On today's episode of Triggered, we have a special guest on the show, Ben Armstrong, founder of BitBoy Crypto. He's been on the inside of the crypto space for a long time, and was one of the early adopters of the space. He has been a vocal advocate for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and has been involved in a number of high profile scandals. In this episode, Ben talks about how he got into crypto, and what he thinks about Joe Biden. We also talk about a developing story from the House Oversight Committee and Senator Chuck Grassley about an alleged corruption scandal involving Joe Biden and a former employee of the FBI, Hunter Biden, and his alleged involvement in a massive corruption scheme involving the exchange of money for policy decisions and influence in Washington, D.C. And of course, we talk about how much money Joe Biden got from a Chinese state controlled entity. We'll talk about all of that and much more on today's show! Subscribe to have it delivered straight to your eardrums! Subscribe today using the promo code: "TRiggered" to receive $5 and receive $10 and a free Bitcoin membership! Today's episode is brought to you by LedgerX.co.nz. Use the discount code "ELTOGOOD" at checkout to receive 10% off your first month with the offer code "Triggered". I'll be picking one lucky winner at random, and the other lucky winner will be chosen by the end of May 4/early bird discount code, "triggered." at random.ee/cryptocode.co/trigged.co and the winner will get 5% off the next week! If you leave a review and receive 5/day of $5/month and get 5/month, they'll get 10/month free of a VIP membership offer, and I'll get 7/4/month of 7/27/19/2019 and 7/29/2019 + 7/9/19th get FREE VIP access to the VIP discount. You'll get access to VIP 4/7/ VIP access. Thanks for listening to the show. I'm giving you'll get an ad-free version of the show? Thanks! - I'll send you all access to all the latest episodes and access to a live show with a free ad-only version of this podcast? - The Best of the TRiggered crew?
00:01:23.000I think it's something that a lot of The guys that follow me, libertarian and conservative, want to understand cryptocurrencies and everything.
00:01:31.000So I think this will be a really cool one.
00:01:38.000My kind of guy. I think you'll learn a lot.
00:01:40.000And I think it'll be a really cool episode to figure out something that's probably perhaps a little bit out of the scope of everything that we do here on a daily basis.
00:01:49.000So I think you'll like it. But before we get that, we got to get to a developing story from the Republican Congress.
00:01:54.000According to the House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer and Senator Chuck Grassley, a whistleblower.
00:02:24.000These guys, James Comer and Senator Chuck Grassley, have a whistleblower alleging that the FBI and the Justice Department have a document that describes a criminal scheme involving then Vice President Joe Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions.
00:03:14.000Yes, China does a lot of investing with crackheads.
00:03:17.000Russian oligarchs, Ukrainian oil companies, all had him on the payroll because of the value that he brings, right?
00:03:26.000A crack addict, drug addict, serial sicko.
00:03:32.000Yes, they had him on the payroll because of the expertise that he brought, not Not corruption.
00:03:40.000There's no way they would trade that, his employment, money, etc., for policy decisions and influence in Washington, D.C. That would never happen.
00:03:53.000Because of course that's what's been happening, folks.
00:03:56.000Like, there's literally no other explanation that Hunter Biden would get any of these things, right?
00:04:03.000So add that to what we already know about the IRS whistleblower who says the investigation into Hunter is being plagued by interference and bias to protect the Biden family.
00:04:13.000Now, maybe they'll do something about the tax stuff to hide the bigger picture, but I think we're getting to the bigger picture now.
00:04:22.000They'll do a little something on the little things to make the bigger stuff go away.
00:04:26.000But we gotta make sure we see this all the way through for each and every one of the things that's happening.
00:04:34.000Of course, this corruption has been staring us right in the face.
00:04:38.000But the media, as usual, big tech, big social, etc., They continue to deny reality, or they know it's the truth, but they also know they control all the methods for you to actually see it, for the American people to realize what's going on.
00:04:55.000That's why programs like this A couple others are important because we'll actually talk about these things to large audiences.
00:05:03.000Again, why you need a like, share, all this stuff so other people can see it.
00:05:09.000Guys, the delusions hitting us right in the face.
00:05:12.000They're trying to make this stuff go away and pretend it's not happening because it's disgusting that it is.
00:05:19.000And now you have yet another whistleblower talking about it.
00:05:25.000Guys, the delusions, as we've discussed, are disgusting.
00:08:38.000Right? All the conspiracy theories always tend to come true, right?
00:08:43.000This is what they're doing. Now, of course, we don't have the ability to get rid of natural gas because our power grid isn't strong enough.
00:09:33.000It has nothing to do with the curriculum.
00:09:35.000But when Republicans then try to ban critical race theory from the classrooms, Liberals say that teaching that white people are racist is a must.
00:09:55.000They're dishonest snakes, and they'll keep doing this.
00:09:58.000Meanwhile, Joe Biden, speaking of dishonesty, his weakness has led to two separate oil tankers being seized by Iran in the past week.
00:10:09.000Iran, the world's leading state sponsor of terror.
00:10:14.000Someone that... We don't want to do business with, but now we actually have to get oil and gas from because we stopped producing it ourselves because Joe Biden's an idiot and he doesn't mind getting rid of American energy independence.
00:10:26.000Clearly doesn't mind crushing good, hard-working American jobs and labor.
00:10:33.000Certainly not the national security benefits that come along with being energy independent.
00:10:38.000Certainly not helping gas prices, right?
00:12:32.000We had everything that's missing from Joe Biden and the Democrat agenda.
00:12:37.000Okay? When Iran was thinking of attacking US soldiers, we took out their top general with a missile through the face.
00:12:44.000Okay? Biden, on the other hand, is so weak that Iran, Iran, again, the world's leading state sponsor of terror, feels so emboldened as to engage in piracy.
00:12:58.000They don't even care because they look at Joe Biden and it just encourages their aggression, right?
00:13:06.000That's the nature of nature of predation, folks.
00:14:11.000It's what benefits we're having from getting our act together and reducing all of those climate benefits.
00:14:16.000Let me ask again. Maybe I'm not being clear.
00:14:21.000If we spent $50 trillion to become carbon neutral by 2050 in the United States of America, how much is that going to reduce world temperatures?
00:14:54.000You just want us to spend $50 trillion and you don't have the slightest idea Whether it's going to reduce world temperatures.
00:15:04.000Guys, the point of these Green New Deal plans has nothing to do with helping the planet, okay?
00:15:11.000If they wanted to help the planet, they wouldn't support wild mills, again, that are killing whales or electric vehicles that require extensive mining.
00:15:20.000In China or Africa by slave labor in, let's just call it, slightly less than environmental conditions, right?
00:15:28.000Far worse than if we were drilling in America under our regulations with actual environmental oversight.
00:15:35.000No, no, no. It's done by child slave labor in third world countries under totally non-humanitarian conditions.
00:15:47.000The point of the Green New Deal initiatives is to funnel money from taxpayers like yourselves to left-wing nonprofits and to decrease the quality of your life while making them rich and giving them power.
00:16:02.000There's nothing else to it, folks, because otherwise it doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
00:16:10.000And guys, there's another big issue that we need to talk about more.
00:16:15.000Jeffrey Hinton, also known as the, quote, sort of, godfather of AI, artificial intelligence, he recently quit his job at Google Over concerns about the risks associated with artificial intelligence.
00:16:29.000He says, and I quote, it's hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.
00:16:56.000So there's a little bit of a catch-22 in all of this.
00:16:59.000But AI has grown very powerful in the last few years.
00:17:03.000You can have ChatGBT now write a convincing episode of Seinfeld in a matter of seconds.
00:17:11.000What will it be capable of in a couple of years?
00:17:13.000Dr. Hinton noted that he used to think that the idea that AI will be smarter than people would be way off, but obviously he no longer thinks that.
00:17:24.000I mean, think of the jobs that were replaced.
00:17:25.000Maybe they could replace the media real quickly, just running off some nonsense because anyone can do a better job than what our media does, so maybe they're going to have to learn to code.
00:17:36.000But I think Elon Musk used the analogy, you know, when we build a highway, right, and there's an ant colony in the way, there could be a billion ants there.
00:18:18.000I think we've seen this movie before, folks.
00:18:20.000It's called The Terminator. It doesn't work out well.
00:18:25.000Man, it feels like we could definitely be in the way in the not too distant future.
00:18:30.000But unfortunately, as long as our enemies are going to be using it, which they will, we probably also still have to be prepared.
00:18:37.000So we have to find that happy medium to make sure we can take care of ourselves, that we don't get subjugated to the Chinese who are definitely going to be running with AI full bore to take over the world.
00:18:49.000And now finally, guys, in shocking, shocking medical news, You're going to want to sit down for this because it's scary.
00:18:59.000The geniuses at Harvard Medical School figured out that men are at risk of prostate cancer.
00:19:09.000The headlines this week from health.harvard.edu says, Prostate cancer in transgender women.
00:19:40.000But apparently I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night, so I understand basic biology.
00:19:47.000I wonder what these geniuses will come up with next.
00:19:51.000If we keep lying to ourselves, if we keep pretending that biological men are magically women, we too can waste millions in research dollars, spend and divert time and energy that could be used towards maybe actually curing prostate cancer or perhaps Breast cancer or ovarian cancer in women, which perhaps I had imagined that even trans women also don't get.
00:20:18.000Now, again, I am not a genius Harvard Medical School doctor, but I believe that biological men who identify as women and call themselves women are probably not at risk of ovarian cancer.
00:20:33.000Now, my only evidence of this And again, I'm going out there on a limb.
00:20:40.000I'm risking it, making scientific conclusions, hypotheses based on what I know.
00:20:46.000But my only evidence of that is that biological men don't have ovaries.
00:21:04.000Well, kidding aside, and not really kidding, before I get to Ben Armstrong, I want to make sure to thank our brave sponsors.
00:21:12.000Because again, even if I am out there calling the idiots at Harvard Medical School idiots for thinking that somehow calling yourself a woman, even if you're a biological male, would avert the risk of prostate cancer.
00:21:27.000Or if you're a biological male that thinks they're female, that you would maybe...
00:21:34.000Not have to worry about ovarian cancer.
00:21:36.000I understand there's some risks associated with that.
00:21:38.000Even though at any other point in our history, that would be totally common sense and 100% logical.
00:21:44.000So I do want to make sure we thank our brave sponsors.
00:21:56.000We understand gold and silver can help protect your retirement savings from inflation, dollar devaluation, forced ESG from your retirement account managers, all of that nonsense.
00:22:48.000Just hear them out. Go to donjrgold.com and learn from yourself about what to do to protect yourself, your retirement savings, your family's well-being.
00:23:02.000Just hear it out. You don't have to do anything.
00:23:04.000If you think you may want to diversify a little bit, if you think you may want to hedge, probably a good idea.
00:23:18.000These are guys that literally have funded some of the anti-woke stuff in their area in Dallas, Fort Worth, in that area where they are based.
00:23:26.000They literally funded some of the The school board votes to be able to get conservative parents who represent the average area in the district on their local school boards and overthrow the radical leftists.
00:23:42.000They've been attacked by the big media guys as being radical for doing that.
00:23:54.000You might as well do it and give it to a company that supports what you believe in and a company that puts their money where their mouth is.
00:24:01.000A company that gives back to the causes that we believe in.
00:24:05.000Protecting the First Amendment, protecting the Second Amendment, our brave first responders.
00:24:12.000Again, they were funding these school board battles to make sure that the kids in their area, and I'm sure they'll do it elsewhere, We're good to go.
00:24:33.000Okay? You're going to get free activation with that.
00:24:35.000But again, you're going to have a cell phone.
00:24:37.000Have a cell phone with a company that gives you the same services as the other providers, but cares about you, shares your values, and gives back to the causes that you actually believe in.
00:24:48.000So check out patriotmobile.com slash John Jr.
00:24:51.000Now, we're going to go to Ben Armstrong, and we're going to learn about crypto.
00:24:55.000It's going to be awesome. Thanks so much, guys.
00:25:00.000Welcome to another episode of Trigger.
00:25:02.000This one's going to be fun because we have Ben Armstrong, sort of real early adapter crypto guy, talking about everything that is crypto.
00:25:13.000I mean, this is going to be a little bit of a tutorial getting people up to speed.
00:25:17.000I don't even want this one to be political, but the nature of it is because government is cracking down so hard on anything that You know, puts a threat to the sort of hegemony they've had over currency and the control associated therewith.
00:25:33.000So, Ben is the founder of BitBoyCrypto.com.
00:25:49.000Plenty of the people watching, just given the nature of sort of the conservative slash libertarian crowd, probably has an understanding, but there's probably a lot of people that have no idea.
00:25:59.000They see the pitfalls in the media, but I think they're also watching this because they're rightfully skeptical of the media and the narrative that turns out to never be accurate, but serves its purpose at the time.
00:26:11.000Well, I think one thing is what I try to do is I try to show people the truth.
00:26:16.000Like, I try to get outside of the media narratives.
00:26:18.000Because at this point, if you don't understand that everything the media is telling you is wrong, then you don't have a brain.
00:26:24.000And I would assume all the people watching you right now, they have a brain.
00:26:30.000You know, there has been a lot of backlash against crypto.
00:26:33.000And I think when you go back to 2012, when I first got into Bitcoin, a lot of people that were getting in at that time, they were using what was called Silk Road.
00:26:41.000Silk Road was an anonymous drug marketplace.
00:26:45.000Now, I got into it, not through that, but through having to buy Bitcoin to purchase a software that I needed.
00:26:53.000And a guy who owned the software I used for Craigslist, posting ads, I used to have a ticket business, and that's what I did.
00:26:59.000He got sued, and he couldn't come to America to answer the charges from Ukraine.
00:27:05.000And they shut his payment processors down.
00:27:07.000And so he had to try to figure out some other way to get paid.
00:27:13.000The Silk Road narrative for Bitcoin, where people were buying drugs, you know, somebody was, you know, 30 Bitcoins for some shrooms, they gotta feel real dumb right now.
00:27:21.000Yeah, I mean, you hear about those transactions, you know, I saw something that was like, you know, 1,000 Bitcoins for a pizza.
00:27:47.000Get a lot of pizza for that. A lot of pizza.
00:27:49.000A lot of pizza for that. But, you know, a lot of people don't know the guy, Laszlo, who was the guy that spent—that was the first Bitcoin transaction.
00:27:56.000To pay for a service or a good was the Bitcoin pizzas.
00:28:00.000They're from Papa John's, two pepperonis, 10,000 Bitcoin.
00:28:05.000That guy Lazlo. I'm sure he had plenty of other Bitcoin.
00:28:07.000He had plenty of other Bitcoin. I think people, it's not one of those sad stories about people that were mining Bitcoin early on and, you know, lost their keys or whatever the case may be and trying to like, guys paying $150,000 to have somebody come excavate the landfill to try to find- Those are the things.
00:28:20.000For the average person, if they want to invest in that, if they're looking and they're scared of what's going on in the economy right now, that is intimidating.
00:28:30.000I'm a real estate guy, so I've always done better investing in things that I fundamentally know really well as opposed to speculating.
00:28:36.000When people see those articles, he's got his hard drive that's right here in his desk, but he forgot his password and he has $220 million in it.
00:28:48.000Man, that's intimidating for a lot of people.
00:28:51.000Yeah, I understand that, but when you look at the Bitcoin supply, so Bitcoin supply, the total ever is going to be $21 million.
00:28:57.000Bitcoin mining is how you bring those into the supply.
00:29:00.000The last Bitcoin will not be mined until 2140, so about 117 years from now.
00:29:06.000Now, Bitcoin mining has gotten to a place where it's very highly sophisticated and things like that, but it's not like people today are just going to have $220 million that they can't find.
00:29:17.000Four million Bitcoin is the approximate number that is in the total supply.
00:29:23.000I think about 19.6 million, somewhere around there right now.
00:29:27.000But yet, it'll never be moved because it's lost.
00:29:30.000But those are all people that were mining Bitcoin very early on.
00:29:34.000And so they were doing it with a laptop.
00:29:36.000And it's not like they had a lot of money into it.
00:29:38.000It's just they probably forgot about it.
00:29:40.000Or they accumulated something from nothing, right?
00:29:42.000I mean, like you said, you got 10,000 Bitcoin for a pizza today.
00:29:45.000That's worth... Hundreds of millions of dollars.
00:29:48.000Oh yeah, oh yeah. Depending on how you, yeah, easily hundreds of millions of dollars.
00:29:51.000It is. Now, so with that though, I mean, you obviously have sort of actually having the Bitcoin on like a hard disk or whatever it may be, and you have it sort of owning it through an exchange.
00:30:01.000Yeah. Talk about the differences for the average people that are, again, looking to speculate.
00:30:05.000Because if you look at the stock market today, I mean, everything seems like it's pretty risky.
00:30:11.000Yeah, I mean, look at what happened with First Republic Bank.
00:30:13.000You know, one of the biggest red candles we've ever seen in history, right?
00:30:18.000Stocks everywhere are, you know, not across every sector, but especially in the banking sector, very questionable.
00:30:24.000But the thing is, Is that, you know, when it comes to, you know, storage, we call it custodianship.
00:30:31.000And we've got a phrase, not your keys, not your crypto.
00:30:34.000That's a very important phrase for people to understand.
00:30:36.000Because when people first get in, they're going to come in through an exchange.
00:30:39.000It was like Coinbase or Robinhood, something like that.
00:30:42.000And they're going to buy it, and they're just going to let it sit on that exchange.
00:30:45.000Well, what we've seen is, through the FTX debacle, the Celsius debacle, that if these exchanges go down, You lose your money.
00:30:52.000It's not really yours. So, like, on Coinbase, you can send it off of Coinbase, and so you own it from that perspective, but if it's still on Coinbase and Coinbase were to go down, then you're in trouble.
00:31:03.000So we have a couple different ways you can custody your Bitcoin.
00:31:07.000Basically, there's a really archaic way called paper Wallets, where it's just a QR code on a piece of paper, and that's how you access your wallet.
00:31:17.000But it's still protected, I guess, through the blockchain, so that is your QR code unless someone else...
00:31:21.000Right. You can scan it. Yeah, absolutely.
00:31:23.000So, you want to keep that thing under, you know, super, super, you know, watchful eye.
00:31:28.000It's like, it's like Dumb and Dumber, like that, that IOU, that small angle.
00:31:31.000Oh, yeah. You're going to want to hold on to that one.
00:31:33.000Yeah. I loved that movie when I was a kid.
00:31:35.000It was my favorite movie. One of the best. Yeah.
00:31:37.000But, you know, we have cold storage and then we have, you know, hot wallets, right?
00:31:43.000Cold storage is a device, so it's a USB. Ledger is one of the most popular ones, Ledger and Trezor.
00:31:49.000And what happens is, is when it's plugged into your device or plugged into your computer, You're active on the blockchain and you can move the crypto around.
00:31:57.000As soon as you unplug it, it's called cold storage because it's frozen.
00:32:01.000You can't move it. You've got to reconnect it again.
00:32:04.000So cutting off the connection to the internet, that's what we call cold storage.
00:32:07.000And so that's not necessarily password protected.
00:32:09.000Because, I mean, I think one of the people and people I talk to every day, they're like, well, listen, I'd probably give it a chance at some of these numbers.
00:32:17.000Because you can do fractional Bitcoin.
00:32:22.000$10 worth. But everyone I know has problems with their password.
00:32:28.000No one wants to use sort of the You know, the Microsoft Authenticators and all that.
00:32:32.000I mean, it's like, you know, by the time you remember the password of that and you get the password of the password of the password, no one knows what the hell is going on.
00:32:38.000So that is literally just, it's almost like just cache, but unpassword protected.
00:32:43.000You plug it in and you're on and you're...
00:32:45.000Well, you still have to have, you have a password for your device, but it's much simpler than the complicated private keys.
00:32:51.000So for your device, you basically would have, I believe it's an eight-digit, I mean, touch mine in a while.
00:32:56.000It's all in cold storage. You know, I think it's an eight-digit number that you got to put in, and it's kind of like on your phone, right?
00:33:03.000This is an eight-digit number, and it will unlock the device, and then you can get in and you can move stuff around.
00:33:10.000Ledger has a platform called Ledger Live, which is where you would actually move, go into the system of Ledger to move your crypto around through your Ledger.
00:33:19.000So it's not quite the same thing as cash, but But, you know, we also have hot wallets.
00:33:24.000Like, hot wallets are apps or desktop platforms that are connected to the internet.
00:34:02.000And they're trading, they're functioning like a bank.
00:34:04.000I mean, using, just taking those reserve currencies, putting a multiple on it, and speculating.
00:34:11.000I mean, they're basically gambling with your money as the backup, just like the banking system is, and that's why we're seeing a collapse like Credit Suisse, like Silicon Valley Bank, all in the last couple of weeks.
00:34:46.000And I've dealt with this, you know, people who watch this show understand, you know, I dealt with it last month where I had literally a news aggregation app called MXM News, where you just take all of the news, aggregate it.
00:34:57.000Not creating news, not making fake news, but allowing people to see everything.
00:35:01.000And we had PNC Bank Just, well, they sent us a cashier check.
00:35:05.000We didn't even know it. My partner in deal looked at our operating account to see, you know, just the business operating account, and it was like, we had like, you know, 750 grand in there to run the business.
00:35:13.000And he goes, there's nothing in the account.
00:35:15.000I'm like, well, that's a problem that we get hacked or whatever it was.
00:35:18.000And that was conventional banking. Turns out we call them, oh, no, we just don't want to do business with you anymore.
00:35:22.000And like, they didn't even, you know, they broke up with us without even telling us.
00:35:58.000When you look at the world banking, one of my favorite numbers that came out over the last two months is that in the entire world banking system, there's supposed to be $22 trillion worth of money in the banks.
00:36:09.000Do you know how much is actually in the banks?
00:36:17.000100x. Absolutely. And that's very dangerous.
00:36:19.000I may do it sometimes, but it's very dangerous.
00:36:22.000But, yeah, so the basis was a joke, and I don't have an answer.
00:36:26.000They never gave us an answer for exactly why it was, but I can tell you, I then went to a credit union, and I have a credit union account, and I was like, well, you know, let's move the business account here.
00:36:34.000So I went to the credit union. They denied me because my email address had crypto in it.
00:36:40.000So even, I mean, and I think most people think of credit unions much less leveraged.
00:36:50.000Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So it's just one of these things where, you know, everybody that's in the banking system that's powerful, they see what's coming.
00:36:58.000They understand, like, crypto is a better system.
00:37:01.000Well, they're fighting for their lives, right?
00:37:02.000For their lives, absolutely. You see, and that's the problem I think so many of our viewers are facing, which is they love the idea of crypto.
00:37:08.000They love the sort of, you know, the, well, I guess it depends on how you want to view it, right?
00:37:13.000Transparency or lack thereof, so not everyone's looking into all of your business.
00:37:17.000And yet, you see as governments starting to talk about their own digital cryptos.
00:37:20.000They're on digital currencies, and all of this, it's like all of the things that made it unique and appealing to people like yourself, people like myself, although it's clear, I'm a total noob when it comes to this, but again, I'm interested.
00:37:33.000I gotta learn the game, and I think so many people need that primer to kind of figure out exactly what's going on, but it feels like everything that the government now is doing to insert themselves is actually pulling all of the things that would actually make it attractive to the people for all the obvious reasons.
00:37:48.000Well, not necessarily. Because when you look at CBDCs, Central Bank Digital Currencies, and I would say, I'm going to shamelessly plug my book, Catching Up to Crypto, that we wrote that book to be the primer for people.
00:38:15.000And so I was able to take my experience from everything I've been through and be able to apply that to the audience.
00:38:20.000It's got great reviews. And so if anybody's looking for a good place to start, like, that's when we wrote the book to say, this is where you start.
00:38:36.000But going back to your question with CBDC, Central Bank Digital Currencies, right?
00:38:41.000These are... Basically, a continuation of the fiat system that we already have.
00:38:46.000Except for, you can actually spend cash today, and nobody knows where you spend it, but with CBDCs, they're gonna know where you spend every single dollar.
00:38:53.000Well, that's what I'm talking about, in terms of the attractiveness.
00:38:56.000It's like, I don't need the government in every transaction I have.
00:38:58.000I mean, you see the weaponization, 87,000 new IRS agents.
00:39:04.000They're going to watch your Venmo transaction so that it's $601 more.
00:39:10.000Because there's not enough billionaires for them to be auditing with that many armed agents.
00:39:14.000So they're going after every possible transaction, getting involved in every aspect of our lives.
00:39:19.000I don't know that I trust Or have much faith in, you know, the institutions that are going to monitor a $601 transaction for me, $33 trillion in debt, managed to lose $220 billion from the Pentagon budget, and it's like, oh, well, that's okay. They're worried about my $600 transaction, but they can't control $220 billion.
00:39:40.000They're paying for fines for money laundering built into their budgets.
00:39:45.000It's crazy. Like, all that happens when they get in trouble is they just get a slap on the wrist and they pay, you know, some millions of dollars and they get out of it.
00:39:52.000You know, in some cases, you know, I think if you look at Deutsche Bank, I mean, they've had some really expensive fines for money laundering.
00:39:58.000It reminds me a lot of the supplement business.
00:40:01.000If you've ever seen, you know, some of the documentaries on supplements and the way the FDA works, is somehow the supplements were able to have some kind of lawsuit to where You don't have to check to see if all the ingredients are good unless somebody dies.
00:40:16.000So if you go to GNC and you get some random stuff from there and then you die that was never protected and it's only after you die that someone would file a lawsuit on your behalf and then they go after the supplements.
00:40:27.000So it reminds me a little bit of maybe the FDA as well and in other things over the last couple of years.
00:40:32.000Oh yeah. But it's the same thing, right?
00:40:34.000It's like, we didn't have to actually test it.
00:40:37.000We're going to say it's good. We have total immunity.
00:40:39.000Yeah, and that's kind of what you see, you know, kind of a similar mindset when it comes to the way that, you know, crypto is regulated or the lack thereof and the way that, you know, things are sketchy out there.
00:40:53.000Like, there's a lot of sketchy stuff going on with the banks.
00:40:56.000And when it comes to the supplement thing, it's like the banks are doing the same thing where they're building.
00:41:03.000So in the supplement business, the companies build into their budgets having to pay for lawsuits.
00:41:08.000Yeah. They build it in because they know that somebody's gonna get sick, somebody's gonna get hurt, and then later they just go in, they pay for it from the budget.
00:41:16.000That's what the banks do. It's the same exact thing.
00:41:18.000It's like they know they're money laundering, they don't get held accountable.
00:41:22.000When they get caught publicly, They've got to come, you know, the SEC works with them to make sure that they, you know, say their apology and pay their fine and they move on.
00:41:30.000And it's just the dirtiest business in the world.
00:41:32.000And I think that that's why people have to understand that CBDCs and stable coins, which are coins that are pegged to an asset, most likely to a dollar in USDC's case, is that this is not crypto, right?
00:41:54.000Now, when we do get a digital dollar in America, which will probably come at some point, it will be a CBDC, then what that means is that's a walking, flashing neon sign for Bitcoin, right?
00:42:06.000As those come in, people understand the permission, the controls, the surveillance.
00:42:10.000That's what it is. It's going to be surveillance.
00:42:11.000They want to know everything. That's not crypto.
00:42:15.000And like the markets, you look at them and you compare them.
00:42:17.000I imagine that adds a lot of weight towards your decision to put your money in a Bitcoin or perhaps one of the other crypto forms.
00:42:26.000Talk about that. What are the differences between Bitcoin, Ethereum, some of the other...
00:42:31.000You hear about the shit coins and all of that.
00:42:35.000Talk about those differences, because where's the stability?
00:42:40.000Where's it become a lot more speculative for people who are looking to do that?
00:42:44.000Well, the speculation's in the meme coins.
00:42:46.000Your Dogecoin, your Shiba, plenty of other ones out there.
00:42:51.000Right now, there's one that somebody made, Gensler.
00:42:54.000After Gary Gensler. And it's called Good Gensler.
00:42:58.000And so I'm invested in that, by the way.
00:43:00.000I don't want to not disclose that, but it's just a joke, right?
00:43:19.000It's just a community of people that agree to buy something.
00:43:21.000They hype it up. It's kind of what's wrong with crypto in a lot of senses, but yet people made a lot of money with it and continue to make a lot of money with it.
00:43:28.000So it's like you've got to find the validity there for those people.
00:43:32.000Well, I mean, yeah. There's a pyramid scheme element to it, right?
00:43:52.000You know, right there. Now, when you actually are looking at crypto projects like Ethereum or Cardano or XRP, you know, these are projects that have utility in the future, I mean, there's utility now with Ethereum and some other things.
00:44:06.000Of course, XRP has a big lawsuit going on.
00:44:09.000We represent the XRP army because they're anti-Gary Gensler and anti-SEC, which we love.
00:44:40.000So, I didn't know you could type in web addresses.
00:44:42.000Like, I would just go log into AOL, and then there were chat rooms, and then there were, you know, sports message boards and video game stuff, and that's where you would go.
00:44:50.000Well, you kind of think of Ethereum, or what we call Layer 2 Projects, Or, excuse me.
00:47:23.000I mean, all of it can be automated like that.
00:47:25.000And that's why they're fighting for their lives.
00:47:27.000Because they're trying to explain like, no, you do need us.
00:47:30.000I promise. I promise. I remember I went and spoke in 2019 at an event for college students at, I think it was UCF. And, you know, there was a guy that stood up in the back and he's like, now look, I don't buy any of this crypto stuff.
00:47:45.000You know, I'm way against it, blah, blah, blah.
00:47:47.000I said, sir, what do you do? Well, I own a credit card processing company.
00:47:54.000Like, this is a new system that— what you'll find with crypto is the further we get into it, people are going to see it solves all the problems with our current financial system are solved.
00:48:02.000It has some other problems, of course, with people getting hacked.
00:48:05.000You have to remember your passwords. But I think, you know, in crypto, there's this phrase people say a lot like, we're in the Wild West of crypto.
00:48:12.000No, guys, we're still in the Wild West of the internet.
00:48:14.000Like, that's what people have to understand.
00:48:16.000When you look back... When you think of even just what's going on in AI, in like the last two weeks...
00:48:23.000You're right. And it feels like, you know, I've been on the internet now for 20 years.
00:48:27.000I must be really... It's like, no, man, I don't know anything.
00:48:29.000When an eight-year-old can pick up their phone and look at porn, it's broken.
00:48:32.000It hasn't been... That's the Wild West, is the fact that anybody can access anything on the internet...
00:48:40.000No matter how old they are. And this is something that blockchain fixes too, you know, as well, is digital identity verification to where your phone is hooked up to your identity, so that way, I know there's some scary aspects of that, but that way, they know that your kid is nine.
00:48:56.000They know that your kid, when he picks up his phone, he's nine years old, and it automatically prevents from going to certain places.
00:49:02.000Talk about the blockchain a little bit.
00:49:05.000Again, as a neophyte looking on the outside, you hear about it as every aspect.
00:49:27.000And when you think about this, like, it's shocking to people.
00:49:31.000I think it's going to be really shocking on how much trust you've given places that don't deserve it, right?
00:49:36.000Oh, yeah. Well, listen, I see it every day because, I mean, one of my big things is, like, you know, all of the social companies obviously have a big presence, big platforms.
00:49:44.000They're looking at everyone's information at all times.
00:49:47.000They're selling it to the highest bidder.
00:49:48.000There's, you know, Google probably being the worst offender.
00:49:50.000There's a reason they're a multi-trillion dollar company.
00:49:52.000Absolutely. You know, you don't even probably want to know what they know about you.
00:49:57.000No. And what they're doing with it, which is probably much worse.
00:49:59.000Exactly. But we've gotten used to the point where we just trust those people and what they say and the records that they show you.
00:50:05.000Like, for instance, in your bank account, when they show you your bank account, they show how much money is there.
00:50:10.000That money ain't there. Go try to withdraw it tomorrow.
00:50:13.000When we want to withdraw $5,000 of cash, it takes a week from Bank of America.
00:50:19.000Like, it's crazy the, you know, lack of cash, but yet, that's what it shows in your account.
00:50:24.000Now, with the blockchain, the blockchain is a ledger, basically.
00:50:27.000That's what it is. It's a ledger of transactions that, you know, For eternity, basically.
00:50:33.000Like, from the beginning of the blockchain, from the beginning of Bitcoin, every transaction that has ever occurred on Bitcoin is on that ledger.
00:50:39.000Now, when it comes to like the trustlessness that I was talking about before, it's because it's done in a decentralized way.
00:50:46.000So the ledger is what the blockchain is, but then the infrastructure of how blockchain runs is through everybody that's on the network.
00:50:55.000So every computer, we call them nodes, every computer that is on the blockchain network or on the Bitcoin network, for instance, it has that ledger within it, right?
00:51:04.000Well, every other computer on the network has it as well.
00:51:09.000So if I were to, let's say, want to do a fraudulent transaction or try to show like, hey, this transaction occurred so I can get paid back or, you know, what we call a double-spin transaction where the same transaction occurs multiple times on the blockchain, I'm not a nerd.
00:51:23.000That may not be the exact definition, but the point is that it would immediately be seen because every computer on the network- Literally every other node is a check and balance to the fraudulent transaction.
00:51:36.000Yes, absolutely. So you can't have one bad actor.
00:51:38.000To take over the network, you'd have to do what we call a 51% attack, which would be where more than half- Of the nodes on the network all contrived together to create fraudulent transactions.
00:51:50.000With Bitcoin, that's impossible now because the network is so big and it's so secure that there's not enough money in the world almost to try to make that happen.
00:51:59.000Not even like a bad actor, like a state.
00:52:01.000You hear about the Russian bot farms and the Chinese are hacking the Pentagon, but But they—that's more—that's less protected than this would be in your mind?
00:52:11.000Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely, because when you're attacking the Pentagon, you're attacking a system that has centralized points of failure.
00:53:43.000Once you lose that reserve currency status.
00:53:46.000Yeah. You lose that ability to borrow.
00:53:48.000Now, I know there is a component sort of within the crypto world where they're like, you know, stop talking about the strength of the U.S. dollar.
00:53:54.000But, like, if you lose the U.S. dollar as that sort of preeminent world currency, there's a big ramification to the U.S. economy as well, which I think we still, even certainly crypto people in the U.S. still benefit from a strong U.S. economy, even if they may not be a fan of the U.S. dollar.
00:54:11.000But I don't know, how do you have it both ways?
00:54:13.000Well, I think this is very important because when your dad came out and made the statements about Bitcoin that he made, of course, I criticize him heavily for that because I'm Bitcoin.
00:54:23.000That's my livelihood. I think it came from a fundamental misunderstanding at the time of thinking you can't be pro-dollar Pro-Bitcoin and pro-America.
00:54:33.000And that's not true. I'm all three of those things.
00:54:36.000And it's one of these things where as the dollar goes down in value, obviously the value of Bitcoin is going to go up based on US dollars, just like anything else with inflation.
00:54:47.000However, if we lose the reserve currency, we're screwed in America.
00:54:51.000Oh, like, well, by the way, it may be a mixed blessing.
00:54:55.000Our economy will get a tank, but at least we won't be funding like Drag Queen Story Hour because we won't have any money to fund anything.
00:55:01.000Yeah. Maybe we solve some of the disasters that have managed to become government-funded things, which I don't know why they'd be government-funded at all.
00:55:10.000But no, I mean, it's overall really bad.
00:55:13.000Now, I don't know if it's as bad as racking up $33 trillion in debt, that we also have no real way of paying back while simultaneously shutting down our own energy sector, becoming dependent on our enemies.
00:55:25.000But if the GDP is growing, that debt number doesn't matter as much.
00:55:30.000When the GDP stops growing and we start getting stagnant, that's when the debt number starts becoming something you can't avoid.
00:55:37.000But the debt number is growing more rapidly than the GDP number.
00:55:41.000Yeah. So you're always sort of shrinking whatever buffer you had, right?
00:55:44.000And that buffer is what, you know, a couple bad weeks, a couple bad job reports.
00:55:49.000That collapses, and so does everything else.
00:57:13.000Or a woman, because I don't want to be a misogynist, so we've got to make sure we cover both bases.
00:57:18.000Or, maybe they're neither, I don't know.
00:57:20.000But the point is, when you look at one of the hearings that Gary Gensler testified at, Elizabeth Warren asked a lot of tough questions.
00:57:27.000We call Elizabeth Warren the banking broad.
00:57:29.000Because she pretends that she's for the people and against the banks, but really, she's a direct line between the banks and the SEC. Get into detail on that, because I've done that a couple times where I'm reading Twitter, I'm like, wow, I'm actually, I sort of agree with what she's saying here, but what's the backstory to that?
00:57:45.000Because I know- Go look at her donors.
00:57:46.000Go look at her donors. She's against a big corporation.
00:57:48.000She's against billionaires. Look at— We're doing a big expose video on her soon.
00:58:29.000The Republicans are guilty of this, too, right?
00:58:31.000I see plenty of guys, you know, they're gonna take on big tech, and I'm like, well, you're still cashing your Google checks, you're still doing this, and, you know, you talk really good in a hearing, but when it comes time to actually vote, when you see the final legislation, I'm like, well, you know, so you aren't actually for- You can't vote both sides.
00:58:45.000But they do. And again, our side is...
00:58:48.000I'm probably much more familiar with our side and how bad an actor they are in that because I'm actually following it more closely.
00:58:53.000And you see it. They go on late night TV and news and we should be doing this, this, this.
00:58:58.000But you're like the chairman of the committee that actually has the power to do that.
00:59:01.000So do it! But they're taking advantage of people who are either, I don't want to say ignorant, because they've got other things going on.
00:59:15.000I actually went to Washington, D.C. and met with six different offices of Congress about a bill that I had trying to create a digital asset commission in the United States.
01:00:20.000Yeah, absolutely. In addition, also, Sam Bankman-Fried, who is the biggest scammer in the history of the world, his dad, Joseph Bankman, actually worked on tax legislation with Elizabeth Warren.
01:00:33.000Like, directly, like, three or four years.
01:00:35.000Yeah, I mean, he makes Madoff seem like small potatoes.
01:00:38.000So talk about that, because you guys broke.
01:00:40.000Didn't you guys break sort of the FTX story?
01:00:42.000Yeah. I mean, not that you're a news agency, but you're sort of like, something's wrong here, right?
01:00:47.000Talk about how you did that, the entire SBF thing.
01:00:51.000Now, I understand why it happened and how.
01:00:53.000I mean, he became the second largest Democrat donor after Soros, so he's protected, in a way.
01:00:59.000Well, but all that money's got to go back, so is he protected anymore?
01:01:02.000But notice, the Democrats aren't exactly, no one's clamoring for it.
01:01:06.000If I was the Republicans, I would do it because it would bankrupt them this cycle if they had to give that money back, but they're gonna do it.
01:01:11.000Well, the money's gone, it's been spent, it's been, you know.
01:01:14.000And by the way, the people who invested, even the Democrats who invested in FTX, You know, they ain't getting their money back, in my opinion.
01:01:21.000We'll see. That ain't coming back, and the dumb donors aren't getting it back, giving it back.
01:01:27.000But talk about that, because you saw some of that coming.
01:01:31.000And yet, this guy could be meeting with the most powerful people in the world.
01:02:06.000It's the best game meat in North America, certainly up and native.
01:02:09.000Nilgai down in Texas is pretty good, but that's sort of an invasive species, introduced species, but yeah, good stuff.
01:02:15.000Loose is phenomenal. So what happens is, this is relevant to the story, is that I get ready to go to Alaska on a trip, and right before I go to Alaska, I was going to be gone for two weeks, no internet service.
01:02:26.000I had actually, we had this bill for a digital asset commission.
01:02:29.000We were trying to raise funding for it.
01:02:30.000And so one of my guys, Brian Evans, who is a big guy in crypto, who I love, great friend, he actually told me, he's like, hey, we can send this to FTX for funding.
01:02:42.000Because he had a connection with Sam and with Brett Harrison, where they had conversed before.
01:02:47.000He's like, well, let's try to leverage that and see if they'd be willing to fund this.
01:02:51.000I think it was like $1.6 million we were trying to raise.
01:02:54.000We sent this over to them, and Brett Harrison responded and said, Hey, yeah, this looks real good.
01:02:59.000We'll send this over to our department, their regulation department, basically.
01:03:04.000That was Mark Wetjen, a former guy from the CFTC, I believe.
01:03:11.000What happens is, we send them the bill, and then I leave.
01:03:15.000They sat on the bill forever, and they just wouldn't answer after that, after it got sent to their policy department.
01:03:20.000So, we basically had a couple politicians that we were working with.
01:03:25.000They're just burying the evidence, or at least stalling it out as long as possible, like, riding it out.
01:03:32.000Exactly. Well, that's the time that Sam starts really going in and trying to get involved in the regulation of the DCCA, I can't remember what it was.
01:03:42.000But it was the bill that got killed that was, you know, trying to change stuff in crypto.
01:03:47.000I can't remember what it's called now. It's so irrelevant.
01:03:49.000But this is when he really latched onto that.
01:03:52.000That was the bill that Sam was trying to use as his vehicle to get all the centralized exchange regulations the way that he wanted it because he doesn't care about crypto.
01:04:00.000He didn't care about decentralized. He just cared about making money and becoming powerful and being able to fund all the, you know, people that he was funding.
01:04:08.000So I'm going to go ahead and— maybe I shouldn't say this, but I'm going to say it anyways.
01:04:12.000So we were working with, we were bipartisan.
01:04:17.000I won't say who- No, by the way, that's okay.
01:04:19.000Yeah, of course. And I'll get crap from my people and be like, hey man, sometimes you actually have to deal within the realities of the world.
01:04:25.000Yeah. And I'd love to say, this is our side and this is the stance, but it doesn't work that way.
01:04:29.000It's like business. You don't ever get 100% Of what you want in something.
01:04:34.000And you have to actually understand that game.
01:04:36.000And people are like, oh, you sold out.
01:05:30.000And so Barbara Boxer calls Mark Wedgen.
01:05:35.000And says, what is the deal? Why are you all sitting on this bill?
01:05:37.000We need answers. Like, what is going on here?
01:05:40.000And he tells her that not only are they not going to be funding our bill, but also they were going to try to steal her to support what they were doing now.
01:05:49.000Interesting. They try to take her from us.
01:05:51.000And so, like I said, our bill's kind of dead right now in the water.
01:05:54.000We'll see what happens as regulation gets a little more friendly.
01:05:57.000But Barbara Boxer is the one that kind of started that entire thing.
01:06:00.000And what happens is they tell her, well, what we're doing is we want to basically create a federal BIT license.
01:06:05.000So the BIT license in New York City or in New York State, the Department of Financial Services, is the worst piece of critical regulation that was ever passed.
01:06:11.000Well, it's like all gaming regulations and all that.
01:06:55.000So I think all that stuff is very important.
01:06:57.000That's one thing we've been pushing for in regulation.
01:06:59.000That's why we wanted Digital Assets Commission because you'd actually have people that understand it making the rules instead of people that, you know, they might as well be regulating fried chicken.
01:07:08.000But how many people in government actually understand it?
01:07:11.000I spend a lot of time with a lot of people, and there are much simpler concepts that most of them don't have much of a grasp on.
01:07:20.000That's true. I mean, it's a complicated thing.
01:07:23.000I've been kind of surprised, honestly.
01:07:25.000With a lot of people that we've spoken to, them and their offices are a little bit more educated on crypto than I think people would suspect.
01:07:32.000Yeah. I'm shocked to hear it, actually, based on everything else I know.
01:08:26.000People made these auto-tuned remixes of it and all this stuff.
01:08:29.000It was hilarious. And, you know, I said that day, I said, if I have to become a meme for people to see how bad this guy is, for us to stop— Happy to do it.
01:08:36.000Hey, memes are powerful. They are powerful.
01:08:38.000As a general in the meme wars, I thought myself, listen, a picture can say a thousand words.
01:08:44.000Absolutely. So you caught that just from the way they took what would have been, in your opinion, based on actual experience, great legislation, Because I mean, yeah, I guess people want to know, how can it be regulated?
01:08:57.000You know, what's the government going to try to do to get rid of all of the stuff that we imagine would be good to sort of bastardize it down?
01:09:04.000And I guess that's probably where he was going because it allowed him to carry the scheme on longer.
01:09:09.000I mean, because he becomes the only regulated centralized exchange in America, Coinbase probably would have gotten it as well.
01:09:16.000But all of a sudden, all the other exchanges that people were using, They had to actually now move towards, or they would have to move towards one of these regulated exchanges.
01:09:24.000So it's like an RFP, a request for proposal, like, that basically was designed to only allow them to participate.
01:09:30.000100%. That's what the entire thing was about.
01:09:32.000So he basically created or changed the legislation to give himself monopoly power over crypto.
01:09:39.000And so we first, I first found out about this the day I got back from my hunting trip.
01:09:45.000Yeah. I know what those days are like when you've been like incommunicado for 10 days and like it's just a shit storm and it's like.
01:09:50.000Exactly. Like I'm walking around the Seattle airport where I had my layover like for hours just talking about this with all the people that were involved and like what do we do about this?
01:09:59.000And so we started attacking him relentlessly and then people thought we were crazy and then before you know it everybody's realizing oh he knows something we don't.
01:10:08.000And so that's when all of a sudden all of a sudden all of a sudden enemies started contacting me.
01:10:13.000This is something that people don't even know yet.
01:10:14.000I mean, we talked about it on my channel, but if you're not in the main, if you're not in crypto knowing that I talked about this, nobody's talking about it.
01:10:22.000Is that not only were the retail investors victims because they were co-mingling funds, but also, they straight up extorted and counterfeited projects all across the board specifically to destroy them.
01:10:48.000Well, everybody's calling it a scam because they were saying, well, you know, like, they had all these founder's tokens and all that stuff.
01:10:54.000Sam paid for all that. Sam launched perpetual futures contracts on ICP four days before it was available to buy anywhere.
01:11:03.000How can you have a futures contract on something that doesn't have a baseline price?
01:11:07.000Yeah. And so, Sam used that to pump the price up of ICP to an unsustainable level, and they shorted it to the ground.
01:11:13.000His parents were the architects of the entire thing.
01:11:16.000Along with Dan Friedberg, who has actually ran the biggest poker scam in history on Ultimate Bets, where they were doing what they call God Mode, to where they were able to actually look at the other players' cards, right?
01:11:29.000That's the same exact thing they did at FTX. Dan Freeberg was a compliance lawyer of FTX. The same guy that ran the biggest poker scam of all time.
01:11:38.000Well, if you're going to come in a fraud, that seems like the perfect guy to have as your general counsel.
01:11:42.000Well, it does, right? So Dan Freeberg, we believe, was the architect.
01:11:45.000There's tons of evidence tying him to all this.
01:11:48.000He was the architect of the entire thing.
01:11:51.000And his parents, you know, Barbara Fried and Joseph Engman, they're absolute crooks.
01:11:57.000I talked to some people that worked with them on the philanthropy side because Joseph Engman was in charge of the philanthropy of FTX. Well, the philanthropy was bundling money, customer funds, to politicians.
01:12:08.000That's all it was. Even if you look, like, you know, certainly, you know, not as much with your audience, but I understand on a larger scale there's some controversy around, like, you know, COVID-19 and the whole thing.
01:12:20.000The pandemic, was it planned, was it not?
01:12:21.000I mean, I definitely have my opinions.
01:12:23.000I believe they're probably very similar to yours.
01:12:24.000They're probably quite similar to mine, because it seems like there's one big beneficiary of everything that happened.
01:12:29.000There was one big cover-up for everyone that started it.
01:12:32.000Amazing, wasn't it? And it was always so obvious.
01:13:11.000Well, beyond Big Pharma, if you have a virus or a disease that attacks predominantly the elderly and the already infirm, meaning people with pre-existing conditions, I don't know, seems like something that a country with an aging 1.3 billion population It doesn't exactly care for their citizens, as evidenced by the way they treat the Uyghurs or whatever.
01:13:32.000I don't know. Maybe it's conspiratorial, but if they lost the elderly and firm that have maybe now experienced a little taste of wealth for the first time, There might be something there.
01:13:46.000Like all conspiracy theories that have been proven correctly, that's as plausible as anything else.
01:13:53.000And if they manage to take out the U.S. economy, take out Trump in the process, Wow, that's a pretty solid added benefit.
01:14:00.000And again, I'm not saying this happened, but like, we'd be foolish to not have this conversation.
01:14:04.000And like all the conversations we'd be foolish not to have, no one's having them because of the uncomfortable truths that would probably come from it.
01:14:11.000Well, you're not allowed to. Thank God that Elon Musk has opened up Twitter to where I feel like we can go there and talk about realities of situations.
01:14:18.000Because before, you felt like if you even said COVID-19, you're going to get canceled.
01:14:22.000Well, for me, I mean, I was one of the early guys being like, hey, they're censoring me.
01:14:26.000Well, how do you know that? I was like, well, because I have, you know, at the time, you know, five million followers and I used to get a couple thousand retweets a post.
01:14:32.000Now I'm getting two. I'm getting four retweets a post.
01:14:35.000Like, I've been doing, you know, like you with crypto, I was an early adapter on social media.
01:14:41.000Okay, you know, I was the first guy on Telegram to break a million followers at the time.
01:14:45.000You know, ever since the other ones opened up, that's come down.
01:14:48.000But like, you know, millions on Twitter early.
01:14:51.000Like, when I hit send, I know what it's going to do.
01:14:53.000I know when I'm pushing the boundaries.
01:14:54.000I know when it's Miltos. Like, I get it.
01:14:57.000I saw discrepancies like this, but then I'd also see the lunatics on the left post something that wasn't particularly good, particularly just viral through the roof.
01:15:06.000And I'm like, okay, they're being assisted, and I'm being stymied.
01:15:09.000It's very clear. We saw the government was working with Twitter.
01:15:13.000But the whole point, wrapping this back around to FTX, the whole thing is, They were supposed, like, if you're against pandemic prevention and stuff, like, that's one thing.
01:15:24.000The main nonprofit they were giving money to was, I can't remember exactly what it's called, like, preparation for the pandemic or whatever.
01:15:31.000They're supposedly giving money to prevent the next pandemic, right?
01:15:35.000I mean, so even if you're against COVID-19, or not against COVID-19, but against, you know, you understand the conspiracy, it's like, okay, well, that's kind of controversial that that's where they're giving money to, but okay, whatever.
01:15:47.000That's not what it was. It was called like pandemic prevention, but it was all about funneling money to candidates on the left, and they just called it pandemic prevention.
01:15:57.000It had nothing to do with COVID-19, nothing to do with the pandemic at all.
01:16:01.000It's like everything on the philanthropy side was a straight-up scam.
01:16:04.000And they were using other people's names because all these campaign finance laws are going to be absolutely insane when it comes to FTX, all the violations.
01:16:14.000Well, I feel like they were manipulated so badly by FTX by the time, again, you don't hear anything about it.
01:16:19.000I haven't heard anything about FTX in three months.
01:16:21.000So I'd be curious to see your thoughts on that.
01:16:23.000But yeah, it seems like if FTX or Sam was donating to Republicans, you know, the FEC, Federal Elections Commission, they'd be looking at these contributions.
01:16:37.000A little differently than they are when they went to go benefit Democrats.
01:16:40.000Because, you know, like all of these big government institutions, they're controlled by the communists, essentially, at this point.
01:17:04.000Yeah, so what happens then is we start exposing all these projects and I start realizing like, Oh, this is much bigger than just, you know, him being a bad person because of this regulation that he's pushing.
01:17:15.000And as we started giving out all these narratives about all what he was doing with counterfeiting projects, you know, he's probably actually the reason Terra Luna collapsed.
01:17:23.000He's probably the reason why Celsius collapsed.
01:17:25.000He's probably the reason why Voyager, Three Airs Capital, he was stop-loss hunting the guys that own that.
01:17:30.000All this stuff is out there and is on the blockchain somewhere.
01:17:32.000Somebody's still got to find the evidence.
01:17:34.000But he was just trying to destroy All these projects across the board.
01:17:51.000From day one. Now, it still has a network, but they can pause the blockchain.
01:17:55.000If you can pause the blockchain... That's not the point of blockchain.
01:17:59.000Yeah, it sort of feels that that defeats the...
01:18:01.000100%. Yeah. They favored speed of transactions over decentralization, and that's eventually what ended up, you know, causing Swan to fall off a cliff.
01:18:10.000But a couple of, like, on October 29th, so FTX collapsed on November 9th.
01:18:15.000Mm-hmm. On October 29, I had a tweet where I warned everybody, get your money.
01:18:20.000I said, if you don't take your money off FTX, you're low IQ. Like, get your money off.
01:18:24.000There's something wrong. And we were pushing this narrative because we knew something was wrong.
01:18:27.000But a couple days later, I actually said, well, I didn't think they were insolvent.
01:18:31.000Because we're working with the projects.
01:18:33.000And so what you're seeing on the project side is they were creating a fake market.
01:18:36.000I just hadn't came to the point yet until everything happened on the night of realizing, oh, the fake market was insolvency.
01:18:43.000Like, that's what the whole thing was.
01:18:45.000They were creating a market that didn't exist because they were using customer funds and they were over-leveraging everything and they didn't have the money.
01:18:51.000And they had to create these fake markets to be able to keep the appearance that they had all the money.
01:18:55.000And so You know, on November 2nd is when Coindesk released the leaked balance sheet of FTX that showed how much trouble that they were in.
01:19:05.000And people were— And Sam literally came out and said, Oh, no, that's absolutely not true.
01:19:17.000But— They literally lost eight figures on FTX because Sam came out and said, we are totally solvent, everything's good, and they were getting ready to make a big move in there.
01:19:26.000And they took that vote of confidence as, oh, we can put the money on there.
01:19:30.000I told him, I said, well, that's the dreaded vote of confidence from the NFL owner.
01:19:34.000It's like when your owner of your team comes out and says, we trust our coach, he's got our full support, he's always fired the next week.
01:19:43.000Yeah. You know, so once all the insolvency stuff came out, it's like, oh, this is what we were on to.
01:19:49.000We've been working with Gretchen Morgensen, an NBC reporter, putting out a big story about the fake market.
01:19:55.000We just hadn't made that final connection yet, and it was so crazy.
01:19:58.000Like, we were involved in this story from pretty much day one, and yet, It's all unfolding much more rapidly than we thought that it would.
01:20:06.000We were working on the story. We thought we had a month on.
01:20:08.000And then all of a sudden, two weeks later, the entire exchange has collapsed.
01:20:12.000Or was it just, I mean, again, you've made this your life for the better part of more than a decade.
01:20:19.000Could anyone else have seen this coming?
01:20:21.000No. So how do you prevent it from happening again?
01:20:24.000We remove these actors from the space.
01:20:28.000The traditional financial markets have no place in crypto.
01:20:31.000And when you have guys that are coming over from Goldman Sachs and are coming over from the banking system and creating crypto projects, these are our enemies.
01:20:39.000This is not what we want. Because when you're a hammer, everything's a nail, right?
01:20:42.000So if you're bringing that 25 years of experience at Goldman Sachs into crypto, it doesn't...
01:21:00.000Literally started by a guy from Goldman Sachs.
01:21:03.000The biggest channel in crypto started directly from a Goldman Sachs employee.
01:21:07.000And it's like, can we not see what these people are trying to do?
01:21:10.000Can we not see they're trying to turn crypto into the traditional financial sector?
01:21:13.000Because when you look at FTX's scam, It's the exact same way the traditional system already works.
01:21:21.000We're, oh, it's so crazy that they were doing this, that they were taking the customer funds, and they were co-mingling, and they were over-leveraging, Guys, that's the way the entire system works.
01:21:31.000100%. They just went bankrupt three weeks ago.
01:21:34.000When I graduated from Wharton, the Wharton School of Finance in 2000, half my graduating class went to Credit Suisse because that was where, if you were an investment banker, that was before hedge funds were really a big thing.
01:21:47.000That's what you wanted to do, and that's where you were going to make a lot of money doing that.
01:21:51.000That just went insolvent, and now you're bringing that same mentality here.
01:22:08.000The funny thing is, out of all the nine people that are included on that, I'm the only person that literally did not promote FTX. I never was paid by them, never even had a conversation with them, and yet somehow I get looped into this billion dollar lawsuit.
01:22:20.000You get dragged in because you're Either you're a big name or a big wallet, perceived as a deep pocket, and guess what?
01:22:26.000They're just going to add you in because they can, and you have to defend it, and that's the problem.
01:22:42.000On Monday, I was down there for a harassment hearing, because I've been very vocal about what a scam they are.
01:22:51.000Because they're going after an innocent person that had absolutely nothing to do with it.
01:22:54.000And so in the court, on the transcripts, people will see when it's public, is that they literally lied about voicemails for me.
01:23:02.000So in the courtroom, the guy is literally telling the judge, well, you know, my plaintiff is scared for his life, asking if I have to have a gun because of all of the violent threats that That Ben Armstrong has made towards me and my family.
01:23:18.000He used his daughter in the courtroom.
01:23:20.000He said, my daughter came up to me and said, dad, are we safe?
01:23:23.000100% made up. I made some mean tweets to this guy on Twitter.
01:23:26.000I threatened to have his license taken.
01:23:28.000All of these threats that supposedly I made to them, they were all on phone call or voicemail.
01:23:35.000The entire hour that he says that I was calling for an hour straight, I was on a livestream, and I was literally recording videos with timestamps, and I was literally on camera the entire time he says that I did this.
01:23:45.000And the evidence he submitted- Well, never let the truth get in the way of a good story, right?
01:23:48.000Of course, of course. You'll learn through this experience as I have as well through the media and others.
01:23:54.000Well, he's going to get a lot of learning to do himself on this because I think he just thought I was an idiot and thought that I'm just loud and brash and I'm talking and all this stuff.
01:25:09.000That's the problem with BS. You still got to deal with BS. This lawsuit has been so great for me.
01:25:14.000I love it. The fact that they literally have shown their lack of due diligence to the extent where they literally include someone that never even had a conversation with FTX. On this lawsuit, it's just wins for me.
01:25:26.000I'm just racking up wins, you know, left and right over this whole thing.
01:25:29.000And so, you know, I got looped into this entire thing.
01:25:34.000And, you know, everybody's been talking about it.
01:25:35.000They've been tweeting about it. And, you know, I've been making a joke of the entire thing because the entire thing is a joke.
01:25:40.000Like, there's a reason why it's a sideshow for me because it's so laughable that I'm even included on this That I'm going to make a mockery of the entire thing.
01:25:48.000Like, it's not fair that you can just attack people for no reason.
01:25:52.000And so we're going to be able to find and show the receipts.
01:25:55.000And so I was down here on Monday to face that hearing.
01:25:58.000And, you know, it's just so crazy the lack of due diligence from our legal system.
01:26:28.000Yeah, it is. There is no equal justice under our law, and that's the problem.
01:26:31.000I mean, it's something I think we have to fix because it's not sustainable this way where it could be weaponized this way against the people.
01:26:39.000That's the reason why I'm making a mockery of the entire thing because people have to understand that not only is our financial system broken, Our legal system is broken.
01:26:47.000Our media system is broken. Our medical system is broken.
01:26:50.000All of these are broken in the same way because they all favor centralization over the people.
01:26:56.000Talk about that. Obviously, the notion that makes this so appealing in terms of crypto and that decentralization, the deregulation.
01:27:05.000But when you watch an FTX happen, When you see that, you know, what's the happy medium of, I don't want to say regulation because some people may be like, there should be none whatsoever.
01:27:16.000Well, you have to have some regulation. So what is that?
01:27:21.000How do you do that and how do you keep sort of, let's call it political bias out of it, right?
01:27:27.000You end up in a court in New York City and if you're a hunter, if you're maybe even libertarian, whatever, zero chance.
01:27:35.000Yeah. Like, you're out because of that, and we'd love to believe it's a jury of your peers, but like, you know, is someone in that jury gonna, are they gonna take even the most ridiculous case against Trump and be like, you know what, it's just easier, we'll say guilty because I can't go home.
01:27:49.000Yeah. I won't be able to go to school, you know, when the media leaks that I was on the jury and that I was one of the people that let him go.
01:27:55.000I mean, but those are the considerations that are going through these people's minds, and it's sick.
01:27:58.000Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that, like, we just are dealing with an irrational system that has to be changed from the inside out.
01:28:05.000And, you know, it's no longer, like, everything now is subjective and opinion-based.
01:28:10.000Like, as we move more towards blockchain decentralization, like, everything has rules and standards that have to be governed and have to be lived by.
01:28:18.000So when you look at social media, for instance, you know, their rules about shadow banning, you know, like, Mark Zuckerberg, like, just two years ago, or maybe it was a little bit longer than that, three or four years, said, shadow banning doesn't exist.
01:28:34.000It's very obvious that you're doing it.
01:28:36.000So the difference between a social media blockchain and what we have now with our centralized entities would be that there's still rules.
01:28:44.000There's still, like, it's not just a free, you can't go post child porn on a public, you know, blockchain or on a public social media site.
01:28:51.000So there are rules that people have to follow.
01:28:54.000The difference is, is that those rules are ironclad and they're not subjective.
01:29:00.000They're not based on somebody sitting up on his perch saying, you know what?
01:29:03.000I don't like that one, but I like this one.
01:29:04.000So that's all regulated within the blockchain.
01:29:09.000You know, the governance within a blockchain, within a network, will be the ones that handle that.
01:29:13.000And so when you look at, like, look, I'll just be really honest.
01:29:16.000I think that, you know, if Trump, if your dad comes out as pro-Bitcoin, I think that would be enough to swing the entire election for him in the future because it's made up Of strictly independent libertarian voters that have to make a choice between one side or the other.
01:29:30.000That's almost the entire cross-section of crypto.
01:29:33.000And I think that, you know, when it comes to this libertarian mindset, a lot of these people have this mindset that there should be no rules and no regulation because, you know, they think you should be able to do heroin on the side of the road.
01:30:33.000Right, right, right. It's very possible that he was just that incompetent.
01:30:37.000And how does he get to keep running the SEC when he worked alongside the biggest scam, fraud, Ponzi scheme in the history of the world?
01:30:47.000This is possibly up to $50 billion when you factor in all the companies that were involved with FTX. It's not just the customer funds that were on the site.
01:30:59.000And there's a guy, ZK Sharks, I think is his name, on Twitter.
01:31:02.000He's been doing a phenomenal job uncovering so many conflicts of interest of Gary Gensler from the stuff he said when he taught his MIT blockchain course.
01:31:44.000If the guy that's in charge of these things doesn't know and can be scared, how do you create the level of confidence for people to be like, okay, I'm in?
01:31:55.000Like, what we need is people to learn how to self-custody.
01:31:57.000So if you had taken your funds off of FTX and moved them to what we talked about earlier with cold storage or a hot wallet, they couldn't touch your funds and you wouldn't lose your money.
01:32:07.000So people have to have, like, look, we've been trading convenience with For rights and freedom ever since 9-11 especially.
01:32:17.000You can definitely go back before that, but 9-11 with the Patriot Act was really where we started giving up our rights.
01:32:22.000When you look at the convenience that, let's say the banking system offers you, Everything's, you know, on your account and that if it's gone, you know, it's FDIC insured and that, you know, all you got to do is call them and say, hey, I really didn't spend this and they'll, you know, they'll remove their transaction.
01:32:38.000It's taught people to be completely irresponsible with their money.
01:32:55.000We're trading rights for convenience. So when you look at FTX, you say, well, if people would have just taken the extra step to have learned the self-custody, we wouldn't be in the spot we're in.
01:33:04.000It's not about preventing centralized exchanges necessarily from being able to be scams.
01:33:10.000It's about protecting yourself from it if it is a scam.
01:33:12.000If you were to have gone on FTX, Bought a crypto and then taken it off the site, you couldn't have been hurt.
01:33:19.000And that's what we've got to do in America is get back to like, let's be responsible for our own money.
01:33:23.000How about that? Like, this is stuff they don't teach you in school, you know?
01:33:26.000There's no financial education in school.
01:33:29.000There's barely financial education in business school.
01:34:33.000They can't have an excuse. Blame someone else.
01:34:35.000And I think that independence, that self-assuredness, all of that is so interesting.
01:34:40.000I think, yes, it's not just in crypto or your financial responsibility.
01:34:43.000Like, hey, take some ownership of your actions.
01:34:46.000We'd be better off if they did that across the board in every aspect of their lives.
01:34:50.000Absolutely. When you look at the SEC, the way that they're trying to over-regulate everything right now, which, by the way, the SEC is going to fail to regulate crypto.
01:34:56.000Like, there's already been one case decided that said that the secondary market is not securities, so they're not going to end up regulating crypto.
01:35:04.000It's not going to happen, but they're— But, okay, fine.
01:35:10.000And is that why there's, you know, so much volatility in the markets?
01:35:13.000Yeah. Well, no, they're not going to let it go.
01:35:15.000And yes, certainly a lot of the volatility comes from the unsureness of institutions to get into crypto right now because of all the stuff that, you know, the SEC is doing.
01:35:23.000But I would also argue, like, a lot of those institutions know what he's doing because they're paying him.
01:35:27.000So they can kind of see where things are going.
01:35:29.000They're trying to stall. That's what they're trying to do.
01:35:32.000So I think when you look at everything they're trying to do with regulation, you know, it just makes me so angry.
01:35:37.000Like, we have a state bill, SJR 16 in California, to change the accredited investor laws.
01:35:41.000Because, like, Everyone needs to be able to access the same kinds of investments if you understand how to do it.
01:35:48.000We're trying to change it where it's a test instead of having to have a million dollars.
01:35:51.000Recently, they just came out and said, now they're thinking about changing the credit investor law to $10 million.
01:35:55.000Yeah, that takes out literally 99.9% of the populace doesn't have a net worth of $10 million to be able to check that box to be able to get into an investment.
01:36:38.000That's the scam. And so when it comes to regulation, we need some type of regulation across the centralized exchanges.
01:36:44.000But overall, what we hope is going to happen is everything's going to move to decentralized exchanges.
01:36:49.000To where everything is done with automatic market makers, and you're not having to custody your funds with someone else.
01:36:55.000You're able to do it all from your wallet, and your money stays in your wallet and never touches somebody else.
01:36:59.000And so it's really like moving more towards decentralization, which is what Sam was trying to prevent.
01:37:05.000It's what Gary Gensler was trying to prevent.
01:37:08.000Why? Because they just want the system to run the same way the broken system has continued to run.
01:37:13.000They just don't want to be the last one holding the potato in a game of hot potato.
01:37:16.000What people have to understand is everything they're doing is for a point.
01:37:19.000We need regulation, but we need people to understand crypto making the regulation.
01:37:23.000So how do you do that? Because I mean, I imagine that plays into big into the adaption process.
01:37:27.000I mean, I think creating some confusion around that, not having sort of defined regulations on that creates a little bit of an insurmountable obstacle for a lot of people to get in.
01:37:37.000Because I mean, how do you get the adaption where you have a critical mass that all of a sudden You know, gets rid of sort of the problems, right?
01:37:47.000You're big enough, you're too big to fail.
01:37:49.000Much like the banking system, you know, despite the craziness were bolstered and you knew they'd be backstopped.
01:37:57.000You know the big four banks are going to be backstopped, but actually the good actors in some of your local and regional banks, they may not.
01:38:03.000And so you're actually Forced to play with the bad actors because you know they're going to be taken care of by gambling with your money.
01:38:11.000And it's this vicious cycle of insanity.
01:38:17.000And when will people be able to go to a grocery store and pay with Bitcoin?
01:38:22.000Well, you can right now through certain, you know, I use a crypto.com card, which is I convert crypto over to dollars like, you know, before I want to do a transaction, and then I can spend my crypto off the exchange with a card.
01:38:36.000You can do it with USDC. So there are ways you can spend Bitcoin right now.
01:38:40.000I think the big confusion is, like, people thinking you have to understand blockchain to use it.
01:38:45.000And I think it's just kind of a, it's kind of a consequence of our internet culture where everything's public and it gets out there so fast.
01:38:52.000Yeah. Where things that are growing, like, look at AI, for instance.
01:38:54.000Like, we all kind of knew about AI, but now look where it's going so quickly.
01:38:58.000It's like, now people are able to see what's happening in real time.
01:40:09.000And so in blockchain, like, we're really striving for a day where everybody's going to be using it and not really knowing that you're using it.
01:40:16.000It's just, it's the underlying infrastructure of the apps that you use.
01:40:20.000You don't need to know exactly how it connects or how it works.
01:40:23.000And so, unfortunately, with blockchain, like, it's so confusing to people.
01:40:27.000And you've got all these people making big investments, right?
01:40:29.000Like, big money is moving hands in crypto.
01:40:31.000You know, pound for pound, probably the most, you know, lucrative, you know, space in the history of the world.
01:40:36.000And when you look at it from that perspective, like, people are interested because of the money, and they're saying, when adoption, when adoption, when adoption.
01:40:43.000Like, in the bull run when Bitcoin's going up, everybody's like, adoption's here!
01:40:47.000Then you go in the bear market, and everybody's like, oh, never use it.
01:40:50.000It's a failure. It's like, you just keep seeing the same cycle over and over and over again.
01:40:53.000And one day, we're going to get to a point where things are going to reach an equilibrium.
01:40:57.000I believe, look, when I first got into, into, now, I got into crypto in 2012.
01:41:02.0002017 is when I really, like, started to dedicate my life to it, you know?
01:41:06.000Like, I was like, this is what I want to do.
01:41:07.000This fixes the system. I fell in love with the idea of decentralization and things like that.
01:41:12.000Like, you know, looking back in on those earlier days, like, you know, I would have told you in 2017, oh, adoption is less than five years away.
01:41:21.000Definitely. Definitely less than five years away.
01:41:22.000It's one of those things where the longer you're in it and the more you learn about it, the further off you realize it is.
01:41:28.000So if you ask me today, I think it's maybe 10, 15 years, maybe 20 before we have full-blown adoption in crypto where all these protocols are being used Decentralized applications are built on top of those networks and that people are using it on a daily basis and interacting with the blockchain without even knowing they're interacting with the blockchain.
01:41:47.000I think that's where we have to move to because right now, a lot of our decentralized applications are just...
01:41:54.000And is that what you're trying to achieve?
01:41:56.000Yeah, over time, that's what I'm all about, is adopting this new technology because it's, in my opinion, the only way we're going to save America.
01:42:03.000I really believe that. I think that we've got to get off of this fiat system where you just print money at will because when we talked earlier about the dollar losing the World Reserve currency status, that's terrifying.
01:42:16.000That's Armageddon in America when that happens.
01:42:22.000That actually feels like it's a lot closer than 10 to 15 years, because it's going on right now.
01:42:26.000Maybe if your dad comes back in and wins, maybe he can put his foot down on some stuff and maybe get tough with some of these BRICS nations, which Joe Biden, he's not ever been tough with anybody in his life, other than Twitter talking about Hunter Biden.
01:42:41.000I think that, you know, it's one of these things where, you know, the adoption curve is going to be, you know, very dramatic when it happens, but we're a long ways away from it happening now.
01:42:52.000And I think that, you know, this is something that hopefully we can use to prevent us losing the world reserve currency.
01:43:00.000Because if that happens, the main reason we're protected in America is because of that reserve currency.
01:43:05.000When that's gone, all of a sudden, we're susceptible to hyperinflation.
01:43:10.000Oh, I mean, hey, we're going to call our $33 trillion.
01:43:15.000Yeah. You know, you think FTX was a collapse.
01:43:19.000Exactly. But we're protected right now because the other countries in the world, they have to have dollars, and so they're all motivated to keep us from going into that hyperinflation.
01:43:29.000But when we lose that, like, now all of a sudden you're looking at, What do we do now?
01:43:35.000And when you look at, like, Germany in the 1920s, you know, after World War I, when people wore, you know, wheelbarrows of cash.
01:43:44.000Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe, you look at Venezuela, where, you know, they make trinkets in the street with their currency.
01:43:49.000They will make you a purse out of their currency.
01:43:51.000Because that's worth more than the currency. Exactly, because it's absolutely worthless.
01:43:54.000We think that could never happen in America.
01:43:55.000You're right. It could never happen in America as long as we have the World Reserve Currency.
01:43:59.000But once we lose that, you see these BRICS nations, you know, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa starting to move away from the dollar into the digital yuan.
01:44:07.000It's very scary. And I do think that the digital dollar will come eventually, and it will kind of be used to pump up demand across the world to keep the Ponzi scheme going a little bit longer with the way we print money.
01:44:17.000But it's just the system is broken, and it's got to be fixed.
01:44:21.000And I believe that crypto and blockchain is the only way that we can start holding people accountable.
01:44:25.000There's this idea that, you know, There's so much fraudulent activity in crypto and, you know, Elizabeth Warren's always saying, like, all the criminals are using it!
01:44:32.000And there's 0.1% of all blockchain transactions are using it.
01:44:35.000Well, but they use that, you know, like you said, to Silk Road, that whole concept.
01:44:38.000They tried, like, early on, like, before I even knew much about it, it was like, they're trying to make it, it's a pedophile ring, it's a drug trafficking ring, it's all this.
01:44:45.000And so, you know, but, you know, I guess what I've learned over the last few years is, like, the second, like, the big government people are going after it, there's probably...
01:44:52.000There's probably an understory that they're not telling you and there's a reason for it.
01:44:56.000And that's why, you know, it's fascinating.
01:44:58.000But it's cool to see how early we are on the curve because I feel like, you know, someone who's missed it, but it doesn't feel like we've actually missed it.
01:45:04.000Yeah, and I think, like, it's so amazing when I talk to people about crypto because, you know, everybody's like, oh, well, you know, I can't get my family in crypto or I can't talk to my buddy.
01:45:27.000And by the time I'm done talking with them, they say, oh, I get it now.
01:45:31.000Like, and that's what my book is all about.
01:45:33.000It's like, Everything's a mystery in crypto, but it's not really a mystery.
01:45:36.000The truth is right in front of you the entire time.
01:45:38.000Like, when you look at all the people losing money with crypto, not necessarily from, like, the lack of having the private keys, but just with the market, it works in a four-year cycle.
01:45:47.000Bitcoin has worked in a four-year cycle ever since the very beginning.
01:45:50.000You get one massive run-up for one year, you get one gigantic dump for one year, and then you get two years of the market building up, you know, stably.
01:45:59.000And when people are saying it's a scam, That's the time to get in, right?
01:46:04.000When FTX was collapsing, it went down to 15,000, which ironically, we had said all year last year, the bottom of the market was going to be in November.
01:46:11.000We didn't know what was going to cause it, but it's because that four-year cycle works so exact.
01:46:16.000We could forecast when we should see a bottom.
01:46:21.000We said for years, top of the market would be in between Halloween and Thanksgiving and 2021.
01:46:28.000Exactly. Like, November, you know, 22, I think, was when we saw, you know, or no, November 12, I believe, was when we saw the top of Bitcoin.
01:46:37.000And, you know, it's just amazing to see how mapped out this thing is and people would just follow it and understand it.
01:46:42.000What I'm trying to tell you is, Number one, we have the system that's broken that's got to be fixed, and it plugs a lot of the system.
01:46:48.000But a lot of the mystery surrounding the movements of crypto, it's not really a mystery.
01:46:53.000When you understand why that four-year cycle works, it's because every four years, the production of Bitcoin gets cut literally in half.
01:47:00.000It's supply and demand built into the code of Bitcoin that makes it so powerful.
01:47:05.000And every four years, everybody's like, well, you know, it's not going to work this time.
01:47:08.000This time, we're going to see something go totally different.
01:47:10.000This time, it'll be different. We've heard that a lot.
01:47:12.000I've been crushing that this time would be different narrative for years.
01:47:17.000And, you know, the people who want to reinvent the wheel and try to figure out, like, I want to be the person that called the time that was going to be different.
01:47:25.000And so I think that for people who really understand, like, there's not as big of a mystery to Bitcoin as you think there is.
01:47:31.000It's not about... It's choreographed when the right time to get in.
01:47:36.000So tell them how they can find your book so we can learn about it.
01:47:39.000Sure. Where can our audience find you?
01:47:41.000Because again, I think I have a feeling as more especially emerges from FTX and the regulation, we'll have to have you back on to talk about all that.
01:47:47.000But tell them where they can figure it out so they can get that primer and they can start looking at it.
01:48:25.000I went down to the Bahamas, tried to track down Sam.
01:48:28.000I got some very interesting text messages from him while I was down in the Bahamas that he asked me what I would do if I was the CEO of FTX, which is a crazy question to ask.
01:48:38.000But the whole thing is our next book is actually going to be called Catching Up to FTX, Lessons Learned During My Crusade Against Fraud, Corruption, and Bad Hair.
01:48:45.000Awesome, man. Well, guys, go check out Ben Armstrong.
01:49:00.000Definitely a trend that's here to stay.
01:49:02.000I think the government's going to try to do whatever they can to prevent the outside crypto guys from doing it so that they can control it and learn everything about you.
01:49:10.000I think we probably want to avoid that and follow the guys like Ben.
01:49:15.000And whether it's the exchanges or the actual currencies, start looking at it.
01:49:19.000Check it out. Again, I want to thank our sponsors, Patriot Mobile.
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