Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Independence by Design podcast where we discuss what it means to be a business owner and ways to get unstuck from the day to day so we can design a business that gives us a life of independence.
How does the government printing money impact your life, your valuation and the decisions that you should be making? That is exactly why I've got Lawrence Leppard, who is the author of the Big Print I on the podcast today. So pumped I got to meet him at the bitcoin conference. He's got a phrase that says fix the money, fix the world. And I wholeheartedly agree. In today's episode, you're going to hear me and him talk about how bitcoin and sound money and the paradigm shift that we're in the middle of right now is going to change the, change the base layer of all investment, asset pricing, valuations. And it should really be a part of your decision making framework as you're looking to reinvest back into the company or diversify outside the business. And how does that, that impact your long term goals? Lawrence is a absolute hoot. I love our conversation and I hope you do too. Thanks everybody for tuning in and I hope you enjoy the conversation with Lawrence.
Lawrence, I have to say I am beyond grateful for your time. I know your time.
I mean seriously man, like I, I, I, I've been, I started, I can't even remember which podcast I watched of yours and I was like, I love Lawrence.
And it was just your, your, your absolute mission to help people comes out in your authenticity and your desire. And so I'm very grateful. And you wrote the book, the Big Print and, and I'm going to take some assumptions here, Lawrence, that like we want people to go in and pick it up. You wrote it for an entry point because the Lynn Alden's broken money and all the other stuff that's out there becomes a little bit more complicated. And I think you did a pretty good job at the bridge, so thank you so much.
[00:01:53] Speaker B: That was the goal. I mean, I, and I borrowed heavily from them. Don't, I mean I didn't write this book. I assembled a lot of other people's great thoughts in a way that the average person could understand.
And it's the average person that's going to get hurt by what's coming. You know that.
[00:02:06] Speaker A: So I know. And so I, I, I, I'll be honest, I got a whole page of notes from reading the book and from listening to it again and like, and, but I, I thought a lot about how do I want to start this because I also could talk for five days about this shit. And I'm going, okay, to make sure that we have a good journey for the, the, the listeners. But also, I, I, I was thinking about your. Some of the stories that impacted me a lot, that really resonated with me in your book was the Fair Game of Capitalism is Not Here.
And you had serious stories about your grandfather, your father, and the multiple times you got hosed with big bets. And then all of a sudden the game has changed.
And kind of just walk me through, because I've had the experience, Lawrence, where I'm like, this is not fair.
[00:02:58] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, walk me through that. It's a broad thing throughout the country. I think most people in our society feel it. I mean, the game board is tilted or the deck is stacked, whatever metaphor you want to use. I mean, look, the founding documents in the United States are a beautiful thing. I mean, not that we would all have equal outcomes because more talented people should do better than less talented people, but that the game would be fair. That was the notion of the, you know, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They tried to make the game fair.
And sadly, like so many things, so many great ideas, over time they lose their luster and they get watered down. And particularly in the monetary sphere, which is really what the book addresses, it's just gotten progressively worse and to the point now where it's just unrecognizable. I mean, the Founding Fathers saw it today. They'd be, what the hell is this?
To what their idea of a government should be. And so we slowly but surely wandered into printing money and fractional reserve banking and the Federal Reserve. And then the real big one was 71, when we abandoned the gold standard and all of these things at a macro, at a big level, big picture level, to keep it simple, have benefited the people on the inside who know how to play the game, wealthy people, bankers, et cetera, and have benefited the government and have cost the average man or woman money and lifestyle, which is time.
And time is the only thing we all have. You exchange your time for a wage, and that wage is what you need.
[00:04:33] Speaker A: To preserve that wage into something.
[00:04:35] Speaker B: Yeah. And if they're stealing it, if everything you earn becomes less valuable every year, and that's truly what happens.
They are stealing from you in a subtle way. And it's worse than that because they're not only stealing from you, the government is stealing from you in order to fund programs that keep them in office and foreign wars and boondoggles all kinds of stupid shit, you know that?
But the wealthy people, the bankers, and the very. What I call the cotillionaires, the very smart people who know how to game the system, they're like, yeah, inflation, this shit's good for me.
You know, I'll borrow cheap, and I'll invest in things that yield a much higher yield, and I'll get rich, you know, and.
[00:05:17] Speaker A: And what's what. Sorry to interrupt, but I think it's important.
I'm tracking the whole thing you're saying and, like, in. Because I, I. And I'm really honestly curious of, like, how you've emotionally processed this, because I'll give you my example. And because, like, you mean, you told your story about your grandfather, and I mean, you had. You had bets placed, you know, before the great financial crisis and all this. And then, like, the game was changed. So, like, when I figured this shit out, Lawrence, because I, like, again, me and the audience were entrepreneurs. It's like, okay, here's the game. Go, work hard, eat shit, and you will get rewarded for the efforts and the risk. And so I might. When I figured this stuff out of, like, they're printing money from nothing while I. Everybody listening in here every two weeks, I had a $240,000 payroll, and I had to hit it. And if there was no money in the checking account, I'm screwed. And, like, everyone listening in has a constraint of cash flow. And then when. So, like, when I realized, like, wait a second, they just print money out of fucking nothing. And then. And then I. I was like. So I was trying to tell this to my wife, which, God bless her soul, for them having to, like, talk to me about all this. It's like I said, Megan, I feel like I've been playing soccer my whole life.
And the other person on the other side of the team picked up the ball, threw it in the net and said, two points. You can't use your hands and do that.
And it was like this. Because, like, it's this weird where that it started to bubble up. Resentment, Lawrence. Where, like. Because, like, I have no issue with someone being super wealthy. And that's why I love working with my clients, because they earned their wealth versus, so maybe kind of speak to, like, how that's different from earning versus.
[00:06:47] Speaker B: What you're talking about. Something new and create something and adds value and gets paid for it. I mean, I'm. I'm all about that. And, and as you know, in today's world, there are a lot of people who want to tear down billionaires. And I, I don't have any problem with somebody if they're a billionaire, if they've earned it honestly. And there plenty of ones who have.
Although what I would say is that many, many billionaires have benefited from this capital system that I've talked about where they can borrow cheap and we can't.
Let's just do it on an equities basis. The biggest inequity in the world right now is the difference in the cost of capital for somebody who's got a lot of capital in a big business versus the average person. If you're an average person, you're a working person and you want to borrow money, there's only one cheap way you can borrow money that's against the house. And even that's not as cheap as it used to be. It's 7% or something now, let alone.
[00:07:36] Speaker A: The ridiculous bullshit you have to go through to get the equity that you own. Right?
[00:07:41] Speaker B: All that. But on top of that, if you really want to borrow money, you're not going to get an unsecured line of credit. Your only unsecured line of credit is your credit card company. And since the usury laws were thrown away, those are now 25% on average. And some of them, I've seen them as high as 30%. I mean the mob would blush. You can't borrow money at 30% and pay it back.
I mean, you just never get out. And so whereas if you are a connected financial player, a hedge fund person, a Wall street person, a banker, whatever, you can borrow at the federal funds rate or something very, very close to it. And so that gives you an enormous advantage because you can borrow that money and then use it to go somewhere else and place a bet on something that yields more than that money. And for basically just being a rentier or capitalist, you get wealthier. And the point I'm trying to make is that the cost of borrowing should be equal for all people within the system. And it's not.
That's the fundamental unfairness. Right?
[00:08:37] Speaker A: I love it. And I think that'll tie into as you know, and my whole goal is with your quest to getting to the normies and we're going to orange pill as many people as possible. So we will get to how Bitcoin fits into this. But I think it's going to be interesting as we frame up the why. And this has all been integrated, Lawrence, into my life over the last couple years where it wasn't. And then all of a sudden I was like, okay, so My chain of events was, okay, the game is not fair. They just print money. When Delta got $55 billion in 2020, everybody got free money in 2020. I'm like, this is insane.
I had a fractional CFO business. Lawrence, everyone's getting money.
[00:09:13] Speaker B: And I'm like, what the hell? It was unbelievable. I mean, I know guys who didn't need the money who took out $10 million in loans. They kept their employees, and a year later, the loan was forgiven. And they had literally just gotten a $10 million check from the federal government. I was like, what?
[00:09:28] Speaker A: I know. The ertc, the ppp. Ppp. Round two one.
[00:09:34] Speaker B: Yeah. So that's another. We haven't even gotten into that. That's the most recent thing. And what the COVID example did, by the way, is it really primed the pump for universal basic income. I mean, they sent out about $18,000 per household in the United States, but the average household only got, you know, two or three stimmy checks. Maybe call it two or $3,000. Right? Somebody else got that other slice of the 18.
[00:09:57] Speaker A: The business owners listening in. I mean, like, we like the business. Anybody with a company got a ridiculous amount. But, like, okay, let's. Here's. I want to frame this up because I want you to hear how I'm describing this situation to my clients who weren't familiar with Bitcoin. And then by the end of a conversation, like, one conversation we can get into, like, what do you get? Like, they're like, what?
So here's how, like. And I'm curious, like, truly, like, because we can unpack a lot of these parts of this story, I think, because you have a lot of good detail. And then we always want to go pick up Lawrence's book. But so game is unfair. So there's this kind of first, like, you know, the grievance of, like, denial. Then, like, okay, wait. It isn't fair. And, like, everybody dealing with the banking system, I mean, we could go on for, like, four days about how effed up that fiat pyramid scheme is, but okay, if we say the system's wrong. So, like, I spend a lot of time, Lawrence, teaching these owner operators how to think like a capital allocator, which means we have to think about rates of return and cash.
So I got a D in accounting, by the way. So, like, I actually, like, was terrible at school, and I landed all this because everybody that owns a company wakes up and they go, where's. What's in my checking account? Who owes me what receivables where's my inventory, where's my payables? Like I have to pay payroll.
[00:11:13] Speaker B: Make it. Yeah. Am I going to make it this week? Yeah.
[00:11:16] Speaker A: And this is a million dollar company too. I have people that do 50 to 100 plus million that it's the same issue because they are in the traditional system like you said. So even though it's not the Jane or John who is a consumer, they still have to go to their shitty bank to beg for money for a line of credit or conventional loan or an SB loan. So anyways, here's where I'm going with this. Where like I've as I've been walking through to people like okay, is it because I explained to them where the multiple comes from? Because private equity since you know the last 10 years of the Zer or 15 years had like these multiples don't cash flow these companies.
So like it's a complete scam. Like the multiple times the normalized ebitda. And I've been saying, well it doesn't include working capital, debt, taxes, all this. So here's where I'm going with. Like there's not enough cash flow in the system. The owners know that.
So then I, I, in my trainings I actually walk through the discount rate and the buildup. So like okay, 4.7 treasuries, then we've got 5.6s and P. And then like we're building up risk and I said your company should be generating a 20% rate of return. I said oh by the way, that balance sheet is getting eroded every single. So like the 4.7 is fucking bullshit. Like it's actually 8, which is M2. And they're like what? And I'm like that's why you feel poor every single day. And your employees, your payroll costs. So when I, we're where I want you to maybe fill in some of this, of the, of the M2 of like where how we can prove that like this is not Ryan or Lawrence's opinion if the cost of money is that build up and that's where the multiple comes from. Like the whole pricing mechanism of corporate finance is wrong. If they're printing 8%, so can you. What do you think about that?
[00:13:00] Speaker B: I completely agree with that. I mean in terms of it, you know the one thing I've always said, and I say this in the book too and the reason why a lot of people don't understand this, they shouldn't blame themselves for not understand this is a very sophisticated fraud. Do you know what I mean?
I mean, it is. I mean, yeah, guys who run the system, I mean, they're not stupid and they've rigged the game in their favor and they, you know, they tell us a lot of bromides, but, oh, don't worry about it. The Fed's doing the right thing for the people, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's all a lie. It's a complete lie. Just like the COVID thing was a lie. It's the same. And once you start peeling it back, you see what a lie it is.
Yeah, I mean, look, the cost of capital, in my opinion, is something that should be set at a market rate, not by the government, which is what the Fed does. The Fed is a price fixing bank cartel. And the cost of capital should be set at the level at which savings and investment needs balance one another. So there are people who need money to borrow for consumption or if you're a business person, probably to fund your business or grow your business. And then there are people who have savings who were like, okay, I don't want to just let the savings rot in the bank. I want to get a rate of return. And so the two supply and demand for money, the use of money should balance out at the business rate. Now, when you're the Fed and you start messing around with that, all kinds of bad things happen. Because we saw rates as high as 20% in 1980, which almost bankrupted my father's business.
And then we see rates as low as 0%, which is basically a giveaway to anyone who can borrow. The problem is that the average guy, you, me, Joe Sixpack, we can't go borrow at 0%, but Wall street can, banks can, hedge funds can, wealthy people can.
And so that's just a free giveaway to them. And, you know, they all. I mean, let's go back to kind of the quantity theory of money and the money supply in M2. Let's just talk about that for a minute. Okay? I mean, so money is a representation of. It's a claim on goods and services in an economy. I mean, it's.
Yeah, exactly. Money. And money is wealth. But it's only wealth insofar as, I mean, dollar bill per se. It might as well be monopoly money. It kind of is anyway.
But it's only good insofar as you can walk into a coffee shop and buy a cup of coffee with her, a couple of them. And so it's a representation of a good or a service. And there's only X amount of goods and services in the economy at Any given point in time. I mean, you can't like snap your fingers and say, okay, let's double the coffee production in the US it just doesn't happen that way. You got to plant trees, you got to harvest the beans, blah, blah, blah. So if you have X amount of money out there and you have Y amount of goods and services out there, you know, the two balance and you get a price level. Well, if you're growing the money piece, and that's what the banks do, and that's because they print money out of nothing, ex nihilo, out of nothing. Literally, you know, a bank sits there and it says, okay, you know, Ryan, I'm going to put, you know, a million dollars in your checking account, and now you owe me a million dollars. That money came from nowhere. It did not exist before they created it. It just came from nowhere.
[00:16:06] Speaker A: And they don't even have to use paper and machines anyway.
[00:16:10] Speaker B: It's on digits, right? And most people don't understand that. So through you, through credit creation, through you taking a loan and then giving you a million dollars, you know, if. Let's say there was. Let's say there was 100.
Let's keep it simple. Let's say, I mean, these are crazy numbers. Let's say there was $10 million in the economy, and let's say you were the only participant, one of the only participants in the economy, you just went and borrowed a million dollars. So now there's $11 million in the economy in terms of money supply. Well, you just grew the money supply 10%. So the cost of everything over time will go up by 10%. So the money supply, if it grows, is inflation by definition. And so inflation is nothing more than more money supply chasing the same amount of goods.
[00:16:54] Speaker A: Well, and what's so fascinating, Lawrence, is with these owners that I help understand finance, I mean, if you have a balance sheet, like you have a starting balance sheet when you start a company, assets and liabilities, right? And if the denominator is growing, it doesn't work, right? So if you have someone chipping away because your cash flow statement is literally just a difference of the balance sheet over two periods of time. So the ground is literally melting underneath.
[00:17:26] Speaker B: Well, that's what you're talking about is the decay in the fiat value. And that's why Michael Saylor changed the model that he was operating under. And he realized that he had, he had $500 million worth of cash sitting on his balance sheet. I'm sure a lot of your group that you talk to and work with are folks who have cash on their balance sheet. And what they're probably unaware of, or maybe they are kind of, they're tangentially aware of it, but they're not really focused on it in many cases, I think, is that whatever cash they have is losing value every year.
It's not what the CPI says in the book. There's some great statistics that show how they cook the cpi.
The right measure of how much value it's losing is the growth in the underlying M2. Because it's really simple. I mean, it's like diluting beer. Okay, so you have one mug of beer, and that'll get you so drunk. And if you add a mug of water to a mug of beer, you still only have one mug of beer. And if you drink all of it, you've now drank two mugs, but you still only have one mug of beer. And so the fact of the matter is the beer is the production of the economy, and the water is the new money that's getting added in and diluting the old money and its value. And so that's just what's going on. It's going on consistently. It's been going on since the beginning of time. But it's gotten particularly worse since the global financial crisis in 2008 when they printed a ton of money, and then even worse still in 2020 when they printed a gargantuan ton of money.
So I wrote the book, I called it the Big Print. And I say there have actually already been two really big prints. One was 08 and one was 2020.
And here's the thing. I think a lot of people think, well, okay, these are unusual circumstances.
A housing bubble and a pandemic, and we'll go back to normal and everything will be fine. And that's where I split with the consensus. I'm like, no, you don't understand.
This is a feature.
Yeah, we're going to have a bigger print. It's coming. I mean, this is. There's a.
[00:19:25] Speaker A: And I want to. I want. Let's, let's, let's unpack that, because I got. There's a. These economists called ITR Economics.
[00:19:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:32] Speaker A: So Alan Bolio is a friend of mine. His, his daughter, Kim Clark is a really friend. Good friend of mine. So this is, this, this is where I think there's some Venn diagram overlap. So Alan. And Alan comes on my podcast once a quarter, and I have. Has for years, you know, the whole 20, 30, Great Depression. And like, he speaks with Peter Zion every once in A while. So it's all about this demographics and all this stuff. But what's fascinating. So I actually, Alan had me on his podcast to explain to him what, what Bitcoin is.
[00:19:59] Speaker B: Oh, good. Yeah, yeah.
[00:20:00] Speaker A: And so, and, and so here's where this. I think we, we. And I, I was, I love how open minded he is. And Lawrence, I looked at him because, you know, it's all about like the crash and the, the, the, the Great, Great Depression. 23 day. I said, Alan, I said, like, okay, I'm tracking you on all of the data. Like we have like all these problems. And I said, do you really think, Alan, that the old people in government are going to let all of the old people's stock portfolios drop by 50% and their houses drop by 50%? I said, just, just ask me that one thing. He just looked at me and I was like, dude, they're gonna print. And then I was like, larry, I was like, they're gonna print. They're not gonna let it go down.
[00:20:38] Speaker B: Yeah, we know what the policy response has to be. I mean, when faced with a sudden death event and the risk of inflation through printing, they'll take the risk of inflation over sudden death every day. And they did it in 08, they did it in the pandemic, and they're going to do it again. And so the book really should have been called the Bigger Print, because that's what's coming.
I think it's part of the Nothing Stops this train theme that Lyn Alden has started on. There's a chapter entitled that in the book. And what it really describes is in a system where you're basing your GDP growth on debt, and your rate of debt growth exceeds your rate of GDP growth, eventually the gap between the two gets so large that either you would have a collapse, which is what happened in 29, and they were not able to arrest it. And so we had a Great Depression, or it's what happened in 08 and 2020. But in both cases there they addressed the issue by printing money.
And we've now got two times when they did that. We actually got a lot of other smaller times when they did that as well, but those are the big ones.
They did it at Silicon Valley bank, and they did it September 23rd. And there are other examples, but when.
[00:21:45] Speaker A: SVB got bailed out. Right, okay. Like in. Because it was really interesting for me in the timeline of all this, like, just to give you like, the context, like, I have, like, so I've got. I, I have read hundreds of books on this shit. So, like, for up.
[00:22:02] Speaker B: And.
[00:22:02] Speaker A: Because, like, I. I had banking problems, Lawrence, with my. With my family business. So, like, I was always like, well, these people in suits just randomly, magically give us money when we need it. And I just, I. I can't stand not being sovereign. And so, like, there, for 10 years, I studied the problem and I'm like, what is the solution here? And then I stumbled on bitcoin. It was like your podcast. And then it was like, Lynn Alden and then Safe Adim. And I'm like, oh, my God. Yeah, yeah. It just was like, blowing my mind.
[00:22:31] Speaker B: Blows your mind? Yeah. I mean, the first part of my book is actually quite depressing. And I've had several people come up and say, God, that was really dark. And I'm like, well, yeah.
And there are people in the bitcoin community who knock me for being, quote unquote, a doomer. And I'm really not a doomer. I'm very optimistic about the long term arc of humanity and how things will get better for my kids and grandkids, but I also think it's unrealistic and irresponsible to be in a situation where things are breaking. And they are, in my view. I mean, people are getting roasted with inflation and to not talk about it and to not talk about solving it.
[00:23:06] Speaker A: You know, it reminds me of. I've got the allegory that cave. And this is getting pretty geeky with, like, Socrates. Like. Like, it's the whole matrix. Like, everyone's arguing. I saw this shit on the cpi and we can talk about some of the data I want to talk about. I'm going to keep weaving us together with all these topics is it's just gaslighting on a mass scale and at some point and going back to your doom. Because I'm the same way. I'm like an internal optimist. And then everybody's like, God, Ryan, like, you're so just. I'm like, okay, everybody, here's the deal. Like, you got a fricking stint going on in your heart. Like, should you keep smoking blunts and, you know, having a bottle of vodka every night? Probably not. Like, like, do I want to party all day long? Fine. But, like, at some point your body's gonna go mating mayday.
And, like, the whole world is being like, no, Lawrence, just be a good boy and sit in your desk. And it's just like. And the people listening to this are usually outsiders because they're entrepreneurs, right? And so that's Why?
[00:24:02] Speaker B: I get it. Because they have to, they have to live in the real world and they have to deal with reality. The people who generally don't get.
[00:24:09] Speaker A: Do you have cash for payroll?
[00:24:11] Speaker B: Right?
Yeah, and they, and yeah, you know the people, the people who definitely don't get it are academics and the government. I mean they, because they don't live in the real world. I mean they live in their own fake constructed world and they think their models make sense. And of course we can all show that they don't.
[00:24:26] Speaker A: But which is the money printing versus the sound money do you want to make like. Because I think how we could, how we could line this up is like the, the business owners, Lawrence, that, that were, they're listening. They have to generate more cash flow to make it worth it. Like at the end of the day it's like your time is being stolen if it's not worth it.
And the, you know, when you talk about the Wall street people, like they're, they, they've been ingrained in the rates of return forever. Where owners like even of a $50 million business, like revenue, net income, K1, it's like no cash flow.
Like the valuation is what's important with that lens. Then they start going, well, where should I get the return? And all of a sudden like this like eye opening experience happens, like where's the return? It's like, well, is it your business? Is it treasuries?
If 8% is diluted every year, we have to have a 9 to 10% rate of return pre tax. And then you go holy shit, where do I get that?
And you start to kind of think wildly different.
[00:25:31] Speaker B: Yeah, no, that's exactly right. I mean capital allocation and return on capital is what capitalism is all about. And yeah, and Bitcoin obviously has had the best return on capital of any asset ever since inception. And you know, that's just something. It always kind of shocks me that more financial advisors don't understand that and ask themselves the question, well, if this thing is outperforming everything else, why don't I know anything about it?
[00:25:55] Speaker A: You've probably thought a lot about that. What's your answer to that?
[00:25:58] Speaker B: Well, I think they're self interested. They can't make money off it. That's part of it. I think many of them are intellectually lazy. I actually think that whole thing, that construct's going to get broken apart.
Some person is going to go.
Some person. I mean, I know people like this. Five years ago they went to their financial advisor and said, hey, some people told Me, I should buy some bitcoin. I think I should do that. What do you think? And their financial advisor said, no, that's a stupid idea. Don't do that. It's a fraud. It's a, you know, blah, blah, blah. And scared them away. Let's just say it was at 20,000 bucks, okay.
And you know, now here we are, X number of years later and you know, it's $200,000 or, you know, someday it's going to be a million dollars and they're going to realize, holy shit, if I'd done that, I'd be so much better off. I'm going to sue my financial advisor.
[00:26:41] Speaker A: I was going to say class action lawsuit.
[00:26:43] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm going to do it for bad advice.
And there are plenty of attorneys who would take that on because it really.
Maybe they'll have a defense which is, oh, there's always risk and you never know the outcomes. But today you've got the best performing financial asset in the history of the world.
And so I think we're going to get to the point where a financial advisor is going to be to. Forced. Forced to say to themselves, I cannot ignore this.
I mean, I know there's some big pension consultants in Boston where I live, and when bitcoin first came on the scene, they all shat on it, but the museums and endowments, college endowments and pension funds that came to them kept asking about it and asking about it and suddenly they did the work and they kind of realized this thing's probably going to make it and I don't want to get sued for sending.
[00:27:34] Speaker A: I love the. On X. It was the Harvard saying it's crap.
[00:27:39] Speaker B: And then all of a sudden they buy 120 million.
Yeah. And my point is that they started saying they changed their tune. Well, it's highly risky, but if you want to do a little bit, that's fine. You know, Larry Fink and I mean.
[00:27:51] Speaker A: All of them, right. It's.
[00:27:51] Speaker B: Yeah. So, you know, eventually everybody has to bend the knee because it really is the best financial asset out there right now. And it's going to be for many, many years. And so, you know, whether people want.
[00:28:01] Speaker A: What was your story, Lawrence? Like, like, where did you. Because of all of the.
[00:28:05] Speaker B: Like, well, my bitcoin story or how.
[00:28:09] Speaker A: Yeah, like what was your inception point? It was there like, because I know you started going into hard assets after the.
[00:28:13] Speaker B: Yeah, so I was, I mean, even before the gfc, I was a hard asset kind of guy.
[00:28:19] Speaker A: Can you explain why to the audience? Because I Sound this kind of ties this into the ceremony.
[00:28:23] Speaker B: I mean probably because my grandfather was a, you know, was a gold bug. But I, I think, you know, my family, I mean there's a lot of inflation. The 70s, I grew up in the 70s, I saw that and I saw well gold did in that time frame. And, and I always kind of intrinsically knew that the financial system was built on this paper money that they can print as you know, as you say, and that that's not a good foundation for money. I mean money to have value needs to be scarce and gold is scarce and Bitcoin is scarce. But printed paper money from the government, that's not scarce.
They've abused the privilege, they've printed too much of it too many times. So I always kind of knew that, but I really wasn't focused on that. That wasn't the core of what I was doing. I spent the first 2/3 of my career investing in technology because I thought technology was going to change the world. And I was right. And I got in on PCs and disk drives and software and all the stuff that grew in the 80s and 90s did really well with it. I got in the Internet in 93 or 4, did really well with that.
And so by the time I kind of got to the gfc I'd made some money and I was kind of semi retired managing my own money. And then the GFC just woke up. Me up was like, holy shit, yeah, I've got X amount of money but that's not going to, I'm only 50 some odd years old. I might live another 40 years. This might not be enough if this inflation gets bad enough.
So at that point I seriously pivoted to not just I own a few gold and silver coins to I'm going to become an investor in sound money. And I created a fund that invests in gold and silver mining companies. I bought gold and silver stocks and I was a gold bug.
And the reason is it was really simple. There's nothing hard about this at all. It was just the government can't print gold and the government can't print money and the government's going to print a lot of money. And they always have, they always will. I mean it waxes and wanes. There are times when they print more and times when they print less. But the trend is they're going to keep printing more. And as we've seen, it's gotten the Fed balance sheet. I mean pre the GFC the Fed balance sheet was $800 billion. I mean now it's just over. Well, it's just come under 7 trillion. But its peak it was 9 trillion. So that's over 10. It was at one point over 10x where it was not that long ago, 15 years ago.
So the problem is accelerating. So I kind of moved over into sound money. And then when bitcoin came along, I heard about it early on because I was involved with the Ron Paul movement and a lot of libertarians at Pork Fest and others were buying it. I've got some great stories about people who were buying at A$2 a share. I mean very, very modest means. People who ended up with a lot of bitcoin.
[00:30:52] Speaker A: So cool. One of my favorite clips, Lawrence, one of my favorite clips of you on Twitter is like, you're like, there will be a time when all of the like and I can't remember, it's like two and a half minutes of like you explaining like who will have all the money and how everything inverts and like you'll, we'll say to our children, we had you let 12 people price money. That's insane.
[00:31:12] Speaker B: Like all of the people, what were you thinking? Yeah, right. And so, so I, so I kind of saw bitcoin, but so I made a mental error which was because I'd been following these things for Internet based money, alternative currencies, et cetera, had always been something that was of interest to me. There were other experiments called ecash and Hashcash and Egold. People tried to do this. The notion of having money on the Internet that couldn't be tampered with was a good idea. And a lot of people tried to do it, but they failed. They didn't have all the technical pieces, they didn't have the cryptography, they didn't have the mining, the proof of the difficulty, adjustment, the proof of work. All this stuff, all the things that make bitcoin so unique weren't in place yet. And so they failed. So when bitcoin came along I thought, well shit, here's just another one, you know what I mean? And just like these other five, it's going to fail too. So I ignored it.
[00:32:02] Speaker A: What year was that?
[00:32:03] Speaker B: What's that? Yeah, I really regret that.
[00:32:05] Speaker A: What year was that?
[00:32:06] Speaker B: Oh, that was like 9, 10, 11. And I was on Max Kaiser show and Max was, you know, Max was originally a gold and silver bug, as was I. And he's like, hey man, you got to get some of this. And I was like, no, Max, I don't believe it's not going to work.
Right? Oh yeah, No, I fucked up. But then it went to, like, 100. I was like, oh, hang on a second. You know, this isn't $2 anymore. This is some real money.
And then it went over that, and I was like, all right. And I dug into it more, and I realized I was probably wrong, that it actually was working and there was a chance it might continue to work. And so I started buying it. And I almost got into the Mt. Gox thing, fortunately. Well, actually, it would have worked out okay because the Mt. Gox guys made money. But it took him 12 years to see it. But I almost got into Mt. Gox. I was about to send them some money, and then Coinbase came along, went public, and I bought through coinbase at like, 300 bucks.
And then I just kept adding to it. But even then, I think I told the story. I went to an MIT bitcoin forum sitting next to a core developer. The Guy's got a PhD in computer science. I mean, he knows 100 times more than the shit that I know. And I ask him, I said, hey, man, is this thing secure? I mean, is this really going to work? I mean, there have been other experiments that have failed. I own a bunch of these, but not a huge number. And I could maybe put more money in, but I'm not sure I want to.
And he said, well, he said, to be honest with you, Larry, it's an experiment, and we don't really know for sure. And, yeah, there are times when we make some changes on the code. And I go home at night and I would think to myself, oh, fuck, I blew the whole thing up. And I'm like, here's a core developer, MIT, PhD, computer sci guy, who says, well, it still got rid. And it did. At the time, there were. They found back doors that they had to plug. And as you know, you had. You know, you had the. You know, you had the block wars and you had the hard forks, and, I mean, there were a lot of. There were a lot of things. There were a lot of kinks to be ironed out between 2013 and today.
And those things got ironed out, and as they did, I got more and more confident. I bought more and more of it. But, you know, so. And then, of course, as I just kept studying it more and more, then Safe came out with his book. And that was a big. You know, it was 2018. That was a huge, you know.
[00:34:05] Speaker A: You know, I've sent that book to.
[00:34:07] Speaker B: A lot of people.
[00:34:07] Speaker A: Along with your book. Yeah, like, your book, Safe's book. And Lynn's book are different for different audiences. And I tried to tell everybody to read all of them.
[00:34:14] Speaker B: Right? I mean, I've given Safe's book to a million people. I've given Lynn's book to a bunch of people. Problem is, first of all, people don't read books in general. I mean, Americans just don't read books.
[00:34:23] Speaker A: It's crazy. I know.
[00:34:24] Speaker B: It's crazy, right? I mean, how do you get smarter if you don't read books? But second of all, not all Americans read books. But second of all, you know, they read books that are. That are. You know, they can understand and have stories in them that have some human interest. And so I try to put human interest into my book, and I try to make it easy to understand because I really wanted it. I didn't want it to go over this because I've given Statesbook to people, and I know they don't read it. They get into it. He gets into the classical economic theory, and they buck down. And so.
[00:34:48] Speaker A: And that's where, like, I. So I. And I love it. And I want to continue to unpack sound money. And, like, here's where if I kind of lay out to you, like, how I got here and I cut. Because I think a lot of my clients, like, dude, I just want to be free.
It's just that simple, Lawrence. And, like, I want to be free. And, like, my dad barely graduated high school, and he told me, you work really freaking hard. He was a sales guy. He sold copiers so that our family business was copiers sell 400 phone calls, 15 appointments, seven net news, five proposals, 50 grand. You make a shitload of money. Just show up, do the numbers, man. And, like.
And I hate people telling me what to do. And I got a wife and two daughters, and, like, they can kind of do that. And, like, you know, then it's like, you have to cohabitate.
[00:35:33] Speaker B: They're allowed. Yeah, they're allowed, right? Yeah, they.
[00:35:36] Speaker A: That is. And so I say this because a lot of that's why I resonate with all my clients and my audience. It's like, but I'm willing to take personal responsibility for my choices. And when I realized that the game was rigged with our bank, like, I have a whole banking story. And that's why I was so fascinated with your stories that you shared. And so I, through deductive reasoning, landed on Bitcoin of like, I want to be free. I'm sick and tired of the world stealing my time. Because I earn a bunch, it disappears. I earn a bunch it disappears. And I'm like, wait, I like it. So like Lawrence, because I, I'm, I'm turning 39 in a couple months. So like I am the like second year millennials or whatever. And like I, it, like here's my emotional feeling most of my life is I've never surfed. But like, I watch people that sit out, I'm waiting for a wave, and then you miss it and they're like, oh, and you're just like paddling. And I feel like my whole life I've been paddling behind the fucking wave. And I'm going like, this is not fair. I work really hard and then I look at all my clients and I'm just going like, something's rigged. So then I got here.
So then like, how I, you know, to kind of go expedite to the. I think you could do some, do some really good favor to us on explaining to how the bitcoin technology works. Because I tried to do that with Alan and like, it's like, okay, well, does it work? Well, I'm like, okay, wait a second. You can't print money out of nothing. This is insane. And then I read US History of Money and Banking by Rothbard and then all the other shit, I'm like, this is the biggest freaking joke ever. Like, the whole thing's corrupt to the core. For hundreds of years, the whole blue versus red has been a fight over money.
[00:37:20] Speaker B: Franklin, you've got here. Because. And I think, See, I think. And I think that, I think there are a lot of people in this country that fundamentally know that something is wrong and that something is broken and that they're suffering as a result of it. You know, their healthcare costs, their food costs, whatever it might be. And they're just like, hang on a second. Back in the 50s, you know, one person could support a family, you know, et cetera. And now everybody's struggling to get by. I mean, it doesn't matter how well you're doing. You notice it, I notice it. I'm doing fine and I notice it. Things are goddamn expensive and getting worse. And so once you realize that, then you start to kind of question why?
Why is this so it wasn't always this way. What's changed? How did we get from where? It was better when I was young. I mean, part of the reason I wrote the book was I remember how great America was in the 70s. It wasn't perfect. We had some, a lot of racial strife and we had the Vietnam War going on. But. But in general, in terms of A nation. It was a kinder, gentler, more middle class oriented. Everybody kind of got by sort of nation in the 70s, where now it's really much more of a dog eat dog. There's the rich and there's everybody else.
[00:38:22] Speaker A: Because the pie is shrinking.
[00:38:24] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And when the pie is shrinking, people aren't happy.
And what you can see, I mean, I think you probably saw it with your dad. I know I saw it with my parents, is they got you on this hamster treadmill and you can't ever get off because you don't. They can, they can always turn up the speed. And so I saw my father retire with some money. And by the time he passed, it wasn't much money left. I mean, it was because the cost of everything had gone up a lot. And so. And that, that's not what should be happening. I mean, if you earn money, if you, if you spend your life's energy to earn money, that should be, that should hold its value.
And. And the reason it's not is because the government and the banks are stealing it from you in the corrupt system that they've created.
[00:39:05] Speaker A: I know, it's insane.
[00:39:07] Speaker B: All of those things are very painful and we all feel them.
And that would be depressing if that was the end of the story.
Fortunately, it's not the end of the story. We've got this really great technology and we've got two forms of sound money, gold and bitcoin.
And they're both really starting to thrive as against their system.
And what I think the end game is is that their system is going to fail and our system is going to dominate and we are going to be on a sound money standard and things are going to be much, much better in the future. I mean, I have enormous optimism for what my kids and grandkids will live in. It's going to be really great. But you know, every generation, I think, is forced or is faced with, you know, what are the challenges of your time?
[00:39:54] Speaker A: I mean, the fourth turning, like.
[00:39:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, in the case of the people who grew up in the depression, I mean, they had to go win World War II and it was brutal and they suffered to do it, but they did it.
And my life has been pretty easy. And a lot of boomers lives have been pretty easy and boomers are a pretty spoiled generation in general.
But we're about to get our comeuppance because they may have all this wealth. It's interesting, I always say they can't cut Social Security because it's politically untouchable but they're going to effectively cut Social Security because your Social Security is going to buy half as much shit.
[00:40:27] Speaker A: Well, and that's where like it's like when I launched. When I think about like, okay, so there's a, in Phil Knight's book, a shoe dog. I love his phrase, like, what do I know? Yeah, isn't it great? And I was like, God, he earned every single dollar that he took. And but like his whole phrase, like what do I know? And so this is where I go, okay. And then I constantly am pulling back. Well, I know that there's 330 million Americans, 80 million boomers. And I've done so much research on the economics, you're like, okay, how much money does the average person have? Okay, well it's mainly in their house. Well, that's fake money too because it's actually getting printed. So you go through the, you just keep double clicking and you go, that's where the 2030 Great Depression from Alan and ITR comes from. Peter Zions always talking about his, you know, the demographics. But I go, okay, well so what do I know? They're going to have to print the back to your whole book. They have to do this. They're not going to not do this, which means we're going to devalue the money.
[00:41:20] Speaker B: That's why the book was really meant as a warning. I mean I tried and you and I talked about this pre show. I mean you asked the question, has the book been successful? And I think in terms of the reviews, I mean it's 4, 8 on Amazon. Most people read it, like it. I mean I've sold almost 40,000, just under 40,000 of them so far.
A little over half a year, which they tell me for a self published book is quite successful. But in my book actually it hasn't been successful. And I'll tell you why.
I want the goddamn thing to go viral. I mean there are 330 million people out there that need to hear this lesson, need to understand this problem and they're gaslit and they don't understand it. They know something's wrong, but they don't get what it is. And so, and I think if they took the time to read this book, they would understand it. Because the experience I've had and I've had feedback from a lot of people who've taken it and given it to their friends is it works. You know, people read it and they understand it.
And so, I mean the beautiful thing is bitcoin is a very, I mean if you kind of consider the other side to be this monster, this fiat monster that's kind of constructed of banks and government working in concert to inflate our money and screw the average person, what we've got with bitcoin is we've got this really sharp spear.
[00:42:33] Speaker A: What was that like being aware of all of this and then finding that bitcoin exists? Yeah, that must have been very fascinating for you.
[00:42:40] Speaker B: Oh, it was great.
In fact, that was one of the things. I mean, it was so funny to me. I tell a story. So I was a gold guy, right? Because I knew the fiat thing was a scam and gold was your defense against it. And bitcoin came along and I slowly got orange peeled as I got more and more conviction that the technology was really sound, that this was a true innovation, it wasn't going to blow up.
And somewhere in that whole process, one of my good friends who was a bitcoiner, he had been a gold guy. He was a very smart guy.
He quit. Well, his background doesn't matter, but he had pivoted from 100% gold to 100% bitcoin probably in 2017. It's pretty early, so think about that. Yeah, that's, by the way, he'd gone 100% gold in 2000, when gold was at 300 bucks and it went to 1900.
So he got two really important trades, right?
He took his wealth from 300 to 1900, and then he took it from.
But when he had pivoted, the 1900 had come off to closer to 12 or something. But then he took that and put it in bitcoin. Yeah, it was significant. And he said to me, he said, larry, this fiat monster is a big ass monster. And we've been losing with gold because they can manipulate and everything else, but these bitcoiners, we got these angry bitcoiners over here, and they're like, they got torches and pitchforks and they're storming the castle.
They're going to go overrun these assholes. And I was kind of like, I just love that metaphor because it really is kind of true. I mean, and I'll tell you the other thing. So your generation is now into it, right? So in the olden days, if you were a gold bug, you'd read von Mises, you'd read all the Austrian economists. You knew who Rothbard was, you knew who Ron Paul was, et cetera, et cetera. You got it right. Nobody who was young knew any of that shit, okay? So suddenly safe comes along and he writes his seminal book, the Bitcoin Standard, which everybody needs to own and read. He's a brilliant man, just brilliant. And Now I've got 20 year olds quoting von Mises to me because they read the bitcoin Standard. So what it did was it opened up the eyes of your generation, of all the generations below mine, to.
I knew what was going on because I've been watching it the whole time. I've been seeing it for 40 years. But if you were 20 years old.
[00:44:49] Speaker A: Coming out of college, I couldn't imagine. I literally could not. I think about this a lot. Watching you imagine have understood this for 40 years and how long it's taken. Your sheer endurance is so admirable. It's like. Because I just think about, like, how angry I am. I'm like, I couldn't imagine feeling this way.
[00:45:10] Speaker B: Well, and by the way, I mean, I got the. Kicked out. I mean, I talk about that in the book. I mean, 2015 was a pretty dark year for me. I mean, it was really. I got pushed right to the edge of my limits. And I was, you know, I was like praying like, you know, Jesus, God, why are you putting me through this? I mean, this, this really is.
[00:45:25] Speaker A: What is it like to be gaslit like that by everybody around you?
[00:45:28] Speaker B: It's horrible. And yet, and yet, I mean, I just, I knew, I fundamentally knew the underlying structure of the whole system and I knew I was right. And I thought, well, you know, I don't give a shit. I'll go down with a ship if I have to. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, I die. But I'm not giving up on this principle that sound money is the right answer. And, you know, in 2016, we caught a little bit of a breeze and now we got wind in the sails big time as bitcoin and gold are crushing sovereign debt. And so it came my way and I think in the next five years, I'm about to look brilliant. I'll be Michael Burry or something. I mean, people would go, holy shit, he wrote that book and he could see this shit coming.
But it's been 10 years. Maybe at that time the book will pick up and go and we'll sell millions of copies. I mean, I've become good friends with Robert Kiyosaki who wrote Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
[00:46:17] Speaker A: Oh, cool.
[00:46:17] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. He loves the book. He's been pushing the book. He's been trying to help me everywhere he can. And he said to me, he said, you know, Larry, it took me a while for my book. To catch on, you know, I was on a trip in Africa, you know, on a safari, and my wife called, said, you got to come home. And he said, why? And she said, oprah called?
Yeah. And he said, I didn't want to come home because, I mean, I planned a safari for years. It'd been a dream, blah, blah, blah. He said, I got on the next plane and I came home and I'm sitting in Oprah's green room, and I'm thinking to myself, you got to be the best Robert Kiyosaki you could ever be.
[00:46:50] Speaker A: And he goes off because I, you know, I think you. In your book, you mentioned how, like, you had found your health and then some spirituality and, like, I think about, like, Noah's Ark. I mean, like, it's such an interesting example where, like, everyone else is not doing it and you're the one doing it. I mean, so the metaphors there are super stupid.
[00:47:08] Speaker B: I, like, I had friends, though. I mean, there were other, you know, I wasn't alone. There were, you know, there was a hardcore sound money community that we all would buck each other up and just say, God damn it, we're right. Let's just hang on, you know.
But anyway, you know, so Kiyosaki, I mean, the story ends with he said, you know, Oprah, he sold 2 million books in the next two months. And Kithas, I mean, this is amazing. That book has sold 50 million copies.
[00:47:33] Speaker A: Whoa.
[00:47:33] Speaker B: Isn't that amazing? Well, it's been out since the 90s, so it's 30 million.
[00:47:37] Speaker A: It's got some time.
[00:47:37] Speaker B: Yeah, it's the best selling finance book in the history of financial books. It's a great book, by the way. I mean, it really does make you think about, you know, how his rich dad taught him how to buy assets versus.
[00:47:49] Speaker A: Was that Keith Cunningham, right, or what? Or no, I don't know. I think. Oh, maybe that was Tony Robbins. Anyways, Keith Cunningham's got a great book about that, but I think it's. It's seeing where the puck is going by first principle, understanding that and when you stumbled on bitcoin. So someone's sitting there and I. And I try to do a decent. An okay job in one of my most recent episodes that hasn't been published yet. But, like, so bitcoin is, like, compared to gold.
Gold, you know, markets are very manipulated. So maybe help us just give, like, a broad overview of, like, okay, there's the proof of work. Why is it incorruptible? It's like, what. What gives you the Confidence, like what, when you think about, okay, you got that chapter in the book which again, everybody should go check out. But like, what gives you that level of confidence? Like, this is sound like there, there are certain features of it that you have called out.
[00:48:36] Speaker B: Well, you know, it's, it's algorithmically driven, it's, it's distributed, it's math.
I mean, probably the only risk to it is that the core developers can kind of mess with it and fuck it up. But even that, you know, it would have to be a majority of the miners and modes accepting any fuck up. And I think there's enough people with enough brains to prevent a fuck up from occurring.
You know, it, it's, it really is kind of perfect money. I mean, what, what they, you know, I think one of the reasons, Ryan, I think a lot of people misunderstand this is that you need to think of this thing not as an investment, but you need to actually think of it as a technological invention. Or some people call it an invention, some people say it was always there, we just discovered it, whichever, doesn't matter.
And you need to think about how the world changed once we created what Bitcoin is, which is provable digital scarcity.
Now you might think, well, provable disc, who gives a shit? Who gives a shit about provable? Well, because anything digital, whether it be a file or a Word document or.
[00:49:36] Speaker A: Software, copy, paste, copy, paste, copy, yeah.
[00:49:38] Speaker B: You make a million copies of anything digital. But here we are, we're creating something digital, but we created a system to make a limited number of them and therefore make it digitally scarce.
It turns out that that's actually incredibly important as regards money, because money is one thing that even throughout all of history there have been harder forms of money and softer forms of money.
But money has always been something that we, you know, we, there will be more of over time. So, you know, and gold has become the soundest form of money because as say points out, the stock to flow is the lowest, it's the lowest one out there, you know, in terms of comparables. And so, you know, the supply of gold in the world grows at between 1.5 and 1.7% per year.
[00:50:23] Speaker A: And that's no matter how much technology comes out, right? Because like technology like in Lynn's book I think is super important. Because let me like, I want to interject here for a sec because I think this is one of the things that like blew my mind apart. So I'm gonna, I want to go back to then your technology point. But like when I Explain. Because my daughters get this Lawrence, because I have twins. And so I'm like, the fair cop. And so, like, I say, like, everything is about being fair, but not equal. And it's a really interesting, like, exercise as a personal growth. But it's like, okay, so my daughters understand money printing because I'm like, okay, well, if you work Everly for five hours and I give you 25 bucks to work, clean the house, and I just give it to Zoe, is that fair? She's like, no. I'm like, I stole your time.
And she's like, it's like, so who made me God as Ryan?
And so then this whole, like, who made me God? Is like, the balancing of the ledger as Lyn Alden talks. It's just we're managing the calis of time. And so then we have to figure out, well, who is the arbiter of that balance sheet. And what I thought was fascinating in Lyn's book and you talk a lot about is, well, gold become.
Became the arbiter because you can't. No matter what kind of technology we had, it was one and a half percent supply. So you, like, you can't inflate it, no matter how much technology you have. And it's just tied to time because it's on the freaking periodic table, right?
So then there was this way, like. And then they. The gold got centralized because you and I, like, if we wanted to. If I wanted to buy your book, I can't, like, send you a pile of gold right now. Like, you have to melt it down and all that shit. And, like, so you give it to someone that you trust, and then they become the thief.
[00:51:59] Speaker B: Right?
[00:52:00] Speaker A: And so now we've got digital ways of not having that happen, Right?
[00:52:05] Speaker B: So it. Yeah. So it's effectively digital gold. And I think a point I would make is that for all the people who love gold, is that in 40 years, we'll have twice as much gold out there. So there's inflation in the gold supply. And by the way, if the price goes up a lot, that 1.5 to 1.7 may go up a little bit. There's some people who say, well, you know, we're going to. If price of gold goes up, we're going to mine a ton more gold. And there's going to be a lot of the meteors.
[00:52:27] Speaker A: It's coming from the meteors.
[00:52:28] Speaker B: Well, we'll get to that in a minute.
It's so hard to build a gold mine. It takes 10 years. I mean, yes, higher gold prices will Mean more gold production. Are we going to move the needle on the 1.5 by very much? No. I mean, maybe we go from 1.5 to 2, but it's not like we're going from 1.5 to 10. You couldn't do it. I mean, first of all, because a lot of big easy deposits have been found. I mean, we're now.
We're now scraping the bottom of the barrel to mine gold. I mean, the easiest shit has been mined. And the whole asteroid thing, I mean, I know people talk about that as an existential risk to gold. I mean, slow down a second. How many asteroids have we actually even tracked? Do you know what I mean? How many asteroids have we actually even made contact today? How many asteroids? I mean, the notion that we're going to find, catch up with, track and get on and mine a metal on an asteroid out in the middle of.
[00:53:15] Speaker A: Space, I mean, all before our balloon payment in 2026, right?
[00:53:17] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, good God, man. I mean, that's so many orders of magnitude away from where we are today in terms of technology that I just. I find it laughable. Do you know what I mean?
[00:53:28] Speaker A: Yeah, same thing with the quantum computing. It was just like, yeah, give me a break.
[00:53:34] Speaker B: That's not going to happen. But here's the point. Let's go back to the core issue.
So bitcoin comes along. I mean, for thousands of years, literally, for all of human history, we have had money that could be created, it could grow, silver, grew gold. In fact, the reason silver got demonetized is because it wasn't as scarce as gold. And, you know, over time, the silver standard went away and the gold standard emerged.
[00:53:58] Speaker A: So when the benefit of silver was to actually be more portable, when the moment we went digital, right, We. We started using, it became less valuable because.
[00:54:07] Speaker B: Exactly. Well, and it was smaller and easier. Easier to deal with. I mean, it's hard, you know, a gold coin at $3,000. How are you going to pay for coffee? So silver was good for pocket change, always was. And that's why the Romans based their thing on silver. But there really wasn't enough gold at the time. But the point I'm making is that the hardest money always wins. And by hardest, I mean the one with the lowest amount of dilution in the future. Well, okay, guess what? Bitcoin got invented. How about zero dilution? 21 million. That's it. Forever. It's like, oh, my God. That's kind of different. And so.
So what they created or what they found, discovered Created, however you want to call it. When bitcoin emerged was they created a form of money with zero dilution. It's perfectly inelastic. What do I mean by that? The SEC has said Bitcoin is a commodity.
So think about commodities. What are commodities? Corn, grain, coal, gold, any oil. You push up the price enough, we're going to find more of it. That's just the way it works, right? I mean, if oil were $200 a barrel, we'd be drilling in your backyard.
So the fact is that commodities respond. Supply responds to price. Bitcoin is a commodity that's perfectly inelastic. It does not respond to price. It doesn't matter what the price is. There's no more. There's 21 million. That's it.
That's why everyone's blowing it in terms of looking at it as an investment and their investment analysis. And that's why when Saylor says it's going up forever, Laura, he's right.
It's 100,000 today, it's going to a million, then it's going to 10 million, then it's going to some higher number. Now, I won't be alive to see those higher numbers, but I'm sure I'm going to see the million in the next five or six years.
[00:55:43] Speaker A: And, and it's, it's like, and, and, and then I go like, what, what, what my brain does, Lawrence, which is why I've been able to get this confident with this, even though I'm still always asking questions. Because I don't want to be wrong. Right? Like, I'm just doing this out of my own journey.
[00:55:56] Speaker B: I always try to protect ourselves.
[00:55:57] Speaker A: Yeah, right, like, and that's where I think the, the why does sound money always win is because I think inherently humans want to be sovereign.
We want to do and like, and I want to protect my time. And then you not tell me what to do with my money, which is then what I do with my time.
[00:56:10] Speaker B: You don't want to be stolen from.
[00:56:12] Speaker A: Right? And then I go, okay, well we have a lot of people, like too many people are getting old that we cannot create more revenue off of. We are going to pay them more. So it's $2 trillion in a deficit right now. And like we're in this mathematical doom loop right now. I go, okay, how would this not happen? And there's no way out. Nothing stops this train. I go, okay, well.
[00:56:39] Speaker B: The math is absolutely relentless. And that's why we have this sovereign debt crisis. And the reason, I mean, there are Two charts in the book, which I really love. The charts of the price of gold compared to 20 year bonds and the price of bitcoin compared to 20 year bonds. And since 2020, gold's up 200%, bitcoin's up 2000%.
So what that tells you is that the money represented by the sovereign bonds, which used to be the base layer of finance, the money is dying.
And the book talks about this. I go through a lot of examples. We've seen this before, we've just never seen it with the reserve currency.
We saw this in Venezuela, we saw it in Weimar Germany, we saw it.
[00:57:14] Speaker A: In Zimbabwe or the Dutch glider or the.
[00:57:17] Speaker B: There's 50 examples of money failure in the last hundred years in developed countries around the world, some less developed, but in countries that are notable and you know, so those are, they're out there and those examples exist. And you know what you can see is you can see all the steps that took place before the money failed. And then you go back and you look at what we're doing right now. We're doing the exact same shit.
[00:57:41] Speaker A: Rome and all this stuff.
[00:57:43] Speaker B: Yeah, they ran up debt that they couldn't repay, they printed money to pay the interest, you know, etc. I mean we're doing all of it. And so it's kind of like okay, you do the same shit. Why do you expect a different outcome? You know, you're going to, you're going.
[00:57:55] Speaker A: To end up in the propaganda that people get of like cpi. Like, like it's just, it's just it. And I'm hoping and back to your virality of your book. I hope is like dude, like daycare is 35,500 bucks for people to have Mac and cheese. And like yeah, I go through my health, I have, I have high deductible health insurance. It's like 20 grand a year and it's horseshit. And like I go through and like this is a freaking joke. Cars at a hundred thousand dollars. I mean like 85 month, you know, like. And so like I think people are going and I, so I like, I'm, that's why I'm hoping like as I continue to interject more of this material into my material, it's like, so there's a couple, couple things I want to do to spot check in the like 15, 20 minutes or is the, what I'm really, really curious of like how you see potentially things unfolding like with the stable coins and like what's these transition period look like? But let's, let's hold it, hold that for a second. I wanted to, I wanted to throw a thesis by you because I, with all of the stuff we talked about, the game being changed sound money, like the actual, where is the actual rate of return coming from?
I have been getting more and more confused, confident or if, or validated that. Okay, so the name of the game, I'll call it a, like a middle market company. So I'll give you a couple numbers and just kind of walk you through my thinking. If you got questions or if you're like, don't know what I'm talking about, just ask me. So if you have a million dollar normalized EBITDA so proxy for cash flow company and they're getting a five multiple, so five years of cash. By the way, both of those are bullshit because like it's not free cash flow to actually is based on like, it's that there's a lot of faults in that metric. But like in the middle market, that's what they're using, which is that you tracking me like that.
[00:59:47] Speaker B: Yeah. So I follow what you're talking about. Yep.
[00:59:49] Speaker A: So, so as an owner, you're going, okay, well let's say that million dollars in normalized evidence, maybe kicking out 500 grand in free cash flow after working capital debt, taxes, you go, okay, well that's not. So you go, okay, well I'm sick and tired of my goddamn job.
Like I, I need to hire Lawrence at 250, 300 to be my CEO. Well that will go against my cash flow. So people are stuck in this machine. That's also their largest asset, Lawrence. So then you go, okay, well here's what you do, Lawrence. We build all this forecast and we figure out when you can hire that CEO at 25 grand a month. And it's going to take you 36 months. Then on the other side of this, the whole kind of like rule of thumb is like in five years or whatever the timeline would be is you're going to go from a million dollars in normalized EBITDA to 2A 5 multiple to 6. So you go from a $5 million company to $12 million. Debt, taxes, the whole thing. And I literally ran some numbers and I'm like, with purchasing power in the debasement, it's the same fucking number. So like you worked for five years doing all of that shit and then it's the same purchasing power and then you, and then you get the fiat bag of shit and then you don't know where to put it. So like I am like and this has been the whole private equity. Everybody in the marketplace, the attorneys, the bankers, the brokers, the investment bankers, the wealth managers, everyone's based on this transaction. The boomer sell. And I'm going, this is a false paradigm. I said, what if instead of, like, Michael Saylor, you know, who is taking this to the, you know, hundredth magnitude, what if we took the company and we say, you know what? Instead of reinvesting for all that growth, which is being diluted every single year, what if we optimize the cash flow and the operations to have a really good life and we stack Bitcoin? Now all of a sudden, this pressure gets released off of that hamster wheel.
Not to say that someone might not want to sell and then take the fiat and put it into bitcoin. But, like, what do you think about, like, that paradigm shift of, like, get off the private equity, I got to sell this thing in four years and do all these things to, like, change the game?
[01:01:52] Speaker B: Absolutely. I mean, I. Look, the.
You know, it's very rare that you have an asset that appreciates it north of 30%. I mean, right now, the ARR.
Bitcoin's in the 40, 50% range. I mean, even Saylor and others, and I believe, concede that that'll come down over time as it gets more widely distributed. But, yeah, I mean, look, if you have a business that's throwing off cash, you should be putting all of that cash into bitcoin. And I think what you'll find is that that cash will suddenly grow in value in excess of the growth in your business. I mean, there are very few businesses that can organically generate 20, 30, 40% IRRs.
[01:02:35] Speaker A: That was Michael Saylor's story, right?
[01:02:36] Speaker B: Yeah, there aren't that many. Now, I'm not saying there aren't some.
There might be a business where you think, no, if I reinvest this in the business, I can triple this sucker and my iron. That's going to. Okay, well, then, fine, then maybe you should reinvest in the business.
But I mean, most businesses, when you have a business generating capital, you have to then make a capital allocation. It's the most important decision you make. Right. As you. As. You know.
Right. And so, you know, what you got to ask yourself is, what, what's my return if I allocate it here versus what's my return if I allocate it there?
And right now in Bitcoin, you know, I'm very comfortable saying it's north of 30% a year, it could be 40 or 50% a year. And you know, unless your business can grow at that rate and grow that much value, why would you allocate more capital over there versus, you know, versus.
[01:03:25] Speaker A: What you thought, Lawrence, like what that does like. And I'll tell you my personal, eventually.
[01:03:32] Speaker B: You'Ll get off the hamster wheel because.
Wait a second, Bitcoin, I mean, so the way I look at it, I've got this pile of bitcoin and I'm thinking, okay, this grows every year at 30 or 40%.
All right, well, you know, not far out. And I can live off of 3% of my Bitcoin.
[01:03:46] Speaker A: So, you know, the savings actually, the savings math actually works.
[01:03:50] Speaker B: Yeah. People are like, hey, you know, you need to go get bitcoin. You're like, no, I don't. No, I don't. I'll just, I'll sell 3%, you know, that'll give me enough money to live on. And by the way, the other 97% is going to go up at 30, so I'm still going to be getting richer every year.
[01:04:04] Speaker A: You know what I mean?
And Lawrence, what it does is like back to that feeling of like paddling behind the wave and all this crap. And it was life changing for me. So you know what I ended up doing?
Yeah, what I ended up doing, it was a year and a half ago. So I was in this professional. I was a part of, partner at a, I founded a professional services firm that did fractional CFO services. So I was hiring like quarter million dollar CFOs, putting them in on the board of people's companies and like, and I'm like, this is like, it's taking me so much capital to grow this. And I looked at like what would be the normalized E to the multiple in like five years split it. I had a couple partners pay debt and taxes. I'm like, this is F'd. Like, this is a game I can't win. Especially with the debasement. I flipped and go, what if I had a great life and optimized my cash flow and then put it into bitcoin? And it was like my anxiety went from like 11 out of 10 to 2 or 1 and everyone in my.
[01:05:00] Speaker B: Yeah, go ahead. I mean, I don't want to, I'm not trying to brag, but I mean it's, it's.
But I would just observe that since this, since I've gotten into bitcoin, since I understand what it is and since it's behaved the way it's behaved, I've now Kind of gotten to the stage where it's like, all right, you know, I won. I mean, I'm kind of done.
And, you know, I can. I mean, it's like, go do CrossFit.
[01:05:21] Speaker A: Hang out with your family, right?
[01:05:22] Speaker B: Yeah, I can do what I enjoy. I mean, I. You know, I feel like I have an obligation to try and help other people understand this. That's why I wrote the book. That's why I do these podcasts. But I. You know, I'm 68 years old. I'm trending towards retirement. I don't have as much energy as I had when I was younger. And, you know, I got other shit I want to do. I mean, my wife wants to travel and so on and so forth, so. And that's okay. I mean, it's what's really amazing about bitcoin, and most people don't understand this. A lot of people miss it, is that this solves your financial equation, and you can just do it, forget about it, and then go do what you really enjoy with your life. And there's one thing that is scarcer than bitcoin, and that's your remaining time on Earth.
[01:06:00] Speaker A: Amen.
[01:06:03] Speaker B: That's what real quality of life.
There are lots of forms of richness. Sahil wrote that really great book about the five forms of wealth. And, you know, I mean, one of them is having control of your time and your emotions and not having stress and being able to do what you like and be able to stay fit and eat well and travel and have good experience.
There's a lot of wealth in that.
[01:06:21] Speaker A: In my opinion, that is what really matters. I think everything else is secondary.
[01:06:25] Speaker B: Raise your kids. I mean, in your case, take care of your family. I mean, work on charities or projects that you're concerned about. I mean, all those things, to me, make a wealthy life, not just kind of what your bank balance is, because someday it's all over, and that's just gonna either go to somebody else or go to the tax man or whatever it might be. I mean, it's. You know, that's just.
[01:06:45] Speaker A: And, like, think so, Lawrence, which is. So I'm trying to. I'm trying to figure out how much do I lean into exactly what we're just saying. Because, like, so listen to this. I got. So I have 16 coaching clients that I work with individually where, like, again, get out of the operations into the boardroom, become a capital allocator. And then I'm growing my coaching program outside of that. And then, like, I want, like, Alex Ramosi's Deal is like your marketing and your content will change more lives than the people you work with. And that's kind of my goal. And it sounds like it's probably similar to yours, but I'm trying to figure.
Yeah, it's like I want to change people. I want to help and I want to help people.
[01:07:22] Speaker B: I mean, I would really. I mean, this is ego based. I know, but I would, I would. So I'll tell you the funny thing that got me hooked caused me to write the book. Somewhere along the line, I was talking to a woman who was a potential editor. It turned out I didn't hire her, didn't use her, but it doesn't matter. But she said something to me that really set the hook really deep. And I said, why should I write it? It's gonna be a lot of work, this. And she said to me, she said, larry, you do realize that books can change the world, don't you? And I was just like, that's so cool.
Exactly. She just set the fucking hook. And I was like, okay, God damn it.
Do you have something, you know, she asked me, do you have. You say that you think the world needs to hear and it could maybe in a little way change the world? I said, yeah, I really do. And this is. You got to write it. And she was right.
[01:08:10] Speaker A: And she is. And like, what?
So how. I think we. Because you're, you're helping people with the orange pill.
Like, the way I think about is step off that railroad track with the train coming at you. And so how it relates to the owners that I'm talking about, and I really think that you, maybe you and I should maybe unpack is like the owners of the middle market, they employ 70% of or more of the country. So, like, the people that I work with that are my audience, so like, they're not the Wall street people, they're not working at Amazon.
[01:08:38] Speaker B: It's like they're the people who run the country who make work well and.
[01:08:42] Speaker A: Actually make for real people doing real things.
[01:08:44] Speaker B: Yeah, they do real. That we need to have done. They're not in Washington.
And here's the, here's the great thing, Ryan. I mean, if you orange pill one of those guys or girls and they.
[01:08:55] Speaker A: They really understand 400 employees, then they're.
[01:08:59] Speaker B: Going to go give this, Then they're going to go give my book to all their employees and say, look, you guys got to focus on this, right?
[01:09:04] Speaker A: So, so let's, let's, let's, let's unpack this for a second. Because I think I like kind of what, what you're, what your editor said to you about the book. Like when I said, because I think that a good life is the high, the highest noble aim over the longest amount of time span, impacting the most amount of people. And I go, well, if I can go change like with my clients, they have thousands of clients or thousands of employees, like if they can have good companies, then if they're taken care of, then they can take care of their employees. And like it's all this recycled. So what is being told to the middle market for the last 15 years because of the unhealthy growth of private equity? Yes, there's a place for private equity, but it's because of the low interest rates have been chasing returns. So Lawrence, what's happening is everyone's being told you need to grow your company, grow your normalized ebitda, grow the multiples so you can sell to private equity, then you can be free. But the, the effed up part about this is like just like when we started, like what is driving me is independence. I literally want to do whatever I want. Well, what if it was like way closer than you thought? And that whole game that's being talked about, you can just go, no thanks. Because like what happens, Lawrence and I did this when we turned around the family business. 350,000$350,000 new accounting system, hire three new executives, find the recruiters, put in the digital marketing and you're just burning money on fire trying to get that return. And it's just eating shit. You can get there. It is possible, I'm totally convinced of that. But what if you just didn't have to do that and you just shifted over here and said, well that's the.
[01:10:41] Speaker B: Thing, that's the beauty of it all that you can actually by opting into this, we're all very, very fortunate to be at this time and place in the development of this new system. I mean it's, we're just, we're just about to get on the steep part of the adoption curve. I mean, depending upon who you believe, you know, what do we got? Between 5 and 12% of the people own in the country, in the developed world own Bitcoin. And by the time it's over, 90% are going to own it because they realize it's the best money they got.
[01:11:09] Speaker A: How do you, how do you see. And knowing that we're, we're getting close to the end here is before talking about like how you maybe see like the Transition period, which I got thoughts on. But like what? Like what could an owner of a business do for their employees? Because, you know, you got this 401k and all these captive things so all the advisors can get rich off all this shit. But like, what are ways that they, if they decided to change, make their.
[01:11:32] Speaker B: 401K self directed so that their employees can buy Bitcoin ETFs in it. So that would be one thing they could do as opposed to forcing them into whatever Vanguard wants to sell them, you know, S&P 500.
They could give out my book or work to educate their employees about savings and how important it is and how they found in many cases, I'm sure the owners of these businesses are fairly well to do and the employees respect them and they follow their judgment. And if they say, hey, look, this is what I'm doing with my money, you should consider doing the same.
That would make a difference.
I feel like every person we orange pill, we've kind of saved somebody. I mean, it's almost like Christianity. But I mean, I don't necessarily always like the religious component comparison, although I do think the world might be divided into pre Bitcoin and post Bitcoin, like BC and ad And I do. There are times I am spiritual. There are times I honestly do think that bitcoin is kind of God given in the sense that we're just running down this nihilistic, evil fiat path and suddenly digital code and we have the.
[01:12:40] Speaker A: Actual option to opt out. Like watching Jeff Booth, like watching Jeff.
[01:12:44] Speaker B: Booth talks about this. The book talks about really how the microprocessor really saved us. I mean, it's the microprocessor. I mean, you know, the Internet saved us. The fact that you and I are having this conversation 20 years ago, we couldn't do this, right? Yeah, it's just, it's wild and it's a really good thing. And you know, so people should embrace that change and recognize that these things are positive things, not negative things and that they're, you know, they, I mean, you can now, you know, you don't need a college degree. You can totally self educate yourself online with podcasts and become smarter than people. You have college degree.
[01:13:14] Speaker A: I have an entire story about, like when I wired my first bank wire from US bank to Coinbase. They're like, who told you to do this? I'm like, me, I read books and did pox. They're like, no, we need to put someone's name.
[01:13:25] Speaker B: And I was like, oh my God.
[01:13:27] Speaker A: It is so Insane. It's like, not your bank, not your money. There is no money.
[01:13:31] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Right. Well, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, it's a beautiful thing, this change that's taking place and those who are aware of it and understand it.
It's kind of like I feel obligated. It's like, okay, I cracked this code. I mean, some people are like, well, you're shilling bitcoin. I'm like, no, I'm not. I'm trying to help people.
Bitcoin's not going to respond.
No one owns it based on what I do. But I mean, I just want, you know, I want people who are honest and hardworking and trying to save and get ahead to understand that there's a technology that'll help them enormously. And that's. And this is it.
[01:14:10] Speaker A: How do you see the next. So knowing we have like, $9 trillion to refinance, we have the stable coins. Like, I see, like, the stable coins. And like this tether safe's presentation at the bitcoin conference, it was very fascinating to me where it's like, okay, we're just crowdsourcing the last run of debt to the rest of the world.
[01:14:32] Speaker B: I think that's right.
[01:14:33] Speaker A: And that's the big print is kind of what I've like, is that.
[01:14:36] Speaker B: What do you. Yeah. So to me, the Besant and Trump stablecoins are going to save us from all the debt because they buy debt. I mean, this is like Doge is going to cut $2 trillion, which is a fantasy. I mean, stablecoins are net positive. Don't get me wrong. The tether is called 160 billion circle 60. So that's 220. And they buy treasury bills. So there's 220 billion of demand for treasury bills. Guess what? We've got a $2 trillion deficit and we've got 9 trillion to roll over.
And the stablecoin volume is growing 50% a year, although most of that's overseas. I mean, I was on a show where I sat with a lot of Russians who basically said they're the heavy stablecoin users because they got shut out of Swift.
So the stable coins are not going to save us. But it's okay. I mean, if the government wants to push the stable coins and the genius bill and the clarity Act, I think it's all net positive for bitcoin, the bitcoin ecostruxure. But really a stablecoin is still just. It's denominated in a dollar, and the dollar is going to Die. I mean, the thing that I think, and this will be shocking to some of your listeners, but the thing I think people really underestimate is how the dollar's value is going to zero. Okay? Now, I can't say on what time frame. It could take 20 years, but it is going to happen because it's just because of the way the system's constructed. And I think my kids will price things to satoshis.
I get it. That's a very unpleasant thought of dollar value going to zero. But if I were a wealthy person, I had everything denominated in dollars. I might say to myself, huh, that's interesting. If that guy's right, maybe I need to have something, a hedge against some hedge.
[01:16:13] Speaker A: Yeah. Do you think that there's any possibility.
[01:16:16] Speaker B: I don't need to take all my money and put it in bitcoin? But gee, bitcoin is the best performing financial asset last 15 years. Why do I have zero of it?
Maybe I should have something. Right?
But to your question, because I know we are running out of time to your question of how's this all going to unfold? It's very tough to know. It's really tough to know.
Sadly, I think it's going to be kind of messy and I think some people are going to get hurt. I think we're going to.
Well, big picture, anyone who thinks inflation's over under control, going to go back down or going to get solved, they're wrong. Inflation is going to get much worse, which is really sad. Eventually, I think what will happen is it'll get so bad there'll be such a large outcry that I don't know if you saw Robert Kennedy's speech at the Nashville Bitcoin conference. A very good speech, by the way. I recommend everyone listen to it. We are going to demand that the politicians fix the money. We're going to demand that we reset the system.
[01:17:08] Speaker A: I hope that's the case because like, you know, if you look, if you read Ray Dalio, it's either a fascist or communist that gets elected.
[01:17:14] Speaker B: That's the alternative. And you know, look, chapter I don't know if it's 21 or 22 in my book talks about. I mean, I actually have a policy prescription in there for what they should do now you're a presidential address. Yeah.
[01:17:25] Speaker A: That's freaking awesome, dude.
[01:17:26] Speaker B: Right?
That's what I would say now.
But be honest, Ryan, I mean, the odds of somebody doing that right now are like zero, right? I mean, there's just not enough pain. It'd be politically, you know, do you think, like.
[01:17:38] Speaker A: So, like. And maybe I'm totally batshit crazy here, Larry. Is that.
Is there because, like, after reading the history of money and banking in the US or that the US History of Money and Banking by Rothbard, I was like, this has been the biggest sham for 400 years. It's been the fight for the money supply forever.
Is there, Is this a. Is there like a 1% chance that the world leaders, as we're doing this trade war bullshit, are maybe renegotiating our money situation on bitcoin?
Is there a small chance?
[01:18:15] Speaker B: I think it's higher than 1%.
I think Steven Moran, who is now going to the Fed, and he used to be the Council of Economic Advisors, he's pro bitcoin. I mean, percent gets it. I mean, he's a gold bug. He says that he's also. I think he's supportive of bitcoin. I mean, look, the national defense people, I know this from a variety of sources. They understand that money is a real risk for the United States.
And I mean, Trump has said things like, he who has the gold makes the rules. I mean, Bessant said he wants to be president the next Bretton woods, which is the last large monetary conference. I mean, Mirren's paper was called the Mar? A Lago Accord. I mean, kind of a restructuring of the financial system.
So, yes, this is all in their sphere and on their radar.
And they were thinking about it and they're trying to move the chess pieces around.
Don't get me wrong, there might be some of them who know exactly what we should do, which is go to a full bitcoin standard immediately.
[01:19:09] Speaker A: Well, how would that be so chaotic for.
[01:19:11] Speaker B: Well, exactly. That's the point.
So the politics of it are that like so many things, this is going to be a several decade, like, process.
But if you read the tea leaves and you listen to what they're saying and you watch all the moves by the key people in the Trump administration, Eric Trump being a huge bitcoin bull, saying their family has an enormous amount of it. I mean, you realize that we are strongly headed in that direction.
And whether it's a couple of years or a decade or maybe two decades, that's where we're going.
So it's Gretzky, right? You want to go where the puck's going. So it's a very, very good time, in my view, to own this shit.
And I think the reset, I think people are going to be shocked.
Let's just zoom out 10 years. 20 years from now, I think you're going to know who owned bitcoin and who didn't. It's going to be like, oh, my God, that guy is fucking silly rich. How'd that happen? Well, he owned a lot of bitcoin. I mean, it's already kind of true. I mean, look at Max Kaiser. The guy's a billionaire. The guy was a stockbroker and a podcaster, but he was buying at $2 a coin. He's a billionaire, multi billionaire.
I mean, it's. You know, there's going to be more of that. And, you know, the history shows that if you hold the wrong money, the money that's depreciating, you end up bankrupt. I mean, if you held Reichsmarks In Germany in 1921, you know, you became poor. It just. They went to zero and you became poor. If you were Hugo Stinis and you owned property and businesses, you know, they reset the currency, they backed it with gold, and then suddenly all your things became worth something new, you know, had value in the new currency. So. So that's kind of the. You know, that's what's going to happen. And I think, you know, it's going to be shocking. And so I'm kind of here, like.
[01:21:03] Speaker A: Well, how does your.
[01:21:04] Speaker B: I don't want to be an extreme. I don't want to be an extremist, but I want to. I want to say, you know, don't mess around with this stuff.
[01:21:09] Speaker A: I mean, it's not worth messing around. Like, even if, like, even if you don't want to be wrong, like 5% for crying a lot.
[01:21:16] Speaker B: Right? I mean, exactly. I mean, I'm pounding the table, you know, get some of this. Because otherwise you could experience severe regret if I'm right. I mean, severe.
You know, And I'm not telling you, you got to go put 100% of your money in bitcoin. I wouldn't recommend it to anybody, but I'm saying, you know, you got zero bitcoin, huh? No, no, no.
[01:21:34] Speaker A: What do you think exactly?
[01:21:36] Speaker B: Huh?
[01:21:37] Speaker A: I just don't get it just a little bit and does it. There was a recent interview I watched with Jeff Booth where, like, because I feel similar, like, when the reason I've gravitated to a lot of the material that you put out and why I watch a lot of your episodes is because I feel the same, like, burning passion, and it actually, like, it's, like, uncontrollable sometimes, and I have to figure out, like, how to, like, reign it in and I watch Jeff and I go, there's something that I learned from watching one of his most recent ones. And I was just like, he's really relaxed. I'm not usually relaxed. I'm very energetic. And I'm like, I'm like, what if, like, because I feel so stressed out about like orange peeling everybody, because I love so many people and I want to help people similar to you. And I go, well, if it were to, if the whole transition were to happen right now, it would be very painful and maybe this is just the way it's supposed to go and I can actually give myself a breath of fresh air and just take some time with it. I don't know how you process that, but.
[01:22:35] Speaker B: Yeah, well, Jeff's great. Jeff's a friend and, and I really. He's got kind of a Zen view of it. Yeah. I mean, there's some argument, There are arguments for going faster. I mean, my. The faster argument is it's a broken.
I mean, the other. I mean, first things first. Let's. I think we would all agree, or those of us who understand it well would agree that on the other side, when we're on sound money, things will be much fairer and better and it's going to be a much better world.
So when we fully get there, things are going to be great. Okay. So then the question becomes how fast do we want to go from where we are to getting there? You know, what creates, what's the right balance of pain and this, I mean, you know, it takes too long. I mean, and remembering that everybody, that a lot of people are suffering right now under the existing system, so it'd be better to, you know, even if we have to suffer a little bit more, maybe faster is better. So.
[01:23:20] Speaker A: Well, and how many people would actually, like, how many people would it actually be worse for is kind of the better, like, right.
[01:23:26] Speaker B: Yeah, there. And there certainly would be some. I mean, you know, when you kind of consider, you know, the working man, the blue collar person, or just the white, the average person, they don't necessarily have a lot of assets. And especially if, unless they're old, it's going to. That's the other thing. It's going to be generationally different. Right. If you're 60 plus and the money becomes worthless and you have a pension or you have Social Security payments, well, you're screwed because you can't really work that much anymore. And what you thought you had, you don't really have any.
[01:23:54] Speaker A: Well, this is where like, couldn't the government, like, put back like almost like what, like Saylor is doing or Tether is doing. It's like there's a way to figure that out because like Lawrence, I went down the rabbit hole. It's like you have 4% of the country that makes 200 grand as a household income anymore.
You're like everyone, like in, like. No, like I, I'm in it too. It's like, it's, that doesn't get your.
[01:24:15] Speaker B: And you go, okay, well, it's hard. That's what I was, what I was. What I was gonna say though is so, so let's, let's take you, let's take your plumber. Just your, you know, and I know some plumbers do better than this, but let's, let's take it.
[01:24:26] Speaker A: They're not making 200 Grammy because no.
[01:24:27] Speaker B: One wants to fly.
Let's take your 25 or 30 year old plumber. Right. And the money becomes worthless. But guess what? People still need plumbing services. And once the money becomes worthless, there's a new form of money that emerges. And then you suddenly have.
Yeah.
[01:24:41] Speaker A: And well, the time. Your utility.
[01:24:43] Speaker B: Right, right. And so he just reprices his services and the new money and he now lives in a fairer system where he can save and grow capital. So, you know, it's interesting. Yeah. What it hurts is it hurts the people. It'll hurt the rich a lot because especially if they've got bonds, it hurts the people who have Fiat denominated assets. But frankly, they've done pretty well for a long time.
I think it's interesting the Trump administration said, look, Wall Street's done great for a bunch of years. It's time for Main street to do better. And I completely agree.
That's the fundamental problem is the wealth inequality that Fiat creates because it gives all these people at the top an enormous advantage.
[01:25:22] Speaker A: It's so crazy, Lawrence. I was in North Carolina and Wrightsville beach and I have these pictures where like, I'm like, okay, all these houses, they're all two and a half to $5 million. All of them.
So many of them. And I looked, it was 780 grand in 2019. And I, and I was talking to my wife, I'm like, you know, they're not buying this with cash. You're taking margin loans against their commercial real estate or their bond portfolio, whatever it is, and they're buying this. No one has that kind of cash or not this many people. I mean, it's just like it's all this. Well, that's margin loans on.
[01:25:55] Speaker B: Margin loans on Margin loans fueled boom. That's what you get. You get inflation and everything. Sometimes it's in assets, sometimes it's in grocery prices, but it's all inflation.
And look, the bottom line, I mean, the thing I would say to your listeners, I think is the most important thing to fully understand is that the government system we have is broken. And it literally requires them to print money to keep it going.
And by the way, that printing is kind of an accelerated rate. One part of the book, I talk about how alcoholics, they solve a hangover by drinking more. You know what I mean? And the government's a dead alcoholic. And so, you know, therefore, how do you fight back? You want to fight that system? Fine. You save in things that the government can't print. Real estate's one, but they can tax that and you can't move it. So it's not a good one in my view. So the really, the two things they definitely can't print are bitcoin and gold.
So you just, you've got to. I mean, I tell everybody you've got to save in bitcoin and gold. A lot of. I mean, that's, you know, and then there's stocks as well. And that's, That's a whole different, you know.
[01:26:58] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a whole different can of worms and like. But I think, you know, if there's, as we wrap up and thank you so much for the time is I think people have the opportunity to step up, step off the treadmill, get that actual. Get the wave where you make your time and your value the worth it. You can be sovereign and independent. I mean, you have. You're proving with your book that this is possible now.
[01:27:18] Speaker B: That's the important thing. There's a better life waiting for everybody once they adopt this and understand what it is.
Everybody I know who's become a bitcoiner, just, they experience a sense of peace once they fully get down the road. I mean, at first they're nervous, like, why am I doing this? Maybe I'm wrong. They got the doubts. And they get people, their family and friends take shots at them. Once you really get into it deeply and you fully understand it, you're just like, this is great. You know.
[01:27:49] Speaker A: Life is not as stressful anymore.
[01:27:51] Speaker B: I know I'm gonna be good.
Yeah, it's a shit show out there. Yeah, the government's bad. Yeah, they're spending a ton of money. Boy, they're doing stupid shit left and right, but doesn't affect me.
[01:28:01] Speaker A: Well, even like this whole fed shit.
[01:28:03] Speaker B: Even like yeah, the more that stupid shit they do, the richer I get. So I'm not rooting for them to do so stupid. But I mean, I, you know, when I do it, I just kind of laugh and go, oh, yeah, that'll work.
[01:28:20] Speaker A: Lawrence, thank you for the time that you've spent run.
[01:28:24] Speaker B: But I, I this.
[01:28:25] Speaker A: Thank you for your book. I'll put a link to the book in there.
[01:28:27] Speaker B: We can come back and do another one.
[01:28:29] Speaker A: I would, I would love it. And I think we should talk in more detail about how the business owner community could, I think, be your way. The bridge between the, the, the, the eco or the echo chamber that I think a lot of business.
[01:28:41] Speaker B: That's my personal goal. My personal goal is to spread the word and to change the world. An immodest goal I recognize. But I want to have as much impact as possible. And there's anybody listening who has a sense of, I don't know, media, content, just anything that you think would accelerate the knowledge of the book. I mean, I'm trying to. I don't even have a publisher yet because it's too edgy. But, for example, I'd like to get into the airports. It's not there yet, but you can't.
[01:29:05] Speaker A: I got some ideas. I got some serious ideas about the stuff that we should chat about.
[01:29:09] Speaker B: Yeah, we should. Yeah.
[01:29:11] Speaker A: Lawrence, thank you so much, my friend. We'll be talking soon.
[01:29:14] Speaker B: Okay. Bye. Bye.
