Breaking the Rules of Economics | Jason Hartman's Insight in 2.5 Hours

Jason Hartman exposes the brutal truth. The system is rigged and the average person is losing. Inflation isn't just an economic concept. It's a wealth transfer from the poor middle class to those who understand how to play the game. Saving money? Punished. The government and central banks can inflate away debt, eroding your savings and buying power. The solution? Stop fighting the system.

Use it.

Invest in assets, leverage debt, and position yourself to benefit from inflation. Most people feel powerless, but if you know the rules, you can turn the game to your advantage. It's time to stop losing and start winning. Special thanks to our partner Jeff Hayes for allowing us to release this special presentation exclusively on our YouTube channel. Enjoy the video and the leaf.

Next up, we have Jason Hartman, and I have heard of Jason Hartman, so I had really high expectations for this interview. And whatever those expectations were, he went well beyond it. This guy's like a Renaissance man as far as he has encyclopedic knowledge about so many different topics that I was expecting just one narrow area and we ended up talking about a variety of areas. But he had deep expertise in every area we spoke to. He believes in an empowered investor and he has a great context and perspective on how to become exactly that, an empowered investor. So I am excited for you to now learn what I did when I sat with Jason Hartman for this interview. Let's dive right in. Jason, I've been looking forward to this conversation. We had one a couple of years back, I guess, when the world was a different place, talking about money and investment. And a lot of people really got excited about the things you had to say. The world's changed a bit since then.

It certainly has.

And I think some of the general principles are the same. But, you know, I think maybe our thinking has to modify a little bit. Let's just start again with your background. How did you get into doing the kind of work you're doing today?

Yeah, well, you know, I grew up poor in Los Angeles, California, and didn't like being poor very much. And so I sort of caught the money bug and started to really understand money as a kid. And I saw an infomercial for a real estate investor when I was 16 years old and developed an interest in real estate. And started my career in the real estate brokerage business because I wanted to be an investor. And I bought my first investment property when I was 20 years old. I was still in college. And it just kind of went from there and I just started to really understand debt and money and how to use both of those things, I think, correctly. A lot of people just don't. Don't understand the energy or the nature of money. Like anything in life, money has an energy. It has a way to it. And it's incumbent upon all of us, I think, to just learn the ways of money. And that's kind of where I started. And then about maybe 20 years ago or so, I developed a really deep interest in understanding economics. And just kind of realized what a complete scam our system is.

What do you mean by that?

Well, when I say our system, right, you know, of course the government is a corrupt organization. Nobody will really deny that. Even people in government will agree to that. Wall Street is very corrupt. The banksters, the central banking cartel. It's just such a convoluted and complex system and the elites are really running the world. You know, when you, when you have dishonest money, it affects so many areas of not only our financial life, but our culture, our thinking, our time preferences. So what I mean by time preferences— and Saifedean Ammous in The Bitcoin Standard talked a lot about this, and I think the way he explained it was, was really quite good. You know, people who have faith in the future. In order for them to have faith in the future, they have to believe in rule of law, and they have to believe in sound money. If they don't believe in sound money, they act differently, even at a subconscious level.

What is sound money versus, like, use another, I guess, pejorative phrase towards the money we have now, corrupt money or something like that? What is that? What do you mean by that?

Yeah, so, uh, you know, Sound money is money that is hard. It's real. It doesn't lose value, or at least if it does lose value through inflation, it loses very little over time. So someone who is saving money, and remember that saving is the essence of the future of a society. Capital formation is absolutely necessary to create a great future for the individual, the country, and the world. You must save money, right? However, the system we have now incentivizes people not to save. It disincentivizes saving because the money is not sound. And nobody has any faith that if they save money, if they put their money in a shoebox or the bank, doesn't matter which, that it will be worth the same or more in the future. Everybody knows intuitively it'll be worth less.

You would—

it's buying power, it's buying power, it's, it's purchasing power. And, and so even people who are uninformed about economics, even just the average, you know, Joe Six-Pack, if you will, right, who doesn't think about this stuff, everybody intuitively knows that their money is going to go down in value, that the government, the banksters will keep debasing the money. And as they debase the money, it hurts it actually ruins people's faith in the future. We want to live in a world— I say we want to live in a world where people believe the future is going to be better than the present or the past.

So this is what's fascinating about this, because it's true. People would think economics and maybe the future economies are just based on more black and white spreadsheet numerical things. But you keep talking about the disposition of people in a society, whether they have faith in a future or trust in a government, and that those things actually have a very big impact on economics and what happens. So why is that? Why is it that our emotional states matter as much as the fact that we have a good currency, a bad currency, what have you?

Well, look, I think we all will admit as humans, We are emotional creatures. Now, we rationalize our emotions with logic. We do a very good job of that most of the time. And so, you know, we act impulsively when it comes to money. We make decisions every day of, are we going to delay gratification by not spending in the hopes of a better future? And the willingness to delay gratification is a sign of maturity. But the system we have incentivizes us to be financially immature, unfortunately. And so it causes people not to form capital, not to save, because that's the incentive. That's what the system wants us to do. It's a debt-based system.

You're almost— you're punished if you save.

Absolutely.

If you start to accumulate and save, you're actually punished for it. And unfortunately, when we look at the circumstances of today, which we'll get maybe into in more detail in a moment, what we see is that the people who have the toughest time trying to save, who do, are the ones who are punished the most. Is that the scenario that you see right now?

Essentially, yes. The people are being punished to save because their savings is being debased through inflation, and it just won't buy as much in the future. So people spend today They forego their future, and it's just a very unfortunate system and set of circumstances. But you can benefit from this if you know the game, right? You can actually game the system. And that's what I teach my real estate investors to do, is to game the system through a strategy I developed called inflation-induced debt destruction. I know it's a mouthful.

We'll go through that for sure. But if I were to summarize your trajectory, you got the bug when you were younger, started investing in real estate, then decided you need to study economics. And at that point, I guess you realized, wow, this is a rigged game. The way that this all works, the Fed, the central banks, the monetary policies that they put into place, and that we're pawns in that game. And as I like to explain to my kids, I said, It's like somebody gave me a credit card to live my whole life on today. And then after I die, you got to pay it and your kids got to pay it and your kids got to pay it. You know, it's kind of— I want them to understand how egregious and irresponsible our government is behaving and they get it through that example. But this is the kind of the interesting, curious thing is they said, okay, so I've now— my eyes are open. I see what's going on. And what's the solution? Can I— I can turn this to my advantage? And you said that there are ways to do this.

There are definitely ways to do it. You know, what I always say to our investors is, and you know, we help people buy real estate nationwide, we help people invest in real estate and build portfolios, and I think it's such a good asset class because it's multidimensional, right? And there are many ways you can earn your return. Most people love real estate and they get that intuitively nowadays. But we've got to align our interest with the two most powerful forces the human race has ever known— governments and central banks. Those are the most powerful forces in the world. And we need to play their game. We need to do what they do. And their business plan is to inflate away the debt. And what I mean by that is— I mean, think of this example. For example, when it comes to foreign trade. If the United States owes $1 trillion— if the United States has $1 trillion in debt to, say, China, which is somewhere around the number— I don't know the exact number lately— but that's called a current account deficit. And if it has that debt, and its currency is inflated by 10%, whether that be in 1 year or 2 years, $100 million of debt just vanished. Poof. It's a beautiful thing. The business plan of governments and central banks is to inflate away the debt.

Just stay on that for a second, because it's 100% accurate. The Chinese know this.

Yeah.

Why would they accept the debt?

It's a great question, and it's a multifaceted answer. Because number one, they pretty much have to. We are their biggest customer. I know there's a lot of hostility going on with China nowadays. We're still China's biggest customer, which I believe that the good side of all of this worldwide trade and globalization is that we're less likely to destroy our own customers. So hopefully, that will keep the peace to some extent.

You're relying on some level of rationality, but yes.

Well, look, when it comes to money, people usually do good things.

They sober up, don't they?

Yeah, they do sober up. So the anger might subside to just get the next batch of money. So they know we're inflating away the debt. And, and pretty much every country on earth is doing the same game. But there's one huge difference, is that the United States has the reserve currency of the world and the biggest military the human race has ever known to maintain the reserve currency status, right? And there are all kinds of Chicken Little doom and gloomers talking about how the sky is falling, and it kind of is, but very, very slowly. It's not going to happen anytime soon. They can probably kick this can down the road for decades, if not entire lifetimes.

You're talking about the economic can or the reserve currency can or both?

All of the above. And so China sort of has to accept that situation. They know it's happening, of course. And, you know, they still even buy our debt to some extent. They don't necessarily want to, but there's all of this stuff going on behind the scenes. There are all of these different pressures that countries can bring to bear on each other. And I think a lot of this now the world understands it much better with the sanctions on Russia. And, you know, the world really gets that by and large because we've seen the kind of pressure you can put on a country when you have the reserve currency. You are in the bully pulpit. And the United States is in an extremely enviable position. Now, other countries don't like it. They'd rather have the reserve currency, of course. But the US has it now. And it's using its advantage.

Yeah.

And some people are worried that we're going to lose that. The Saudis are now accepting the yuan directly from China without having to transfer to dollars, but I spoke to an economist friend of mine who was an economist for two presidents, and basically, he said there could be one of two reserve currencies, it's us or China, and people aren't going to trust putting their money in China into a communist government. So, it's secure as far as he was concerned.

I would agree wholeheartedly. The US reserve currency status is going to be maintained for quite a while.

Even though what we're doing to the currency, etc. But I guess—

Everybody else is doing it too.

I guess we're still the tallest pygmy is what it amounts to.

Exactly. It's the prettiest girl at the ugly dance metaphor, right?

Yeah.

It's compared to what is the question.

Right.

Right. Of course, the US is doing all these bad things, but so is everybody else.

Yeah. And to your point earlier, it's not like tomorrow it all comes apart. They can keep this game going. It's kind of this Ponzi scheme, if you will. They can keep it going for a while. It's not going to be tomorrow or next month, but at some point, it's going to collapse. We just don't know what that point is.

The chickens always have to come home to roost, but it can take a very, very long time.

Still.

You know, if you read George Friedman's books, he was the founder of Stratfor, and they're the company or agency that, you know, the US government goes to for intelligence information, right? They have a lot of information. And, you know, he wrote a book called The Next 100 Years and talks about how over the next 100 years America will still dominate the world. And, you know, it controls every ocean on Earth, 12 aircraft carriers, the ability to project power anywhere on planet Earth at short notice. This is not going to change anytime soon. I admit that there is a lot of nibbling around the margins. No question about it. There are countries and governments and other central bankers who don't like the situation, but it's going to remain for a while, in my opinion.

So, let's stay in the macro for a moment, then I want to get into some of your strategies. But on the macro level right now, we've got— so, we have the pandemic. The pandemic, basically, the governments of the world shut down production in their economies. For an extended period of time, meanwhile, printing a bunch of money. And I always— what keeps coming to my mind is saying, you can't just shut down production, print a bunch of money, and not have that come home to roost in some way, shape, or form. And now we're seeing pretty bad inflation. We're seeing that Russia invading Ukraine and that whole scenario and the instability that that's creating. And then I'll tell you what was chilling for me and is relevant to all of this is the trucker strike in Canada, and then going after their bank accounts.

Unbelievable.

And then people right now are cheering, hey, we got these Russian citizens, and we're going to seize their assets, et cetera. And I'm starting to see that, oh, wait a minute. It's like people would cheer that on because if Russia is a bad guy, and And these people are Russian, and they're billionaires, these oligarchs, seizing their assets. You know, that is not a good thing. And I'm looking, saying—

It's pretty scary.

It's a pretty scary thing that people can, without any democratic process whatsoever, just basically through executive edict, say, we're going to seize accounts and assets of people.

And yachts and homes and everything.

And it's like, wait a minute. You know, there should be some sort of due process before you take that kind of action. But no, you know, I think governments probably behave this way a lot in secret before.

Sure.

Like, you know, what Canada just did, you know. But now it's like right out in front. And in the meantime, you have censorship and, you know, all the stuff that is coincident with that, the tyrannical things that have occurred, you know, through COVID as far as, you know, the executive powers have been grabbed saying that we have an emergency. They're not giving back. So how has that impacted your thinking as far as wealth? Now, you have to say preservation, right? And then is there opportunity in it where we're saying that the instability in the world presents an opportunity to us right now?

I think that everybody has really realized that you cannot trust government, even in the best country. You would think Canada. Of all places, would be a pretty meek and mild government. Not at all. We have a tyrant running Canada. I mean, Justin Trudeau is acting like a criminal tyrant, basically, and it is awful what he did and tried to do more. And the seizure of the Russian oligarchs' assets—I'm not defending oligarchs, but I am defending due process. And I think it is a very scary precedent. And whenever there is an emergency, you know, it's like— and by the way, this quote is wrongly attributed to Rahm Emanuel. It's Winston Churchill who said it: "Never let a good crisis go to waste," or something to that effect, right? And so the government is using these opportunities to just push the boundaries more and more and more and just take away more freedoms. I mean, you know, we all remember 9/11. Post-9/11, we had the Patriot Act, and then it became impossible to fly on an airplane pretty much without being felt up. If you want to get through the airplane line more easily, you have to give your fingerprints to TSA Pre. Then I signed up for CLEAR the other day. They scanned my irises. All of us will give in out of convenience. At some point and then combine that with these tech companies, these disgusting big tech companies that are proxies for the government. I mean, look, the government, at least in the United States, thankfully, can't restrict speech because thank God we have the First Amendment. But a private tech company can. And when these tech companies become so large and so powerful and so omnipotent that they are the only way to speak, to the masses. And we saw during COVID how, remember, in the First Amendment you're supposed to have freedom of assembly. Yeah, not so much anymore, right? Unless it's in the liquor store.

You can assemble there. They're still open, right?

And, uh, and, and, you know, any place where the government can tax you, they, they're fine.

Exactly. They can't tax the church, but they could tax the liquor store. That's right.

And, uh, they can't tax the people on the street either. Right. But it's unbelievable what passes for truth anymore. It's absolutely appalling.

So given all this, you know, now I'm sitting here saying I've got whatever money, savings, investments, etc. I'm in this new world. This world is a crazy place in so many different ways, and I don't feel like I have much control over any of it.

So what do I do? Well, you don't have much control over any of it, sadly. I hate to say that because the money, as we all know, is being debased. The value of it is declining. So we can't save, we're disincentivized to save. So saving is— And that's because of inflation. Because of inflation and taxation, both. So that is, and potential confiscation, as we've seen, right? So that's very risky to save money. But money in the bank or in a stock brokerage account, remember, for the government is low-hanging fruit. It's easy to confiscate. For example, I know we talked before about how they might nationalize retirement accounts, individual retirement accounts, IRAs and 401(k)s and so forth.

When you say nationalize, what does that mean?

Well, roll it into Social Security or something. Of course, it'll be for our own protection.

And they're still holding it for you when you want it, but we're going to—

And they'll give it back to you in some totally inflated away value. Is that really a probability? I think so. I think so. Yeah. So there's, you know, one type of retirement account is a self-directed retirement account. And the assets in a self-directed account are much harder to get because you might own real estate in that account. You might own cryptocurrencies in that account or precious metals or whatever. It all has to be kind of this arm's length rule. Right. Okay. But it's a brokerage account or a bank account. Are very easy. They just pass a law by fiat, sign something, an executive order, and suddenly, all of those accounts are now under the control of the government. But if you have random assets, that's messy, that's fragmented for the government. It's very difficult to get that stuff. They can do it, of course, but it's much more— they're going to just go for the low-hanging fruit, the easy stuff. And that's where most of the money is, right? You want to have some of your wealth be portable. And you also want to own assets or commodities. I teach a strategy called packaged commodities investing. And of course, you know, I love income-producing real estate. I love income property. I think it's the most historically proven asset class in the entire world. It's also the most tax-favored asset class in America, and thankfully, it's the most debt-favored asset class in America. Now, this is the good kind of debt, not the bad kind. So with income property, most people think, "Well, I'm a real estate investor," they'll say. But that's not really true if you look at it, because a property really consists of two major components. One is the land, and the other is the house or the apartment complex or the commercial building sitting on top of that land. And if you invest With my strategy, which is investing in what's called these linear markets with low land values, you're spending very little for the actual real estate or the land, but you're spending more as a proportion for the improvement. And what is the improvement made of? It's made of glass, steel, lumber, concrete, petroleum products, copper wire, et cetera, et cetera— commodities. Now, these commodities are needed by every person on Earth. You know, they say there's only 3 things people need. You look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs: food, clothing, shelter, right? And everybody needs these commodities to make shelter, right? And these commodities aren't attached to any one currency. They have intrinsic value on their own. So if every currency on Earth went away tomorrow, and there was no such thing as a dollar, euro, yen, or Brazilian real, or Mexican peso, it wouldn't matter, because I could trade lumber for concrete, or I could trade glass for steel, because we all need that stuff to make a complete house, right? And so these commodities are things of real value. Currencies have fake value. They have fiat value. That means by authority. By decree. And so invest in things, things that have intrinsic value. How do you do that?

What's the vehicle? You still have to do that through exchanges or what have you? Or how do you invest in commodities?

Great question. Well, if you invested in commodities on the commodities exchange, like the Chicago Mercantile Exchange or the London Exchange or whatever, you wouldn't get all the benefits of real estate. And when you stick that real estate label on something, even though it's 80% commodities, guess what? In the United States, you get a beautiful, lower than the rate of inflation, 30-year fixed rate mortgage. You get wonderful tax deductions. You get to only put down maybe one-fifth of the value of it and get the bank to pay for the other 4/5 of the value of it. I call this the ultimate investing equation, because what you do is you acquire commodities with mostly someone else's money, the bank. And then when the bank says, hey, you got to pay me back for that loan I gave you, you go and outsource the repayment of that debt or delegate the repayment of that debt to someone called a tenant. They pay, and then you enjoy these incredible tax benefits. Profits, and you enjoy what I call inflation-induced debt destruction because you, or really your tenant, pays the loan back in cheaper dollars as the value of that dollar is inflated away. So the monthly payment on it goes down in value in a good way through inflation, and so does the loan balance on the property go down in value in a good way for you because of inflation. And this is the ultimate— part of the ultimate investing equation strategy. And that's why income property is the most historically proven asset class in the entire world, because it has these special multi-dimensional characteristics. But the bad side of it is it's not portable. Okay? So if you're worried about the end of the world, right, and you want to be somewhat portable, you do have to have some of your wealth in more portable things. Precious metals obviously come to mind for most people, cryptocurrencies for other people. Look, precious metals have terrible tax treatment. They are a measuring stick. Gold is a good measuring stick, but it's not a great investment because it doesn't have those multi-dimensional things to it. Cryptocurrency is a teenager. It's very young. We don't know what will happen. Look, I own some of all these assets myself, okay, and I endorse owning sum of all those things. But my fear is that the two most powerful entities the human race has ever known, those governments and central banks, they don't like cryptocurrencies, whether it be Bitcoin or any other, because those things compete with the primary product of any government. Guess what the product of governments are? Currency. Currency. Yeah. So the US dollar is what the government produces and sells. So if you had a bookstore and you sold books, do you want a competitor opening up next door? Of course you don't, right? You want to sell books and have pricing power. And you don't have pricing power when there's competition. Now, competition is good for the people. It's good for the consumer. It's good for us. But it's not good for central bankers and governments.

So do you think governments are going to try to take an action that can somehow inhibit one's ability to to have or utilize crypto?

Absolutely. They've already done it in other countries. And I think there will be continued pressure to do that.

But can they? I guess if I have my crypto off of an exchange, if it's in cold storage, let's say, or if I'm using DeFi platforms, something independent of—

Those are super exciting, by the way.

Yeah. Yeah. I guess the question is, can the governments put that genie back in the bottle? Or are they just going to try to find ways to inhibit it, but they can't really destroy it? I mean, I guess if I'm sitting here with Bitcoin, is there really the risk it goes to zero? Or is there really the risk that it's invalidated somehow?

Well, first of all, there is a computing risk, since it is a piece of software, essentially. Quantum computers might be able to crack the code. Code, and that's right around the corner. So there's that possibility. And listen, I hope Bitcoin succeeds wildly. I love the idea. I'm a huge fan. But again, these most powerful entities the human race has ever known, they have standing armies. Bitcoin doesn't have a standing army. OK, so they could make it illegal. And, you know, a lot of people like to say, well, you can't stop it. Well, look, you can't stop cocaine either. But it's not widely traded because it's illegal, and people really fear losing their freedom or getting killed in a drug deal, right? But if you think about it, cocaine is expensive, portable, small. It has what's called a high value density, OK? And you can move that around the world, and people do, sadly.

I don't recommend it. I think it's a terrible drug.

I wouldn't recommend it at all. But it is a store of value. For illegal drug cartels. And so if they make Bitcoin illegal, it will put a huge dent in it.

Yeah. Well, it happened in China already, right? They kicked out all the miners. So it's interesting to see where it might go from there.

And here's the thing. Look, Janet Yellen, since she became Treasury Secretary, has said some really scary things. Now, granted, recently, she sort of said a more positive thing about Bitcoin, which was which was encouraging. But right when she took over, she said Bitcoin is used for terrorism, and money laundering, and drug smuggling, and human trafficking, and all of this bad stuff, right? So are dollars. Dollars are used much more for it. Yeah, absolutely. You're right. And so she really also proposed this idea of a global minimum tax. And what they're trying to do is make it so there's nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. See, currently, although they've made it much harder in recent years, especially under Obama, OK, you know, we've had a way for people to vote with their feet and vote with their money and move their money around the world or move themselves around the world and go expat and live somewhere else. And the United States is the only government on Earth The only taxing agency on earth is the IRS that taxes you on all worldwide income. No other country does that. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. They're the only one. So the only way to get out of the IRS is to relinquish your citizenship, which I'm not ready to do. I love this country and I hope it turns around. It's not going in the right direction. But, you know, it's, it's a pretty sturdy country. And I'm optimistic that the ship will right itself, hopefully. But what they can do with Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies is they can coordinate with other governments. And so China doing one thing isn't enough, right? Because that's just one place. But if there's a coordinated effort, then they could really, really put the kibosh on it. And what was a practice session for this? COVID. Well, COVID. And yes, you're right, absolutely COVID in a different way, but the sanctions against Russia. Now the U.S. has led a financial coalition, but it happened before that under Obama. You know, every time— you know, a lot of these Caribbean nations have been tax havens. You know, the Cayman Islands we've all heard about. Nevis. And Nevis and, you know, yeah, all of these, right? But as soon as some big hurricane blows through and they need U.S. aid, the U.S. basically says, look, if you want our aid, you're going to institute financial controls. If you're an American and you want to open a bank account in another country, it's like you have a scarlet letter on. They don't want to touch you if you're an American. You'd think that would be a good thing, being an American. You got the biggest country, you know, yada, yada, yada. But no, being an American is worse. You're much better off being a Colombian. You could open up a bank account in another country if you're Mexican or, you know, or some other country, but if you're American, it's really difficult.

Wow. So final question. I guess generically speaking, the things that you talked about, real estate, cash flowing real estate, using low interest debt to acquire it, having some other commodities, maybe some crypto, but you're not convinced it's a very safe bet at this point, et cetera. Put all these things together. Similar to maybe what you've been thinking 3 or 4 years ago, but given what's going on today, has there been anything that's changed to say I'm playing more defense now, or I've modified how I'm managing my wealth or trying to protect it, or what investments I'm making? Categorically, it seems generically the same, but are there any details about the way the world is today that's modifying your behavior around this?

Yes, it's making my behavior, and I think it should make other investors' behavior, more extreme. Here's what I mean by that. Inflation is nothing more than a transfer of wealth from people who do not have assets and do not have debt against assets to people who do have assets and have debt against assets. Good point. It's a transfer of wealth. So sadly, the poor and the lower middle class, they probably don't own real estate, and they probably only have bad debt—credit cards, student loans, car loans, et cetera—whereas the rich have real estate, and they use debt against their real estate and the stock in their companies, if they own a company, and so forth. And so the debt gets debased by inflation while the assets go up in value with with inflation. So it's a massive wealth transfer, and it's a terrible thing. The concentration of wealth is getting worse and worse and worse. And growing up on the lower-middle-class side of the economic spectrum myself, and seeing the rich and the upper-middle class and wanting to be in that group— and now I am— I love the middle class. If you want to have a stable country, if you want to have a stable society, you need a large middle class. I've been to 87 countries around the world. And you know what? I go to countries and I see how the rich live in their mansions— razor barbed wire around it, bars on the windows. Who wants to live like that? I mean, being rich in those countries is no fun. You know, being rich in the United States is great. You can drive around in a Rolls-Royce and you're probably not going to get carjacked most of the time. I mean, it depends where you drive. You know, you can show your wealth in the U.S. and not be in fear, mostly. OK? And that's because we have a big middle class of people who are taken care of. They have the basics they need. They have food. They have a home. And sadly, that's just disappearing. And it's very dangerous. So the answer to your question is, Buy more assets and use good long-term 30-year fixed investment-grade debt against those assets. Do that even more, because as we see more and more inflation, you're just going to benefit more and more. And, you know, recently we've seen interest rates go up quite a bit, right? And a lot of people are thinking, oh my gosh, is this going to ruin the real estate market, etc.? Well, it's, you know, likely to slow it down a bit, but Compared to what? I mean, it's been so red hot, it could use a little breather, if you ask me. But think about it. Last month, we saw inflation increase by about 1.5% in a month, OK? And we saw interest rates bump up about 0.5% in a month. So the inflation rate is still accelerating faster than the interest rates are accelerating. And even before that, the rate at which you borrow for 3 decades was dramatically lower than the official inflation rate. That's hardly ever happened before in history. There's only a few little blips that that's happened, where the CPI, the Consumer Price Index, has said inflation is 8%, but we'll still loan you money at 5% or 5.25%, for example. Okay? Now, the real inflation rate, as we all know, is probably at least double what the official number is, maybe 16%. Right. And some people would even say— argue that it's higher than that. So you're borrowing at maybe less than 1/3 of the real rate of inflation. So you're getting paid to borrow the money. And that is an incredible thing. It is a wealth transfer, but anybody watching or listening to this, should be on the right side of that transfer. I was going to say, yeah.

They know better. Back to— and it goes back to you don't have any control over it, but understand the game so that you can use it to your advantage.

That's all you can do is look, we can curse the darkness all we want, but we got to light a candle in our little corner of the world. That's all we can really do. And then use that wealth to make the world a better place. Support people who are being censored by buying their books or subscribing subscribing to their service or whatever. And that makes the world a better place.

Fascinating look at things, Jason, as always. I think you have such an extraordinary context to be able to see through your lens and see how things are working. And I think it's very sobering, but at the same time, there's opportunity here as you described. And I appreciate you coming and sharing all that.

My pleasure. Thank you.

Isn't it amazing how one one guy can have that much expertise in so many different areas, and he's got amazing common sense. I loved listening to what he had to say, and I was especially excited as I was listening to it because I knew I'd be sharing it with you right now. So thanks for watching this interview. Welcome to part 1 of my 2-part interview with Peter Schiff. Peter Schiff is a brilliant economist. I had been following him for a while, And he's not only brilliant, he's also colorful. He's, he's somebody that's interesting and fun to listen to. And you'll see that if you haven't seen it before, you're going to see that shortly when you watch this interview. And again, this is just part 1 of a 2-part interview. But Peter, amongst other things, can look at macroeconomics, interpret what's going on. He called the 2008-2009 recession, and man, he got well known for doing so. Also, though, he is a naysayer when it comes to crypto, and he's really colorful and forthright about that. I know that we have brought you several interviews with people who are very bullish on Bitcoin, very bullish on crypto in general. They tell you why you should be investing in it, how it's the future. But we wouldn't be doing our job if we didn't bring somebody to you who has the complete opposite opinion. And I think he makes compelling arguments. You can decide whether they're compelling to you or not. And I will say I do hold a good chunk of crypto, so he hasn't talked me completely out of it. But certainly I want to listen to him. I want to hear what he has to say, and I want to temper any enthusiasm I might have by listening to him before I just go out and make big decisions about my own wealth management. So with that, enjoy part 1 of my 2-part interview with Peter Schiff. Peter, uh, thanks so much for taking the time it. And I hope we can be as entertaining as you were before we started the conversation. So we're asking about your middle initial being D, and you said that stands for what?

Well, I was just joking about the Austin Powers movie. Yeah, D is for Danger.

And then you said DeFi.

So, no, I'm not looking for danger. That's why I stay clear of crypto. Yeah.

Well, let's have this conversation. So I think you're pretty unabashed about, you know, about crypto, saying that you think it's a scam. As a matter of fact, you said, what's the name of the series? I said Crypto Revealed. And you said you should rename it Scam Revealed. So Crypto Scam. Yeah. So, you know, one of the things that I want to establish about you, which is well known, is that, you know, you're famous prognosticator. You know, you've seen down the road, especially in 2008, you know, the big recession, and you anticipated that. You spoke about it before it happened, etc. And as a prognosticator and an economist and, you know, the work that you do, I'm interested in your thoughts around crypto because it's all, you know, it's all the buzz and a lot of people are jumping in and, you know, people are getting— it's like a fever almost. Yeah.

And, you know, it's interesting, but Yeah, you know, I wasn't the only voice that was warning about the 2008 financial crisis or that profited from it. You had, you know, guys like Nouriel Roubini who were out there. You had John Paulson. You had Michael Burry. You know, and all these guys are also coming out calling out Bitcoin for another bubble, just like the housing bubble. And then you have a lot of other people like Nassim Taleb or Jim Rogers or Rickards. I mean, a lot of other people that have been saying the same things or similar things that I have about the Fed and about inflation and money printing. They're also very harsh critics of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. You know, obviously there are some people that, you know, completely believe in it. There's a lot of good people. I have a lot of friends in the crypto community. I mean, I tease them a lot and, you know, they certainly make fun of me. And right now, you know, they seem to be in a better position than I am because they've got all the money, right? Because they, you know, they bought Bitcoin way back when, when I didn't. And that's part of the problem with seeing the future. I see too far into the future. If I had only seen, you know, if I had like a shorter horizon, maybe I would have seen the huge bubble and I could have made billions of dollars off it as well. But I saw too far. I saw beyond the bubble to the crash. And so the crash is still coming because despite the fact that some people truly believe in it, and I think there's really two groups. There are the ones that really believe in it and the ones that know it's a scam, but they're pumping it anyway because it's a great scam because a lot of people are getting rich scamming people. And so they have a vested interest in continuing the fraud. Because the only way that you can make more money selling crypto is if you've got a new supply of people willing to buy it. Because crypto itself, Bitcoin has no actual value. You can't use it for anything. So people only want it because they think the price is gonna go up. And why do they think the price is gonna go up? Well, because somebody else is gonna buy it because that person thinks the price will go even higher because they'll be able to sell it to an even greater fool. Except they don't realize they're fools. That's part of the greater fool concept is none of the fools realize that they're fools until they get left holding the bag. And then the fools are revealed. And unfortunately, there's going to be a lot of them this time. And I think there's going to be a lot of new government regulation that's going to follow the collapse of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. A lot of people are gonna lose a lot of money and they're gonna be looking for someone to blame. And the government's gonna step in with the, I told you so's, and they're gonna use it as a way to get more regulation into the economy, just like they took advantage of the 2008 financial crisis, you know, and every crisis like the COVID I mean, look at how they've taken advantage of COVID To usurp more power and destroy our rights. They're going to do the same thing with the losses that are going to follow the deflation of the crypto bubble.

So you mentioned John Paulson. I just saw an article from him saying he predicts it's going to zero, you know, that the whole thing will just collapse to nothing.

And yeah, I mean, he said, you know, it's a scarce supply of nothing, which is what it is, you know. And as long as people are willing to pay for nothing, then the price is going to go up. But eventually, the people who are buying Bitcoin are going to want something for their money. They're not going to be content to settle with nothing. And then when that happens, you know, the bottom drops out because there is nothing there to support it. You know, they try to compare Bitcoin to gold, but it's nothing like gold. That's part of the fraud. It's really counterfeit digital gold because they depict Bitcoin as a coin, even though it's not a coin, it's a string of numbers. They make it the color gold, but it has no color because it has no substance. And they pretend that it's mined, but there's no mining involved. You use a lot of energy to solve a math problem, and then you get the solution to this problem, and that becomes a Bitcoin. But the reason that gold became money. It's not an accident. Society ended up deciding on gold because gold won out over all sorts of other commodities that also circulated and functioned as money. It's just that gold did a better job of being money than other commodities. But before gold was money, it was a commodity. And it's the value of gold, the metal, that underlines its value. And that's why gold is a store of value, because what gold stores is the value of it as a metal. All of the things that you can do with gold, you can do them today, or you can store the gold and somebody else can do them in 100 years, in 1,000 years, because gold's not going anywhere. Gold doesn't lose any of its properties over time. It doesn't decay. which makes it very unique. But it also has a lot of other properties that make it better money than, let's say, cattle, you know, or, you know, other commodities that have been used, salt, right? Gold is better. Now, Bitcoin tried to replicate a lot of those properties, divisibility, fungibility, portability, all that stuff, and say, hey, look, we're better at being gold. Well, no, because without the fundamental value of gold as a metal, none of those other properties matter. And so they don't matter to Bitcoin either. But, you know, right now, you know, nobody cares about that. You know, and they try to market Bitcoin as being a store of value, but you can't store what you do not have. And price appreciation doesn't represent value. Just because Bitcoin was, you know, $1 11 years ago or whatever, and now it's, you know, almost $50,000, that doesn't mean it's a store of value. It just means it's a speculative token that appreciated in value because people bought it. But that doesn't say anything about what's going to happen over the next 10 years, because all you're talking about is price. Bitcoin has a price determined by the market. It has no actual value. But people, you know, will pay a price for anything. It doesn't matter. You have all kinds of fads where fools are willing to pay for whatever is in fashion. But that doesn't mean they're going to want to buy it in the future when no one cares about it anymore. Gold doesn't depend on fads and fashions. Gold's value is derived just from, again, its properties as a metal. And human beings are not going to stop desiring all of the things that gold is used for. I mean, they've been using gold for thousands of years. I assume there'll be even more uses for it in the future. Than there were in the past because it's such a great metal, it's such a great conductor of electricity that it has so many applications that we probably haven't even figured out. And so we can store all that gold for future use. And that's one of the reasons that it's such good money. And remember, money replaced barter. It was a natural evolution of barter because before man invented money, they traded, but you just exchanged goods or services for other goods or services. And of course, it was very cumbersome because if, let's say, you were a chairmaker and you wanted a pair of shoes, well, you had to find a shoemaker that wanted one of your chairs. And so it was very difficult. But when they decided on, hey, let's have one good that we all know we all want and let's just price everything. In that one good. So now, if I wanna buy a pair of shoes and I'm a chair maker, I just take some of the gold I got selling my chairs and I can buy shoes from anybody. But when I exchange my chairs for gold, I exchanged something of value, right? A chair that you could sit in for gold, something of value, a metal that could be used to make jewelry or to adorn other items around the house, or people put, put it in their swords or their shields. I mean, gold was a decorative metal that had all sorts of applications, or I made different things with it. So, you could use gold as a metal, so it had real value. So, really what money is, is the most marketable commodity. So, money is a commodity first. And then the most marketable commodity is the one that society chooses as money. Well, Bitcoin was never chosen as money over other commodities because it's not a commodity at all. And people just decided to say, hey, here's this thing Bitcoin, and we're just going to claim it has value. You just can't magically infuse value into something because all of Bitcoin's value comes from confidence. It comes from faith, which is ironic because the Bitcoin promoters want to hold Bitcoin out as superior to fiat currencies. When the main problem with fiat currencies is that their value is derived from faith, as opposed to real currency, which derives its value from the actual money that backs it up. Currency is supposed to be backed by gold and silver, money. But when you take the backing away from currency, that's when it becomes fiat currency, because it's no longer backed by anything other than the government trying to demand that people accept it as a medium of exchange or as a legal tender. But ultimately, the willingness of the public to store it is a function of their faith. And that's the same principle with Bitcoin, except you don't have the government behind it trying to force you to use it, except you can look at El Salvador that's about to be pushed into this ridiculous experiment by people who are trying again to get more people into the Bitcoin pyramid so they can get out. And so they're going to force this poor little country to waste taxpayer money buying a bunch of Bitcoin and giving it away to people. Yeah, they'll probably spend their free Bitcoin. But as soon as they've blown through it, they're not going to want to use it anymore because it's a horrible medium of exchange. I mean, even some of the ardent Bitcoin bulls, some of the Bitcoin maximalists acknowledge that it doesn't work very well as a medium of exchange. And it's not going to work well in El Salvador. They claim it just works like gold, except it works nothing like gold because there's nothing that I can substitute Bitcoin for. If I need gold, like here, I'm wearing a watch. The jeweler can't say, oh, instead of using gold, I'm just going to use some Bitcoin. No, no, you can't substitute gold for Bitcoin. And so it's not digital gold.

It's just a pipe dream. So I'm glad you brought up the fiat currency because in essence, you know, with the chain of logic you use in the explanations is saying that fiat currency, you know, when it was backed by gold, when currency was backed by gold, hey, it was directly related to It was a representation of gold. But when we went off the gold standard, now we've got, you know, we have to have faith in that currency. So is there an argument? And I'd like to actually be a fly on the wall for some of your conversations and debates with your friends who are very bullish on Bitcoin. But is the argument on the other side that they might make toward you that, well, hey, people have more faith in a decentralized currency, a fiat currency like, you know, like a bit like Bitcoin as compared to the government who's constantly— because what's, what's the government do with money? They're printing trillions of dollars and, you know, they're creating all these.

Yeah. I mean, today there are a group of people that do have faith in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. I mean, there's over 11,000 of them. So there's certainly no scarcity. Of cryptocurrencies. They're all over the place. I mean, the new ones are being created every day. I mean, the inflation in cryptocurrencies exceeds the inflation in fiat currencies. But there is a relatively small group of people who are in this, who do have more faith in Bitcoin than they do in the dollar, or the euro, or the yen, or even gold. I'm not saying that they don't. But the question is, how long will that faith last? I mean, there are some diehards that, you know, they'll go down with the ship, right? If Bitcoin falls to $1,000, they won't lose faith. But there are a lot of people who will. I mean, there are a lot of people, if they buy Bitcoin at $50,000 and it goes down to even $10,000, let alone $1,000, a lot of people are going to say, you know what? This was a mistake. I never should have done this. They're going to regret the fact that they bought it. So faith is very ephemeral. I mean, you can lose it very quickly. A lot of people have faith in it because they've gotten rich off of it. And of course, that kind of blinds you and clouds your judgment because you're so involved, right? When you're inside a bubble, it's very hard to recognize it for what it is. And so, but as the air is coming out, some of the people then begin to figure it out. And then other people too that are very leveraged up, a lot of the guys that have been sitting on and hodling their Bitcoin, they've decided that they didn't just want to be Bitcoin rich, but poor, right? They didn't want to be hodling down in their parents' basement. You know, they wanted a new car, they wanted their own place, and they had all this wealth in Bitcoin. But no, no, they couldn't sell any Bitcoin because that's like against the religion, right? Never sell, right? I mean, that's part of the cult, right? You can't sell. And of course, that's being promoted by the people who are selling, right? There are people who got in early that are selling, but the only way they can sell is to convince everybody else not to. One thing that's happened to allow people to not sell, but still spend some of their paper wealth, is they've been able to borrow against their Bitcoin. And so that means that when the price really starts to fall, the margin calls are going to come in fast and furious. And I don't think a lot of these people can meet those calls. And so Bitcoin is going to get crushed. And so a lot of those people that end up losing all their Bitcoin because of margin, you know, they may lose faith pretty quickly. And, you know, once a lot of people get burned in Bitcoin, they may never come back. You know, Bitcoin then is going to have an even bigger PR problem. Because right now, you know, predominantly the stories you hear are about people that got rich in Bitcoin, right? Young people, you know, they put a little bit of money in and now they're driving Lambos and they got all the pretty girls. Girls, right? And hey, you could get rich too because you could buy your Bitcoin now, and not realizing that there's a big difference between buying it now at $50,000 and the guys that bought it when it was $5. I mean, when nobody heard about it and it was still kind of early in the game. I mean, people are being told that it's still early, that Bitcoin is still cheap. There is no way Bitcoin is cheap. And there's no way anybody buying it now is early. Everybody knows about it. It's all over the world. It's all over the news. I'm hearing about it constantly. You know, you look at a network like CNBC, which hasn't had me on in about 3 years. And it was even rare when they had me on. I mean, they used to have me on every week until the financial crisis, and then they gradually stopped inviting me on. But, you know, they rarely had somebody that would come on CNBC and talk about the Fed and reckless monetary policy and inflation and fiat currencies and how you have to worry and get out of the dollar, right? It was very rare that somebody would come on and express those views. And then of course when I did, they all jumped all over me, they laughed at me, they made fun of me. They would say, "Oh, Peter, you're just saying this because you're trying to sell gold. Come on, you don't really believe this," right? That's what happened. Well, now, Every single day, their guest lineup is nonstop Bitcoin shills who are saying the same thing that I was saying, but they're shilling Bitcoin. And they get no laughter. They get no criticism. In fact, all of the anchors are totally on board. It's like the whole network has become one giant Bitcoin infomercial. And of course, all their biggest advertisers are crypto companies, right? Or like Grayscale, right? So it's— this is so not early right now. Is this the 9th inning or the 8th inning? I don't know. I mean, it's— or maybe it's already extra innings of this game, but this game is going to end and a lot of people are going to be left stranded as the bag holders. And so, you know, this is all a bunch of hype.

So, you know, and you anticipated my next question. You know, I realize nobody can absolutely know, but your crystal ball gazing. Yeah. When is this thing going to collapse? When do you see this? And let me ask this also. Did the last collapse— was that— did you think that was the one? Or are you thinking that there's more time before this happens?

Yeah, well, clearly, I don't have a crystal ball, or I would have loaded up on Bitcoin early on. So, you know, so I don't. I mean, yeah, when Bitcoin went to $20,000 the first time and then pulled back to $3,000, I thought there was a good chance that $20,000 was the high. Now, I never said that it could never make a new high. I just said, you know, there's a good probability that that was the end of the bubble, but you never know. I mean, maybe there's another leg coming. I mean, I always held that out as a possibility, but I didn't think it was— necessarily the probable outcome that you should bet on. And clearly that was not the case because it went from $4,000 to $65,000. So that's still a huge gain, more than a tenfold increase. And, you know, I didn't participate in that. So now we had Bitcoin got up to $65,000, pulled back to about what, $28,000, $29,000-ish. And as we're recording this, it's, you know, Technically, I think it's around $48,000, so not quite $50,000. Now the question is, was that it? Was $65,000 the high? Or are we going to fulfill the dreams of all the laser beam-eyed guys and have $100,000? I mean, the fact that so many people now have laser beams in their eyes, and that's supposed to signify Bitcoin $100,000, makes me feel that the odds are we'll never hit $100,000 because too many people assume it's a foregone conclusion. I mean, I've been in the markets for a long time, and they generally try to confound expectations. So when a lot of people expect something to happen, it rarely does. And everybody in Bitcoin— I mean, if you told somebody in Bitcoin, is Bitcoin going to $100,000? Oh, of course. I mean, it just goes without saying. I mean, there's no risk that it won't. I mean, you'd have a hard time finding someone in Bitcoin who doesn't think it's going to $1 million. So, you know, when you get that kind of, you know, unbridled optimism and complete lack of fear— I mean, nobody in Bitcoin thinks they could lose money. I mean, they will acknowledge that the price could go down, but nobody accepts that it could stay down, right? If it goes down, it's just going to go right back up, right? There are people aren't in there thinking, yeah, you know, there's a decent chance that this thing goes to zero. There's not that many. They're religious fanatics. That's why I say it's like a cult. I mean, there are some. There are some. And those people put a little bit of money in. So if you get a guy that has 1% or 2%, 5% of his portfolio in Bitcoin, OK, there's a guy that, yes, acknowledges that there's a lot of risk. Otherwise, he'd be all in. So he's prepared for Bitcoin to go to zero. But you get a lot of these people, oh, I got half my portfolio, I got all my portfolio in Bitcoin. These guys assign zero probability to that kind of event. And unfortunately, I think that's most of the people who are in Bitcoin, is that they're really all in to the exclusion of everything else that they could be doing, which is what's so dangerous, especially if you get older people, retirees. I mean, it's OK if young kids lose all their money. Because A, they don't have a lot of money, and B, they have a lot of time to make it back. And these are valuable lessons to learn when you're— you know, my son is 19, and he's all in on Bitcoin. So let him lose all his money, you know, get it out of his system, you know, learn from his mistakes and move on. But, you know, when you're 70 years old, you know, you're supposed to have made all your mistakes. There's no point in making a big mistake at 70 because it's not going to benefit you. Because it's too late and you're not going to make back your money because, you know, your, your, you know, working productive years are largely behind you. So that's where it's going to be very unfortunate. And the Bitcoin community, you know, that's what I really dislike because they are trying to go after older people. They are trying to get people to put Bitcoin in their IRAs. And, you know, it's one thing to try to get, you know, the 20-somethings, you know, to gamble in it. Okay, fine. You know, but when you go for these older people who put real money in, not just, you know, some play money, you know. And I do think that's gonna open up to a lot of regulation, maybe even some prosecutions. We'll see what happens. Because, you know, a lot of older people, when they get wiped out, you know, a lot of congressmen are gonna be under a lot of pressure to do something about this situation. There's gonna be a lot of people too suing. One thing I know, you know, from my experience in the United States, We're very litigious. So, whenever a lot of people lose a lot of money, and then a lot of other people make a lot of money, there is always going to be some lawyers. And the lawyers always make money. No matter who loses and who wins, the lawyers win. So, a lot of the people who are making a lot of money in crypto, they're going to be given a lot of it back. Right? So, they better be finding nice places to hide it. Because the people that lost money are going to want to get it back. From the people who made money. And, you know, just like with Bernie Madoff, there were people who— some people got into Bernie Madoff's fund and then they got out with profits. Well, the people that lost money tried to claw back that money, say, hey, have you got any money out of Bernie Madoff that was more than what you put in? That wasn't your money. That was my money. My money was stolen. So a lot of people that came in late to this Bitcoin Ponzi and they're going to lose money, they're going to be saying, oh, wait a minute, you made money. All right, I want some of that back. And so the lawyers are going to be in. Everyone's going to get sued. Everybody better lawyer up. I think CNBC, I mean, I think the parent company, they're going to be sued like crazy. All their viewers who are going to lose all this money, and they're going to say, wait a minute, you were paid by all these crypto companies to run ads, and then you put on all these crypto bulls as guests. Guests while you were accepting their ad money. And some of these— you're on— some of their on-air guys actually have invested in crypto businesses. There's so many conflicts of interest. Non— I mean, this is just, you know, it's all going to come back to bite them because people can lose a lot of money. And the lawyers are there, they're like sharks, right? They're gonna— they're gonna come around. And so, uh, even the people— again, the people who think they've made a lot of money, let's see how much they keep. Yeah, yeah, good.

Yeah, I was entertained. I said, boy, what would it be like to be your 19-year-old son and being all in on crypto?

This conversation is funny because people think, oh, you know, I'm hedging my bets. You know, my son's got crypto. You know, my son doesn't have much money. I mean, he's got more, you know, ironically, he's got more money than I had at his age, thanks in part because of crypto. I didn't, you know, So yeah, I mean, and he's got more money than a lot of adults. And that says a lot more about, you know, the adults in America and our lack of savings. But he doesn't have any money because I gave him any. Yeah. You know, I mean, he had a little bit of money. It's not like he's got this big trust fund that he's in control of. The only money he's got in Bitcoin is money that he earned, you know, doing some odd jobs, money he got, you know, our birthday presents or allowance money, that he initially put it into some silver stocks and made decent money there. And then put all the profits and the original into Bitcoin. And then he also got some, gifted some Bitcoin. And so then, never sold any. He's hodling it. But actually, no, the first time he bought Bitcoin, He was, I think, maybe a freshman or a sophomore in high school. Maybe even, maybe it was before, maybe he was in junior high school. And he heard about it. And so he bought some Bitcoin at, I don't know, like $10,000 on the way up. And he sold it like at $18,000, $19,000, like, I don't know, like a week later. And that was his only experience. And he made like, I don't know, $500. And he was like, oh, okay, cool. I made some money. So, he just got— he flipped it, but he didn't really just start really going into it until it got back above $10,000 like a year ago. And then he just totally drank the Kool-Aid. I don't know where I failed as a father. But he went over to the dark side.

I'm just loving you saying, "That's a good lesson for him to learn at 19." Somehow I found that entertaining. And as you're speaking, you know, Madoff popped into my head and then you said it, you know, because it starts to have that vibe to it in the way that you paint this picture. Yeah. And there's one thing I can't get a— you know, because you talk about Bitcoin being stored value, you know, digital gold, etc. And you explained your view on all that. But then, you know, these altcoins, you know, take an Ethereum or take a Polkadot, take some of these other ones. That actually have utility, you know, they do something, but I keep asking this question, I can't get an answer to it. What? Yeah. I said, so people are building on their backbone, right? They use the Ethereum technology, they use any of the other ones, and they have all this functionality and it's expanding. I said, but where does revenue come in? Where does profit go? And I can't understand that if somebody's got a free ride on something, Because there's nothing to understand.

It's all the marketing hype. Look, you know, one of the reasons I didn't buy Bitcoin back in 2010, right when I first was told about it, was because one of the problems I had with it is like, okay, yeah, this is pretty cool, but what stops somebody else from coming up with another one just like it? Well, nothing. Anybody can come out with one. They can. I'm like, well, there's your problem right there. It's not really scarce because, you can have an indefinite supply of digital tokens that have identical properties. They'll just have a different name, you know, but a rose by any other name, I mean, it's the same thing, or in this case, not really a rose, but something that doesn't smell good. But, you know, so, but now we have over 11,000 of these things. And what I think is really funny, I get a kick out of this when I see these or hear these Bitcoin maximalists come out and criticize Dogecoin. And they're like, oh, this is crazy. That's a joke. How could you buy that? Well, the joke is it's no different than Bitcoin. That's why it was started, to highlight what a big joke Bitcoin is. And the fact that the people that own Bitcoin don't understand this, they're the ones who don't get the joke, right? And the joke's going to be on them because they own Dogecoin. They're all Dogecoins. I don't care what you want to name it, or Doggycoin, whatever the real name for Dogecoin is. Maybe it really is Doggycoin, but they, They put the Dogecoin on it so it wouldn't sound bad. But it was supposed to be bad, right? Doggy coin. So you can try to say something with a French accent to make it sound fancy. But I used to have a joke. There was a discount store in Connecticut, Marshalls, which sells— people say, well, it's Marshalls. Try to spiff it up, make it sound like it's—

Targe is another one I've heard. So you mentioned gold, real gold. And so here's something that's perplexing to me. It seems really hard to buy physical gold, but the price doesn't seem to move. So why is gold— why is gold not going up in value?

Gold is not hard to buy. I mean, gold is very easy to buy. I mean, you call up Shift Gold right now and buy some gold. We'll ship it right to you. You know, you can buy gold. There's a lot of, you know, local stores, you know, that have gold coins that you could buy. But of course, you know, the markups will be a little higher, just like, you know, anything. I mean, the cheapest way to buy it is just, you know, go on the phone and buy it from a firm like mine. Just like a lot of people go buy things over the internet these days on the telephone because they get a better deal than just going to a local merchant. Brick-and-mortar store. And yeah, I mean, you could get physical gold pretty cheap. Now, there are a lot of other folks out there, a lot of other companies. I don't need to name them. But the majority of them are ripping people off. Because unfortunately, a lot of people aren't that educated about gold. And before they get educated, they get ripped off. Because they buy gold, and they end up paying these huge markups. And they get talked into buying these crazy collectible or rare or supposedly rare, but not really that rare coins or proof coins or stuff like that. And unfortunately, a lot of conservative talk show hosts are paid a tremendous amount of money to shill for these companies that end up ripping up these talk show hosts' audiences. I don't know to what extent these talk show hosts even realize how much their audience is getting ripped off. But they have to try to understand, like, where are these companies getting all this money to pay us? Because, you know, if our markups at Schiff Gold are very, very low— I mean, we couldn't afford to pay anybody. I mean, I promote Schiff Gold for free, but they couldn't afford to pay me because we don't charge enough. Right? It's very small. And we're not the only reputable gold dealer out there. We're one of them. And so if you go to Schiff Gold, you're not going to get ripped off. You're going to get a great price. Price on physical gold and silver. And particularly gold is very easy to store yourself. Anybody can store gold in their house. I mean, very few people will ever own enough gold to fill up a shoebox. So, I mean, it's easy to store it somewhere and keep it safe. And if you ever need to transact in it, I mean, if you have smaller denomination coins or you can have silver coins for that. And we sell this barter bag where you have 1-ounce silver rounds. Or people can buy some old quarters or dimes, half dollars. And they're a pretty good way— they call it junk silver. And that is really untraceable. You get that. It's very private. It's very secure. You can't— I mean, if you have Bitcoin in a wallet somewhere and you're transacting with it, I mean, the government knows everything you do. I mean, it's all traceable. Unless you're just writing down your code and just going to hand it to somebody physically. But when you're going to do that, you might as well just hand them a silver coin as your seed phrase or whatever it is to your Bitcoin. It's easy to get ripped off. But one of the ironies, when I first heard about Bitcoin, one of the things people told me— and of course, all the stuff I was told early on, none of it happened except the price went up, right? All the stuff that they said was going to happen was pure BS. Like, well, you know, you can't use your gold to buy a cup of coffee, but I can buy a cup of coffee with Bitcoin. Oh yeah? Try buying coffee with Bitcoin. I mean, it would make the coffee so expensive nobody would want to do that, right? No, you know, no one's buying coffee with Bitcoin. Easier to buy it with gold or buy it with silver than Bitcoin. But one of the things people said is, well, you know, no one's going to want to buy gold because, you know, it's so expensive to store. You need a third party. Now you have all these Bitcoin guys saying, well, you know what's going to really make Bitcoin big? The ETFs, right? Because, you know, people don't want to buy Bitcoin themselves. It's hard to buy. It's hard to store. People are afraid they may lose it. So a lot of people don't really want to buy Bitcoin, but they'll buy an ETF. Well, wait a minute. When you— the minute you have an ETF, now you've introduced a third party.

Now you've got storage. Can you just explain in case somebody doesn't know what an ETF is? An exchange-traded fund.

And in fact, what they already have right now is this Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, because it's not an ETF. But the thing has a 2% a year management fee. So not only do you not own your own Bitcoin, you're paying a third party 2% a year. Nobody pays that much to have their gold stored. I mean, maybe 20 basis points. It's 10 times as expensive. To store your Bitcoin with the Grayscale Trust as buying, having, you know, a gold ETF. But people were buying it, and for a while they were paying a huge premium to overpay to have their Bitcoin stored. Now it's at a big discount because people at least wised up about that, right? They didn't want to buy it. Now the reason people buy it is because it is at a big discount. So you can get Bitcoin cheaper by buying Grayscale. Than by going into the market and buying it itself, which shows you that the so-called institutional demand is already disappearing because it was supposedly the institutions that wanted Grayscale because they were the ones that needed the custody for— because of compliance reasons. But they're making the argument in favor of Bitcoin that they made against gold. They're saying that what's going to benefit Bitcoin is having more third parties involved to store it. And charge you money. And of course, you know, when Bitcoin was originally marketed, it was supposed to be a medium of exchange, right? You were supposed to buy coffee with your Bitcoin. But then when that didn't work out, that's when they reinvented it as digital gold, right? Well, it's not, you know, you can't actually use it in commerce, right? Like people don't use gold. So it's just like gold. It's just worthless. And people just hold it because they think it has value. You know, in fact, the most ridiculous things that people in the Bitcoin community say are not the things they say in favor of Bitcoin. It's the things they say against gold. Because in order to try to, you know, make Bitcoin look good, they have to go out of their way to make gold look bad. And so they have to come up and say all kinds of ridiculous things like gold has no value, gold is worthless. It's like, what? How is that possible? How is the most useful metal in the world somehow has no use, has no value? I mean, they say Bitcoin has utility and gold doesn't. They've got it backwards. It's gold that has utility. It's Bitcoin that has none.

That completes part 1 of my 2-part interview with Peter Schiff. As you can see, he's somebody that you really want to pay attention to, want to listen to, and want to be informed by before you make any big decisions about your own investments in your life. But we do have a second part, so make sure you tune in for that one too. My next interview is with Adrienne Ashley, and when you understand that she is the host, amongst other things, of a podcast called Crypto Vixens, it starts to give you some insight into the colorful nature of this particular person. She has a lot of background expertise in crypto, blockchain, and things like NFTs. but a very unusual way to think about them and unusual applications for these things. So let's jump into this conversation. Adrienne, thanks so much for coming in. Looking forward to this conversation.

Thanks. I'm happy to be here.

This is great. So you seem to have a lot of enthusiasm and energy around some topics, but you also have this interesting background. So tell us about it. Like, how did you get to be doing what you're doing right now? Yeah.

So I grew up in Marin County, California. People don't understand really, but it's kind of like the nexus of the technological world. So at age 5, my birthday party was at a think tank where we had a whole bunch of mainframe computer dumb terminals and we were playing games that were word-based games like look left, look right, pick up that axe, those kinds of adventure games. At 12, I started programming computers. My first program was kind of like a where to go in Disneyland program, and it was using an array and programming in C++. And I broke into banks for a living. That was one of my favorite jobs. What do you mean by that? So back when online banking first started, you know, obviously you have security issues, right? And so everybody knew how to put up a website, but, you know, an interactive website, especially one dealing with financial issues, you want to make sure it's secure. So the developers would develop everything and it would be tested and it would meet all of the functional specifications and security specifications that were laid out. And then I would steal all the money.

And there's, they hire you to go in there and say, can you crack, can you break our security?

Every time. Yeah.

And you were able to every time. Every time. So.

Yeah, that was one of my favorite jobs. 'Cause I was working with the best programmers in the world and they're like, it's perfect. And I'm like, give me 5 minutes. You like, yeah.

So I take it you like challenges? I like challenges.

But also at the time, I was an actress. And I've been an award-winning film producer, television producer. I have an entertainment background. And so I had a fan club. And my fan club consisted partially of a bunch of teenage boys in the Eastern Bloc. And they would literally teach me script kiddie stuff on how to break things. Because did I know how to hack? Was I trained how to hack? No. They're like, here, try this. And I'm like, that's really cool. They teach me new things. And at one point I was doing an American Express project for American Express Blue and I pulled out the entire credit card table from the name, address, city, state, zip from the address. I put in a SQL pull and it pulled out the entire database. Wow. Yeah, that's why your stuff's encrypted now. Hmm.

Shouldn't have been able to do that. No. But.

It's kind of a good idea to encrypt it anyway, just in case somebody does. So you have this whole technological background.

Where'd that lead you?

Everywhere. So I've worked in a number of industries. This is actually my whole— I don't want to say ADHD. I mean, I really am an ADHD and an Aspie. So I get really deep dive into things and get to be a little professor really quick. But I have a lot of different industry experience. I have the healthcare, I have finance, I have travel, I have entertainment, I have all these different things. When it came to this blockchain stuff, I was like, oh, wait, because I saw solutions that needed to happen in all of these various industries. A lot of people in crypto are all about trading and technical analysis, and they look at these screens that are all full of candlesticks, and my eyes roll into the back of my head. Me, right? I build things. My biggest thing is building things. I want to know how can I utilize the technology to ensure more accuracy, more transparency, less fuckery, right? Like, there's so many things that we are doing and it's open to fraud. It's open to, uh, when you backdate transactions because you blew something. Like, I would much rather We have this thing called Sarbanes-Oxley, so every public company has to submit all of these financial reports and the CEO has to sign off. They pay about $20 million a year to get that done. Well, implementing blockchain, everything, every transaction, it would be noted who did what, when they did it, everything. At the end of the year, you press a button, boom, it compiles everything. It costs you about $1 million a year to implement that, so you save $19 million a year. It's definitely more accurate. Something's not right, you correct it, but it's written down as it's corrected. It's not like it never happened. That's one of the greatest things about blockchain is that immutability of the ledger. You know who did what and when. For me, I think especially in this political climate, that would be a very interesting thing to implement with our voting protocols. [Speaker:DAVID_SHERMAN] Why aren't we? [Speaker:HEATHER_MCCALL] Because I think they like it the way it is. This is the problem. Now imagine, and we're not even talking about voter ID, let's not even go that far, okay? But my premise in this entire thing is every single US citizen over the age of 18 who is still living and desires to do so should have easy access to the ballot box and certainty that their ballot was counted and tabulated correctly. Seems like a nonpartisan way to say the Constitution should rule, right? I get in trouble on both sides of the aisle for that. And I think that that's a little telling because what if we just implemented— let's just start with our polling places. You have 50 different people, mostly volunteers, all sharing the exact same login. You don't know who did what. How about we just start with them? We give all of them a login. You know every single transaction that was done and who did them. Let's just start there. Little baby steps to get to that certainty, because the only problem we have right now is uncertainty. That's what's causing the division. If we didn't have that uncertainty and the ability for some people to say, well, this happened, no, this happened, and there's no certainty of what actually happened, we would have unity. But we don't. And I think that's for a point. I think that's on purpose.

I agree with you, incidentally, because it seems that this is very inexpensive and from a scale standpoint not that hard to implement. I mean, it could really be done pretty easily.

And you just Set up triggers so that every single time those ballot tabulators are going in, right, it goes to an audit trail, right? Because we're missing audit records, we're missing tons of records. You know, how do you get, how do you get a ballot machine that's tabulating and it says there's, you know, X number, and then the news is watching it update live, and then the numbers shift? That's not supposed to happen.

It's only supposed to go up. Yeah, and it's probably a topic for a different serious, but in the end, I guess people say, well, people who don't have access to computers, people don't have access to X, Y, and Z, but all that—

People don't have to have access to computers.

Very solvent, yes.

Because I'm not talking about people, citizens. I'm talking about the implementation of the infrastructure. That's right. Like our infrastructure in Nevada, where I currently live, we have 10.2 million eligible voters according to the Secretary of State in our database. We have 2.1 million voters. So why do we have 10.2 million? We had over 3,000 underage 18 people vote and their votes were counted. We have entire neighborhoods where their ballots were never tabulated. They were never submitted because they were vote by mail. They didn't have that, and there was no way for them to say, "Hey, I voted." It's like, "Well, no, you didn't send it in." "Yes, I did." The whole neighborhood though, right? So you have to look at, How can we give people that certainty? Well, blockchain does that. When you look at all of the things that are crazy in the world, there's a way to implement blockchain and just the technology, the immutable ledger of what actually happened. I like to say an unfuckwithable ledger of what actually happened. All you need is that to implement in certain little places and it eliminates the ability for fraud. I'll give you an example. My first NFT that I ever designed was in 2015 before I could actually do it. I was trying to figure out how we could give donors the ability to track the value of their donations, to replace the bricks in front of a hospital. So you buy a brick, it's got your name on it, it's paved in front of a hospital, and that's it. You don't know where the money went. You can't track anything. Well, what if instead of that, there was a token? And basically what we now call an NFT, but a singular token worth a dollar. Your name's on it forever. It's on the legacy wall. And as that token gets recirculated, you're still on the legacy wall, but the new donor is on the donor wall for whatever that nonprofit project is. But then you could log into the dashboard and see my dollar that I, that I minted that token that has been recirculated so many times. I have created $77 worth of value every year. That's going to make people more willing to donate, right? And it's the same thing with the World Economic Forum, or whoever it is that donates all the money. They give $600 million for a project, right? 12 months later, they're like, we're out of money. We need another $400 million. Where'd the money go? I don't know. That would stop that.

True with a lot of charities. So this is sort of like a forensic accounting to say, OK, where's money gone? What's it being used for, et cetera? What would that mean to me as someone who's watching this all unfold. So, we're sitting in a world and it's actually relevant, the whole election thing, for example, the trust of government thing impacts the markets. And right now, we're dealing with out-of-control inflation. We got Russia invading Ukraine. We've got the supposed pandemic that they're creating all kinds of policy around and shutting down businesses and creating economic economic upheaval. So all this stuff is going on. And in the meantime, we're also seeing the emergence of blockchain, NFTs that are coming into play, people trying to figure out, how do I get involved in this? How do I invest in this? How do I take advantage, if you will, of an opportunity that might be at play? But I think there's also probably— they're preyed upon too, because there's a lot of ignorance. And they're hearing the stories of people getting rich. And they want in.

And they want in. So let me tell you about my girlfriend. I just actually helped her because she was having a meltdown. I couldn't understand why. And she's like, if I don't go open this bank account, they're not going to give me my $50,000 grant. And then I won't get my money. And she's in a panic. And I'm like, hold the phone, hold the phone. And I log into her email. And her entire inbox is what you and I would have in our spam folder. Right? It is, here's a grant for this. Here's a grant for a house. Here's the— and it's all like, give us $100, we'll get you the money. They wire the money. She goes, my brother already got it. Right? And so he got the money. But what happens is a couple of weeks later, the wire actually reverses. Right? It's pulled back. So they get the money, then they charge them the 10%. They pay them $5,000 of the $50,000 they just got, but then the whole $50,000 gets taken back. So there's scams abound. And most of us understand that you don't click on links in your email, right? But we have this citizenry that has no understanding of NFTs and blockchain and wallets and MetaMask and keys and private keys, and they don't get any of that. They don't understand it. And then we're moving them all into Discord, which is a little black box that is unsupervised. If you're not in it, you're not seeing it. It's not spidered. It does no SEO benefit. To the project, right? And civilians don't understand what they're doing, so they get these DMs. They're like, you've been alerted on the whitelist, right? They click on the link. Now, I'm an OG, right? I teach due diligence, I teach compliance, I teach security. I have a whole handout on security. So what happened to me? I clicked on the damn link in Discord and I went to this spooky boy's website. And I remember in the back of my head, it's niggling Spooky Boy, Spooky Boy. That's a hot project. My friend was talking about that project. Oh my God. And here's the whitelist and there's the FOMO counter. And I can mint 5. And I'm like, I'm just going to mint 1. I'm just going to mint 1. Minted it. Boom. Wow. Gas is really low. It was only $7. You're not minting an NFT for $7. That's not a contract. You're just sending money. But I didn't think of that at the time because I was overtired. I'd just come off of a 3-week tour. And And so then I'm like, oh, I could mint another one. I could mint 4 more. So I minted 4 more. And the minute that I hit send, which keep in mind, blockchain, no go-backsies. I've submitted the transaction. I can't cancel it at this point. I realized I was just sending Ethereum. So speaking of forensic accounting, I used to be a forensic accountant. I was a certified divorce financial analyst, forensic accountant, certified asset protection specialist. I did a lot of family law and celebrity stuff and my best thing was piercing corporate veils and tracing money offshore for asset protection. I know where they're putting it and I know how they're laundering. It's very helpful when you're looking at blockchain, when you're doing these forensics and trying to figure out where is it, can you blacklist a wallet? Yes, only with centralized exchanges, not with DEXs. It's very difficult when you get these scammers and it happened with Super Gucci. but I looked at it. So you look at the FOMO counter because it's like, this is how many are left. And that suspends not only your disbelief, but all of your normal rational thought, right? Because the greed takes over.

Yeah.

Right. So the thing that everybody has to do if they want to play in this market, you need a Brave browser because just like with Chrome where you can do an incognito, Brave will let you do it with Tor. You open a Tor window in Brave. You copy the, copy the link, paste it in there. If that FOMO counter resets, that's a scam. That's just the quickest, fastest gut check.

So here's, I think, one of the points is that you, who's got a background in all this forensic accounting, fell for it. Technology. I fell for it. I fell for it. So if they can get you, they can get anyone. They can get basically anyone. So Yes. Now, and of course, you just gave a tip saying, here's something you do to kind of verify if this is valid or not valid. So all these NFTs are out there. And of course, people know the big ones, the Bored Ape Yacht Club or what have you, CyberPunks and so on. And look, they bought it for this, they sold it for millions, et cetera, et cetera. And there's like this gold rush. But now you go to OpenSea and there's more NFTs than you can shake a stick at.

And OpenSea has admitted that 80% of them are fraudulent. Yeah. And they're not taking any responsibility ability for that, and it would not be difficult. We are working on a protocol that's going to solve that problem for mainstream consumers. It's really not hard, but the whole point of crypto, like kind of our religion, is decentralization and anonymity, right? So we want—

when you say our religion, who are you referring to?

Our— the OGs, I'm not a Bitcoin maxi, but I did get Bitcoin in 2009. Didn't understand what I had, lost it, and then ended up giving away the computer that I had gotten it on. So somebody's got a very valuable computer, or, or it's in the dump somewhere because it was an old one. I was— I donated it to a nonprofit for the kids to learn how to edit videos. Well, we all have those stories. Everyone who's been in for a while has those stories, which is why I don't focus so much on the get rich quick and the money and all of these things, and DeFi especially worries me greatly. What worries you about DeFi? The SEC and the IRS are looking at DeFi, and the banks and their lobbyists are looking at DeFi and going, okay, we have been paying people 0.5% on their savings, and they've been giving us their savings. Well, remember, banking is fractional reserve banking. They have to have a certain number of deposits in order to borrow from the Federal Reserve in order to make their money. If we're suddenly no longer willing to take a half a percent, and we're going to go put it in Celsius and we're going to get 8%, or we're going to go put it in Salt Lending and we're going to get 11%. Salt Lending, it's a percent over whatever the going is, like the best is of the most secure, they'll do a point higher. When you're looking at that, The banks are like, all of our money is slowly no longer being deposited. People are using our banking for their everyday, put your paycheck in, spend your paycheck, but there's not a lot left over for them to fractionally reserve.

Well, it's a threat to the banking industry, but that's the whole point. But that's the whole point.

Right. But okay, but you have to understand that the minute that you threaten a power structure, they're going to fight back. Okay? Yeah, of course. right? So we've got banking. Banking is scared, right? But brands have an option. Like, they can either assimilate and adapt or die, right? Time magazine, one of the oldest, most conservative things, they got into NFTs. They're like, yes, right? One of the things I was talking about on Clubhouse almost 2 years ago now, uh, was I was like, look, you know, Nike can set up a store in the mall in the metaverse. They can create all of these different shoes that people can wear in the metaverse. They can do limited editions. I mean, drop culture is huge. And then they can sell them. And then if they see that they're popular enough, then they can put them out in the real world. Or they can do a limited edition where if you have the NFT, you can get a pair in your size in the real world. There's all these different ways for fashion brands to implement NFTs that are beneficial So we're not producing so many clothes that they're just ending up in landfills. So we've got a lot of waste. The NFTs and blockchain can really lower the amount of waste that we produce by knowing exactly how much of what we should produce before we do it.

But that's a hand up to certain industries or companies like Nike, and it's a threat to other entrenched industries as you're talking about. One of the things, if we're looking down the road, like, I think DeFi is inevitable. Do you think they can stop it? Or do you think they'll try to control it? What do you think is going to happen?

So here's what's going to happen. They've just hired, what, 600,000 IRS agents? Some big number. Big number. I don't know if that's the right number, but a big number of IRS agents. So they've already leveraged Coinbase. They just leveraged crypto.com.

Every— what do you mean by they leveraged them? They get all the data, every single transaction from the exchanges. But that's even more of an— more of an argument for DeFi. Get off those exchanges and, and now go direct.

Except remember, a blockchain is an immutable ledger. Where'd you get your money in the first place, right? So, and they're doing interesting things now, uh, to, to force people away from crypto, they're saying, look, the law says right now, if you buy an NFT for crypto and you sell it and you made a profit, that's a capital gain. If you buy an NFT with a credit card and you sell it for a gain, it's not. They're incentivizing— Wait, walk me through that.

So if I buy an NFT with a credit card and sell it, it's not a gain? How is it not a gain? That's correct. It's not a gain. Just based on current rules?

Just based on current rules. So that's a good thing for any NFT marketplace that wants to allow people to buy with a credit card. That's not MoonPay. MoonPay, you buy crypto with a credit card, then you buy the NFT with crypto. That's not the same thing. There's all of these different rules that they're implementing in order to make it so difficult, onerous, or scary that mainstream consumers won't do it.

Just so I understand, they're basically changing income rules to say that if I can make income in this digital universe on the blockchain, say with NFTs, if I can make that profit by using dollars to acquire and then take dollars to sell, they're not going to tax me. And they're doing that just to discourage me from going in OpenSea and using Ethereum. Yes, exactly. So it's almost— well, I'm old enough, so I remember all kinds of things like in the airlines when they had price were— a new airline would come in, what would the established airlines do? Cut their rates so low that they couldn't compete anymore, eliminate them, then put their fees back up. So, you think that's what they're doing here is trying to get everybody to stay on the dollar for these transactions over a period of time, try to kill this, and then the plan is that then we'll tax it later once we've killed the threat?

I think you're right that DeFi is inevitable. And here's why. We have no control over Congress. There's a video by Represent.Us where it— you would assume, if you were a logical human, that if 80% of the population wanted something, it had an 80% chance of passing. And if nobody wanted something, it would have no chance of passing. Neither is true. It's about 30%, whether we like it or not. Only a 30% chance. And if you look at the 26,000 current bills in Congress, Are there that many? Yes. I mean, each session, each session, 26,000. 26,000. You can go look it up. Wow. On House.gov. Okay. And Senate.gov. There's— they have a list of all of the pending bills, right? And you look at most of them, most of them never even make it past the 'I submitted a bill, I did my job,' right? But the ones that do pass, that always pass, bipartisan pass, naming a regent to the Smithsonian and naming a post office. And I'm sorry, but that's not what we pay Congress for. No, right? I want them to do the hard things. What I, what I would love to do in a decentralized manner is to have the entire country come up with the top 100 things we actually care about. Clean water, clean air, probably a good idea. Low gas prices, affordable medicine. Um, let's stop paying $600 for a toilet seat because that pisses me off. Now, do I understand that you're like funneling $594 into a black box fund for a Lafemme Nikita program? Yes. You're paying $6 for the toilet seat. You're funneling the rest. Great. Please tell me that. Don't make me think you're an idiot. Right? Do I think we need a Lafemme Nikita fund? Yes. I actually think that— my personal thought is, yes, there are some people that—

We need black ops. We do need black ops.

I'm perfectly fine with that. I'm not perfectly fine being lied to. Apparently, I just found out back in the early Gulf War days, they suspended the law or voided the law that said that the government cannot lie to the US people. They cannot use propaganda on the US people. They have been using propaganda on us since then.

This is why— Unabashedly at this point.

Unabashedly, right? Then another leak just came out from a Google tech who works in the bot section, and they have an AI bot program that literally drives sentiment, that drives propaganda, that drives a particular narrative and crushes the opposition. That doesn't allow we the people to run our country. Right? And blockchain would stop that. One of the biggest things that I did— so now we're going to get fun. Just so you know, I majored in sex ed. I speak innuendo fluently, so we might get a little— saucy. All right, all right. So, uh, one of the things—

fair warning for the viewers—

fair warning for the viewers. So in, uh, in 2015, I launched, uh, Crowded TV, which was the world's first crowdfunding platform for reality TV and talk shows. We took our first talk show from idea to a national broadcast in 4 months. Um, and then I launched a dating app. Dating apps are just fraught with predators, scammers, bots, ghosts. I mean, it's dangerous out there, especially for a woman. And a man's worst fear going on a date is that she's going to be fat. And a woman's worst fear going on a date is that she's going to be murdered. And how do you solve for both equations? The way is with a sovereign ID. We call it a smart IID. It proves you are this person, you are human. And it allows for a reputation factor, proof of personal stake. Your friends and family can stake you. Yes, this is her current picture. No, he's not going to murder you, right? It makes saying yes a lot easier because it's a really high bar for women to say, "Yes, I'm gonna go out." That means getting in the shower, washing your hair, doing your hair, doing your makeup, getting dressed, leaving the front door. I could be staying home and binge-watching Netflix with popcorn and having a rockin' good time, right? So it's got to be better than that, provably better than that, before I say yes. So that's what we were doing with this ID. But when you extrapolate out what you can do with this identity piece, if you have your identity and your reputation, that makes everything moving forward so much easier, right? When you have an entire NFT team that's fully doxxed and provably that human, right? I'm the number one most fraudulently added woman advisor on blockchain projects.

Meaning that you're doing that to test—

No, no, I'm saying I have a stack. I'll work for a hedge fund or family office, and they're like, this is what we're looking at. And I'm sorting through going, I'm not on that project, but I'm listed. Not on that one. Not on that one. You can just throw those ones away. I've never heard of them. Because if they're adding me as an advisor and I've never heard of them, the rest of the project's crap. Of course. So by having a way of verifying Yes, this is me. Yes, these are the projects I'm affiliated with, right? With your reputation, that gives people more certainty. It's what we did with Crowded TV. We called it social currency. The fans, not only could they back just like Kickstarter and buy little packages, but they could back you with their social media. That gave a broader spread for advertising and awareness to that show, which gave advertisers more certainty that if they backed that show and sponsored that show, that it was going to have more awareness and they were going to have this particular audience, because they could look at who's backing it and they could see the demographics, the reach. It's the same thing with blockchain. We just need certainty.

Well, but that's the whole point. It's what it brings. As you're saying all these things, I think it ties back into the whole voting thing again. It does.

Everything actually all goes back to that because that's my secret project. Yeah.

Well, and I think a noble one, for sure. But you now are very aware and sensitive to this whole world of NFTs and the blockchain and the virtues, and then of course, the pitfalls, how people are being abused and taken advantage of, etc.

And on OpenSea, a girl reached out to me on Clubhouse. She had bought a $1,400 NFT. Turns out it was fake. OpenSea has no way to give her back her money, right? And they could if they changed their smart contract, by the way, they could, but they have no way to give her back her money. So they just gave her back her 3.5% transaction fee. She's out the NFT, they've delisted it. So she doesn't have the NFT on OpenSea. Here's the key. This is what people don't understand. Your NFTs do not live on OpenSea or Coinbase NFTs or any NFT marketplace. Your NFT, that token lives on the blockchain. Those marketplaces are simply viewers to that platform. So yes, they can stop it and say, we're delisting this one. That doesn't mean you can't go to Rarible and see it, right? And the imagery generally lives on IPFS. So They can't take it away, right? Just because she can't see it, it just means she can't verify because she can't see it on OpenSea because she's a consumer.

How hard would it be for OpenSea to vet though? I mean, it would not be hard at all. Can't they see there's an actual blockchain and there's an actual smart contract that the NFT is sitting with? OK, this is the fun part.

I want everyone watching to Google Beeple's 5000 Days Version 2 Mr. Nobody. This is why I'm telling you they absolutely can. And this is the interesting part. So royalties are not generally baked into your smart contracts. But if you go look at Coinbase NFTs, Coinbase, they, they will not pay the royalty. I have a royalty set for my NFT projects, right? On OpenSea, you have to do it every single platform. It's not baked into the contract generally. So now you have to use this wrapper to add it, to add the royalties, right? But if you look at what Mr. Nobody did, he kept trying to say, look, here's a problem. Here's a hole. Here's a security issue. Nobody was listening. So he went, OK. So Beeple had just sold 5000 Days for $69 million. So he went and he hacked a smart contract. Now, keep in mind, anybody can mint a smart contract.

There's no permissions. Well, it's different between minting and hacking, though, right? No, no, no, no.

He hacked together. So basically, you have a very typical— if you look at OpenZeppelin, and you look at the Ethereum protocols, they have standard contracts. You can tweak them a little bit. What nobody really realizes is that there are a ton of different protocols for a ton of different uses. And one of them in the financial services area, by law, they have to be able to claw something back. So he was able to mint. Beeples 5,000 Days version 2 in Beeples' wallet and then move it to a wallet where he could sell it from without Beeples' permission. It's called sleep minting. So when you look at the transactions and you look and you verify on the blockchain, oh yes, Beeples minted this, right? But if you don't read the actual smart contract of what was done, You won't understand, and civilians are never going to understand that. OpenSea could, with their standard contract, when you're on OpenSea and you're minting, they could put that same feature of a security protocol for a clawback provision. But they don't.

But they don't. Is that because they would lose out on a bunch of commissions? Yes. That's basically it.

Because 80% of their stuff is fraud is what they said.

You're saying we're providing the platform. Shouldn't they have a concern that a new platform will arise that will do this and then nobody's going to want to— the legitimate people won't go to OpenSea anymore?

Okay. OpenSea is the Amazon of NFTs. But it's still very early. Civilians only know about OpenSea, right? Magic Eden, which is the Solana version, actually generated more revenue, but nobody knows about Magic Eden. Or not nobody, but very few people. The civilian space, the mainstream media space doesn't.

But if I'm Bored Ape and I know that most of the people who are coming to the platform that I'm trading on are getting scammed, if I'm them, I'm going to say to OpenSea, either you're going to fix this or I'm moving to a platform that has it fixed because I don't want my brand to attract people here to shop. Okay.

You don't have a choice. Here's the thing. So I am the co-founder of the Billionaire Zombies Club. And we've done just in our Genesis collection, almost 700 ETH in secondary sales. We're not blue-checked. We've been trying since November to get blue-checked on OpenSea. Which means that you're verified. Verified. I'm verified on OpenSea as a human. And they won't verify it. There are at least 30 fraudulent collections at any given time. We report them, some go, some don't. They just don't, right? If we were verified and any other collection had that same name, they could automatically, automagically with AI, just kill it or put it in for secondary review. They don't do that. Um, it's— it is a problem because you set your royalties on OpenSea and you set your royalties on any other platform, but if you have that NFT, it's on the blockchain in your wallet. You can sell it anywhere you want. Anywhere, which means I can go to, you know, a third party, other platform, and there's no royalty set as the project, as the contract that minted the project. Right. So there's no royalties that they're going to pay for secondary sales there if they want to sell it privately, if they want to just add an NFT selling thing on their own website and, you know, and flip things. No royalty is going to be paid because it's not baked into the contract. We've been asking since 2019 to bake the royalties into the contract as part of the standard contract. So there are a bunch of different platforms now that are doing that.

So people that are viewing this conversation right now, vast majority, it's a little bit like, this is way too complicated for me. Do I buy an NFT? Do I not buy an NFT? It really gets down to this very primordial kind of binary decision. Reality, I guess, in trying to draw a conclusion here is that with NFTs as it exists today, because FOMO is a big deal, right? Everybody's saying, oh, I missed it on Bitcoin, right? My friend bought it when it was $300, and so I missed it. But now NFTs are like Bitcoin at $300. I mean, there's this mania around it, but it's a very strong buyer beware call. Caution, right? Because of everything you're saying. Right. So is the conclusion of all this— let's say people said, you know, I think I caught about 25% of what I deeply understand, you know, the terms. I think hopefully I know what an OG is. I don't know. But original gangster, I understand. But now that— here's the question, is saying, well, okay, she knows what she's talking about, she's got background security, she even got scammed herself.

Yeah, that's why I'm trying to say it's so dangerous.

So, so the conclusion now is unless you really, really know what you're doing, you shouldn't be doing this. You shouldn't be trying to get into NFTs because somebody told you it's a hot market and you can make a lot of money. Is that a conclusion or how do you know? What's the advice you give?

Educate yourself. So there are multiple chains. Okay. Ethereum being the one that everybody knows, that's also the one with the highest gas price. Prices.

You're going to have your blue chip projects. Gas price, incidentally, is kind of like the fees they charge for transaction.

Yeah. Everybody knows Ethereum, right? But highest transaction fees. Also, that's where the blue chip projects are, because if you're going to spend that much money, you're fine paying $100 or $200 to mint something, right? But as an example, I minted Wannabes Music Club. I paid $250 for the NFT. I paid $250 for gas. Ouch. They're now sitting on the floor on OpenSea for $15 to $25. Still $100 gas. So, it's a problem. There are other ones. Layer 2 solutions is what they're called. They're Ethereum virtual machines. They run the same code, but they run it on proof of stake or other consensus methods that don't require so much gas fees. So Polygon is one of those. Polygon is what the Billionaire Zombies Club is on. And the reason that you're going to practice on Polygon You need to practice, right? And you can actually learn how to look for rarity, right? How to find projects you like, how to do the due diligence to make sure that this is a real contract, how many wallet holders, right? Check out the Discord. And you can actually practice on projects where the NFTs are $1, $0.50, $1, whatever. And your transaction fees are like $0.02, $0.05.

Training. It's basically— this is tuition for education.

It's a tuition for education, right? Because you need to learn the platform and how you do your analysis, right? When you're looking at the project and you're saying, I might want to mint this, you go to whois.com, and in the upper right-hand corner, you put the URL in there, and it will tell you when was it registered, where is it registered, is it actually registered to a person, or is it private. Then you go and you look at that website and you see, is the team doxxed? If they're doxxed, go check those people's LinkedIn. Doxxed. Doxxed. Doxxed means that they're public. They're not anonymous. Right. So a lot of these projects, it's like Wavy Bear and Cyber Kitten, like, who the heck are these people? I don't know. Right. So kind of like when they launched BitCloud and everybody was anonymous and it was like, oh, Okay, you're doing something that's quite a bit sketch, putting up all these celebrities generating a whole bunch of Bitcoin, and the celebrities could come and claim it. But if they don't claim it, where'd that Bitcoin go? Then there was no way to offload it. You could never actually sell it. You could— bad, very bad, very bad. You have to look at the nature of scams. I do have a crypto security wallet worksheet on my website, wowisme.net. They can download that. That comes from my own experience losing my MetaMask wallet for 48 hours.

How do you lose your MetaMask wallet?

You log out of your browser and then you log back in and you have to have your keys and your keys don't— you have to have your keys. Yeah. Yeah. Well, everybody just thinks they just log in with a password. Well, not if it's a new browser.

So a new browser requires a key and you didn't have your keys. No.

I found them, but it took me 48 hours.

MetaMask is a 12-word phrase or 24? 12. Yeah. 12.

But the key piece here being when you have a crypto security worksheet, every single time you make one, every single time you open it, you will not lose it. I even go so far as to give you all of the options for using a hammer on a steel plate, fireproof paper made out of ceramic. I'm actually going to do a video on that. I'm going to write with a whole bunch of different kinds of pens to test, set it on fire. Let me just explain why this is important.

Yeah. Is that everybody's heard the horror stories about people losing the keys to their wallet, which is basically a passphrase, which is usually 12 or 24 words.

Or your public key and your private key, because I lost my Bitcoin pre-wallet. That I had to generate from a terminal window on a Mac. This was old. That's why we say there's about 4 to 5 million Bitcoin that are never coming back. We're never coming back.

So from the 21 million max, we're down to probably 17.

About 17 possible. And yeah, which increases the value. Yes.

So I wonder if Satoshi took that into consideration. Probably. Yeah, human error. Yeah. But I guess ultimately the point My point is that crypto in general, and especially if you get into DeFi and get into things you're talking about, it's— to borrow a phrase from Bernie Madoff, it's radical self-reliance. And that's the difference. See, when you put your money in the bank, you got FDIC and you got these things. But in crypto, it is either you're taking full responsibility or you're not.

This is where this whole conversation of onboarding mainstream is. We have to have baby steps. Coinbase, crypto.com, centralized authorities, you can recover, you can get your stuff back, but they can also lock you out. I was locked out for a year and a half in Coinbase. I just got it back. Why'd they lock you out? Because they reversed a transaction. Then I was negative $30. and it said, make a deposit. And I'd say, make a deposit. And it's like, add a credit card, adding a credit card or adding a debit card. It says it's already added. I go, great. No. And then for the longest time, I couldn't even just send Ethereum to cover it for a year and a half. And the support wouldn't get it back. Crypto.com, a lot of my friends for no reason at all are now kind of shut out for a thing, because this is the danger with civilians. When I say the government is going after all of this, they're using the exchanges to do it. It's not the exchange's fault at all. No.

They can't function unless they submit to regulation.

Right. And so they have all of these requirements. Well, now what's happening is if you've ever interacted with a wallet that is a blacklist or if you got scammed and you interacted or you bought something or you bought an NFT or you did whatever, then that can actually taint your account because even though you didn't know, right? So it's like I bought a fake Louis Vuitton. If you're in France, you could go to jail. You don't buy fake Louis Vuittons in France. That's just not a thing. So it's these kinds of things. So onboarding people, we need to be able to onboard them for credit cards. Thankfully, there are now a number of services that will let you set up your own website, have your own mint site, and mint for a credit card. Now, you're taking the chargeback risk, but you're minting for a credit card, which means you're protecting them from future capital gains. That's helpful, because they don't need to understand what a wallet is. There are a number of things that are coming out like this to get people more into it.

And I think that's one of the takeaways from the conversation, is that it's come a long way. But there's a long way to go before I think you have generalized adoption for all these reasons.

Which is why the things that I'm doing— that's why my dating app, it was crypto-based. Proof of personal security, that was token. That was DeFi. The thing about DeFi that is scary when it comes to SEC types of things is because is it a security or is it a contract? So the Constitution guarantees us the right to contract peer-to-peer. Right, right. They cannot take that away. However, a lot of the different ways that these DeFi pools have been created are not sustainable. So they could be Ponzi, right? Unless it's clearly declared, this is our tokenomics, here's our pool, here's the number of tokens, here's our reward strategy, right? This is what we're going to do. This is how long this lasts. And then it's like a CD. But you have to show the math that you're not going to run out of tokens, and that it's not a Ponzi. And people don't understand how to do the math.

Is that an SEC issue? Because the SEC doesn't really regulate this. Is it an FTC issue? They want to. Of course, they want to. But right now, the IRS looks at this as property, not as securities.

Well, sometimes. Sometimes. For tax purposes. Well, sometimes. Go ahead. They look at Bitcoin and Ethereum as property. Altcoins are different. OK? So if you look back, there's a ruling in 2017 called Munchee, M-U-N-C-H-E-E, food app. We were all so excited. It was literally going to be the perfect example of a utility token, that a crypto could be a utility. And just the way they marketed it, the SEC ruled that they had transformed it from the functionality of a utility token into a security because they used words like invest and this is how much it's going to go up and, right, prospective gains.

So it's based on how it's marketed, not based on its functionality.

For that particular case, which is why it's such a steep slippery slope, right? You have to make sure that how you're marketing it is compliant, that it is a utility. You have to actually make sure that it has full functionality and utility and purpose prior to minting, or it's a security. Because if you mint it in order to build it, that's a security. So all the altcoins is where the dangers are, but it's also where the biggest growth is. If you look at Shiba Inu, it was like 1,400% in one year. Right now, altcoins are super volatile, but highly—

stay on Shiba for a second. Yeah. You also just said something altcoins. So what are you looking at? So do you look at ETH as an altcoin or no? No, some do. It's Bitcoin and then everything else is an altcoin.

Okay, but those are Bitcoin maxis. Yeah. Okay, so I don't look at ETH as an altcoin. I look at ETH as a DApp platform. Okay. ETH is for smart contracts, right? ETH itself, yes, people are trading it, staking it, doing everything else. It is highly useful. It is absolute utility, right? Bitcoin, harder to program. Although a woman that I was with on Clubhouse literally minted, I want to say, the first NFT. I tried to do it based on colored coins. That's what I was doing with my hospital bricks, but it was going to cost $1 million and take forever. She literally just did it with an NFT project on the Bitcoin blockchain. I'm like, Props, girl. That was not easy. And it's not, because it wasn't designed for that. Bitcoin is a store of value.

I was going to say, it wasn't designed for that.

Bitcoin is for peer-to-peer transactions, cross international lines. Purely decentralized. Right. It is, yes, very decentralized. So Ethereum, while also decentralized, not as decentralized as you think. No.

I mean, they all— there's people making decisions about what might happen. That means that it's not a decentralized autonomous thing. That's why I look at saying for me, I don't know if I'd call me a Bitcoin maxi, but I would say that it's different in kind than these other things.

It's apples and oranges, but it's not an altcoin. An altcoin to me, because you've got Binance Smart Chain, which 80% of the financial transactions happen on the Binance Smart Chain. That's an Ethereum virtual machine. The code that works, my smart contracts that I wrote for Ethereum, they work on Polygon. They work on Binance flawlessly, like with no alteration whatsoever other than switching the chain that I happen to be on in my MetaMask before I mint. That's it. So they're all very similar. An altcoin is anything that is a custom token on any of those chains, ones that you mint, you name. But they're based on that chain. But anybody can make them. There are videos on YouTube right now, and I followed along and I thought it was hilarious. I'm like, this guy is freaking crazy. He's so funny, right? And he's like, how to mint a shitcoin in 2 minutes. And we did. We didn't just mint that puppy. We put it up there on PancakeSwap and added liquidity and boom. And I just did it for giggles. Yeah. There's like 300 wallet holders now. People are buying it.

And it's a joke. Yeah, well, isn't Doge— isn't that kind of how it started?

So Doge— Doge is near and dear to my heart. I've done 10-day Doge rooms on Clubhouse. That's hilarious. So Doge is interesting. Low transaction fees. The problem is it's highly volatile. But you now have Dogecoin.city. Which is an entire marketplace of businesses that will take Dogecoin as payment. I actually think it may— Roger Ver did Bitcoin Cash so that you could buy a cup of coffee without the length of time that it takes for Bitcoin and without the transaction— because that's the store of value. It's like, why would I give somebody a piece of gold for a cup of coffee? It's a store of value, not— intended to be transactional value for small—

a checking account. It's just that you're storing, you're storing wealth there.

Yeah, right. It's your IRA, not your checking account. And so Roger Ver was implementing Bitcoin Cash for that. But I almost think that Doge, it's, it's funny, it's fun. Elon tweets about it, so people know what it is, right? And I almost feel like a Dogecash might actually go really well. They are looking to improve and add smart contract capabilities to that. There are people who are working on that. So I wouldn't count Doge out.

Is there a limited amount of Doge, or is it kind of a fiat coin where they can decide, oh, we're going to mint a bunch more now? They can keep making more. Yeah, so I don't see how this ends well.

So that's the tokenomics conversation for every single project that you want to get involved with, right? How many are there? Is it limited? Are they doing mass burns like they did with Shiba? The SEC has already said that the old school way of doing an ICO, which is we're going to sell as much as we can, and if we don't sell out, whatever we don't sell, we'll burn, that's market manipulation. There's all these things that we do very normally in crypto, in this whole industry, that aren't necessarily kosher. Even though they're standard practices.

So going back now to the altcoins and the tax question. If I buy Shiba— you brought Shiba earlier— and it goes down, I can sell it.

Yep. And take a loss.

I can take an immediate capital loss. And I can immediately buy it right back.

Unless it's considered a wash sale. Wash sale rules still apply.

OK, so I've interviewed people about this. And they say, no, this is kind of the loophole in the crypto world right now.

No, no, it is the loophole. But there's a certain amount of time that has to go by.

Well, they're saying you can buy immediately back again. And that's what I'm trying to verify, because you sort of allude that that might not be the case. I would say that I don't— See, if it's a security, I can't do that. I have to wait 30 days. Otherwise, I can't take the loss. Right. if it's an equity buy. But in this case, they're saying this is property. It's not securities. So you can take an immediate loss from it according to the IRS rules.

According to the IRS rules, as property, you can. That is assuming that the token that you are transacting in does not get identified and flagged as a security later. And then retroactively, all of those things go away.

So you think they can go back retroactively?

Oh, no. Think they do. They do. They do. Yes.

That's the scary part. But has any crypto been made a security? Munchie? OK. Many. You get that example.

OK. Many, many, many, many have retroactively become a security. Interesting. Interesting. Oh, yeah. A matter of fact, on some of the projects that I worked on, one of them in particular, we did $50 million in no time flat. And then got the nasty gram and had to give all the money back to every single US person. Wow. Which pretty much wiped out my commissions. Well, that sucks.

Yeah. So let's have the final part of our conversation here around this Crypto Vixens.

So what's this all about? So Crypto Vixens is the nonprofit I started in 2017 with Lawrence Slade. And it's a DAO-ish. Decentralized Autonomous Organization, which we could go into more. But basically, it is to inspire women to join founding teams as advisors or co-founders regardless of technical expertise. And this came early on in the ICO days where we had these great projects. I was trying to recruit this woman in healthcare, 30-year veteran, baller, great credentials. And she kept going, well, but I don't know blockchain. But I don't— I'm not technical. I've just been doing this. I'm like, it's a healthcare company. But I don't know blockchain. It's a healthcare company. And finally, I just got so exasperated. I'm like, woman, you use email every day. You don't know how that works. And that's my example to everyone. Why are you limiting your opportunity when we need more gender parity in blockchain? Like the internet was started by a bunch of guys in their underwear in basements, and I was the only girl down there and it was smelly. Don't make me do this again. Seriously, don't. I love NFTs because Because I've been trying to get women into crypto for so long. But again, when you're talking about these candlestick charts and finance and technical analysis, their eyes roll in the back of their head. But NFTs are different.

Are you implying that it's not gender neutral or not gender blind? Do you think that there is disadvantages for females in this? No, it's not. What's the drive?

No, see, this is the whole point. There aren't any disadvantages for women. Women perceive there to be disadvantages. Oh, OK. So you've seen it. Just like in the tech industry. It's a cultural perception. It's a cultural perception. But blockchain doesn't care your gender. Right. OK? If you are smart, the teams don't care your gender. Right? You show up with a baller idea, trust me, you'll find a team to be able to come around that idea. But the best part, the reason why we're getting so many women in now is NFTs. It's about art. It's about community. It's about social impact. It's about storytelling, right? There's all of these things that women are naturally good at and community building, which women are very good at, right? And it's different than— Discord is different. That's usually a bunch of gamers. You know, when I came onto the Billionaire Zombies Club, I called it my 26,000 unsupervised frat boys. But I'm a frat little sister. So I'm frat friendly. I— and I told them, I'm like, I'm perfectly fine. I get that, you know, the house is going to be dirty. There might be some dishes there, you know, might be some socks on the floor, maybe even some dirty underwear, right? Like, let's just set the threshold there, okay? Right? Um, and they're great. And these, these guys— and this is what people don't understand, is you can inspire a community. These guys, when we did our charity token drop, we dropped on One Mama building birthing clinics in Uganda. We dropped on, um, on KUDJU, which provides period cups. These 26,000 guys, literally our charities, promoted and helped women around the world.

When you say you dropped for the women in Uganda?

Yeah, we did a token drop, which we needed to drop our token, our utility token, so that we could then mint the kings for the DAO and things like that. We dropped these tokens on these charities.

Which in effect raises money. For them. For them. Yeah. And so people will buy these tokens more to support a cause than to say that this is an investment, or it's both?

Well, they need the tokens in order to mint things in our marketplace and play our game and buy things for the game. So they need the tokens. So it's a utility, right? But they can get the tokens from the charities.

And now you're translating this to your current project, saying it's a similar thing.

It's a nonprofit. Foxes is the— that is our project for Crypto Vixens. And we are educating 1 million women in blockchain education and entrepreneurship.

So walk me through this new philanthropic dynamic with crypto and blockchain. So you've got an idea. You got a cause you want to support, right? You set up this— is it, is it a blockchain or what is it that you said that that's the Crypto Vixens? You know, what is that part of it versus Foxes? Which is the minted coin.

So Crypto Vixens is a nonprofit project of the Digital Legacy Foundation. That's the 501(c)(3).

OK. So you file as a 501(c)(3)?

Been 501(c)(3) for years. OK. So Crypto Vixens basically functions as one of our outreach projects. Foxy's is another of the outreach projects. That one is going to drive STEM education for young girls. As well as blockchain education for impoverished areas. We're actually going to launch those in Overland outside of Miami. We're going to start our first project. We're doing community hackathons every month. We also give them the education so that they can get certified and get jobs. We also function, we do the incubators for the founders, for female founders to get them the entrepreneurial opportunities that they need because women only get 2% of the funding. Yet we fail far less often. I don't know why that equation is still the way that is.

It's actually a really good question because investment dollars usually are— again, if somebody's putting up money, they're going to care more about the data and statistics than they are about the gender, right?

They should. You would think. You would think. And what I try to explain is social impact does not necessarily mean nonprofit. There are a lot of things that we can do that have great, positive, tremendous social impact that are actually very profitable. Yeah. Right? Should be. Should be. And there's a way to design things that way. But what we're doing is we're creating an online platform, a community. We have job boards. We're basically going to bring in all of these women and give them a central place where they can play together, hire each other. You know, I need a marketer, you're a marketer. I need a coder, you're a coder. We've trained the coders. They know it. Everybody knows everything. We have central platforms that they can pull from. They know what the architecture looks like. If you want to do this, they have the whole formula. They don't have to go out and do all their own research because it's already been done. Wash, rinse, repeat. Different industry, same architecture.

So fascinating where you're taking all this. What is the— gaze into your crystal ball a little bit here. OK. OK. You're in the game right now. In some very unique ways. And you've got this sort of perspective from your past leading up to today. Yeah. Where's this all going to be in 5 to 7 years? What's— where's it going to be in the world? I'm talking about as a cultural phenomenon, economically, and, um, and otherwise. Yeah. Where's this all going to be?

Okay, well, I'll start with short term. Elon just bought Twitter.

Yeah.

Yeah. So last year Twitter came out with communities and I said, oh, Twitter's taking on Discord. Discord was going to—

Explain what Discord is, please.

Discord is a community chat platform for gamers. That's how it really started, right? So it's a— it's kind of— think of it like a hypersonic Facebook group, right, with lots of other channels. There's a lot of plugins you can use so that you can gate things. You have to have an NFT to get in. They were going to launch NFT sales and crypto last year. They? They, Discord. And the community, all the gamers went batshit. And they had to roll that back. And they're like, okay, maybe not. So then Twitter puts out communities and I go, hmm. We call it crypto Twitter because that's where we all congregate. And it's much easier to get a civilian to Twitter than it is to Discord. Discord is dangerous. I don't like bringing people there depending on what your target market is. If you are going after mainstream consumers, I would never put them on Discord. It's just, it's, it's a learning curve and they'll never go, so then they'll never know anything, then they're never going to amplify you. Twitter, however, every single tweet is SEO'd, Google indexed, findable, shareable. Like, it is, it is a masterful marketing platform for NFTs. We're already there. They added communities, and I bet you Give it 6 months, if not sooner. Now that Elon has bought, we're going to have mint buttons. We're going to be able to mint. You're going to be able to literally go buy an NFT from a mint button on an official Twitter. Wow. That's, that is my, that is my hallucination. I don't know when this video is coming out, but that is my hallucination. I guarantee you there is going to be a, there is going to be a way because right now on WhatsApp and Telegram, There are platforms where there are tools where you can literally open a wallet and send people crypto through WhatsApp and through Telegram. Really? Yeah. I'm betting you're going to be able to do that with Twitter. Okay. Potentially. Okay. We'll see. There's security issues that I have with all of it that I'd like to see that firmed up so that people can't get hijacked. I've been SIM jacked, so that would be an issue for me. Yeah. Good. But in 5 years, In my perfect world, our entire budget, our entire federal budget would be on blockchain.

So there's two things. I'm not saying paint me your perfect world. I'm saying, what do you think is going to happen? What do you think reality is going to be in 5 years?

I have a really big mouth. I think I'm going to make them do it. No, kidding. OK. I think our current political situation is so volatile. And so polarizing that we're going to hit a tipping point at some point next 24 months, definitely before the next election or right after. We are going to get the certainty that we need, the transparency, the permanency. We are going to demand that fraud be eliminated. No backroom deals. That's not going to be a thing. We the people are going to take over. Part of how we're going to do that, I think, is through DeFi. We're taking the purse strings away. So then they're going to make all these laws, and they're going to say, you have to do this, you have to do this, you have to do this. And then at some point, somebody is going to realize that taxes are voluntary. I will voluntarily fund my federal government, absolutely. But we the people are actually in charge. That's going to sink in at some point. Congress is going to have a problem because we now have all of these abilities for leaks. All the dirty laundry is going to come out in the next 24 months. I'm a #BrandNewCongress personally. I want no entrenched special interests. I want clean slate. I want people who go to government for the express purpose that our founding fathers intended, which is you go to serve, and then you go back to your life. Not that that is your life.

My question is, does what we've been talking about relative to DeFi, the blockchain, et cetera, what is the probability that we may actually be able to seize back our— we the people, if you will, can seize back our economic destinies?

In our lifetime, 10%. And here's why. First, we have to wake everybody up. We have a country full of lemmings who have been societally instructed that they are always the victim, and someone will always save them, and the government is going to save them. We need that radical self-reliance. We need Burning Man in every single city. We need people to adopt the religion of crypto, which is decentralized, private, and Personal responsibility, self-reliance, your keys, your money. Nobody is coming to save you. Until we can get people to understand that, you know, my word is my bond, a handshake is a contract, and live like that, then we're not gonna get there. There's no hope, yeah. But if we can start with the littles, right? I love the littles. I had a garage sale for 4 days. I just moved and I had these littles that they're just so, I love the littles. The littles are— that's in our lifetime, we can do it if we can get the littles. We have to start driving blockchain education, STEM, engineering, math, finance, teaching them at a young age. And that generation— I just got goosebumps— that generation can do it.

If we can get them out of the hands of the current entrenched educational system, which may be It's not possible for a lot of reasons.

It depends. We need to come up with some kind of a fundamental, this is what we want education to be.

Yeah. Right? Well, it's who gets to decide, and that's what's at stake.

Which is why brand new Congress. Hello, every single intelligent person watching this, please, please run. I was a Bernie delegate. Why? Because I said it's the year of the independent. 2016, I called it 18 months ahead of time. I said, "It's Bernie or it's Trump. Pick one. Pick your poison." Trump didn't need my help. So I was a Bernie. I'm like, "It's going to be one or the other. If Hillary's the candidate, Trump is the president. Period. That's it." So we need more independents. No doubt. Brock Pierce is going to do that. Brock Pierce ran for president. He's creating an independent national committee for all of the third parties. Imagine if you get all 70% of us. From the sensible middle. And we actually get to pick a candidate that we all agree, this is not necessarily the most perfect candidate, but we are gonna run a third party backed with a lot of money and a PAC, and we are gonna run just like the RNC and the DNC, and we are going to run an independent candidate. That will shake up their world.

That's what's necessary. Yeah. You know, this is the— and this is some of what I hope comes from from the technology and its impact. But in the end, it's absurd in my mind that these are the choices we have.

And that's the whole point. It's no choice. Represent.us did a video with Michael Douglas, and it was basically talking about, you know, here's this 15% of the population, here's this 15% of the population. They have the primaries. They literally tell the 70% of us in the sensible middle who our candidates are that don't represent us. I'm sorry, I represent 70% of America, fiscally conservative, socially progressive, pro-choice to an extent.

I thought my friend had the best idea on this is that there always should be a third choice called none of the above. And if none of the above wins, they have to create a new slate. Oh my God, that's perfect. Isn't that a brilliant idea? So if we're saying we don't want any of these choices, we're going to pick none of the above and now there's a new slate to choose from.

Yeah, please stop giving me the lesser of two evils. Right? And stop giving me only three things, guns and abortion. I'm sorry, how about affordable insulin? How about quality education? How about clean air, clean water? Probably a good idea. How about affordable gas? How about our housing index is now so far past unaffordable. You can't get a house. We need to fix that.

There's a lot of things to fix, but we can.

We're actually launching crypto mortgages. It's— there's so many great things. I mean, if people don't know anything about crypto, just start diving in. Start jumping into a Clubhouse room. Start following some people on Twitter, right? Start learning. You know, there's meetups all over the place. Avoid crypto MLMs like the plague.

That's not crypto. Yeah, I think this is a crawl before you walk scenario. And I think that's what's really important.

If you do not know what your investor profile is, right, and you're going to invest, probably a good idea to know. Yeah. So one of the things I say is, why are you investing? What is the outcome? You want high returns, or you just want participation, and you want to put your money where your ethics are? Crypto.com, I happen to love. It has a huge slate of altcoins. But here's the key. Your very first baseline is you went to Vegas. You had a great weekend. You saw shows. You ate dinner. You went to clubs. You had pool. Like, you had a phenomenal weekend. You've checked out. You've called the Uber. You have your bag. You're walking through the casino floor. There's the craps table. One last bet. Throw it down. Win or lose, you're not salty. What's that number for you? My girlfriend goes, $10,000. And I'm like, I'm $20. Yeah, $20, right? I'm salty if I lose more than $20, right? So the key is you take that $20 and on crypto.com, you pick some of the altcoins that you hear about or that you're doing research and you learn. The key piece is someday in the next month, after you do this, your entire thing when you open that up is going to be bloody red. How do you react, right? You need to know how you experience volatility. Yeah. Even if you're only talking about $100 or $200, right? And it goes up and down and you go from $9 to $500 and then back down to $20. Like, how do you work with that? Because if you don't know that, you're not ready to get into crypto.

Wise, wise words. And I think people need to know, yeah, exactly, where do I fit? And how do I fit? And I think that's a really good— Because I'm a hodler.

I don't do the trade. I don't want to trade. I don't want to day trade. I don't want to do any of that. My girlfriend makes a ton of money day trading. She's really good at it. That's her skill set. I build things. That's all I want to do.

Adrienne, very fascinating. We took a tour of a lot of neighborhoods. So I appreciate you going along for that ride. But thanks so much for being here and thanks for your insights. Thanks for having me.

It's been great.

To see the next episode in the Money Revealed series, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe and I'll see you there.

It was Einstein that said compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world. It was Rothschilds that said no, compound interest tax-free. A dollar doubled 20 times is $1 million if it's tax-free.