EP077 - BITCOIN AND CRYPTO REVOLUTION - MAX WRIGHT | WHOLE MAN ACADEMY

Okay, so this is the whole Man Academy podcast, episode 77. My guest today is Max Wright, who I'm really excited to be interviewing. I wrote a few things that I would label you as. We love labeling these days. So entrepreneur, investor, author, YouTuber, analyst, father as well, which maybe we'll get onto that. But Max, firstly, how are you and where are you?

I'm doing very well, thanks. I'm coming out of the Midwest in.

The US and what's it been like out there? Because, I mean, I'm in the deepest, darkest countryside in the UK and we're still under some ridiculous form of lockdown. But what's it been like for you out there?

Yeah, about the last. I would say in the last month or two, people have kind of woken up. Pretty much everyone's throwing the masks away and it's pretty close to business as usual, I would say. I think some employees of certain businesses are still wearing masks, but other than that, everyone else is just completely over it.

Yeah, and I saw the pictures of. I think it was in Texas where there was, you know, a lot of the sports games are going ahead now with full stadiums and no restrictions. So it reminds the people over here that there is, you know, we don't get shown that stuff on telly over here very much, but remind you that some, some of the world is completely back to normal. And I wondered for you, what, what brings you out there? I mean, how long have you been out there for? Because you're originally from Australia, if I'm not mistaken.

I'm originally Australian. I've been in an Internet entrepreneur for like 15 years. So I think in 2008, I started living in endless summer. That was six months Sydney, six months San Diego. And that kind of. Well, then I ended up meeting a girl from the Midwest, marrying her, met her in San Diego, traveled the world for many years, living in the Caribbean, living in Europe, living in Canada, living all over the place. And then eventually had a child and he's now six and a half. And then eventually came back to the Midwest, just a get a little bit of help from family and stuff because it is tough traveling with a kid. And so we did that, but then we ended up splitting up and I went from living in all these super cool places. Midwest is fun. But all of a sudden I find my son here and so all of a sudden I'm kind of living in the Midwest and I'll probably be here for a little bit.

Yeah, fair enough. It's always one of those where I know one of your previous YouTube videos where you stopped it because you were like, hold on a minute, my son's coming halfway through these friends. I know a lot of the guys over in the UK or actually across the world listen to the podcast when you're trying to. Maybe they were working from home before, maybe they weren't. But when you've got kids and you've got distractions, you're trying to do podcasts and YouTube stuff. How do you find that? Because you do a lot of YouTube videos.

Yeah, I do. So I actually spent very, very little time doing YouTube videos. Like, I do them all in one take, I punch them out. I don't, I don't make the thumbnails, I don't choose the keywords, I don't write the description, I don't do the chapter, I don't do any of it. I mean, it's just, I sent, I hit record, hit send, upload it, text a guy, say it's here, and that's it. So I literally, I spend less than half an hour a day making YouTube videos. So even though I do tend to make like four or five a week with those. So I do get the confusion, especially if you're used to doing all the work yourself. But yeah, no, so I actually have, I mean, I know the statistics and when we got divorced, I had an enormous amount of guilt. I felt I was letting my kid down and a whole bunch of things. But I live within a handful, like, like three minute drive from his mom. And we're 50, 50 and we're just super amicable and we're always there for each other. How good a meeting can you take him? And it's just for, for us and I feel guilty saying it, but for us it's better. Like for mom and dad it's actually better. Like it's just we both enjoy it more and because we were able to keep that really good warmth between the two of us, I think the, let's call it the damage to him has been rather minimal. And so I'm really blessed. Her boyfriend is in an absolute nightmare divorce scenario with children. And I just watch just apples and oranges. Like, if you can't keep it together and can't keep it warm, you're in for a miserable, miserable, miserable decade. And I'm fortunate enough to end up in a fairly good situation.

It's always interesting to talk to guys. It doesn't matter. You know, after my years of work in the city, you can have some people that have on the outside might be doing really well. But again, they might have split with their partner and suddenly they're not seeing their children maybe as much as they want to, especially if they move away. And that can be one of the big things. I mean, we haven't covered it too much on the podcast with that kind of thing. But let's jump into what I would say an expert in because I know you could talk about stocks, we could talk about precious metals, banking systems, etc. But one of the big things I wanted to cover on the podcast was talking about cryptocurrency and knowing and having subscribed and watching your stuff for a long time, I know you've got so much kind of knowledge on it. So what I was trying to work out, I asked a few of the guys who subscribed to the E Letter and are part of the whole man academy, what would they like to know about the cryptocurrency? Because I've been delving into it for I first heard about it when I worked in the City. I didn't have a clue what it was, thought it was funny money, and unfortunately didn't buy any of those many years ago. But what I came down to was a question of why. Why should someone be interested in cryptocurrency and why might they get involved in it and actually kind of become an investor?

Sure. So yeah, I won't bore people with technical details. And you've asked the best question, which is for me, why, why, why is it? And that is a big, big, long answer. And I know I can make it short and I can make it big. The short answer is it's the savior of humanity and it's just going to bring peace and prosperity to this world. Okay, what the hell does that Aries bearing answer mean? So in order to understand why that statement's true, it takes a fair amount of knowledge of a history, specifically monetary history. Now what the hell is monetary history? It's like something that if you, no matter where you went to school, anywhere in the world, this was specifically not taught to you. No one knows what money is, why money has value, where it came from, what's the history of who is in charge of money? What happened to those people? How much control did they have to and how much tyranny did they exit over their dominions? All of that history is, I think, fascinating. I was being passionate since way before bitcoin, and I'll run through it all if you like, but once you know all that, this question of why Bitcoin? It's like, why isn't the question becomes why isn't every single person on the planet grabbing everybody from the lapels and say, hey, let's get on this bitcoin bandwagon. This is the key to peace and prosperity for humanity. So you tell me how far you want me to go down that rabbit hole with that history lesson on monetary, on money.

I realize it could be an all nighter, to be honest, but I guess if you could delve into it. But I guess we've got quite a few questions to go through. But yeah, just to give us your kind of, I don't know, your medium.

Term, I'll take about six or seven minutes. Is that a good amount of time? Okay, so critically important to understand is. So first of all, let's talk about counterfeiting, working towards inflation. Understand printing. That's kind of the magic here. A lot of people think counterfeiting is illegal because if I just print out dollars in my basement over here, I got something for nothing. And that's not true. Counterfeiting is stealing. It's very, very important to understand this concept. The argument is if I'm printing up dollars, this is me, like let's say the world monetary supply is a trillion dollars and I print up a million dollars in my basement and I go and spend it, it's very easy to see that I got the million dollars, but I didn't get it from nothing. What happened was the purchasing power of everybody else's dollars went down. And it went down a trillion dollars went down by a million. It's just a fractional thing, no one observed it. But very important to understand that concept. And I'll usually go a little bit deeper into that and why that isn't some examples. So it really jumps off the page at you. But I'll just leave that there so we can speed through it. Another way to look at that concept of inflation is whoever gets to print the money, whoever. Now whether whether if I'm doing counterfeiting in my basement, that's illegal, doesn't change the mechanism of theft. If I put on a suit, do it at the Federal Reserve and have the powers that have ordained me with the privilege of printing money, I'm still creating money, which means I'm stealing purchasing power from somebody else. So everybody else, I should say. So what's this concept? And this is the analogy I think really hits home for most because when inflation happened, they're printing money, you're stealing their purchasing power. What that means is the cost of goods is going up the dollars, you need more dollars to buy the same stuff. Okay, but you don't feel the theft because you've got $1,000 in your bank account, you've still got $1,000 in your bank account. It just buys less. So what happens is the people who print the money, they get first use of it, they spend it, filters out into the economy, and then the value of the dollars kind of decreases. That is inflation happens. And so the people who get to use the dollars first get the benefit. Okay, I think this analogy is kind of fun. Let's say we're all hungry people and I've got a big vat of soup here, and it's a very nutrient, nutrient, nutrient rich soup, soup. It's very high, dense in all the good things. And I take a, pour a bowl for myself, eat the bowl, and fill up the pot of soup with water. And so now it's just a little bit more diluted. And then I hand you a bowl of soup and then you eat it, I fill up the cauldron, fill with water, and we keep going, keep going. Well, if you're, you know, ten thousandth down the line, all of a sudden you're just drinking a pot of water. So you were still given a bowl of soup. And that's the analogy of still having $1,000 in the bank account. The problem is, unlike your Grandma, who paid 5 cents for a gallon of milk, you're paying $5 for a gallon of milk. What that means is the purchasing power of the dollar was stolen. So the people who get to print it are the ones who are doing the theft. This is a tremendous power. It's a power that unlike anything else. And we'll go back in history real fast. Basically, in the 17th century, 18th century, it was the goldsmiths who really mastered banking. And they ended up doing deals. Specifically, the Rothschild family did deals with the kings and queens of Europe. And within a very short space of time, all of a sudden, their wealth was equal to the kings and queens of Europe, the bankers wealth. And that is their power. And those dynasties are still alive, well today and in control of the central banks all around the world. For centuries and centuries and centuries, it's the bankers who have owned the world through their privilege of legal counterfeiting. And from behind the scenes, they can buy and sell political parties, buy and sell newspapers, buy and sell everything, you know, movie houses, publishing studios, book publishing, media. And they control the narrative. They can. They're buying up social media so they can control narratives, they can control storylines, they control education, they've tricked us into handing over education to the government. So they're controlling political parties who are creating what our children are learning at schooling. And one thing they're definitely not learning is banking, finance and understanding money. And so they get to go away, live on for centuries with this privilege of stealing money. And as it accelerates, and it always does, basically the gap between rich and poor gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And that's the kind of horrible situation we see in the world now where this wealth divide gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And for all the wonderful kind hearted people out there who are trying to solve this tragic problem with minimum wage and mandatory two weeks holiday, all these irrelevant concepts, just completely irrelevant, the wealth divide will get bigger and bigger and bigger. As long as we have broken money. Once we have sound money, those things will work. And I could show you a whole full of charts and prove this very, very simply. But for right now, I'm afraid you're just going to have to trust me that by orders of magnitude, nothing else matters. If you care about narrowing the wealth divide, if you care about wealth equality, you don't need more government, you need less government, you don't need anything else other than sound money, sound money and relatively free markets and a relatively small government will give you the largest middle class the world has ever seen. And that now, so now there's a lot of, you know, kind of trimming it down here. So I'm not proving my case, I'm just kind of stating my case. So that's okay. So now if you accept that now we get into a little bit of understanding the tussle. If you were the master of the world, you were one of these banking dynasties, dynasties, however you say it and you, you know, were able to print money and effectively collect the wealth of the world, you got to drink the sir. It's a privilege that you do not want to give up and you will, you will fight to the death to keep. So there's been, and it doesn't take much many people to change the world, you know, 2, 3% of the population usually does it and they, we, we, we've understood this. There's enough of the population to understand this problem and we're out. We can educate people and we want to use things like gold and silver historically want to use gold and silver. That's a sound money because it just can't be print enormous amount of work to mine it, get it. And it's considered sound money because its supply is finite. Okay, but the problem Is in order to make gold a useful money in the 21st century. We're not giving back and forth gold coins and silver coins and running around little leather pouches anymore. That's not working. We need to do something online so the free market can solve this problem very, very easily, Very, very simply. You just, you stick your gold, everyone. It's a competitive landscape and there's a whole bunch of gold vaults out there. And you send your gold in there and they have an ordered every three months by all these independent agencies and da da, da, da. And your gold sits there. And you have an account, and you have an account with a thousand grams of gold in it. If I want to buy a cup of coffee from you, I can pay you in 3 grams of silver and just the gold. Silver never moves anywhere. It's an electronic transaction. It could be super simple, super easy, and the world, all of a sudden prosperity would reign. However, the powers that be have shown that they will never ever allow that to happen. Under the guise of terrorism funding, under the guise of money laundering, they just send in men with guns and go and confiscate all the gold. And all those people who were creating a competitive system to their corrupt system, all of a sudden it gets shut down. And all of those people were made poor. That is where we found ourselves. And all of a sudden, a person, a person or a group of people known as Satoshi Nakamoto. A pseudo anonymous group. No, anonymous group, I should say. They created a technology which kind of brought all the good things of gold. The sound money, the fungibility, the divisibility. There's a whole bunch of things there. But it was also one other thing. Censorship resistant. All the guns in the world cannot stop Bitcoin. And the people who benefit from this very corrupt system of printing money and stealing from us through the magic of inflation, these guys cannot stop it. They can say it's bad for the environment. They can say it's used by criminals, they can say it's used by terrorists. They can do all the things. And believe me, me, I have no doubt in my mind, they're plotting and planning in their very expensive mansions how to actually do this, how to bring it down. And the point is it can't because it's censorship resistant. And to understand, a quick analogy, to understand that back in the day, your viewers might remember there was. What was it? Was it Napster? Yeah, Napster. Where you can download music, right? And everyone could download music. And the music companies went and lobbied government, said, hey, don't let Them do that. We own that music and you shouldn't let them download it for free. So no problem. Men with guns. The police came over, pulled the plug to the server and Napster was dead overnight. The next day, something called BitTorrent came up. Something a little less known. It was a little clunky, not everyone used it, but basically it's the exact same concept, but decentralized. What does that mean? Instead of there being a big server with millions of songs on it, now your computer had five songs on it. My computer had five songs on it. And they might have been the same five songs. And there'd be a thousand computers with the same song on it and there'd be another million computers with another song on it. And on BitTorrent, if I want to go and download the song, I'm not downloading from one computer that the government can unplug. I'm downloading little fragments of this song from a thousand different computers. Your laptop, my laptop, everybody else's laptop. The concept was decentralization. And I think, I obviously don't know Satoshi Nakamoto, but as an analogy, I think I'm going to say he saw that and saw the power and the censorship resistance of decentralization, said how can I create a decentralized money? And through some really cool things, fun things, cryptography and a very complicated technical conversation, he did it and gave to the world this incredible gift of a decentralized censorship, sound money and the impact on the world. I can promise you, within 50 years, much, much shorter time than that, probably 20 years, will be absolutely incredible. I mean, puppies and rainbows type world living. Because once, you know, the, the tyranny inflicted upon us from all this confiscation of wealth from productive people to unproductive tyrants, now all of a sudden the people who work get to keep their money and save their money. And it's not getting confiscated via inflation. The purchasing power is not getting confiscated. And so now all of a sudden, people are encouraged to work again. Think of the future, think long term, save. And all the things that they tell you will ruin the world. Oh no, everyone's saving their money. It's going to cause an economic collapse. Quick, punish everyone for saving and let's make zero interest rates and get everyone to spend, spend, spend, spend, spend. It's an absolute disaster for the economy long term. Get someone elected four years later, but it destroys economy long term. And that's what's kind of playing out. And so this is kind of like the antidote to Bitcoin is like an antidote to the greatest problem the world has ever seen. And one last thing, just to impress upon you the magnitude of the problem that is solving. Money is 50% of every single transaction everywhere in the world. If you pay, if you buy my labor, if I have a job, you're giving me money for my labor. If I'm at the store, I'm at the store. You're giving me your goods for money. It is half of every single transaction. And when half of the economy, before you even start is corrupt, then that's just a huge problem. And that's why a lot of people think saying things like we're in late stage capitalism, like capitalism is dying. Free markets have been proven not to worry work, no government took over money. And when the money is corrupt and not free market, we don't get to choose what money we use. They say pay your taxes in this. Any other legal tender is illegal. When they do that from day one, right there, 50% of the kind of the economy is centralized and at best 50% is free market. But then they've taken over medical, you know, the medical industry, they've taken over all these other military defense and they've taken over all these industries. So you were at like 70, 80% centralized planning. And so to take 50% back with Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency, it's just the ray of hope that people who understood what was going on can be. And so once people and the greatest gift to the world that bitcoin is is the story that what I've just taught you there, or I know you know it, but that teaching the people, some people get into crypto, buy some, who cares, don't pay attention. And usually there's a big correction, 50% correction, they shit their pants and run and they sell when they're done.

Yeah, we've seen it.

It's the ones who learned why bitcoin. And all of a sudden they hold on for dear life. We call it hodl hodl. They huddle. They're holding on for dear life because they know with certainty they're going to keep printing the fiat currencies, the paper currencies of the world, and they've got something that can never ever, ever be inflated and is censorship resistant. And they're going to ride through all the bumps and all the headaches and they're going to take the arrows and because ultimately these people believe in the promise that humanity can be with a sound money.

I'll tell you why I think it's so important to try and like you beautifully done there. Like give a background as to why it's important. Because even with when I first heard about it, again, I'm trying to think it must be seven or eight years ago, something like that. And again, I was working in the city and one of the guys that was one of our clients who had lots and lots of money, we got told back then had bought like 100 grands worth of bitcoin. Again we were like, what's that? Because we read the newspapers and the newspapers said it was funny money and only used by terrorists. But still for me, I slowly learned little bits about it. And then really it was only kind of two years ago that I started paying a bit more attention. And I still feel like there's. I wonder if you went out in the street now where you are, where I am. And you asked 100 people, firstly, have you heard of Bitcoin? Maybe 40 out of 100 might say, yeah, I've heard of it, but I don't know what it is. I would guess maybe only 1 out of 100, if you're lucky, would actually really know what it is. Maybe less than that. And that's why having you on here and talking about it, I think that the people that run the state now are so early on still on the graph of the kind of the whole, the story of where bitcoin can go from here. And I just wonder if you, what was it like when you first heard about it or how quickly did you. Were you able to actually understand the value and the power and the importance of it?

So I was very, very lucky. I had just some passions in life and luckily, for whatever reason, I did engineering at college and my actual passion has always been economics and philosophy and history. And I love all these things for just an absolute blessing. I was, I didn't, I didn't do that. I did a very hard science of college and I did engineering and it was math and either the, you know, the bridge stays up or the bridge falls down. And so very little indoctrination at college. And I didn't get any of my. They didn't learn about any of my passions there. I graduated college around about the time, maybe a little bit earlier, before YouTube comes out and then YouTube comes out. And all of a sudden I'm just spending all my time reading up on history and philosophy and economics and absolute passions and I'm just getting the best teachers in the world teaching me things that I would have hated all of Those subjects, if I went to college for those subjects, and everything I would have been taught would have been completely wrong. I have absolutely no doubt. And so I was very, very lucky in that before bitcoin came into my life, I would already consider myself an expert in all of those disciplines. And so me being an expert in all of those disciplines and someone introducing this concept of magic Internet money to me, the only reason I looked into it was so I could, you know, pontificate about how clever I am and I'll see the floor in it and I'll tell you why it's not going to work.

Yeah.

And so I just kept looking and kept looking and kept looking, and every time I said, aha, found it, the guy who was introducing it to me says, yeah, well, what about this? And I was like, yeah, God damn, you're right. They solved that problem too. And I thought, what about this? What about this? And just every time I tried to shoot it down, there was an answer. It's like, nope, this here's how it's protected against that.

Resilient.

And it's resilient. And then at the end of it, I was just like, this is absolutely incredible. This is the savior of humanity. And so from when I heard about it to when I understood, like, this is the savior of humanity. For me, it was a very short journey. Like, I'm talking about two months. But like I said, I had an enormous amount of knowledge of monetary history and gold and I was teaching people to save themselves from the wrecks of inflation through gold and silver investment stuff like that before it happened. So I think for most people it's a good. So, you know, people go to work and then they get to spend a few hours per week researching fun stuff like monetary history. And so, you know, for most people, it takes about six months to 12 months to really kind of become a disciple, if you will.

I see. Also it's. And I think you might have spoken about it the other day in one of your videos, when you're looking at where kind of users of bitcoin now are back, like when the Internet, many, many years ago, where there was so few people. And I wondered now, because you've now got, I mean, things like Coinbase. It's not, you know, it's. What I like about Coinbase is it is so basic in the way that, you know, your mum can pick the app up and start using it. It's not necessarily like one with a lot of people just look at a screen and I'm trying to Think example like Binance or something where you can be on with lots of different numbers and even if they don't need to know what they are. It seems confusing but the ease of the apps now must be bringing in so many more people when you can just in five minutes set up an account and start trading.

Absolutely. And that's just, that's critically important to understand that with regards to the growth of any technology. So some fun stats and I'll just be. So I'm around about the close to what I'm saying here. So I think from like when app, when maybe market. Let's just go with Apple. Went from when Apple was invented to when it had a trillion dollar market cap. I think it's something in the order of like 40 years from when Facebook was invented to when it had dollar market cap, it was something like 20 something years. And if you go down the line, some of the things that you like Amazon and you think about what would be the greatest investment in the history of the world that's gone from zero to a trillion dollar market cap? Bitcoin did it in 10 years and it did it in half the time of everything else. And if you think about that, I mean that's just. There's a reason it's been the greatest investment of the last decade by orders of magnitude compared to everything else. But what's happening is the rate of adoption is faster than anything. And so the way things are adopted, any technology, this can be the dishwasher, the mobile phone, the television, you name goes through what's called an S curve. And I'm going this way. Yes. So the S curve comes in, there's very few people involved, it's like so it's zero, there's no one involved. And then these like innovators get in, there's this new technology, they start tinkering it, they buy it, they tinker with it. I know what the hell it is, but all of a sudden they make it a little bit better. And it gets to the point where not the innovators are involved, but that's called the really early adapters. And they're like the people who are just super excited about new technology but they're not going to go through all the headaches of dealing with the innovators because there were so many more headaches back then. And I would say I kind of came in the innovator stage maybe back then, maybe then, I don't know. But I didn't tinker with the code. And then so they got the Innovator stage. And then once the innovators and they start building all these really cool technologies that make things so much easier. So I was researching this the other day and I found it interesting. Like the dishwasher was invented in like 1920. It was this big commercial thing and only restaurants had it. And the market penetration of it remained pretty flatlined for about 30 or 40 years. And then somewhere along the line an innovator made it cool enough, cheap enough, good enough to put it under your kitchen bench in every house. And then all of a sudden you get the masses joint. That's where the S curve goes parabolic. You know, just within a few relatively small amount of time, the billions of people around the world all of a sudden are using it. In this case, billions of households have it, have it and then it kind of peters off and it reaches like maximum penetration of about 100% and just everyone uses it and that's how all technology goes. It's called the S curve. And right now bitcoin we are way early. Usually the big sign is like when you hit 20% of the population using it. After that there's so many entrepreneurs building things on top of it to make it super easy like Coinbase and everybody else that all of a sudden it becomes ridiculously simple. And then all of a sudden your grandma's buying it. It's like your grandma's using it even though it's quite difficult technology. And grandma's aren't known for adopting technology that well. But now it's so easy they can. And so you just go through this vertical time in the S curve where within a few years billions of people are using it. And I think we are very, very close to that. I think we're within five years of that and we've be phenomenal. But actually bitcoin's biggest growth is still to come.

I was wondering whether when I've kind of spoke to, I had a couple of guys through the Harmon Academy then contact me. Not because I'm an expert in it, because I just know a bit more than them. And sometimes you just need someone that knows one bit more than you to kind of put in the right direction. One of them pointed out if you looked at the bitcoin graph when it was its all time higher, what is it a month and a half ago, whatever it was. And he was like, oh, obviously missed out on it. And I was like, yeah, but if you looked at it back how many years ago was it when it hit like 17,000 or something like that and. And then dropped off back then. Now, if you'd have bought it at the high then and you sold it at the high recently, you'd have been massively up. So I still see it as this drop recently will actually end up just being a blip on the graph in years to come.

Yeah, it really will. And people, it's just human psychology is human psychology and we all go through it. There's two competing thoughts. Some people have both of them and took themselves out of taking action ever. It's like, yeah, oh my God, I missed it. It just went up 100 times. The price is so high. It's too low. I can't buy it now. I'm at the end of a big run. So you're saying that if it was to crash and you got a second chance, you'd take it? Yeah, absolutely. So now it crashes and you get this huge pullback of 50%, like now, and like 80% or 85% a few years ago, it's like, okay, so now it's super cheap, right? So you'll buy it. It's like, oh, yeah. But this is. It's crashed now. No one wants it now. This is a dead idea now. And so no matter which way they go, they managed to talk themselves out of taking action. And so that's just part of human psychology. And so it's just something to deal with. But with the exception, there's no person, not one single person anywhere in the world who has bought any fraction of bitcoin or bought a bitcoin and sold it four years later and lost money. That has never, ever, ever happened ever in the history world. I'm pretty sure that's actually true. For two years. No one's held it for two years and lost, I think. Although that one could be wrong. I don't want to over exaggerate in terms of calendar years. Of the 11 or 12 calendar years that we have had, well, it's only had a price. Bitcoin was invented 2009, but it didn't have a price until 2011. It was like, here's this thing. And people were just tinkering with code. And that was it. It was one day in 2011 where someone said, I'll pay if someone sends a pizza to my door. Two large pizzas to my door, I'll send them 20,000 Bitcoin. And I think it was a Florida UK transaction. The person who wanted the pizza was in Florida. The person who had the bitcoin was in the uk. And so they ordered a pizza for him and he sent the bitcoin or something like that. So it was 20,000. Bitcoin for two large pizzas was the first transaction. From that moment on, bitcoin had a price and all of a sudden it just started getting used. So that happened in 2011. So Bitcoin's at a price for 10 years. And I forgot where I was going with this point now I forgot where I was going. Sorry.

Well, we'll come back to it because you were leading on to. One of the questions was. And I don't particularly like talking about Elon Musk and Tesla, but it's an interesting one because my question there is about mass adoption, not just of normal people like Bob up the street and Jeff at football, but we're talking of the big corporate, I know organizations that, I mean, Tesla was kind of pretty much the first one. And then you've got MicroStrategy. They're obviously filling their boots with it. But again, that seems so early at the moment and you've got so many hundreds of thousands of these companies. Do you think you'll see more of those coming in even in the next, I don't know, three, six months or something like that?

Yeah, I really do. So a little bit of the history and narrative of that institutional money. So, yeah, Michael Saylor was and his company MicroStrategy, so late last year they announced that they pretty sure they're a Fortune 500 company. They are listed on the stock exchange in the US and so they've got a lot of reporting to do and things like that. And they were the first one to come out and say we are converting all our treasuries to bitcoin. So we are no longer working to make dollars. We are working. We don't. We just, our customers just pay us in dollars. As soon as we get the dollars, we leave enough to run the business. But we're just going to, every month we're just going to buy more bitcoin. And they converted, they had a billion, I think they had over a billion dollars in their treasury and they just converted the whole thing to bitcoin in one go. And then every month they just buy more and more and more. And that was the very, very first one at that level. And then he convinced Elon Musk to put one and a half billion dollars worth in to and buy some bitcoin. So now Tesla has it as well. And you're just going to see this forever march of more and more companies come into it. But then I believe it was late February or early March. Michael Saylor ran an event because it is an effort. Like if you're a Fortune 500 company, just you've got boards of directors and you've got CFOs and you've got CEOs and you've got CTOs and you've got the custody issues and you've got insurance issues and you got compliance issues and you've got to run it through 300 people and you've got to educate 300 people on why bitcoin is amazing and why your company wants to hold it. It's very, very difficult to do, to go through all of that and then actually buy it and hold it. So he ran a big event and it was kind of like giving his playbook for how institutions can do that huge process and it's like turning the Titanic. It takes a long time. He estimated it, it would take six to 12 months from that event for the vast majority of big institutions to get into bitcoin. Now Tesla is a fast moving company and Elon's very. What's the word? I don't know, just changes mind quite regularly. And so Tesla moved very, very quickly. But the vast, vast, vast majority of corporations with all of their stuffy suits who need to sign off on it, it's going to take six to 12 months. And that's so that six 12 months started counting back in late February, early March. And so we're still a few months away from really the first few coming in. But the last half of this year I am expecting to be extremely exciting for that reason and others. But it's going to be a very good time, I believe.

I know it's. I was going to ask you if you think that and I do not have a great expertise in it from all the different things that people I've listened to and you try and take a bit of info from everybody and, and come to some conclusion. But the second half of this year will be very good for bitcoin. But then I wonder, what do you think dropping into like 2022, I mean, who knows where the world will be at that point? But what you think, kind of, because what I laugh about is I think sometimes there's some clickbait where people on YouTube is a good example, but obviously online will put that they think it's going to a huge number just because they know that people will click on it and have a look. But, but for yourself, where do you think it will be? Let's say roughly at the End of the year, let's talk dollars. Makes it easier, like $100,000, something like that.

Yeah, I think it's going to be even higher than that. I think it'll rush up to like $300,000 or something like that. And I even think with regards to a crash down. So Bitcoin has like a four year cycle and it's really interesting now the cycle is so well known that as soon as the narrative shifts that we're, oh, we're into this part of the cycle, that part of the cycle happens much faster than it used to happen.

Yeah.

So there used to be this like long four year cycle and now I think the cycle looks like this because it's like, oh, it's the beginning of the four year cycle crash. It's like, oh, there's that and then it's going to come in and then all the four year cycle starting. Oh really everywhere, everyone piles on it just goes skyrocket. And so it's becoming this very just it's chopping around a lot and having some big moves which is kind of interesting. So I'm not sure exactly how it's going to play out, but I would say that my best guess, sometime later this year, early next year. I think we're going to get up into the $300,000 mark or, or higher. Pardon me. And I then I think within the next couple of years I think it will come back down probably to between 60 and $100,000 after that.

So I guess institutions can only sound silly, but institutions can only get in once. So you had that initial surge in price when Tesla came out or Elon Musk said on Twitter and I can't remember what it jumped like 10% in a day or even more than that maybe. But I guess there's that thing of, is it that you'll have a lot of these institutions, do you think they will say they're getting into it or do you think they'll quietly get into it and then announce it on a balance sheet or something months later?

I think yeah, they'll get into it first and then especially the big companies because they don't want to move the market. So they'll get in, buy it as cheaply as they can and then at least at the quarter they have to report it quarterly what their balance sheet shows. So that will be for the public institutions that will be made available. And so but yeah, in order to not move the price, they'll be buying and accumulating before they announce. So that is important.

To know question on that. Going back to my broking and trading background when I used to deal with people that had to do huge deals, obviously you didn't want the market to know what you were doing until it was done. But that often meant they might either quietly go around to several different people to do the same trade, to do several huge deals all at once. But if you were looking to, let's say you're the CEO of a company now or you're looking to do a billion dollars, where do you go to buy that? I mean, you don't just create an account on Binance and whack a billion in, do you?

So pretty much all the exchanges have this. They have what's called over the counter. And it's for the big ticket guys because if they go in and try and buy the order book, they just destroy the order book. And so what they do, we can do it via text or phone. I can just text the guys at my exchange and I can just say, well, with a cash purchase, I've got to get the cash there first. And then they'll send out the bitcoin. But if I, I can also just say, liquidate the bitcoin. Like I say sell like 500 bitcoin. Let's just say if I said that, sell 500 bitcoin. I say, I'd say, give me a bid on selling 500 bitcoin. They would text me back and say, here's the price we can offer. And I say, done. That's it. It's a text. Done. Now what they're doing is they're amalgamating all of these orders from somewhere else. It'll happen, Julie fast. But they're amalgamating orders and they are creating a market for this. And then I've got the, if I do that, like sell that, I've got to get them the money within the Bitcoin within 24 hours and then they release the cash. But the transaction was done on a handshake first. And that's called over the counter stuff. And if you're at your institutions and stuff, you can do that.

It's interesting. Back to the days when I did it, you had that mixture, but so much of it was being forced to be on screen. And, you know, they kind of took the fun out of broken trading because it basically I left also because you could see the computers were taking over, you know, those different, the algorithms. You ended up feeling a bit redundant and you couldn't do so much of the really big otc. Trades because everything had to go on screen. Then you were like, you could basically train a monkey to do it. So. And a lot cheaper and probably a lot, a lot faster. And monkeys don't get drunk either. But so if we break it down also if you. I wanted to talk about the big trades like that and how you do those, but also how easy is it to buy something with bitcoin now if someone's listening and they're like, okay, interesting. But if we're talking about it being a currency, if you want to buy something in a small, buy a loaf of bread, how easy is it?

This is a fun part of bitcoin's history here, I think. So bitcoin's original promise that it's going to be a store of value and it's going to be a payment rails you're just going to be able to use it as currency just for buying loaf of bread and Things. By about 2017, Bitcoin is so popular, we realized and we saw it coming. But bitcoin, it can't handle that many transactions per second to be the world's currency, pardon me, in its current form. But we saw this coming and we debated about it for years. And there are basically two schools of thought that came up to the surface as to we're going to pursue one of these two scenarios. And basically it really divided the community. And some people went with plan A and some people went with plan B. Turns out Plan A1 what Plan A was was something called the Lightning Network. And it's a big, long technical conversation. I won't bore you with it, but basically we said, okay, we're going to solve this problem by going that way. Now, we all knew at the time it would take two, three, four years to the first of all, the core code has to update to allow it. And then you need all these entrepreneurs to build the applications on top to actually do it. And we knew it would take several years. During that time, bitcoin has done very, very well, purely solving on only half of its promise. It's the store of value. And all of a sudden no one really uses bitcoin for payments anymore. Until recently. The reason was that the network couldn't handle it. And so it became very expensive to get your transaction on the network. You had to pay a high fee, so you didn't want to do that. And so people kind of stopped using bitcoin for paying for stuff. Okay, but that was 2017. Bitcoin survives very, very handsomely on the narrative of it's just a store of value only now. But now, four years later, we start to see the Lightning network come on and the layer, the applications are being built. And most specifically, a really, really fun project that just happened recently was one in El Salvador. Got lots of news. You probably heard about it. A gentleman down there by the name of Jack Mollers Mallers. I'm not sure how to say his name. He created a bitcoin app built on the Lightning Network. And now all of a sudden, we can handle thousands of transactions per second and at zero fees, it's absolutely free. And so what he was doing, he went down and he just hung out at a beach down there in El Salvador and created what he called bitcoin beach. And he just went around and taught the whole community about how to accept bitcoin, to pay their utility bills, to pay for their groceries, to pay for their loaf of bread, to pay for everything. And it's been working extremely well down there. So much so it captured the attention of the president of El Salvador and he just declared bitcoin as a legal tender in El Salvador. So we're at the very, very early stages of bitcoin getting back to its second promise of being used as currency every single day as well. And so that's going to be an extremely important narrative over the next little bit. So in answer to your question, how easy is it to pay with bitcoin? It's extremely easy as long as the vendor has an application on the Lightning Network. He's got a wallet, you've got a wallet. It's extremely simple. It's like saying, how difficult is credit cards? Well, it's extremely simple as long as the other person's got a place for you to swipe it. It's like that. And right now, to be fair, not many people have the Lightning Network app on their phone. They haven't trained their staff how to use it. But I expect that to accelerate very, very quickly over the next kind of five years.

It's really interesting because I know. So for those that don't understand, I guess with El Salvador, the point is it's basically pushing to or becoming legal tender. And I'm guessing that some people don't like that.

Oh, yeah.

Because I wonder where you go from somewhere small like that, is that a domino effect of. Then you see maybe a slightly bigger country and a slight. Or maybe the little ones around the world kind of all implementing that together.

Yeah. So this is what kind of where game theory plays out. And at every point, look, every central bank on the world. Every government who has the monopolistic privilege of counterfeiting the money through quantitative easing, they just get to print money, and that's their monopoly and their privilege. They don't want to give that privilege up. So they are incentivized to ban it, put people in jail, harass people, shut down exchanges, all of those things. They're massively incentivized to do that, to keep their privilege. However, you've got game theory happening out and you've got places where third world countries where their currency collapse every other year and, and they've got all these kinds of problems now. El Salvador had their currency collapsed a little while back, and they actually are working off the US Dollar right now. So they said, listen, we can't do this currency thing. It's too hard for us. We're just going to use the US Dollar. The problem is they're now one of the biggest victims of the money printing going on in the US like our currency is deflating. We're going to die a slow, miserable, painful, starvation death here as the wealth after the currency that we work so hard for, for the purchasing power is stolen out of it. Because they're at the end of that line drinking the bowl of soup, right? They got a cup of water. The soup has nothing in it. So now they're all right, all right, we're going to let the users, let our citizens pay their taxes and do their bits and pieces in bitcoin, and we'll see what they want to use. And now the next third world country looks at that and says, well, hang on a minute. If all of a sudden all this bitcoin starts flowing into there through remittances and through other bits and pieces, and it becomes a haven for bitcoin, that country just starts skyrocketing in wealth, and these countries over here are left behind. Game theory plays out and says, now I've got to jump on. And then other countries are watching, and now I've got to jump on, and I've got to jump on. And you're going to see this game theory play out with corporations, with institutions, with pensions funds, with countries, with individuals. Exactly the same thing that we all go through. It's like, man, if only I bought bitcoin back then, I better buy it now before other people don't. Countries are doing that, pension plans are doing that, Fortune 500 companies, you name it, they're all doing it.

That's why I think there's so much. It's funny even talking to you. There's so many different avenues to go down to understand. Then you could go on to NFTs and talk about all the different parts of, you know, where you can go with cryptocurrency and the different exchanges. And I wondered for you with your YouTube channel, which I love watching and listening to, because I even said just before we started recording that I listened to your latest one and learned something that once you know it, you're like, oh, yeah, that seems obvious. But until you have something like, you explain it, you don't know until you don't know. But with your YouTube channel, what's your main aim? Is it to educate people?

Yeah, my, my. I. My opinion, it's a gift. I hope it's hope other people feel so as well. But my gift is I'm a teacher first and foremost, and I've got a young son and I try and homeschool him as best I can. He does go to school now a little bit, but. But I just love teaching. And I actually started the YouTube channel in 2012, and I got up to like 15,000 subscribers back when 15,000 subscribers was a lot. And then all of a sudden, making videos just felt like a job. And I was like, I'm too rich for this. Screw this, I don't want to make videos. And I regret anyway. So then I just kind of did a whole bunch of other things and I did real estate and I did all kinds of things. But then I really noticed I was really missing teaching. And so I thought, you know what? I should still make videos every now and again, like whenever I want. This doesn't have to feel like a job. If I want to make a video, make a video. If I don't, don't. And so all of a sudden I thought, you know what? I'll relight up the YouTube channel. And now, just because I approach it from a different perspective, I think I end up making more videos now than I did back then. I do them very differently, to be fair. Now I'm one take, I hit record, I speak to the camera, I hit stop, and it's done. Back then I was video editing and splicing things and making them all super cool. And I don't do any of that stuff now. But yeah, so now the main reason for me to do it is teaching. I love teaching and I love being. That's my gift to the world. And it's taking very, very difficult to understand concepts and teaching people, that's one of my gifts. That's the altruistic answer There is a selfish answer as well. I was Gary Vaynerchuk, not sure if you're familiar with him, but yeah. And he, I just heard him listening once, talking once and he was saying like 15 years ago, like if you're a startup, you want like Goldman Sachs to be your seed investor because they can bring more money and they're a big deal and whatever else. Now you couldn't care less about Goldman Sachs. You know who you want to be your seed investor? The guy with a million YouTube subscribers, the guy with the 10 million user. Because they say, hey, I invested, go look at this. And all of a sudden they bring an army of people promoting your brand new service. What does every new service need? Users. Every new unicorn that's going to be the next Facebook, the next Amazon. It all needs users. And so if you can, if I can grow that YouTube channel. Because I'm at a point now where I'm kind of like venture capital and looking for businesses to invest, looking at things to do. And it's like all of a sudden I'm going to have the best deals approach to me if I can get that big YouTube presence and a loyal following. So it's like, okay, I love teaching. It's an unbelievably valuable asset. I originally thought of the asset as what you made from Google Money, whatever that's called, Google Ad search or whatever. And that was not interesting for me. That wasn't enough to move the needle. But then when I thought about the money and opportunities that come with being a high level influencer, then I thought, ah, the venture capital opportunities, getting in on deals on the ground floor, that's super valuable. So now I got to do this thing that's really valuable, teaching the world great and also has enormous amount of value to me as a very good asset in that venture capital world.

Does that mean also that. And I say this from my knowledge of starting even like the whole man Academy podcast. What that then leads to is more people see you and appreciate, especially if it's your channel. So you can say whatever the fuck you want and not have people saying you can't do this and you can't do that and et cetera. But what it means is you get new opportunities. Maybe it's to speak at. I know you were speaking at 1 on Thursday and Friday with the crypto vigilante. And that was the cool thing because it's what you enjoy. And I know when people said to me, oh, is you know, did it take a lot of time doing the podcast because you've got all the, you know, it's not just the talking, it's the bit in between. And I was like, yeah, but how cool is it? You know, I've had 70 plus conversations with guys who are living their own version of an epic life all around the world. And then you get opportunities and it's good fun. So I'd wonder if that's part of it as well.

And that is 100% part of it. Thank you for bringing that one up as well. Yeah, that is super fun. I'm definitely. This concept of finding my tribe is definitely high on my to do list, like, kind of values right now. Seeking out good people. In fact, I'm even. I started toying with the idea. It's like, you know what? It's like. It's good to have these things via Zoom and whatever else. But ultimately, I'm an in person kind of guy.

Yeah.

And I want a whole bunch of friends. It's like, hey, you and your kids, you know, me and my kids, we're going on vacation, the Caribbean for three weeks. And it'll be just so much fun, all these kids running around learning to sail and do all this fun stuff. Let's do that. And I don't really have that. And it's like Covid was a big reason, the divorce, whole bunch of things, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it's like, I got to really focus on building my tribe. And I started thinking, you know, I got to do a mastermind, and I'll get all the big YouTubers, I'll get all the big Internet marketers who are interested in bitcoin and put that together. And. But. But to your point. So it's a little bit personal, but to your point, building that tribe is super important. And hey, I'm a monetary history geek. It's hard to find my tribe, okay? And lo and behold, there are dime a dozen in bitcoin land now. So that's kind of good. And so that's a huge hub for me. And so, yeah, making friends in that world is really cool.

I'll tell you what is interesting you said about having a mastermind. We were about to launch our Hellman cabin mastermind back in. Guess what? You know, last year, before this bollocks happened, and the point was that we wanted to do primarily on Zoom so that anybody around the world but have some meetups. And of course, it completely fucked it when we were told that half the world wasn't allowed to travel. And, you know, Boris over here keeps moving the goalposts every five minutes, which is. Which is not surprising. And it's just mild comedy the way it works. But that's one of the big things we understood, you know, it's about kind of guys, the fun of getting, like you say, finding your tribe and getting guys together to talk and chuck new ideas about. And for you, I was going to ask this one. So one of the guys, I said, you can, you know, he can pitch a question or two. He said, if you had ten grand to invest in crypto now, would you invest in one of them or would you spread it around between defi coins and some Bitcoin, Ethereum and what have you? What. What would you do?

So, yeah, I was asked this question not too long ago and I came with an answer which I was happy with. Look, I think bitcoin is a very, very low risk. The risk, reward, adjustment, return on bitcoin is probably the best. Can Ethereum outpace it and do even better? Absolutely. Can a whole bunch of other things do it? Yeah, absolutely. There'll be some unicorns in there that just absolutely moon. It would be very, very cool to be part of it. But then also, I know human beings, I know psychology, I've gone through it many, many times. And the cryptocurrency space ebbs and flows all the time. And I don't want to give someone a piece of advice and then knowing full well they're going to get terrified and do something they shouldn't do later. Because what's going to happen is, let's just say I told people to go get in bitcoin. They went with all their money in bitcoin and then a week later, the price of Ethereum skyrockets. They watch a YouTube video, Ethereum's a bitcoin killer. Like, oh, my God, I'm going to sell all my bitcoin and get into Ethereum. And then, like I said, it ebbs and flows. The next week it does this. They're like, oh, my God. So a huge part of my answer is managing people's psychology for that. So I would suggest 50%, sorry, 60% Bitcoin, probably 20%, 25% Ethereum. And then I choose like three or four coins as well in the top 10 that you think are interesting to maybe go along and equally distribute the rest of it. And that a big part of that is just to help you ride out some of those news cycles. This is like two months ago, it was just like, it's the flippening. They call it the flippening If Ethereum's market cap goes over Bitcoin's market cap, they're calling it the flippening. It's like it's a flippening. Bitcoin's toast. It's dead. Ethereum's coming to gobble it up. I'm like, no, it's not. But I know a lot of people are thinking that. And so I like to manage people's psychology and say it's good to have a little bit of something just so you don't sell everything and freak out.

Yeah. And I think it's always good to try and remind people. I mean, I had to do it in the City, but, you know, especially what I found funny when you were working with traders at all the different banks was, you know, it's not their money. So, yes, if they fuck up, they might lose their job and their bonus, but ultimately, if they're dealing huge amounts of money, things are very different when it's your money coming out of your bank account that you're risking. So it's always one to consider when you have people talk about these big amounts to always check if it's their money first that they're actually risking. But one of the questions I wanted to ask you was, I know rarely something comes up that for me, I was trying to get my head around it and I'm going to say the word Thor chain, and I wonder if you could, as briefly as so, not to confuse me or anybody else, but explain why. I know you said you were so excited about hearing about that and I then read into it a bit more invested in as well, just to kind of get, you know, dip your toe in the water. So I think if you invest in things, you take a bit more notice of them. But could you explain why you were so excited about it and what it is to the man on the street to understand?

Sure. So bitcoin comes along and it's money, it's base layer money. And it's just. It's a store of value as layer one again. But so we have money, we've got US Dollars and we got British pounds, and you stick them in the bank account, you can borrow against it, you can lend it, you can get. Earn an interest rate. You can do a whole bunch of things in the financial sector with those things in a very. So. But okay, yes, you can do those things. In the world of cryptocurrency, you have your bitcoin and you can do all those things, but you basically have to jump back into the fire and deal with all these institutions. And you've got to trust the institutions. It's not censorship resistant. If the IRS or the government sends a court order to the institution and says steal all that guy's money, they're just going to take it, they're going to follow the law. And so the moment you go to do anything with your Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency, you find out that you have to jump back into the old world, which is corrupt and broken and you don't want anything to do with that. It. So that's called the finance world. Cefi, centralized finance. The next thing, the next big exciting thing in our world is defi decentralized finance. And that means not only is money now sound and trustworthy and you can have faith in it, no one can steal it and it can't be confiscated. Now when you go to use it, you can also borrow and lend in a very safe, trust worthy way. You're not relying on people, people can't steal it, et cetera, et cetera. And that new thing coming is Defi. Now Defi is already here in various different levels on the Ethereum chain. And the reason that Ethereum can do it is Ethereum has chosen to be more adventurous and in its decision making. And they have gone, they become more adventurous and so they can do more stuff. Whereas Bitcoin is very conservative. It's like we don't want to break Bitcoin so we're going to keep it simple. Are we going to move very slowly? Ethereum is moving very fast. It's taking a lot more risks in doing so. Okay, so there's a whole world there to discuss. But what's happened on Ethereum is there's defi happening within the Ethereum world, but it doesn't talk to the rest of the world. You've got Bitcoin, you've got Ethereum, you've got Cardano, you've got Tron, you got bnb, you've got all these different ecosystems, right? Thorchain came along and as the first one, one of the first ones to tip their hat in the ring as far as I can see to say, we're going to allow all these different ecosystems to chat to each other and through us, all of a sudden, Ethereum, you can sell your Ethereum for Bitcoin and buy Bitcoin without going through any centralized parties, without going through coinbases, without going through Krakens, without going through any of them. And it's bringing defi. So we had Defi and Ethereum, but it was locked in this little world called Ethereum. But there's the bitcoin world and there's these other bigger worlds that we want Defi to work with. And now people are learning from what Ethereum did. So the theory has become like the test bed. We can all see what's happening and we're bringing the Defi to Bitcoin and everything else. And so Thor Chain, I just think is a very, very exciting play because it's not just the base level. You buy Bitcoin, you stick it in your closet and you hold it and you preserve your wealth as they print dollars, trillions of dollars every year. Now you get the whole new thing, the 21st century suite of monetary applications, lending, borrowing, insurance, et cetera. And it's all coming right now and kind of starting now. And what's. We're going to see it develop over the next year or two. Just going to be very, very exciting times for the whole cryptocurrency space.

It's just when I first heard about it, and I know you'd spoken about it as well, I tried to do a bit of research and it was trying to get my head around it, but. But you could see, I know it was a bit of a game changer if I could sum it up with that. So it'd be interesting to see how that kind of develops over the next couple of months. And I wanted also I'll type the questions for you because I know I've taken an hour of your time, but to talk about privacy coins. So you've got Monero, because I'll tell you what I find interesting to the different people that I listen to and you delve in out different things. Privacy coins don't necessarily get spoken about too much, but you've got Monero, you've got, wow, narrow as well, pirate chain, et cetera. So I just wonder what your thoughts are on those.

Yeah, so once upon a time, very early on bitcoin, Bitcoin is kind of promised as being relatively anonymous. And because of that issue I just spoke about the moment you got to do anything with your Bitcoin, you got to use Kraken or Coinbase, you got to do your AML kyc, you send off your utility bill and your license and. And now all of a sudden, everything you do on bitcoin is now tracked. And so you've lost an enormous amount of privacy. And so with the benefit of hindsight, there's some new technologies coming out which are Very, very similar to Bitcoin with one added feature. The way the Bitcoin or the way the coin moves around on the chain is much more obfuscated, and they're called privacy chains. You can't see where the coins are going. It's a much more invisible transaction, but it's still cryptographically sound. So that is what privacy coins are. Is there a niche for them? Absolutely. There's definitely a use case where people want privacy, and I wish more people wanted privacy. I think financial privacy is a good thing and we should all pursue it. So now you have this thing. So now you got this thing that's kind of a competitor to Bitcoin and offers more privacy. So what are you going to do? So bitcoin's got a lot of other things going for it. It's got the largest network, it's got best network effects, it's got the best hashing, it's the most secure, it's got the best branding, et cetera, et cetera. So there we are as investors trying to weigh this up. It's like, well, do you have these privacy coins, which are relatively small and insignificant today, but maybe massively desired later when, you know, when governments try and crack down on things, or do you stick with Bitcoin? It's got all these other things going for it, and it's an interesting one. And I can't say I'm entirely. Some people think that the privacy coins are going to just make bitcoin irrelevant. And I think that concept is ridiculous.

Would that be through deciding that they don't want to be. Let's call it. I hate using the term tracked and traced because we're sick of it with COVID But that. Because they don't want to be. That they want the privacy. So they transfer their bitcoin value into privacy coins.

Correct.

Right.

And then whenever they can send it to all different places and no one knows where it's going, it's untrackable once it's in that network. And so look, I think both of these spaces are going to grow. I made. I made one video. There's a whole bunch of people saying privacy coins are going to destroy Bitcoin. I made a video pushing back on that narrative. But privacy coins and bitcoin are both going to have their place in the world. And also, a little something to know. I think bitcoin will move back towards more privacy as it goes back on the decentralized exchanges. It's going to be a really good start, A and b, Also there's some updates coming through with Bitcoin that's going to make it a little more privacy friendly and as well.

Again there's so many different avenues you could go down with this stuff. And that's what I like about it. It's, you know, it's funny, I didn't have much interest in the financial sector when I worked in IT for 20 years. And since I left and started learning about crypto and kind of the avenues you go off, I find it a lot more interesting. And you would never have found me talking about the financial systems when I worked in it. I had zero interest. But it's funny how now it sparked a bit of a fire and a lot of people I know who you know in the last year or two have just said, you know, I'm going to start investigating it and understanding a bit more, which I think is, you know, it just shows how early on we are in the space. But I wanted to ask you as well, changing the subject slightly but you were saying, I know with you, with your son, with like homeschooling and that's exactly what our little ones, four and two and we won't be sending those to a government indoctrination camp, they'll be staying with us and we think we can educate them better. So I just wonder what your thinking was with that.

Exactly the same as you just. Yeah, I mean I, especially with all the, in America, the whole critical race theory stuff going on that's especially toxic. But it's everything. It's everything. And I really think people are not, they're not taught to think, they're not taught to challenge ideas, they're taught to memorize and they're just taught to regurgitate what the teacher's opinion is and what the syllabus that the government creates are. It's like you can make a really, really poor argument which is congruent with what they believe and you'll get an A and you can make it a fabulous argument contradicting their opinion and you'll be, you know, you get, get sent to the principal's office for being a terrorist, then home. And I'm like, that's the exact opposite of education as far as I'm concerned. And you see so many of the like the, all these safe spaces that are going on in colleges. I mean we're, we're creating these 25 year old children who are completely incapable of thought and the moment they're confronted with thought they get angry and start throwing fists and throwing molecule Cocktails. And they're angry at the world because they don't understand anything, because they can't rationalize through problems. And when you say hey, you do realize you were hypocritical. You just said A and B and they both can't possibly be true. Right. Rather than change their mind, they hit you because they've got 25 years of. All I know is if I say A and I say B, I get a little pass as a piece of paper and I get to go to the next level and I get rewarded with an A. And my mum says I was great and things are great. Now you're telling me it's impossible to say A and B is right. The whole 25 years of my life has been a complete lie till now. I'm just going to get angry at you because you're in front of me. And this is the problem with the world. And so just to create people who can think for themselves, who can think outside the box, I think it's imperative to get them outside of schools.

Yeah, no, we've. It's so funny when you talk to people or they say, oh, what school is your son going to go to? And you say, oh, we're going to home educate him. And it's like you've punched me in the face. Because they're like, what? And I had it at the weekend. The guy said, oh, what do you mean? Well, we're going to home educate and not send him to school. He said, well, how does that work? I said, well, we'll teach him how to be a man and teach him all the things he needs to know. But it's not a lesson in how you can memorize things so you can tick them off on, you know, every couple of months. And he said, oh, and you could see he just couldn't comprehend it. So I realized that now, you know, it's so new to some people that I'm gonna have to brush up my story a little bit. But, you know, the last question about talking about kids is you say your son is six, six and a half.

Correct.

Okay, so let's fast forward ten years from now. What do you think the financial systems will look like by the time, you know, your son is, say, 16 or 18?

The what systems?

We're looking for the financial system because.

You know, do you think that's 10.

Years away, gone by then?

Yeah, I would say the majority of the world citizens will be working with crypto, will be doing their primary banking and saving through cryptocurrency. And not the legacy systems in 10 years time. That's what I would say.

Yeah. It's really interesting because I know a lot of people in banks that still work in banks, and I know a lot of them don't know anything about cryptocurrency, which always makes me laugh.

Well, and you said something. I was going to draw your attention to it. You said when you worked in the finance sector, you never talked about finance. You never talked. And that's because it's absolute bullshit. Whatever you were taught then and whatever in your department you were told, what other departments would do, none of it's true. And it's all complete lies and it's all fantasy and it's all designed to obfuscate the corrupt system that people are taking advantage of. And so it's really hard, you ask people, they don't understand finance. And you read the papers and you read the Paul Krugman. It's like this doesn't make sense and I can't participate in that. And I think through arrogance, I was just, I never accepted that I wasn't smart enough to get it. I just, I said, listen, if you're using this word salad to try and describe this, you're hiding something and I'm not buying it. And I found somebody who was willing to show me the lies they were telling. And I was like, now I know the lies, now I know what they mean by their lies. Now I know what they're covering up. And so now I can read their shit and know what they mean. But it was deliberately confusing to keep people out of it. They don't want people investigating it. They need some people to work in the industry, but they don't want people talking about it. Makes it impossible to talk about when you use their language.

I'll tell you why I laughed then. Also because I'm pretty sure if you took, I don't know, 50 people that I used to work with around in the city and you said, can you tell me how money works? That most of them couldn't or would try but would fudge it. So I always think it's one of those ones where you realize a lot of people might think they know what's going on, but they don't know the half of it. So, yes, there's plenty again with crypto and everything else to learn. But Max, I appreciate all your time. I know it's a different time zone over there, so you've probably got plenty of stuff to be getting on with, but thanks. I mean, I know we you know, this hour tries to give guys a good grounding for even delving deeper into understanding even the basics of crypto or kind of going off an avenue. So I would. I'll make sure I put in the show notes to subscribe them to your. Send them to your YouTube channel so they can learn. Learn some proper stuff about it. And, yeah, I appreciate all your time.

Okay, well, thank you very much. It was very enjoyable. And about building my tribe, I feel like I made a difference. New friend. And this is good stuff.

Lovely stuff. All right. Thanks, Max.

Thank you.