Glenn and Stu discuss the Orwellian freedom in China and the brave new world in the US and the UK, an update on what's happening with the U.K, and what the Apple CEO just happened to say about that as well. Plus, we delve into Bitcoin, $40k by the end of the year, and the guy who actually made that prediction.
00:01:20.300Sponsor of this half hour, it is Patriot Mobile.
00:01:23.300Patriot Mobile is just a great service where most people don't even know that when you sign up for Verizon or any of these other cell phone services,
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00:03:27.040Everything in this modern, evolving, and technological world.
00:03:30.300I won't mention places like Russia, as things like oppression, surveillance, censorship is what they expect from their government.
00:03:44.400But what is happening in the U.K. now is downright scary.
00:03:49.440People like Tommy Robinson, he's getting arrested in the street for filming iPhone videos of Muslim rape gangs as they are going into the courtroom.
00:03:58.840Back in the summer, when people gathered around the hospital to protest the killing of another baby, the euthanization of a baby,
00:04:08.380the U.K. police announced that they would be monitoring Facebook and social media for anything critical of the government's medical decision.
00:04:19.040I don't think it gets any more George Orwell than that, does it?
00:04:22.300Now they've announced that if you live in the U.K. and you use the phrase, bringing home the bacon,
00:04:30.780or the phrase, don't put all your eggs in one basket, that's going to be banned as well.
00:04:37.040Apparently, it's offensive to vegans, who don't bring home the bacon, and Muslims, who don't like bacon.
00:04:44.940An academic in the U.K. wrote recently with the need to do away with such offensive language.
00:04:53.280And as ridiculous as it sounds, they're going to do it.
00:04:56.800But this is the world of relativism, where there is no right or wrong.
00:05:01.980Whether you can speak or not is all dependent on who is in charge of what is politically correct.
00:05:12.220Whether something is right or wrong is relative to whatever random person or group thinks is right or wrong.
00:05:19.620And you better hope that that group that thinks you're wrong never gets into power.
00:06:44.180I believe the most sacred thing that each of us is given is our judgment, our morality, our own innate desire to separate right from wrong.
00:06:59.520Choosing to set that responsibility aside at a moment of trial is a sin.
00:07:05.640So, he was talking about de-platforming and how not silencing voices is a sin.
00:07:16.620No, remaining silent in the face of evil is evil itself.
00:08:56.140So I know you're a libertarian and you and I disagree on several things, but we like each other and we agree on most things, wouldn't you say?
00:09:04.540How are you feeling about the whole freedom of speech thing that's happening in not only in England and China, but also here now in a different way?
00:09:16.980I think that there's two things that are worth looking at.
00:09:27.740But there is a culture of freedom of speech, which I do think is problematic.
00:09:31.400We're seeing that on college campuses.
00:09:33.500We're seeing that in general where you're going to get in trouble if you say a particular thing and we're kind of tightening the bandwidth of what we can discuss.
00:09:40.260And that I'm very much concerned about.
00:09:43.140I mean, if you are in college and you are taught that you have a right to silence someone, you're going to be the next generation that will change the rules.
00:09:52.780Have you had Greg Lukianoff on your show before?
00:11:08.380I mean, for one thing, from just a, from a practical standpoint, in terms of making jokes, you want to be able to heighten.
00:11:14.040And so if, if, if President Trump is like, I don't know, trying to hit Rosie O'Donnell with golf balls from a battleship, and that's like the actual headline of the day, like that's what he kicked his morning off with.
00:12:04.260He persisted until one day in 2017, when he logged on to a travel site and he couldn't book a flight anywhere because the site said he was not qualified.
00:12:30.040And there was nothing he could do about it.
00:12:33.500He couldn't shop at any store that he wanted to go into.
00:12:36.820He was basically shut off from absolutely everything.
00:12:41.580And there's now 7.5 million people on this list.
00:12:46.680The dishonest persons subject to enforcement list.
00:12:51.020This is all part of their, their social credit score.
00:12:54.620And, um, China monitors absolutely everything their citizens do and think, their political opinions, their shopping patterns, their travel history, their internet friends, all of it.
00:13:09.480Now imagine a world here in America where you could no longer be able to buy or sell or open a bank account, get a loan, use public transportation, or get a job.
00:13:34.800The surveillance cameras took data on the individual facial expressions and eyes and used that information to create a running score on each student in class.
00:13:44.440If a score reached a predetermined point, the system triggered an alert, teachers were expected to take action to talk to the student perceived to be disengaged or overly moody.
00:13:55.980Now, this sounds like crazy dystopian stuff that only China would do.
00:14:01.800May I remind you that that is exactly how Bill Gates designed and described Common Core, that every child would have a screen in front of them with a camera monitoring their eyes.
00:14:18.420So they could see the blood pressure in their eyes.
00:14:21.740They could see everything and engage, see when the student was engaged, when they weren't engaged, except this was for the teacher's benefit.
00:14:30.020This wasn't for the student, this was, and he said, over time, we'll be able to use that data to be able to figure out who slots into what job so they can be fast-tracked.
00:14:41.220By the fifth grade, we can find out, you know what?
00:14:43.180But he's really going to be good at construction work, and so he'll go fast-track on construction work.
00:14:50.840Now, this sounds, I guess, to some people like Utopia.
00:15:03.000I'm still figuring that out, but about 15 different things.
00:15:06.520When I was a little kid, I wanted to be a scientist.
00:15:08.040And then when I was in high school, I figured I would either be a politician, an actor, or a priest, which in Oklahoma, you can do simultaneously.
00:15:16.280You can be all three if you live in Blanchard County.
00:15:24.760And I think you kicked off the show with this comparison between Brave New World by Aldous Huxley in 1984, which I think is great, by the way.
00:15:33.100A lot of the time, we only talk about 84.
00:16:01.660So right before I came over here and started working at The Blaze, I was in China this summer for the China International Stand-Up Comedy Festival in Shanghai.
00:16:10.080And I got to finals, by the way, which is pretty good for a guy that doesn't speak Mandarin.
00:16:34.780The interesting thing was, if I brought up something about genders or something, you know, men and women are different, I could tell that the audience was a little—I was less worried about angering someone there than places have been in America on a social level.
00:16:46.260But when it got to anything political, even remotely, like at one point I mentioned that I couldn't access my email because they've outlawed Google over there.
00:17:06.280And you could just—you could hear everyone in the room just go and get very uncomfortable for fear of what was going to happen next.
00:17:13.220But that is a kind of—I don't know what you'd call it, a prosperous totalitarian state or an increasingly prosperous totalitarian state.
00:17:21.160Like, the Soviet Union fell apart, right?
00:17:23.080And Gorbachev, who I like because he was a death knell to the Soviet Union, had sort of banked on them being able to open up with freedom and let that happen.
00:17:34.580China has gone the other way, where they're like, well, we're going to give you some market freedom, but we're going to keep this tight, tight, tight grip on all civil liberties.
00:17:41.460We're going to keep this tight grip on censorship and everything else.
00:17:43.900And you need to be in favor of the state at all times.
00:17:46.300Well, they are not going to be able to—they're not going to be able to reverse that now.
00:17:51.980I mean, I don't know how the Chinese people get out of this now.
00:18:30.580Did you hear about the guy—we're going to take a quick break because I have to take a break.
00:18:33.500Did you hear about the guy that—I think it was last week or two weeks ago—that said he—I think you brought the story to the News and Why It Matters.
00:20:21.180It used to be that two days was considered a rush job.
00:20:23.940But with the advent of the email and the Snapchat and the Twitter, people want everything instantaneously.
00:20:29.100And let's face it, you'd be busy even if we cut everyone else out of the equation.
00:20:32.600Between paying your bills and buying groceries, taking the kids to Taekwondo, home repair, walking the dog, volunteering, and, of course, work,
00:26:00.060I think this is what got me in trouble with other teachers, is you see a line of children in various stages of weird, angry faces all walking in dead silence.
00:26:12.060You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck Program.
00:26:14.580Forbes recently described student loan debt as a $1.5 trillion crisis, adding that student loan debt is now the second highest consumer debt category behind only mortgage debt and higher than both credit cards and auto loans.
00:26:43.280It's affecting 44 million borrowers in the U.S.
00:27:15.840He told a room full of students, quote,
00:27:18.300He's exactly right, and I don't know how the universities don't see that they have become the Catholic Church and anyone who has a different idea is Galileo.
00:27:35.500He says at some point, if it's 100 to 0, you start to suspect that you're in North Korea.
00:27:45.060Does the unanimity mean that you've gotten the truth, or does it mean that you're in a totalitarian state?
00:27:51.600We have this illusion that all sorts of important decisions have been decided.
00:27:56.460He added, we are not on the losing side of history.
00:27:59.900It's the other side that's on the losing side.
00:28:01.820The Reformation is going to happen, and it won't come from within, but without.
00:28:09.280Thiel now has actively worked to bring about the change that he's been talking about here.
00:28:14.180The lawsuit he led against Gawker helped topple their empire.
00:28:18.460And he also created the Thiel Fellowship, which gives $100,000 to young people who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.
00:28:28.060The idea that we're on the losing side is a form of psychological warfare, he said, and he's right.
00:28:35.480We're not on the losing side, not in the slightest.
00:29:57.820And I want to explain what's behind that.
00:30:01.860Because I've set a price to where I want to buy more Bitcoin.
00:30:06.400I don't know if that makes me a double sucker, but I'd like to hear what you think the low price or when you think it's going to start to hit towards bottom.
00:30:14.760Okay, the first thing I want to talk about, though, is Bitcoin $40,000.
00:30:18.800So whenever I'm asked a question, I will always tell somebody what I truly believe, even if it could come back to make me look foolish later.
00:30:28.660I hate it when people talk out of both sides of their mouth.
00:30:58.360Because every fundamental reason that I forecasted behind my projection of Bitcoin $40,000 came true.
00:31:05.780I said a major endowment would buy Bitcoin.
00:31:08.160On October 5th, David Swenson of the $30 billion Yale endowment bought into crypto.
00:31:12.980Then Harvard and Stanford followed him.
00:31:15.460I said Wall Street would open up their trading platforms and provide custody for crypto.
00:31:19.500Now, Fidelity, TD Ameritrade, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, the owners of the New York Stock Exchange, and NASDAQ have all announced plans to start trading Bitcoin.
00:31:30.080Northern Trust is creating a custody product.
00:31:32.360And even State Street, America's largest custodian, is getting active in the States.
00:32:37.520The stock actually dropped 40% that year.
00:32:40.080It wasn't until 2004 when they actually opened it up to the PC realm and their sales started going gangbusters that Apple stock started taking off.
00:33:56.320TD Ameritrade has said the same thing.
00:33:58.260Not a single institution in the space has backtracked on their plans to open up their trading platforms to Bitcoin buyers.
00:34:07.120And that, to me, is the news that we have to look at.
00:34:10.940Because the news that's dominating the market right now is all this forced selling of Bitcoin and Ethereum that's happening because ICOs are coming under the regulatory magnifying glass of the SEC.
00:37:34.960Listen, when I went through 08, 09, I couldn't concede that a stock like J.P. Morgan could drop 80% or a stock like Amazon could drop 66% or Amex could drop close to 90%.
00:37:48.720But when you have forced selling, logic goes out the window.
00:38:09.060The panic selling doesn't last forever.
00:38:11.200I think within a couple of weeks, everybody that had to sell, needed to sell, wanted to sell will be out.
00:38:17.060But I still think there's probably a bit more downside ahead.
00:38:19.900Tika, is this a is this an app comparison that the reason why we don't have self-driving cars right now is really not the technology of the car.
00:38:37.380And so and so it would be like you saying, well, I've invested all this money and, you know, in self-driving cars and they can't do anything.
00:39:40.260And that's exactly what's happening here within the blockchain cryptocurrency space.
00:39:45.420And if you look at every product that is being built by Wall Street to be sold to their 500 million customers, they're all being built around Bitcoin.
00:39:54.360And what's good for Bitcoin is good for the entire ecosystem.
00:40:43.980So the answer to that is what's called layer two solution.
00:40:48.360So that's called the lightning network.
00:40:49.980And the lightning network allows you to trade using the Bitcoin network.
00:40:56.040It reduces the feeds to almost zero and virtually limitless amounts of trades per second.
00:41:02.780The other piece that I will say is that what will happen with Bitcoin is I think it will be used more for higher dollar transactions if you want to write directly to the Bitcoin blockchain.
00:41:12.780So complaining that Bitcoin is slow and expensive is complaining.
00:41:17.840It's like saying, you know, my Ferrari sucks because it can't haul firewood.
00:41:21.980It's built for something very specific.
00:41:24.320But again, the good news is layer two solutions are coming that will allow Bitcoin to scale where if you want to buy Bitcoin, if you want to buy a cup of coffee with your Bitcoin, you'll be able to do that once layer two is live, which I would say we're probably about a year away.
00:41:38.480So if you say that Bitcoin is going to be for major investments, you know, kind of like a gold reserve, if you will, what gives it its value?
00:41:47.020What gives it its value is that it's completely tamper proof and sensor resistant.
00:41:52.980So you can't go in there and change the amount of Bitcoins that are going to exist.
00:41:58.780You can't go in there and change the document.
00:42:00.900Let's say you and I are two different countries and we create a document and we want to be able to prove that that document can't be tampered with.
00:42:08.380We can take a hash of that document, which is basically a code, and write it into the Bitcoin blockchain and we can arrange it.
00:42:16.060So the Bitcoin blockchain is constantly checking our document.
00:42:18.860If our document, if one sentence, one line, one period gets changed, the hash will be different and it will say, hey, somebody's tampered with this document.
00:42:28.900So being able to have tamper proof documents, being able to move money without the need for a trusted third party, being able to move enormous amounts of money for fractions of a dollar is valuable.
00:42:43.060Being able to self custody your money in a way that is portable in a way that gold isn't is incredibly valuable.
00:42:50.600So I think that that value will continue to be realized as we move forward.
00:42:56.420And I would remind you, Glenn, that this isn't our first rodeo of Bitcoin going down 80 percent.
00:43:02.040This is the fifth, sixth time that it's experienced this kind of a pullback.
00:43:06.880I can one thing that I've always said, and I said it when we had our meeting together, is that, you know, if you're going to get involved in crypto, you have to know that there'll be at least one or two times when your whole portfolio is down 80 or 85 percent.
00:43:25.660I mean, I think all of this stuff makes sense.
00:43:27.720And then plus two, I think, like, I'm not a, this was kind of my first foray into investing outside of an index fund.
00:43:33.900And the thing that strikes me is that it's so fast in the cycle, whereas normally I think you would kind of, you know, get into something and wait a while, whereas with this, it'll change week by week.
00:43:44.380So I've been kind of impatient with it.
00:44:01.200Tika Tiwari from the truthaboutcryptocurrencies.com, truthaboutcryptocurrencies.com.
00:44:07.360He is also the educator on the smartcryptocourse.com, which is an advertiser on this program, but also something that we asked Tika to put together for this audience so you can understand it.