that has some kind of agenda or corporate agenda behind it.

00:21:44.000 When you watch people like Russell on Rumble, you're getting to hear what he actually thinks and not someone else that's telling him what to think.

00:21:53.000 And that's what's created the opportunity for Rumble in such a large way.

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00:23:20.000 Right, let's get back to this content.

00:23:22.000 I thought of so many things while you were talking then, and not because I wasn't listening.

00:23:26.000 Because I was.

00:23:28.000 That's just common good manners.

00:23:29.000 Here are some of the reflections that I would like to offer you, Chris, and everybody present.

00:23:34.000 When dealing with an organization like Google or YouTube, and I recognize that my voice was significantly amplified by that platform initially, before the blessed day where I got the opportunity to begin to work with Rumble, you recognize how tyranny and power may guide us towards dystopia.

00:23:53.000 Let me illustrate that further.

00:23:55.000 We're being encouraged to Imagine that the dystopias of the future might resemble the despotism of the 20th century, that we might forfail to militaristic 20th century style demagoguery.

00:24:11.000 We're being taught to fear fascism and of course fascism is something that ought be feared because indeed Bitcoin and Rumble, the technologies that we're talking about, are about primarily individual freedom.

00:24:26.000 When it comes to the tyranny that I fear mostly, the phrase I heard that resonates is technological feudalism.

00:24:34.000 When you consider the amount in bureaucracies and the incredible power that's being accrued by groups like Alphabet, Google, because we are talking about monopoly, centralized power, I would like to reflect on how it it feels to deal with these organizations directly.

00:24:52.000 If you find yourself in a spat or a conch-à-tom with YouTube, you will find that the discourse

00:24:58.000 is very unusual and anodyne.

00:25:01.000 We have had to censor your content.

00:25:03.000 You will have to appeal to the community guidelines.

00:25:06.000 A team member will get back to you.

00:25:08.000 It's very friendly.

00:25:10.000 It's very banal.

00:25:11.000 It's very sterile.

00:25:13.000 You get the sense that you're communicating with some peculiar, odd and inaccessible, insidious mist.

00:25:21.000 When we think about tyranny in the future, we should not think about 20th century modalities of dictatorship.

00:25:29.000 We should think of great writers like George Orwell, Audus Huxley, and Franz Kafka, who indicated that dictatorships in the future might be rather anodyne, and friendly, and here to protect you and keep you safe.

00:25:43.000 Some of you may have noticed that in the last five years, in order to protect your freedom, in order to protect your safety, In order to protect your health, certain measures were strongly recommended.

00:25:56.000 Certain conversations were forbidden.

00:25:59.000 Indeed, just think of the people that have been on the stage over the short period of time that we've been at this conference.

00:26:04.000 Bobby Kennedy, strongly censored.

00:26:07.000 Edward Snowden, exiled.

00:26:10.000 Julian Assange, while absent, was imprisoned and incarcerated without trial, all for what To protect you.

00:26:18.000 To protect you from information that might harm you.

00:26:21.000 Or to protect you from microbes or viruses that might harm you.

00:26:25.000 God help us!

00:26:27.000 God protect us from these people that want to save us and protect us.

00:26:34.000 In their rationalism and materialism, they have sought right down to the microscopic level to replace God and to replace the authority of God with rationalism and materialism, to make rationalism the highest authority.

00:26:48.000 Having made themselves the highest authority, their edicts go uncontested.

00:26:53.000 There was a moment, September last year, where I myself was at the very middle of a tundra A dark maelstrom of incredible power.

00:27:03.000 The kind of power that can only occur when big tech platforms, big media and government align.

00:27:11.000 The government in my country directly asked platforms to demonetize me.

00:27:16.000 A sitting government minister.

00:27:18.000 This is an extraordinary overreach of government.

00:27:21.000 Among the people and platforms that were bold enough to say, hold on, we have principles around justice, around hearings, around innocent

00:27:31.000 until proven guilty, was Chris Pavlovsky at Rumble.

00:27:34.000 And of course, Elon Musk at X, who I know evokes complex feelings like many tech billionaires. 1.00

00:27:47.000 They're all fucking crazy, these guys! 1.00

00:27:50.000 They're all a bit weird. 1.00

00:27:52.000 They're not like normal people.

00:27:54.000 I've got to know tech billionaires now.

00:27:55.000 They sort of look at their phone too much.

00:27:57.000 They leave meals in the middle of a meal.

00:27:59.000 They'll just get up and go.

00:28:00.000 Essentially, they're monetizing autism. 0.96

00:28:06.000 Never mind mining Bitcoin, start mining the neurons of these lunatics that are coming up with this stuff, is what I would say.

00:28:14.000 But nevertheless, what we're finding in these unusual minds is the kind of bravery that comes from not centralizing power, but from decentralizing it.

00:28:24.000 Because the simple truth is, is no one should be mediating your connection to God, or your connection to money, or your connection to free speech.

00:28:33.000 Because no one knows better than you, although there are high principles to which we

00:28:37.000 could have recourse.

00:28:41.000 It's even more insidious.

00:28:49.000 The monopolizations are happening both on every aspect of tech.

00:28:57.000 For example, you guys probably all remember the moment that Parler got deplatformed entirely by Amazon AWS.

00:29:05.000 And that happened for a complaint that that exact complaint was actually happening more so on the other platforms than it was happening On Parler itself, so it was completely unjustified to do that, and I think that was like crossing a red line in society when you have like an oligopoly in the cloud business.

00:29:25.000 You got Microsoft, you got Amazon, you got GCP, Google, and at that moment, Amazon decides to take out Parler, which was horrible.

00:29:35.000 And that was a big wake-up moment for us because we realized Rumble won't survive unless we have our own infrastructure.

00:29:44.000 On the infrastructure level now, Rumble can't just be a company that says, hey, we're going to uphold free speech and protect everyone's rights to having their voice.

00:29:57.000 We now have to build our own infrastructure.

00:29:59.000 So what did we do?

00:30:01.000 We built our own infrastructure.

00:30:02.000 We launched the Rumble Cloud earlier this year, which is now available not only to Rumble, but the entire public.

00:30:12.000 That's based on the same principles that Rumble has, free speech.

00:30:17.000 But it gets even worse.

00:30:18.000 It not only is the infrastructure a problem, we solve the infrastructure.

00:30:22.000 Now the next thing we need to go solve is the advertising world.

00:30:26.000 The advertising world, the way they're working and the way they're...

00:30:30.000 colluding together to make sure that they only bring the advertising dollars to specific creators that have certain viewpoints is a major problem.

00:30:41.000 And we just saw in the release, I'm sure you've seen this, Russell, is the Global Alliance of Responsible Media, as they call it.

00:30:51.000 They put it in nice names to make it sound really good, as you just mentioned.

00:30:55.000 That's the way they do it.

00:30:56.000 And you can see the emails that the Judiciary Committee released with respect to that.

00:31:01.000 And Ben Shapiro was talking about this as well when he was at Congress.

00:31:07.000 And it's appalling what you see.

00:31:10.000 You see that they're actually constructing a boycott of putting advertisements on X and other platforms like Rumble to make sure that voices that they don't agree with Are not getting monetized trying to strangle them at the monetization point.

00:31:27.000 And this is just one example of multiple examples both on the infrastructure and on the advertising side of what we're up against.

00:31:36.000 We have ad cartels.

00:31:38.000 We have infrastructure.

00:31:40.000 We got governments.

00:31:41.000 We got states.

00:31:43.000 We're fighting multiple things at multiple different points.

00:31:47.000 But you know one of the good things is we're not alone anymore.

00:31:50.000 There are other companies starting to step up.

00:31:53.000 You have truth, you have X, and things are starting to move.

00:31:57.000 So, question for you, do you think things are getting better?

00:32:02.000 Yes, actually.

00:32:03.000 I'm feeling almost overwhelmed with optimism in this actual moment now, because I know that we are streaming this on Rumble, there'll be people watching this on Rumble now, and a considerable audience are also watching elsewhere.

00:32:16.000 And I'm minded of the significant and oft-repeated maxim, attributed usually to Andrew Breitbart, that politics is downstream of culture.

00:32:27.000 Well, culture is evidently and obviously downstream of technology.

00:32:31.000 We have the technology for immediate proliferation and dissemination of not only information, but clearly a transactional technology also.

00:32:40.000 And what I find deeply heartening about this is the opportunity and obvious establishment already, because you lot are early adapters and adopters.

00:32:49.000 I knew about Bitcoin for ages.

00:32:51.000 I know all the subtle ones you've not even heard of.

00:32:53.000 I know all sorts of cryptocurrencies.

00:32:55.000 I've just made one up right now.

00:32:57.000 You lot know about this stuff already.

00:33:00.000 And one thing that institutions fear more than anything, I believe, is not the direct and martial attacks which John Lennon greatly and famously said they know how to deal with, but people moving away from their institutions.

00:33:15.000 Setting up parallel economies, parallel media.

00:33:19.000 Of course my deep concern is that we remain in the thrall of commodity, commerce and material, when this could be so much more.

00:33:28.000 When this is a genuine opportunity for us to access something Deeply ethereal and mystical.

00:33:34.000 Our own personal connection to the ultimate reality.

00:33:38.000 A personal and private connection to God.

00:33:42.000 A resource that we might utilize so that we are no longer in the thrall of prohibition and inhibition and systems of absolute control that might use the kind of patriarchal auspices of your health and safety.

00:33:57.000 They might use any measures.

00:33:59.000 My interest is this most of all, that this is not just a digital form of the gold rush, but this is a set of systems through which we may bypass our atrophying, corrupt, Hypocritical systems of government, big tech, media, the loss of moral authority that they are experiencing is deserved.

00:34:21.000 Because we know that lawfare can be used, that the judiciary can be used as a weapon.

00:34:27.000 That media can't be relied on.

00:34:29.000 That the regulatory bodies that control Big Pharma are funded by the corporations that they're supposed to be regulating.

00:34:37.000 You have known for some time that these institutions are not worthy of your trust and now you are beginning to have the means to bypass them.

00:34:45.000 And if they cannot be bypassed electorally for the corruption is so immersive or the options so limited, now there is the genuine chance For your individual freedom of expression to exist both in terms of media and communication through platforms like Rumble and others, but also through the advance that you are at the very forefront of when it comes to transaction digitally.

00:35:10.000 So indeed I feel optimistic.

00:35:12.000 Not because of any great individual leader, although we have seen great individual leaders at this conference, but because what Bitcoin epitomizes above all else.

00:35:22.000 Decentralization, transparency, open communication and the possibility for new human relationships.

00:35:30.000 That is the deepest optimism of all.

00:35:32.000 That human beings aren't corrupt and ugly, aren't disgusting and deserving of shame, are beautiful and capable of again connecting with the sacred.

00:35:43.000 So if Bitcoin can do that, surely I believe in it and surely I am optimistic, Chris.

00:35:49.000 But the truth is we've still got five minutes.

00:36:01.000 So have you?

00:36:03.000 No, I think the tide is so big right now.

00:36:06.000 Like I said, we were all alone on an island for a couple of years during COVID and all these, from like 2020 to 2022 really.

00:36:14.000 And I think that tide is like unstoppable.

00:36:18.000 You have Bitcoin, which is a freedom movement.

00:36:21.000 You have companies like Rumble and X and Truth that are freedom movements.

00:36:27.000 It's kind of emerging everywhere.

00:36:28.000 You have infrastructure like RumbleCloud.

00:36:31.000 The parallel economy is really getting developed.

00:36:34.000 And you have talent, like real important talent that are speaking their minds and really kind of waking up to everything and telling the world what they think, like yourself and many others.

00:36:46.000 I think this tide is so big right now.

00:36:48.000 There's nothing that's going to stop it.

00:36:50.000 And ultimately, the number one value that under underlines everything here is freedom.

00:36:56.000 It's freedom of speech.

00:36:57.000 It's freedom.

00:36:58.000 It's transparency.

00:37:00.000 It is when you take a look at it, though.

00:37:04.000 For the last 10 years, we've had a monopoly control the video space.

00:37:07.000 We've had an oligopoly controlling the infrastructure space.

00:37:11.000 The idea of having competition is a type of decentralization in its own right.

00:37:17.000 And that's what we need to have.

00:37:19.000 If there's ways to take things like Rumble and get them even more transparent and more decentralized, I'm all for it as the technology continues to evolve.

00:37:29.000 But in the finance world, you now have Bitcoin, which is really taking hold and has an incredible future.

00:37:38.000 So this tide, nothing's going to stop it.

00:37:42.000 We are going to win in this war, for sure.

00:37:48.000 One of the things that made me most excited about participating in this conference was the inclusion of Edward Snowden.

00:37:54.000 We've spoke to him on this show a couple of times, and whenever you speak to him, you get the sense that this is someone with genuine humility, incredible insight, and a set of values that's probably transcendent of the kind of backbiting, backstabbing, and seething that defines modern politics.

00:38:10.000 It was really interesting to see him say that we should look at the political candidates that were present at Bitcoin, namely RFK and Trump.

00:38:18.000 As really just political figures with their own agenda and their own motives and that we should remember that politics needs to be de-tribalized and certainly isn't a religion.

00:38:28.000 That was among some of the things I thought he was fascinating but Edward Snowden is of course uniquely positioned to comment on both the technical and I suppose privacy related aspects of Bitcoin.

00:38:41.000 Here he is.

00:38:43.000 Our lives have been increasingly intermediated by screens, by panes of glass, right?

00:38:49.000 You are watching this either live on stage, because you registered through a smartphone, through a laptop, right?

00:38:57.000 Nobody went and sort of bought a ticket at the counter anymore.

00:39:00.000 That's not how the world works these days.

00:39:03.000 But in order to even set that computer up, to turn it on, to log in, to set up your account, To pull the smartphone out of the box, charge it, open it up, connect it to your Wi-Fi access point, you have to click OK to continue.

00:39:16.000 You have to agree to somebody else's terms of service.

00:39:18.000 You are made to pass through gates of permission that are owned and controlled by others that do not answer, frankly, to anybody.

00:39:28.000 You see Facebook, you see Google, you see how they've been abusing the trust Of everyone in every country, right?

00:39:35.000 You see, the EU tries to get a handle on them.

00:39:38.000 They're completely ignored.

00:39:39.000 There was the GDPR, right?

00:39:41.000 General Data Protection Regime regulation that was supposed to fix all of these problems.

00:39:47.000 And it didn't work.

00:39:48.000 They say, oh, we'll fine you, you know, 4% of global revenue or whatever.

00:39:52.000 You break the rules.

00:39:53.000 That hasn't happened.

00:39:54.000 It's been years and years and years.

00:39:58.000 Whether we're talking about governments, whether we're talking about corporations, we're talking about the same thing.

00:40:02.000 We're talking about the systemization of technologies that are designed to order our lives to the benefit of the institutions.

00:40:12.000 They're trying to organize us.

00:40:15.000 To benefit them in some cases, we want this.

00:40:19.000 We want to be able to cooperate.

00:40:20.000 We want to be able to collaborate.

00:40:22.000 We need to be able to work together.

00:40:24.000 Right?

00:40:25.000 But we have to agree to this in some way.

00:40:28.000 We should need to and it's not like click.

00:40:31.000 Okay to continue.

00:40:33.000 Or say no and use the phone my way, right?

00:40:35.000 It's click OK to continue or you can't use your iPhone.

00:40:38.000 You can't use your Android phone.

00:40:40.000 It doesn't matter whether Samsung makes it, whether Google makes it, whether Apple makes it.

00:40:44.000 You play by their rules or you don't play at all.

00:40:49.000 And that should be changing.

00:40:53.000 We'll get to it a little bit later where we are making great strides in the context of money, which is why suddenly we see a lot of political interest in these audiences.

00:41:02.000 They understand that there is a new center of power that is rising.

00:41:07.000 But there is a new field of vulnerability that applies to all of us, including all of these luminaries that will be speaking on stage here.

00:41:18.000 And that is artificial intelligence, right?

00:41:20.000 I am not one of the guys that goes on the Internet and is like, oh, AI safety, AI safety, the robots are going to kill us.

00:41:26.000 You know, you need to worry about this.

00:41:27.000 I say, in fact, I want all of them to dump all of these models out on the Internet where we can all use these.

00:41:34.000 OpenAI, which is not open at all and is a very closed model company that wants to benefit themselves at your expense.

00:41:42.000 They want to train on your data.

00:41:44.000 But benefit themselves, and they don't want you to have access onto the coverage.

00:41:49.000 They don't want you to be able to pull down the models, distill it, get one you can run at home, put it on your phone, do whatever you want with it.

00:41:54.000 They want you to have to go back to their watering hole, pay them rents, and to access all of this only through their ways, even if you did have the ability, technologically, hardware, just to run this at home.

00:42:07.000 The good news is it is becoming easier and easier to get this stuff in public hands to run this on home machines.

00:42:15.000 I'm not just speaking rhetoric here.

00:42:16.000 I've spent the last year using these models myself at home.

00:42:20.000 You can do this too.

00:42:21.000 Open source models, whether we're talking about diffusion models for generative imaging, right, sort of what you think of like the mid-journey, the nice web interfaces, you can do that at home.

00:42:33.000 It's 100% free as long as you've got the hardware to run it.

00:42:37.000 And again, it's getting easier and easier to do this.

00:42:41.000 Whether we're talking about large language models, Facebook, which, again, I've been throwing invective at for the beginning half of the talk, has actually been a force for good in this space.

00:42:51.000 Not because they love you, or they love us, or they love me, or anything like that, but because they're afraid their competitors, like OpenAI that I mentioned, are going to build a structure around them, ring-fence them, in a little plot that they can then tax forever.

00:43:07.000 And Facebook doesn't want to end up there, right?

00:43:09.000 So they go, well, what we'll do is we'll develop the tools and give them to everyone else.

00:43:12.000 So a monopoly can't form and be used against us.

00:43:16.000 Self-interest more so than altruism, but I still applaud it, right?

00:43:20.000 And I'm no fan of Mark Zuckerberg, but he's done wonderful things here.

00:43:23.000 I hope he continues.

00:43:25.000 I know it won't last forever, but for the moment, while it does, I'll welcome the help that we can get there.

00:43:31.000 But why am I bringing this up, you know, at a Bitcoin conference?

00:43:36.000 Well, the reason why is that Bitcoin transactions are not private.

00:43:40.000 All of you know this here on The General Sense because it's 2024 and this is not, you know, back in 2013 where we're saying, oh, you know, Bitcoin is perfectly anonymous and it's money for criminals and whatever.

00:43:53.000 The only person who still believes that is Elizabeth Warren.

00:43:57.000 The reality is that Bitcoin transactions are permanent, they are public, and they can be tracked and they can be linked.

00:44:07.000 An enormous proportion of them are fully doxed, just not publicly doxed.

00:44:14.000 And this is because how do people move in and off of the Bitcoin network, any crypto chain really?

00:44:21.000 And it's through the on and off ramps, right?

00:44:23.000 Through these legacy exchanges that get licensed by all, you know, whatever New York State or whatever country, whether it's in Dubai, whether it's in New York, and they are sharing the information en masse with what we politely refer to as regulators, but what are plainly described as great powers, right?

00:44:48.000 People are not really focused on sending this stuff to the government of Barbados.

00:44:53.000 But if they're worried about catching an indictment from that government, they will send anything that government asks for to them.

00:45:00.000 And then they'll say, is there anything else you need while we're at it?

00:45:03.000 Well, there was still one saving grace, which was there were parts of that chain, which were not Fully identified and verified, you could have private transactions, you could send $5 for your buddy for pizza, you know, as long as the on chain transaction fees were low.

00:45:23.000 Otherwise you wait, save it up.

00:45:25.000 But the idea here is that.

00:45:30.000 You could still engage in the network and presume that it would just age off eventually.

00:45:36.000 It's out there, it's on the blockchain, somebody has it, you know, maybe they'll prune it.

00:45:40.000 But it's not you.

00:45:41.000 It's not that everybody will know everything you did anywhere, all the time, forever.

00:45:47.000 Because when they have your transaction history, they have your life history.

00:45:51.000 They know what you read, what you buy, who you support politically, like where your donations went.

00:45:57.000 All of that is available to them.

00:45:58.000 They can Infer your thinking.

00:46:01.000 They can infer your affiliations.

00:46:05.000 At the NSA, we called the kind of information that was not the details of a conversation, right, not literally reading like your texts, but simply saying that you texted someone.

00:46:17.000 And this was under their interpretation.

00:46:19.000 In my interpretation, it's a violation of the Constitution.

00:46:22.000 But in their interpretation, this didn't impact the Fourth Amendment at all, because it's not a search, because it's not reading your messages themselves.

00:46:30.000 It's simply tracking the flow of messages.

00:46:33.000 We called this kind of information metadata, right?

00:46:36.000 And that metadata padded out what was your pattern of life.

00:46:40.000 Metadata can be plainly described as activity records.

00:46:43.000 It's the same kind of thing that a private investigator would get if they just followed you around all day.

00:46:47.000 They don't sit behind you at the cafe and hear everything you say because you would wonder, who is this dude following me?

00:46:53.000 But they sit outside in a car on the street.

00:46:55.000 They see that you go in the cafe at this time.

00:46:57.000 They see that you sit at a table with this other person.

00:47:00.000 They send a guy to go, who is that person?

00:47:02.000 What's his license plate?

00:47:04.000 Who is he?

00:47:04.000 They know that you met.

00:47:06.000 They get the affiliation.

00:47:07.000 They see you at work.

00:47:08.000 They see you at the store afterwards.

00:47:09.000 They don't see every item that you bought, but they see where you shop.

00:47:13.000 And as you pad these things out more and more, you get a more and more complete picture of an entire human life without ever having to go, oh, we need a warrant for this.

00:47:25.000 What held that back?

00:47:26.000 Well, cost.

00:47:28.000 You needed a human analyst to go and sift through this.

00:47:31.000 The metadata could be collected automatically by ingesting the world's internet communications through these machines, right?

00:47:38.000 But somebody still had to put their cup in the big bucket, pull it out and, you know, lay it out on their desk and make sense of it.

00:47:48.000 Machine learning models are going to change this.

00:47:51.000 In my opinion, this is already being done.

00:47:55.000 We simply don't have evidence of it yet.

00:47:56.000 It's going to be testing.

00:47:58.000 It's going to be development.

00:48:00.000 We don't know how it's being applied, when it's going to be truly operational.

00:48:04.000 But it is fantasy to imagine that they're not doing this.

00:48:09.000 And there is zero regulation that I am aware of in the United States to prevent this.

00:48:14.000 Nobody is thinking about what these agencies are doing.

00:48:18.000 And we're not just talking about the NSA here.

00:48:20.000 We're not just talking about the FBI.

00:48:22.000 We're talking about the IRS, right?

00:48:23.000 And it's not just the United States.

00:48:25.000 It's every country.

00:48:25.000 You may go, oh, I love the United States government doing this.

00:48:28.000 I hope they spy on me as much as possible.

00:48:30.000 Well, what about China?

00:48:31.000 What about Russia?

00:48:32.000 What about North Korea?

00:48:33.000 What about Iran?

00:48:34.000 What about every little government that you don't like, that you don't agree with, right?

00:48:39.000 And suddenly they can have every life of every person, every day, at every moment on a live feed.

00:48:48.000 being interpreted at machine speed.

00:48:53.000 And then you start feeding that Those inferences into a decision making process.

00:49:01.000 This is the reason that I bring up the protesters at Columbia University, protesters in Canada, right?

00:49:07.000 It doesn't matter whether you're liberal, doesn't matter whether you're conservative.

00:49:10.000 If you stick out, if you stand out, you are going to become non-normative or rather anomalous.

00:49:19.000 What I am afraid is likely to happen quite quickly, right?

00:49:25.000 Probably not this year.

00:49:27.000 Within three years, it'll begin being done.

00:49:30.000 I think at some scale, within five to ten years, it'll be done absolutely regularly, routinely, is that they're going to take all of the transaction information that they can get.

00:49:43.000 And this is going to start with big banks going on their own personal data sets.

00:49:48.000 It's going to flow from there to people going, oh, where can we get this information publicly?

00:49:54.000 Well, the Bitcoin blockchain is available for anyone for free at any time, right?

00:49:59.000 And how do you train these models?

00:50:01.000 You need learning sets.

00:50:03.000 You need training data.

00:50:04.000 You need data sets.

00:50:06.000 So they're going to pull everything they can.

00:50:08.000 They're going to feed it through these things, and they're going to try to teach them originally.

00:50:13.000 I think it's going to be easiest thing.

00:50:15.000 What does a normal transaction look like?

00:50:18.000 You know, what do 95% look like?

00:50:21.000 And then they're just going to go, what is anomalous?

00:50:23.000 What is strange?

00:50:24.000 What is unusual?

00:50:25.000 What doesn't quite fit?

00:50:28.000 And then they're going to go from that's a 5% probability down to 3% probability, then try to get it smaller and smaller and smaller until they can just basically have people that are getting reports spit out on their desk, little, you know, chat messages to their terminal.

00:50:42.000 Basically, they're saying this just happened, this just happened, this just happened.

00:50:46.000 Do you want to continue?

00:50:48.000 And that banking officer is going to get a click OK to continue on your life, on your ability to transact, on your ability to trade.

00:50:58.000 It's not just going to be Bitcoin.

00:50:59.000 It's going to be Visa.

00:51:00.000 It's going to be MasterCard.

00:51:01.000 It's going to be everywhere.

00:51:02.000 It's going to be PayPal, right?

00:51:04.000 Whether you're subscribing to an OnlyFans account or something like that, which, you know, is a very common thing, but something that a lot of people aren't going to admit to.

00:51:13.000 They're not going to be proud of, right?

00:51:17.000 That's going to start making these institutions go, oh, do we want to continue our business association with these people?

00:51:24.000 Is there a brand risk, you know, on stage here?

00:51:31.000 And I think we really need to think about how do we secure the transactions on the Bitcoin network moving forward.

00:51:39.000 I have said this for 10 years.

00:51:41.000 I have been ignored for 10 years.

00:51:43.000 Well, we're running out of runway.

00:51:45.000 And again, right now, every time you're on this network, and I love this network, I've used it many times.

00:51:53.000 You are going to be adding to the data set.

00:51:57.000 Even if they don't identify you because you're the, you know, whatever mystic cyber ninja that knows how to protect yourself, who is the counterparty that you're trading with?

00:52:06.000 Are you sending it to your buddy?

00:52:08.000 Are they doxxed, right?

00:52:10.000 Are you sending it to a business that you're paying?

00:52:12.000 Are they doxxed?

00:52:13.000 And larger and larger parts of this transaction mesh, of this network, as they get identified, the space for everyone else to have any kind of private interaction diminishes.

00:52:26.000 Now, you might go, well, these big businesses, Visa, MasterCard, like, yeah, they have the transaction history for everybody, everywhere, all the time.

00:52:33.000 And you don't know what they're using it for.

00:52:36.000 But they're not screwing you, right?

00:52:37.000 Well, AT&T, it was revealed this year, lost all of their subscribers' information, or an enormous subscribers' information, for a block of time.

00:52:48.000 I think it was something like six months.

00:52:51.000 Uh, for all of your text messages, all of your phone calls, all of the things that went through there.

00:52:58.000 Routing network, including some cell site location information, which means which cell phone tower you were connected to, were stolen by hackers.

00:53:07.000 They haven't said who they are, as far as I know.

00:53:09.000 They may not have been identified yet.

00:53:11.000 Maybe they'll never be identified.

00:53:13.000 We don't know whether it's state-sponsored or whatever.

00:53:15.000 Maybe there's been ongoing reporting since then that's revealed it.

00:53:18.000 Correct me if I'm wrong.

00:53:20.000 I'm sure somebody will be out there to tweet about it.

00:53:23.000 But the bottom line is this, right?

00:53:25.000 These enormous datasets are a liability.

00:53:28.000 We know they cannot protect them.

00:53:29.000 You cannot control them.

00:53:31.000 And they can have enormous influence over our lives.

00:53:34.000 All of these people who are coming up on stage and saying these wonderful things about how much they love Bitcoin, how much they love you, they're going to do all these wonderful things to make something better.

00:53:42.000 The United States is the only advanced democracy on the planet that I am aware of that does not have a basic privacy law.

00:53:51.000 We have the Fourth Amendment, right?

00:53:54.000 That only binds the federal government.

00:53:56.000 That doesn't do diddly squat to protect you against corporations.

00:54:00.000 And the government, for 90% of their work, probably 95% of their work in intelligence nowadays, they simply go to corporations and ask them for information.

00:54:09.000 It's hand-drawn around the Constitution.

00:54:13.000 And we have been able to suffer this, right?

00:54:17.000 Again, the game is too good to leave.

00:54:21.000 Not because we love it, but because we haven't had a choice.

00:54:24.000 Well, we're running out of time to fix this, and the consequences of ignoring it are about to get a whole lot worse.

00:54:30.000 And nobody sees this.

00:54:30.000 This is not Terminator, right?

00:54:32.000 This is not Skynet.

00:54:33.000 This is not robots descending from the sky to drag you out of your home.

00:54:38.000 That might come someday, but that's a long way off.

00:54:41.000 We're talking about some things that are much more banal, but much easier to do.

00:54:47.000 We talk about that concentration of power.

00:54:49.000 These politicians, right, a lot of them probably don't love that they have to come up on this stage and give a dog and pony show to dance for the crowd that is suddenly much more powerful.

00:54:58.000 Well, the people that they have always been attached to are about to get a much tighter hold on the leash, not just of them, but of everyone.

00:55:06.000 The Internet is broken because institutions are competing against the individual, while the individual is competing against other individuals.

00:55:18.000 We need to shatter that design.

00:55:21.000 Because competition is everywhere, but it's only against the powerless.

00:55:25.000 We need to look back at the avarice of those princes.

00:55:29.000 And I don't just mean in the context of government.

00:55:32.000 I mean everywhere.

00:55:33.000 I mean, you know, Jamie Dimon, J.P.

00:55:37.000 Morgan.

00:55:39.000 We need to think about the systemic influences on our lives and how we can correct for them.

00:55:43.000 The people who throughout all history have the means to diminish the amount of metals in our coins, which is inflation, simply by a different name.

00:55:57.000 We're not using metal anymore, we're using paper now, but the game is the same.

00:56:02.000 We in this room are using a technology that has taken the metal and the paper away from them.

00:56:08.000 And it is through this single lever that they have set flourishing societies on the path to inevitable poverties.

00:56:15.000 And I just want you to remember, every time you look at the grocery store's prices, that you are not alone.

00:56:21.000 You are not isolated.

00:56:22.000 Everyone in that store is dealing with the same battle that you are.

00:56:26.000 We have to cooperate.

00:56:27.000 We have to work together.

00:56:29.000 And we have to make sure they do not reduce this country to the land of the fee and the home of the slave. 0.98

00:56:36.000 The only way we will do that is if we work together.

00:56:40.000 So please, by all means, cast your vote.

00:56:43.000 But don't join a cult.

00:56:44.000 There's a lot of work to be done.

00:56:46.000 Thank you.

00:56:48.000 One of the most significant speeches of that day was delivered by Bobby Kennedy, who I suppose, up until the inclusion of Kamala Harris, was making an incredible impact in the election and may yet rise again.

00:57:01.000 Who knows what kind of deals he'll be offered, what kind of relationships might be formed.

00:57:05.000 But the spirit of independence, clarity, authenticity, openness, a willingness to attack big pharma and big corporations more generally is certainly something that I would look for in a political leader and it's odd to think that just like

00:57:17.000 10 years ago Bobby Kennedy was a darling of the left because of his incredible environmental work

00:57:22.000 and just two years ago he was taboo and couldn't speak anywhere. Whatever's happening in our

00:57:26.000 culture is changing radically and quickly and this speech charted just a little of that. Have a look.

00:57:31.000 Any of you know my own introduction to Bitcoin, my own conversion, my...

00:57:38.000 I knew from my children about Bitcoin, but it seemed almost to me something like a fad or a novelty.

00:57:51.000 And then I saw what happened in Ottawa.

00:57:53.000 I was running at that time the Children's Health Defence, which was the premier advocate

00:57:59.000 for medical freedom in our country, and we had embedded with the striking truckers in 0.97

00:58:12.000 Canada a reporter for our newsletter.

00:58:15.000 and And she was traveling with the truckers from Alberta all the way to Ottawa.

00:58:22.000 And the truckers are very diverse in Canada.

00:58:24.000 They're Asian, they're black, they're white. 1.00

00:58:28.000 The truckers were doing something that all of us in our country take for granted.

00:58:35.000 They were assembling to petition their government about something that they thought was important, which was that the impacts, the financial impacts of the mandates on their businesses.

00:58:49.000 And if you look at the videos of that event, it was like Woodstock.

00:58:54.000 People were giving out water bottles, they were picking up trash, they were playing music, they were being kind to each other.

00:59:01.000 But it was portrayed by the Canadian government has a right-wing, extremist, violent terror organization.

00:59:12.000 And the government began using facial recognition systems and other forms of surveillance to learn the identity of the truckers, looking at their license plates, etc.

00:59:24.000 And then it froze their bank accounts.

00:59:27.000 And it froze their $12 million PayPal account.

00:59:31.000 And when Canada did that, it occurred that the premier template of democracy in the world besides the United

00:59:38.000 States, it occurred to me immediately that transactional freedom

00:59:45.000 was as important as freedom of expression in the First Amendment.

00:59:50.000 Because if the government has the capacity, none of these truckers were charged with a crime, much less convicted.

01:00:05.000 But...

01:00:06.000 And yet the government was able to shut down their bank accounts.

01:00:09.000 They couldn't pay their mortgages.

01:00:10.000 They couldn't buy diesel for their trucks.

01:00:14.000 They couldn't buy food for their children.

01:00:15.000 One trucker told me that he was going to jail because he couldn't make mandatory alimony payments.

01:00:23.000 And if a government is able to starve you, to evict you from your home, if you speak out against it, if you criticize government policies, then we are on the road to totalitarianism and slavery.

01:00:39.000 And I began at that time looking seriously for alternatives, and it was that instant.

01:00:45.000 That led me immediately to grasp the potential of this technology to provide transactional freedom and self-sovereignty.

01:00:56.000 Last year at this conference, I proposed that as your president, I would fight to ensure the right to self-custody Bitcoin to run nodes in our own homes To stop the federal government from usurping First Amendment rights to open-source privacy-enhancing technologies, I pledge to prevent government officials from adopting CBDCs, which would inevitably morph into what we saw in Canada, a malevolent tool for surveillance and control.

01:01:30.000 Most importantly, I promise to secure the United States' position as the global hub of cryptocurrency innovation and entrepreneurship and investment and technology.

01:01:45.000 Now, I'm very happy to learn that I'm not the only one talking about Bitcoin in this year's election.

01:01:55.000 Nothing could make me more joyful than to see other political leaders now jumping on the Bitcoin bandwagon.

01:02:04.000 I've had over a year's head start to study, to understand, to articulate the potential of Bitcoin.

01:02:11.000 And my goal as the first Bitcoin president will be to enact policies that will make America the great world's greatest representative for Bitcoin and a proponent of its democratic values.

01:02:24.000 I grew up assuming that America would always maintain its status as the world leader, the leader of the free world.

01:02:33.000 But ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1993, we've paradoxically been moving in a declining spiral away from that role.

01:02:43.000 Hubris, military adventurism, and corruption have put America's political and economic power in precipitous decline.

01:02:54.000 Our dollar is rapidly losing its reserve currency status because we've weaponized it against other countries.

01:03:01.000 When we disagree with the policies of another country, we kick them off the SWIFT system and we debank them.

01:03:09.000 As a predictable result of that strategy, the BRICS nations are now in the process of de-dollarizing by getting off the petrodollar.

01:03:19.000 They realize that trading their commodities and other hard resources for money that is printed out of thin air is a losing proposition.

01:03:29.000 This trend will likely accelerate until we make the tough transition toward backing our

01:03:36.000 debt obligations with hard assets again.

01:03:47.000 I have a plan to strengthen the U.S.

01:03:50.000 dollar and lower the interest rates and neutralize our $34 trillion debt.

01:03:56.000 By backing U.S.

01:03:58.000 Treasury bills, notes and bonds with hard assets, including a combination of

01:04:03.000 precious metals and Bitcoin.

01:04:08.000 Back in US...

01:04:13.000 debt applications by collateralizing them with hard assets not only restores strength to the dollar, it reigns in inflation, and it will usher in a new era of American financial stability.

01:04:27.000 Prosperity and peace.

01:04:29.000 The world needs to believe that we have safely handcuffed our government and its ability to create money out of thin air with no proof of work.

01:04:39.000 The innovative strategy that I'm proposing leverages the scarcity and liquidity of Bitcoin, along with gold and other hard assets, to restore the dollar's dominance in global finance.

01:04:53.000 The world will rush to adopt an American-backed, decentralized currency that cannot be confiscated by governments, that can be traded and transacted on cell phones at the speed of light across every global border with no banking fees or other transactional friction.

01:05:13.000 This incorruptible currency will immediately start pulling wealth and assets from every other nation around the globe back into the United States, restoring the strength of our dollar and repairing our balance of payments.

01:05:29.000 Six months before his assassination, my uncle John F., President John F. Kennedy, signed an executive order that put silver coins in competition with the notes issued by the Fed.

01:05:44.000 His intention was to rein in Fed discretion.

01:05:49.000 He had been a critic of Fed policy, and he hoped to end the discretionary monetary policy and the inevitable debasement of the U.S.

01:05:59.000 dollar.

01:06:00.000 He understood that a highly leveraged economy leads directly to the destructive kind of wealth inequality that is today eroding American democracy and generating violence and division and discontent.

01:06:17.000 and hopelessness.

01:06:19.000 Notably, after my uncle's assassination, the government immediately stopped issuing those silver coins and power returned to the Fed.

01:06:29.000 My uncle apparently understood the potential for the Fed to evolve itself into a tyranny.

01:06:36.000 Bitcoin has the potential to return monetary discipline to the Fed and to restore the dollar as the unchallenged global reserve currency.

01:06:46.000 President Nixon took us off the gold standard in 1971 to finance the Vietnam War.

01:06:53.000 Since then, the dollar's purchasing power has been in precipitous decline, eroding savings and earnings of everyday Americans.

01:07:02.000 The discipline of tying our dollars to hard assets like Bitcoin will also finally break our addiction to forever wars.

01:07:10.000 Fiat currency was invented to fund war.

01:07:14.000 As I pointed out just now, President Nixon got us off the gold standard in 1971 because printing fiat currency was the only way to continually finance the Vietnam War.

01:07:29.000 I heard of fiat currency.

01:07:30.000 When a country ran out of money, the war would end.

01:07:34.000 Or, if a government wanted to fund a war, it would issue war bonds and borrow the money from its citizens, or it would tell them in advance, we're going to tax you.

01:07:44.000 They, governments, don't need to even ask that permission.

01:07:47.000 They just rent the money.

01:07:49.000 And then they fund the war with fake money.

01:07:54.000 If the world was on a Bitcoin standard, then there would be no war because the governments can't

01:08:00.000 print Bitcoin.

01:08:01.000 I'm a proponent of Bitcoin because it can defund the military industrial complex.

01:08:20.000 That is bent not on national defense, but on international global domination.

01:08:28.000 And I'll say this, you know, during the height of the Cold War, the military budget was about $500 billion in 2024 dollars.

01:08:44.000 Today, it's double that.

01:08:46.000 Why do we need twice the money that we needed during the height of the Cold War?

01:08:51.000 Well, we need it because it has nothing to do with national defense.

01:08:55.000 It has to do with global hegemony and international domination that is actually counterproductive.

01:09:00.000 It's a bankruptcy of us at home.

01:09:03.000 And it has destroyed our relationships and our moral authority across the globe.

01:09:13.000 Oh, let me say it again.

01:09:14.000 If governments couldn't print money with a couple of keystrokes on a computer, they wouldn't be able to fund wars that never end.

01:09:21.000 Again, fix the money, fix the world.

01:09:24.000 And make no mistake, one of the main reasons my administration will fix our broken money

01:09:37.000 is to defund the war machine.

01:09:40.000 To reach that goal, I'm going to support making direct ownership of Bitcoin tax-free.

01:09:46.000 The conversion of Bitcoin back into dollars will be a non-reportable transaction to the IRS,

01:09:56.000 not subject to capital gains.

01:09:58.000 We have to remember that the Fourth Amendment guarantees the right to privacy.

01:10:11.000 As a constitutionalist, I'm an adamant defender of our right to financial and transactional privacy.

01:10:19.000 When U.S.

01:10:20.000 citizens are required to report every Bitcoin transaction to the IRS, The government knows everything that we are doing with our money.

01:10:29.000 Governments have no business knowing your business.

01:10:32.000 See, finally, President Trump has had four years, had four years to pardon Ross Ulbrich and Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.

01:10:43.000 And he didn't do it.

01:10:46.000 And we need to ask ourselves why.

01:10:48.000 I've already looked into those cases and I plan on pardoning them all on day one.

01:10:53.000 **Cheering** Oh.

01:11:00.000 **Chuckles** Remember, if you want to join me for additional content,

01:11:06.000 meditation, Bible studies, early access to interviews as well as intimate conversations,

01:11:11.000 become a member of our locals community.

01:11:15.000 There's a link in the description if you want to join us there.

01:11:18.000 Also, I talk about stand-up comedy and other stuff that's very close to me.

01:11:21.000 I'll see you tomorrow for another special.

01:11:24.000 Not for more of the same, but for more of the different.

01:11:26.000 Until then, if you can, stay free.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - August 06, 2024

SPECIAL: What NO ONE NOTICED About Trump’s Bitcoin Move - SF 423

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