8⧸22⧸17 - Who do you WANT to be? (Wences Casares joins Glenn)
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 55 minutes
Words per Minute
147.18405
Summary
Trump's first formal policy speech since being sworn in was a big deal, but in the end, it was more like the empty calories consumed as we watched the eclipse. Glenn explains why and what a win actually looks like and why we should be fighting to win.
Transcript
00:00:08.000
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00:00:19.580
Well, last night, President Trump gave a primetime speech,
00:00:24.520
first formal policy speech, since the president was sworn in.
00:00:31.960
Yet, I don't know about you, I kind of feel in the end,
00:00:35.740
it was more like the empty calories that all of us consumed
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as we went out to the parking lot watching the eclipse yesterday.
00:00:46.660
I'm not exactly sure why, other than everyone said,
00:00:52.800
You've got to go out, and I have a major fear of missing out.
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And so I found myself standing in the parking lot like a boob.
00:01:01.020
Did anyone else feel that way yesterday during the eclipse?
00:01:07.140
I felt exactly the same way with the president's speech.
00:01:23.760
After all, sending more troops into Afghanistan is a 180
00:01:33.100
the war was an unsolvable quagmire requiring a fast U.S. withdrawal.
00:01:46.280
and he went as far as telling us why he changed his mind,
00:02:01.020
that terrorists, including al-Qaeda and the Islamic State,
00:02:04.400
could instantly fill if we had a quick withdrawal.
00:02:08.440
Trump said Americans are weary of war without victory,
00:02:21.460
Okay, several things here that we need to talk about.
00:02:28.500
Does anybody really believe we're going to win?
00:02:30.100
Because I don't even think we're fighting to win.
00:02:52.480
Because this is now America's longest conflict,
00:02:58.840
And we were told the win was to kill Osama bin Laden.
00:03:13.380
Americans are frustrated because no one on either side
00:03:38.920
He did the same thing that the first president did.
00:03:57.860
And if your media source isn't helping you figure out
00:05:30.800
The president says we're not going to nation build.
01:26:48.440
financial consequences in a family in a society
01:28:37.680
deposit box but the contents have to go back to
01:28:39.980
you and what makes you think that well before we
01:28:44.580
get there tell me what happened with this fork in
01:28:48.060
the road because this caused some some real panic
01:28:51.980
with people because they didn't know they really
01:28:54.840
didn't even understand the concept that Bitcoin
01:29:03.020
frequently I believe Japan now is recognizing it as
01:29:06.760
an official currency and if I'm not mistaken in
01:29:09.400
Japan becoming a Bitcoin society yeah yeah so and
01:29:16.240
because the transactions are happening so rapidly
01:29:18.880
there was talk about we have to have a faster way to
01:29:24.620
process these this is my understanding yeah and there
01:29:27.180
became this fork in the road between Bitcoin cash and
01:29:31.520
Bitcoin I don't know the difference what is the
01:29:34.760
difference not really again it's not really a very big
01:29:38.820
deal basically what happened and Bitcoin is an open
01:29:42.100
source software so we all can see every single line is
01:29:47.140
public and the five of us could do another fork again if
01:29:54.160
we wanted you just copy all the code paste it and run it
01:29:59.340
ourselves or run it with another group of people and it's
01:30:02.640
up to the market to decide if they want to use ours or the
01:30:05.340
other one so this was always a possibility finally someone did
01:30:10.940
it for the first time I think this will be a feature of
01:30:14.160
Bitcoin going forward we will see forks here and there and
01:30:17.860
there will always be one version of Bitcoin that is the most
01:30:23.760
used the one that has the longest history and then there
01:30:27.360
will be others that will be like cousins that were derived of
01:30:30.800
Bitcoin but will turn out to be different right can you turn your
01:30:33.660
Bitcoin into cash of course into normal cash yeah of course yeah
01:30:39.780
yeah it's like any currency yeah and and what is the percentage now
01:30:44.180
of things that you can buy I mean there was a big push we spoke five
01:30:48.400
years ago let's get you know people need to start you know companies need
01:30:52.800
to start taking Bitcoin as payment what are the what are the big
01:30:56.580
companies doing to to accept it are you seeing any big movement there's
01:31:02.400
about a hundred thousand merchants online that accept Bitcoin it's my
01:31:09.340
opinion that Bitcoin has been around for for less than nine years and it will
01:31:17.380
take another decade or two for it to get established I think that the age of
01:31:22.380
Bitcoin becoming becoming a way to pay at a merchant is quite far away I think
01:31:30.760
that the stage the era we're looking at is about something very different and in
01:31:35.460
fact I think that things like what we are seeing you know we had to go this year
01:31:38.580
through a fork for everybody to stop worrying and learn that it's not a big
01:31:43.160
deal forks are something we can live with it doesn't really hurt anyone and but
01:31:50.280
until it happened a lot of people were freaking out about it right and I can
01:31:53.960
tell you so many things that people freaked out about every three months and
01:31:56.980
Bitcoin and we have to see them happen for people to say oh it's good oh it's
01:32:00.500
well thought out oh it's robust it works I think we have a lot more of that to
01:32:04.960
come right now I think Bitcoin is in this first stage establishing itself more as a
01:32:10.660
not so much for payment as a way more what you're what you said that you're doing Glenn which is
01:32:22.000
you're holding it as a store of value just in case not unlike what some families did with
01:32:27.840
they had somewhere in the house a stash of some jewelry just in case right or some gold
01:32:34.660
it's more like that and only if it succeeds at that first with very massive
01:32:41.680
adoption in the hundreds of millions of people it will then make sense as a
01:32:46.460
payment mechanism but right now it's a bit too early it can be used and a lot of
01:32:51.540
people do use it but from my subjective point of view the more important thing
01:32:56.120
that is happening at this stage is it's expanding as a store of value
01:32:59.600
um wenches casarius he is the ceo of zapo.com x a p o dot com um you should uh check it out and as
01:33:10.880
i said earlier um don't don't put money into this that you can't you can't easily say ah i'm fine
01:33:19.300
without it this at this point is one of those things that um could make you a lot of money and you
01:33:26.320
could lose every single dime and uh and so you you put just a little bit in there to
01:33:32.300
just what the heck let's give it a whirl and see what happens thank you inches i appreciate it
01:33:38.140
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apply you're listening to the glenn bet program we uh we're gonna have we're gonna have fascinating
01:36:29.040
the ceo of uh zapo uh stay with us for a second because we were just talking in the break there is
01:36:35.660
a real downside a risk to this but the world completely changes if it if it works and you were
01:36:44.720
just saying that there's about a 20 chance you lose all the money right i would say at least a 20
01:36:50.260
chance you lose all the money okay um and you said you thought that there was on the other hand there's
01:36:55.740
some upside you're saying that there's a 50 chance yes uh that bitcoin one single bitcoin now worth
01:37:05.320
four thousand dollars was worth 200 when trump took that long escalator ride down uh two years ago
01:37:13.060
uh you're saying that in 10 years you believe that could hit a million dollars i think there is a 50
01:37:21.140
percent chance that one bitcoin could be worth i mean that's more than a million dollars that's
01:37:25.560
worth a four thousand dollar investment right that's what i would what i would say is that
01:37:30.820
if you it's very worthwhile just like i would say the most irresponsible thing you could do would be
01:37:36.360
to own an amount of bitcoin you cannot afford to lose to have the kids college fund there or your
01:37:41.100
retirement or a mortgage that would be really a risk the most irresponsible thing but if you put
01:37:45.720
if you put five hundred dollars in because you're like you know what we're gonna scrimp and we're
01:37:51.400
gonna save and i'm not touching our savings i'm not touching anything we're just gonna stop going
01:37:55.700
to movies going out to eat for a while i'll have five hundred dollars in five hundred dollars is worth
01:38:01.780
a lot of money if this is right in 10 years yeah that that's my point is that that the second most
01:38:07.940
irresponsible thing you could do is not to have any right it's so asymmetrical that you can have
01:38:12.140
something that doesn't really it's not material to you but it can have a very material impact on
01:38:17.900
your life so why not do it okay back in just a second convince me what does the world look like
01:38:22.740
should he be right when we come back so you gotta stop going out to eat now yeah so yeah
01:38:37.920
this is the glenn beck program winches casarius he is the ceo of zapo.com xapo.com full disclosure
01:38:50.500
i am a client have been for a while of winches company bought bitcoin and bought it in a way that
01:39:00.600
i think is reasonable you have to make your own decisions but i i looked at you know what we have
01:39:07.620
in savings and said honey what are we willing just to throw if we were going out on a crazy
01:39:14.160
bender what would you be comfortable losing you know on a crazy bender uh you know for our 20th
01:39:22.780
anniversary or whatever what do you we just flush it down the toilet what's that number she came up
01:39:28.900
with the number and i looked at it and said okay maybe maybe a little lower than that or a little higher
01:39:33.660
than that um did she shut her when you said 20th anniversary yeah she did and she thought
01:39:39.600
blackouts would be included so she was willing to go a little higher but anyway um uh and that's what
01:39:45.720
you put in you don't put money in this at this point i think it's irresponsible to advise you to put
01:39:52.100
money into this um because you could lose every penny of this and and i think you could lose every penny
01:39:59.180
because i just don't see a way to where the central banks say okay well we're gonna let a private
01:40:05.220
industry go ahead and take the money supply over but maybe we can get to that i want to get to
01:40:12.140
the upside on this because i just read an article and stew and i were talking about it last week that
01:40:19.940
some some experts are saying that bitcoin could go up to what was it 200 000 i think it was 10 000 to 100
01:40:26.780
thousand yes the idea and you're saying that you think in 10 years that it could go up to
01:40:31.080
a million plus yes in bitcoin yes i think that what you are giving is very sound advice nobody should
01:40:40.240
own an amount of bitcoin they cannot afford to lose because they may very well lose it and regret it
01:40:44.680
and you could buy five dollars worth you can buy any amount five dollars two dollars ten dollars any
01:40:49.520
amount you want um and i think the most irresponsible mistake would be to own an amount of bitcoin that you
01:40:55.700
cannot afford to lose but the second most responsible would be to not own any because i do think that if
01:41:00.860
bitcoin succeeds it's likely to be worth more than a million dollars in less than 10 years and i think
01:41:07.600
there's about a 50 chance that would have sounded crazy even three years ago i think it still sounds
01:41:15.180
crazy and and and i think there's tons of risk to it yeah but there's not as it's not as crazy as it
01:41:20.700
was when it was at 0.008 cents and every every day that bitcoin doesn't disappear and that we can remove
01:41:29.460
another layer of fear oh we have fear of the chinese or we have fear of the fork or we have fear there's
01:41:36.460
always something every day we go past one hurdle it's um more likely to succeed is there an event that
01:41:45.220
would change the change the game for bitcoin in a positive way um i get it a lot from questions
01:41:53.960
like this from journalists and also venture capitalists and other types who are um who have
01:42:00.880
a part of their job is to chase uh yeah news or shiny new objects i think the the rise of bitcoin
01:42:10.580
is meant to be boring like the rise of email right if someone was charged with reporting with the rise
01:42:18.120
of email it would have been the most boring thing ever oh today there's yeah x more people using email
01:42:24.860
and now they're using it also for work just not just to say happy birthday oh now there are more
01:42:29.560
messages being sent but it's just more more of the same so if you do a copy paste of the last eight
01:42:35.460
years of bitcoin one or two times it gets there without anything shiny or new it succeeds today
01:42:43.600
there's about 35 million people who own bitcoin there's about 250 000 new people buying bitcoin
01:42:50.440
every day it's moving about half a million half a billion dollars a day 500 million dollars a day
01:42:56.140
and it's doubling every six months so what what does the world look like when bitcoin is
01:43:03.960
let's just say it makes it 500 000 a coin i think that a world in which bitcoin succeeds
01:43:11.340
um it's a world in which bitcoin has become the world first global non-political standard of value
01:43:21.020
and at the same time the first global non-political standard of settlement
01:43:27.120
we this sounds very conceptual but i'll give you very tangible very concrete examples of what this
01:43:35.140
means we used to have this for 5 000 years in the form of gold but about 500 years ago gold was slowly
01:43:42.040
replaced by reserve currencies the last one being the dollar and the reserve currencies have not been so
01:43:48.160
good at being a standard of value um for example if if i want to compare how much my grandfather paid
01:43:59.580
for his first cabin in patagonia when he first got there uh with how much your grandfather paid for a
01:44:07.020
cabin somewhere or a house somewhere then we can very easily compare the square footage of my grandfather's
01:44:13.920
cabin with your grandfather's but when we want to compare the value it's complicated because there
01:44:18.480
are different currencies different times and complicated and sometimes even it will involve
01:44:22.760
some subjectivity in how we calculate it and in truth it shouldn't be it should be just as easy
01:44:28.160
as comparing square feet right it used to be just as easy if you want to compare how much cost
01:44:34.020
genji's gun to put together his army which how much it cost cleopatra to put together her army
01:44:39.740
even though they're very different time periods very different geographies with every different
01:44:44.200
military technologies it's very easy to compare because what both did it around the gold standard and you
01:44:49.020
can measure very easily people don't understand a 20 gold piece you used to be able to walk in
01:44:55.540
and uh buy a really good suit i mean top of the line man's suit for uh and maybe a shave and a haircut
01:45:04.580
for 20 gold piece that's about what that same 20 gold piece would buy you today if you walked in it's
01:45:13.360
just an ounce and an ounce of gold it's about you know 1500 two grand and so a really really good suit
01:45:20.060
that's what you're paying so that shows you the inflation it should be it was twenty dollars yeah it
01:45:27.280
still is according to gold twenty dollars but the currency keeps changing yeah imagine in in in
01:45:36.940
paris there is a meter inside the glass cage a platinum meter inside a glass cage and it's supposed
01:45:43.300
to represent the standard of a meter and a thousand of those it's a kilometer and it makes length
01:45:50.020
comparisons and very easy but imagine if according to some political necessity of the year we change
01:45:57.540
it a little every year we make it a little longer sometimes a lot longer sometimes maybe a little
01:46:01.840
shorter imagine how hard it would be to compare any length or to just keep track of stuff and well
01:46:08.420
that's what we're doing with value and it doesn't make any sense going through what you went through
01:46:12.680
in argentina do you see the same types of things in other countries like this one i mean the signs
01:46:20.440
as far as you know the hyperinflation i mean there was this world you're talking about with a million
01:46:24.940
dollar bitcoins is this a world where you know national currencies have collapsed and they've gone to
01:46:30.220
bitcoin what does that no i think that in my opinion and again this is subjective in my opinion a world
01:46:34.740
in which bitcoin succeeds it's it's a world in which all countries still keep their currencies
01:46:39.100
countries will never have an incentive to move to bitcoin in fact i think it would probably be bad
01:46:43.820
for national economies to switch to bitcoin because um it's giving up a lot of tools that countries can
01:46:51.000
use for good if they do so responsibly but i a world in which bitcoin succeeded is a world in which
01:46:56.740
whenever you ask for the price of a currency you say what's the price of the euro you get a price in
01:47:01.480
in bitcoin 3200 bits what's the price of the new zealand dollar 1200 bits and what's the price of the
01:47:07.480
turkish lira 800 bits and when your grandkids ask you why was it different when you were growing up
01:47:14.260
how did you ask for the price of a currency and you'll say well when you ask for the price of the
01:47:18.860
euro we set it in dollars and when you ask for the price of the dollar we set it in euro or yen
01:47:22.960
it's like wow that's weird you did it in terms of analysis like asking for the price of oil and
01:47:28.080
have it in terms of copper and yeah well that's how we did it right a world in which bitcoin
01:47:34.140
succeeds that goes away and whenever you ask for the price of a currency all the currencies exist but
01:47:38.200
they are priced in terms of bitcoin which is the first global non-political standard of value when
01:47:43.700
you ask for the price of a commodity whether it's copper or oil or something else you get a price
01:47:48.120
bitcoin when someone from kenya is transacting from someone with someone from china then you use the
01:47:53.500
kenyan shilling or the or the chinese yuan right and or or the dollar or the euro they they use
01:48:00.280
something that is a political that that is global right i think that's why at least this audience
01:48:05.820
is is interested in this because you have the two of the things that you talked about one is no
01:48:10.920
political control yeah you know there's a healthy skepticism of government in this audience and i
01:48:15.300
think that's a great thing and the other part is scarcity we see you know every time we want to
01:48:20.300
solve a problem we print another trillion dollars and we that is something that is not possible with
01:48:25.660
bitcoin and so it solves the two major things that i think scare people about currency yeah and in that
01:48:31.920
regard it could be very much like gold was for 5 000 years and gold worked really really well as a
01:48:38.900
standard of value for 5 000 years but then it has something else that's a standard of value part but
01:48:45.040
then it has something else that is even more powerful that it has embedded in it and a standard of
01:48:50.300
settlement meaning that anybody can settle with anyone anytime and pretty much for free without
01:48:57.340
asking anyone's permission today if you want to settle with someone you need to be part of a network
01:49:01.060
and those networks can only you can only belong if you are a bank where it's visa or mastercard
01:49:06.320
networks you have to be a bank to belong or whether it's the ach network in the us you have to be a
01:49:10.540
bank to belong or the sepa network in europe you have to be a bank to to belong there or the fedwire or
01:49:16.820
swift and that adds cost at risk time restrictions this is a settlement network that anybody can
01:49:24.260
participate it's open 24 7 so imagine that russia is a china with a at war with china during that war
01:49:32.900
anybody from russia can settle with anyone from china on a sunday at 2 a.m without asking anyone's
01:49:38.900
permission so that makes the standard of value even more powerful because you know you can settle
01:49:42.740
right at any given time with anyone talking to uh wenches uh casera caseras he is the ceo of uh
01:49:50.900
zapo.com x-a-p-o.com it's a bitcoin wallet uh that's where you can buy your bitcoin and store your
01:50:00.020
bitcoin and do transactions with bitcoin um you live through argentina and hyperinflation the destruction
01:50:08.740
of money then people are living in denial here in america i mean i i talk to really smart people and
01:50:17.040
i say there's no the stock market market makes no sense that's that's that is the beginning of
01:50:25.840
hyperinflation that is all these big people and companies have all these great reserves they're
01:50:31.300
pouring it into the market that's what's driving it up it's not real and they are
01:50:37.960
in full denial that we are seeing the beginnings of inflation it's just where the dollars are
01:50:46.680
the average person doesn't have the dollar the have the the big banks and corporations they have
01:50:53.760
access to the dollar and they're making lots of money on it but it's not real do you see the world
01:50:58.820
that way i cannot help but seeing it that way because of the way i grew up in in argentina i do think
01:51:05.240
that we are doing something and from the monetary point of view that it's new it's an experiment
01:51:10.340
and i understand people who are much more intelligent than i am and more educated who
01:51:14.920
explain to me why this experiment makes sense and why can work well right um it's an experiment
01:51:21.520
where we never in the history of civilization how we printed this amount of money and the way the u.s
01:51:27.560
is printing the way europe the way japan is printing pretty much everybody we never had this kind of
01:51:32.520
um printing of debt um we've never before had this negative yielding debt all of that is an
01:51:38.980
experiment a financial experiment of a scale never seen before and very intelligent people who have
01:51:44.680
studied a lot more than i have these subjects tell us that there are reasons why it makes sense and it
01:51:49.020
may end up well having uh grown up in argentina i just cannot it goes against sort of my my dna and it
01:51:58.640
makes me very very nervous um that's why i think that that's why i do think that it makes sense to
01:52:04.440
have something that is completely a political a standard of value with whom nobody can mess with
01:52:10.700
politically or even militarily etc that we can all trust as much as we trusted the dollar or the
01:52:17.180
we trusted gold before that the ceo of zapo x a po dot com talking about bitcoin thank you sir
01:52:26.260
appreciate it thank you for having me you bet back in just a second let me tell you about uh zip
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this is the glen back program thank you so much for uh listening today um at uh five o'clock on the
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blaze we are going to be covering the uh news of the day and also looking into some things uh that
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we kind of put into action yesterday for the love of pete stew is trying to work new technology and is
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just you will look like but trust me on bitcoin i can't get my stupid camera phone to work but trust
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me on bitcoin i don't understand it it was working before now it's going all upside down oh my gosh
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you are just you are ridiculous you are absolutely ridiculous i will um you can follow on facebook
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live and uh oh yeah in a minute you'll see a lot of it sounds great it sounds great what do you guys
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have up uh for the pat and stew show today uh lots of good stuff yeah i want to talk about this uh
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this monument in baltimore the the very first uh monument to columbus in the world it's been there
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for 225 years somebody took a sledgehammer to it last night well because he's a genocidal maniac
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of course sure you know i mean of course why wouldn't you know uh why wouldn't you why wouldn't
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you bring down the columbus statue well the the columbus circle i mean we were there years ago
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lived in new york lived by columbus circle walked by it every day and go yeah not a chance this
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thing's gonna last yeah i mean they're just it's just not gonna last um there was some reason
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dershowitz i heard this morning calling for some calm and saying look let's have a rational discussion
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if we want to move these statues let's let's move them into museums where they belong
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in in history let's let's not be the people of iraq after saddam hussein for the love of pete
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too late for that crazy yeah apparently it is too late for that too late for that we'll see you
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tonight five o'clock on the blaze tv this is the glenn beck program mercury