← THE Bitcoin Podcast
THE Bitcoin Podcast
THE BIG PRINT IS COMING: DOLLAR = TITANIC, BITCOIN = LIFEBOAT | Lawrence Lepard
01:31:15
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- [00:00]
Larry Lepard
The US Dollar and the monetary system is, in my view, the Titanic. It's going down, it's broken. They can't stop it. It's going down. And so there are these lifeboats floating next to the Titanic, and one of them is called bitcoin. The other one's called gold. We now have a form of money that is fixed in supply. It solves mankind's largest running issue, which is monetary debasement. It killed the Romans and it's killed hundreds of societies since then. But we fixed it. Right now, the entire world doesn't know that we fixed it. And actually that's the opportunity because, you know, it's one of these first mover advantage kinds of things. I mean, you can wait until everybody knows about it, and then it'll be pretty fairly priced and it won't have nearly kind of the growth potential versus other currencies that it now has. But right now, as we all know, there's $900 billion, trillion dollars of assets and $2 trillion of Bitcoin. And this is a superior asset. And guess what? Some of that 900 is coming for the two. And just for comparison, gold is 20 trillion, you know, of value. So Bitcoin's two. So just if bitcoin were to equal gold in market value size, we'd be at a million dollars a coin, which I actually fully, and I'm sure you agree with me, I fully expect in the early 2000s we'll see that, and then sometime in the 2000s or 50s, we're going to see 10 a coin. This is how Saylor gets to his coin. It's going up forever, Lore. And I agree it comes back to that basic understanding that a monetary unit of fixed supply did not exist before Bitcoin. That's the key. That's the insight that I think people need to get their heads around. You know, in 10 or 15 or 20 years, just like, you know, who went to work in tech and was an early employee at Microsoft or Google or whatever it might be, you're going to know in 10 or 15 years who understood sound money and saved in things that couldn't be debased, and you're going to know who didn't, because they're not financially going to be in much worse shape. And to me, the transfer, you know, the wealth transfer is going to be really significant. And so people, people need to think that through. There's going to be some economic, some serious economic turmoil. And I think on the other side of that, one group of people is going to be in a much better position than another group of people. And I think the people, you know, who could see the future and bet on the future and move towards a better system are going to be advantaged versus those who are kind of stuck in the past. This is the tool and this is hope and this is the way out of it. That's why we do what we do, you know, that's why you do what you do. That's why I wrote the book. That's why I do all these podcasts. I mean, we're trying to make a difference. We're trying to fix the money so we can fix the world.
- [02:44]
Walker America
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin Podcast. Bitcoin continues to create new blocks every 10 minutes. The value of one bitcoin is still one bitcoin. And if you're listening to this right now, remember you are still early. If you're not already, go ahead and subscribe to this show wherever you're watching or listening and share it with your friends, family and strangers on the Internet. If you want to follow me in the show on Nostr and X, just head to the Show Notes to grab the links. If you are enjoying the Bitcoin podcast and want to support it by becoming a paid subscriber, you can download the Fountain app, search for the Bitcoin podcast and subscribe. By paying with Bitcoin via Lightning or Fiat via card, you'll get access to ad free episodes and early releases of select content. Plus you'll help support this show. Head to the Show Notes for product discount links. Go to walkeramerica.substack.com to get episodes emailed to you and head to bitcoin podcast.net for everything else. Without further ado, let's get into this bitcoin talk. What I love about this, Larry, is that all of these Nostr clients, because they're interoperable, so I stream from Zap Stream, but multiple different Nostr clients just integrated the ability to watch live streams directly in their app. So I think Primal Fountain, the podcasting app, which is also integrated with Nostr Amethyst, one of the apps for Android. I'm sure others will follow. I'm probably missing some too, but it's fantastic. You can choose your adventure, you can watch this however you want on whatever client you want, whatever app you want, and it's just available for everyone all the same. And it's one of those things.
- [04:29]
Larry Lepard
I really hope it Continues to succeed and take over the world because Twitter is a mess.
- [04:35]
Walker America
Yeah, we were just talking about this off camera and first of all, just say, welcome back, Larry. It's good to be here with you as well. But you know, we were just talking about this beforehand. Just the vibes on Twitter. It just feels like everybody wants an excuse to be at somebody else's throat. Like you just, you're looking to be angry, you want to be pissed off, you just, you're not. I don't know.
- [04:57]
Larry Lepard
Yeah, it's weird. I mean, it's tough, you know, fourth turning social fabric ripping, you know, and you know, to be fair, I'm always at the throat of the Federal Reserve, but I feel like they deserve it.
- [05:09]
Walker America
You know, they deserve it, I'd say probably more than anyone out there. So, yeah, I think it's quite well justified. But no, we were talking just before here, just before we hopped on the stream. And I was saying that last time we spoke on the show was a little over a year ago. It was August of 2024 or around beginning of September 2025. But at that time, the national debt had just hit $35 trillion. Now the national debt just broke $37 trillion as of August 2025. So in a year it broke up $2 trillion more. And now I think as of September, now It's at like 37.3 trillion.
- [05:53]
Larry Lepard
We added a lot really quickly because they kind of flatlined it with a debt limit. And then suddenly I think we squirted up another 6 or 700 billion real fast. Right?
- [06:01]
Walker America
Yeah, but you know, what's a few hundred billion between friends?
- [06:05]
Larry Lepard
Well, they're all becoming, you know, kind of fantasy fake numbers. And this is what happens when you have a crack up, boom, and the money fails. You know, I mean, I, you know, we all talk about, you know, million dollar bitcoin and I'm pretty sure we'll get there. I know you are too. But what I, you know, the, the tougher question is, well, you know, what will hamburger cost or what will a gallon of gasoline cost when we're at that level? You know, because, you know, as fiat fails, all the other shit gets more expensive too. So.
- [06:31]
Walker America
Yeah, I mean, the wild thing to me is, and I have trouble even, I think it's hard for us to even conceptualize what bitcoin's price may do when denominated in fiat. Because first of all, the question is, which fiat in the US dollar or the skinniest kid at fat camp? Okay, bitcoin's price is going to do mind blowing things. But what about all the other fiats?
- [06:52]
Larry Lepard
Oh, yeah.
- [06:55]
Walker America
We'Re privileged. We have the global reserve currency. I mean, that screwed us in plenty of ways, but it screwed a lot of the rest of the world a heck of a lot more. And it's like, boy, even if you just think about in today's dollars, we both have extremely high conviction. I mean, we've literally staked the vast, vast majority of our wealth on it that bitcoin is going to go up into the right forever. I firmly think it will. But when you're using a fiat measuring stick, boy, that up part and to the right part really can accelerate. It's wild.
- [07:29]
Larry Lepard
Yeah. I mean, Turkey is going through a kind of a mild, very high inflation, arguably close to hyperinflation. And Nairobi, which I wrote about in the book, has actually had enormous inflation. And so, yes, there are many other currencies that are as bad as the dollar is. There are other currencies that are worse. And that's what's one of things interesting. I commented on this on other podcasts. You meet people from other parts of the world and they tend to get bitcoin. They tend to get our thesis a little bit more easily than the average American. And that's because they've lived it. I had a podcast with a guy who was a teenager in Argentina when Argentina went through hyperinflation. And he described it. And so when bitcamp came along, he was like, gosh, I get it. I know what the problem is. I mean, with all of America's faults, and it has plenty. The currency has been healthier than many, most other currencies in the world for a long time. And so the average American kind of has a hard time thinking outside the box and saying, you know what, this, this thing could actually fail. Which is a very scary thought. I mean, and I'm not hoping for that. I'm not wishing for that. I'm not. You know, somebody on Twitter jumped on me last night for saying I'm a doomster, you know, talking about hyperinflation. I'm not. I'm really not. I'm very optimistic about how good the world will be in the future about where we're ultimately going. But I think to analytically look at what's happening and not come to the conclusion that we've got a serious problem. You know, that's being an ostrich and sticking your head in the sand because the problem's very real and obvious. And I mean, it's just, it's screaming at us in so many dimensions. We could talk about those, but it's a record gold price, the record bitcoin price. You know, the failure of the bonds and the bond markets falling off. You name it, we can see it. So.
- [09:06]
Walker America
Well, no, and I want to get into a bunch of those different things. I think before we do that, I do want to say for anyone that has not read your book, they should check out the big print. I am biased. I did the narration for the audiobook. Full disclosure. You should check out the audiobook too. Maybe do both. You know, you can read and listen at the same time.
- [09:25]
Larry Lepard
If you buy the audiobook, there's a PDF that comes with it. Yeah, the book has a lot of charts in it. I think Walker does a nice job of describing the charts, but of course there's nothing like looking at a picture. And so I think some people bought the auto book not realizing that there's a way to actually see the charts and that's just to print out the PDF of the charts.
- [09:43]
Walker America
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Describing a chart is kind of like describing a meme. It's like, well, the line, at least with fiat charts, it's basically like, well, the line goes up and to the right or it goes violently. So at least there's that there's always.
- [09:56]
Larry Lepard
Going to be something lost in the translation, right?
- [09:58]
Walker America
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But people should check it out. It is a great book and I think that the reason it is going to continue being viewed as great and has going to be viewed as very prescient in the years to come is because look at where we're at right now. Look at the current conditions under which we are living. We had. Actually, I think what's interesting is during the last couple years of Biden, we had a monetary contraction, actually. They pulled liquidity out of the system. Interest rates were raised at historic rates. M2 decline took a big old swoop. We're now back up above that. We're at fresh M2 all time highs.
- [10:38]
Larry Lepard
Yeah.
- [10:38]
Walker America
But I feel like we've been in this little lull period and it's kind of the calm before the storm. Is that. Is that your feeling as well? Hello, friends. You may notice that there are no sponsors for this episode and that is because this is a pure value for value episode. So if you find this episode valuable, consider giving value back. You can do that by becoming a paid subscriber on Fountain. You can send me a zap on Nostr, a boost on Fountain, or, or if you don't feel like Doing any of those. One thing you can do that is totally free is just to share this show with your friends, family and strangers on the Internet so that it reaches more people. If you are listening on a podcasting app like Apple Podcast, you can also give this a five star rating so more people find the show. You can subscribe on YouTube, Rumble or wherever else you're watching. But again, I always recommend that bitcoiners check out Fountain. You can also go check out the big print audiobook which I narrated. You also of course do not have to do any of those things. Bitcoin does not care. But I sure do appreciate all of your support, so thank you.
- [11:42]
Larry Lepard
Mine as well. I mean I think you've described it very well. You know, as we know, Covid created a lot of inflation. The peak monthly inflation rate was 9%. And then when Powell saw that he, you know, and of course he said it was going to be transitory, he was dead ass wrong. And that's what happens when you have a lawyer as Fed chairman doesn't comics and, and you know, he immediately swerved and slammed on the brakes and jacked rates faster and harder than almost any other Fed president had ever done. I think Volcker might have done something similar, maybe a little more aggressive but. And of course that very quickly slowed down the growth of credit and the growth of M2. And so we actually did see an M2 decline into the tail end of the Biden administration. But we also saw was that in 23 the bond market started to have a fit and the 10 year went above 5%. And suddenly you had September particularly you had all the Fed governors, 12 of them come out and say well no rate hike, cycle is over. And they realized they'd gone too far and they were able to bring the headline inflation rate from 9 to 3. Three round numbers I'm now some are 2, 7, 8, depends on which measure you use. But call it around three. And now I think we're setting up for what I call the next wave of inflation. And you can see that in a lot of different ways. I mean, you can see it. I mean first of all, let's just discuss the fact the inflation numbers aren't real. We all know that they're cooked. It's worse than they say. Anyone who goes to the grocery store buys auto insurance, buys homeowner insurance or I mean damn near anything. I mean there aren't many things in the world going up at 3%. I tweeted out last week that electricity in the United States on average is going up about 11% a year as a result of all the increased demand from AI. So the inflation numbers aren't even right. And yet in my view they will probably get worse because Trump's desire is to cut the rates by 300 basis points and that'll lead to a wave of home equity refis. Everyone who took out 7% mortgage would go back and take out a 3% mortgage and credit will start to grow. And as you pointed out, right now M2 is growing at about 4.8% a year. Just hit a new all time high. And this is the problem with the system as described in the book. As we all know, when you've got a system based on growing debt, it's like being a shark. You got to keep swimming forward or else you die. And so they have to continue to increase the money supply or else the debt pyramid collapses. And of course they're in the process of doing that and it's, and it's clear that they're having some troubles. I mean they, earlier this year they reduced the amount of quantitative tightening they were doing from 30 billion a month, or I think 25 billion a month down to 5. They're still doing the mortgage backed bonds. And so they've been shrinking their balance sheet less quickly. And then we're seeing other little things that they're doing. I mean the most recent one that Treasury Secretary Bassett has been doing, which I find interesting, is what I call shadow yield curve control. And what does that mean? Well, the treasury needs to sell debt to finance the deficit. And what they've been doing is they've been leaning towards selling the short term debt and then that builds up the treasury general account and they use the proceeds of that to buy the 10 year debt. So the, you know, the, the thing that the fiat money lords, you know, and the Federal Reserve are focused on is not having interest rates go too high. Because if higher interest rates will be death to the economy and to their income statement. I mean already the federal interest expense is about 1.3 trillion a year, which is bigger than defense and growing. And you get into this debt doom loop, right? Interest rates get bigger, the deficit gets larger, more bonds have to be sold to cover the deficit. Sell those into a fixed sized bond market. Interest rates have to go up. Guess what? Interest rates go up and the deficit gets bigger. I mean we're kind of like this, you know, the US Government is kind of like that family that decides to live off of credit cards and pay the minimums and then just keep taking out a new credit card and you know, use that one to make the minimum payments on all the old ones and then go buy some new shit and then when that one gets full, go get another one. And eventually, you know, the credit agencies are going to say, you know, the credit agency in this case is really the bond market. The bond market is going to say to that, you know, the government, guess what, we don't want this stuff anymore. These 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, we don't want them. And we're seeing that. I mean, the 30 year yield is now over 5% and that's not a good sign. And so the problem is becoming more manifest and they were able to hide it for a while and they were able to convince everybody they were going to get inflation controlled for a while. But the point of the book, and I think those of us who are Austrians and have looked at it carefully, know and understand, is yes, for short periods of time they can create a setback, you know, in money growth and maybe in inflation. But if they don't, those periods can't last that long because eventually, you know, the whole thing will collapse if they don't inflate. And so the most recent, I'll wrap this up as a long winded answer, but the most recent thing that happened, I thought it was very interesting. We had Doge, right? So they actually talked about, I mean, the problem here, the fundamental problem here is we've got all this overspending. And so they came in and you know, Doge, great, we're going to cut all this government inefficiency. We're going to. Elon says we're going to cut 2 trillion. Well, that's not very realistic. Maybe we're going to cut 1 trillion. Well, that's going to be hard too. Maybe we'll cut 300 billion. Well, now it's kind of down to maybe they cut 1 billion, 100 billion. And if they did, great, I mean, I'm sure they got rid of some stupid programs. But the point is a lot of it's locked in and, and then, and then, you know, this Freedom Caucus that was elected to reduce the deficit and control government spending, you know, except for Thomas Massie and Rand Paul, they all rolled over and the big beautiful bill got passed. And it depends on who you listen to, whether you use the, you know, the responsible government guys or the Congressional Budget Office people, whatever. But the bottom line is the big beautiful bill is going to increase, you know, expenditures by between 3 and $500 billion a year. And, and so, but, but, but to be fair, they put in tariffs, and those help from a, you know, collecting revenue point of view. And we've increased our revenue about 20, 20 billion a month, so it's 240 a year. But the big beautiful bill spends more than we collect from the tariffs. So we're still kind of going backwards. And then, by the way, those tariffs, if you listen to Lacy Hunt and some of the people who really understand the economy very well, those tariffs are kind of like Smoot Hawley, and they're going to slow the economy down. And as the economy slows down, maybe the stock market slows down, stock market slows down, employment slows down, and then tax receipts start to fall. And, you know, really the government's in a really tough fiscal position as the bottom line. You know, Walker, and the reason why I think you and I and others like us are so confident in our thesis is that there's no easy way out of this. You know, that doesn't involve a lot of inflation or outright monetary reset. And I discuss that in the book Chapter 26 talks about. Everyone says, well, Larry, you're criticizing them, you know, complaining this, that, and the other. Offer a solution. So I offered a solution. It's not politically that likely. In fact, it's probably highly unlikely. But, you know, they say, what would you do if you were president? Well, I wrote the speech that I would give if I was president. So here we like it. Yeah, exactly. Well, most Austrian guys do. And so here we are in kind of a really messy situation. And, you know, as we talked about pre show, I think one of the great memes of the decade will be Lyn Alden's. You know, nothing stops this train. I mean, the, you know, sadly, the way the government in this country is constructed, you know, they use money to buy votes and to maintain their power and to maintain their positions. And there are certain things that are untouchable in terms of spending. And, you know, they kind of keep kicking the fiscal can down the road. And, you know, one can do that. But another chapter in the book is entitled Stein's Law, which says that if something cannot go on forever, it will end. And you cannot continue to grow debt at a rate in excess of the rate of growth of GDP forever. At some point, the two lines have to start to come together again, and that either can happen by a big downturn or by massive inflation or both. And so, you know, my bet, the book's bet, your bet as a bitcoin holder. Mine is a bitcoin holder and a gold holder is that they'll choose the inflationary route. And Besant just told us that he, he came out and he said, look, you know, yeah, we're cutting back expenditures, we're getting all this revenue from tariffs, but really the solution to this problem is growth. You know, we're going to focus on growth, and that's okay. He's right. You know, productivity enhancements, AI growth, that's all good, and they're going to get some of that. But they need, they're so deep in the hole that the amount of growth they need can only come with inflation. And so my belief, and I remember it because I was a teenager in those years, my belief is we're looking at a decade that's very similar to the 70s where we have these recurring bouts of inflation. And maybe there'll be several times the federal try to tighten, to tamp down inflation, but each round will be worse than the prior round. And so that's kind of what I think is coming. And that's why I think, you know, the message of the book to people was we really, you know, as individual adults trying to take care of our families, we need to take some of our savings and put them in things that are protected from inflation. And those are things which the government by definition cannot print. And there are really only 3 of those in the world that are monetarily based, and they are Bitcoin, gold and silver. And silver probably less so because it's been pretty much demonetized. And then there's another one, real estate, but that's not really a monetary asset. It's a hard physical asset and has other uses. And then stocks to a degree. But stocks are kind of a, they're a mixed bag because, you know, they can issue more shares and the economy turns down. And by the way, right now the stock market's not very cheap. So, so that's kind of, that's kind of the big picture of my view of where we are right now. And I think what we're waiting for is just the next leg to start. And it's interesting that we're having this conversation now here on September 5th, because it wasn't but a few days ago gold was doing a very long bull flag below 3, $500. And silver was doing kind of a, you know, kind of a consolidation of a little breakout at $35. It was in the 36, 37 area. And in the last two weeks, I think, I think it's about two weeks is the time frame. And you Go back and look. And gold just went through 3,500 with authority. We're now at 36. And more importantly, silver went from 36. 7 to 41. And so, to me, these are a warning sign that the next wave of inflation is about to begin. What I'm going to do now is share my screen show the window that we were talking about before, which I think is very interesting. This was a chart prepared by my partner, David Foley. He's a very bright guy.
- [22:21]
Walker America
He sure is.
- [22:22]
Larry Lepard
Yeah. And so what we're looking at here, Walker, is a chart that shows from early 2018 to the present, maybe a week old, the price of bitcoin in orange, appropriately, naturally, and the price of gold in gold. And the scales are different because in this timeframe, Gold went up 200% and Bitcoin went up 2000%. So you can't really compare the amount of the move. Bitcoin, as we know, is superior to gold in price performance and has been for a long time and I think will continue to be. And for aggressive investors, it is clearly the best choice. The only trade off is it's a little more volatile than gold, not a little more. It's a lot more volatile than gold. But here's what I find interesting about this chart, is that there are several instances in history where gold has smelled the oncoming inflation and moved first. And probably the most notable one is early 2019 when Powell pivoted and that kind of. It just became clear that financial conditions were getting tight and they were going to have to loosen. And gold smelled it. You know, gold on the right hand scale was about 1000. It squirted up to 1365 or higher before it went up to 2000, roughly in, you know, in Covid. But notice that nice move in gold and bitcoin. Meanwhile, bitcoin's just kind of going sideways, not really going anywhere. And then at some point, the bitcoin, you know, market woke up and was like, hang on a second. There's been a lot of debasement here. We had Covid, we printed all this money, blah, blah, blah, and it took off like a rocket slip. And, you know, notably, you know, I mean, as I say, Gold went up 30, 40%, while Bitcoin, as you. As you and I both recall, because we were there, you know, bitcoin's falling from 10,000 to 50,000, like, quickly. You know, it vastly outperformed gold. You know, and then, of course, the gold smelled, the tightening started to come down. Bitcoin followed and came down Even more, you know, and that was Sam Bankman fried. And then, of course, another. Another run, you know, okay, maybe. Maybe we do have more inflation, but no, we don't. Came back in. Then they both went down when Powell started tightening in 2022, and Bitcoin went down more than gold again. It's more volatile. But then gold, you know, and in this particular case, you know, gold again started to smell it. The bitcoin is going down right here, and gold is going up. What's that all about? Right? But eventually, bitcoin got the memo. Started to go up, you know, and then gold came down. Bitcoin didn't come down as much. And then, of course, then gold really started to go up in 2023. Took out 2000, you know, 2024, 2500. And of course, bitcoin, you know, came off of the bottom and just as rocketed up to 100. Right. You know, and actually even higher. And in each case, though, again, gold moving higher here. Bitcoin still going down, but then comes back. You know, gold moving higher, Bitcoin coming down, but then comes back. And so. So here we are. And this isn't fully up to date because gold's now over the 3500 number. It's into the 36 area. Right. It'd be off the chart, not by a lot, but bitcoin's still languishing around. You know, what is it, 109 today or something?
- [25:27]
Walker America
So a boring US$109,000, you know, just a boring number.
- [25:31]
Larry Lepard
Yeah. Feeling fine about it. But if you bought it right at the peak at 123, maybe you'll think, oh, you know, heck, this sucks. But, you know, I find it interesting because I watch on Twitter and everybody's down on microstrategy and down on bitcoin. How come it's not moving yet? And I'm just kind of like, guys, we've seen this pattern. This is old. This is old stuff. You know, just give it 30 to 60 to 90 days. And I, you know, people always ask me, what are your predictions? I think by the end of calendar, you know, 2025, gold will probably be at 4,000, and Bitcoin will probably be at 140. You know, maybe 150. So, you know, and we'll be kind of on to the next run. And I say that just because I don't think they can keep this thing going without, you know, more programs that obviously indicate printing. And the programs are subtle. You know, they, you know, this. This. This Shadow QE through twist of buying bonds. And I'm pretty sure they're into the banks and telling the banks to buy the bonds and maybe giving them swap lines at low rates that they're not telling us about. I mean, you know, they're doing all kinds of things. They're pretty good at camouflaging. What's really going on. But what is really going on. I mean, as you pointed out, you had a chart up earlier. It's a nice chart of M2 is that M2 is growing again. And we know, you know, and particularly global M2 China has really aggressively been growing their money supply because they had a big real estate downturn. So, yeah, you know, we can, we can. I mean, it's all. Roads lead to inflation is kind of my, you know, they used to all lead to Rome, now they all lead to inflation. And so, you know, I see much higher prices in both of these assets, you know, for quite some time until we address this issue. I'm going to shut that off now just so you're not looking at that chart. But anyway, that's, that's my, that's my shtick and I'm sticking with it.
- [27:13]
Walker America
You know, Larry, I've got it, man. I missed, missed having these long form chats with you. It's been way too long because you, you break things down so well. And this is one of the things I loved about your book. And I like, I, I read your book multiple times over, obviously through the process of narrating it. You know, like it's necessarily, you kind of need to. And each time I'm like, God damn it. Just, I love the way you break it down because it's just, it's simple. And you know, I know that people have like tried to call you a doomer and things. I know you, and I don't think you're a doomer at all. You may be a boomer, but you're one of the good ones. You know, I'm not taking the shit. You know, you've taken the shit in this life.
- [27:52]
Larry Lepard
I'm not happy that we're in this condition. And I think it's a great country with a lot of positive attributes, but I am. I also think that we can't ignore symptoms and problems that have been building for years and that need to be addressed if we want to get back to our core values and the promise that the founding documents of the country created. I mean, it was meant to be, you know, a fair system where everyone had a fair shake and a Fair chance, not, not socialism, not, not the same outcomes. Everyone knew that those who worked harder would do better. That was all fine, that's part of the system. But the notion of the founding of the country was, you know, let's create a fair deal for everybody so everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed. And that's always been the American story, the American dream. And sadly, what happened, the book describes it, is the monetary system got more and more corrupted. You know, that's really been taken away from a lot of people. You know, the young people can't buy houses. You know, Wall street can borrow with the fed funds rate. Everyone else has to pay the credit card companies 25%. You know, I mean, it's just, there's, there's just unfairness everywhere. And you know, it's going to take some reform to fix that. And I'm counting on your generation to fix it and get it right. Because I don't want my kids and grandkids to grow up in a dystopia. I mean, I grew up and the 70s wasn't perfect. I mean, the Vietnam War was a really divisive issue and there were some nasty things happening in the 70s. But I can say from having lived in the 70s and living today, it was an, it was a kind of gentler country in the 70s. There was much more of a middle class. It wasn't haves and have nots. Everyone kind of just got along and got by. There wasn't all the social strife that we see today. I mean, the vitriol that's out there today is just unbelievable. It's really, and it's sad and, and I get it. I mean, when you, when you take people's lives and their jobs and their well being and they can't afford to feed their family and they're working three jobs, you know, they get mad, they get angry, they get frustrated. And I also get it that this is kind of a, it's, it's a sophisticated fraud that the people at the top and the government have pulled on all of us. And that's, and that's, that's a large part of why I wrote the book. I wanted to point out that it really is a fraud. And they've gaslit us about. They've gaslit us about it. And I wanted to just call them on the carpet and say, no, no, no, you guys are, this is bullshit. This is absolute bullshit. And because I think that if we got enough Americans, I mean, my dream would be we'd get enough Americans to read this book, understand this stuff. And we'd get a real movement going in this country to return to sound money. I mean, the kind of thing that Robert Kennedy spoke about in Nashville in 2024. I mean, that speech was very uplifting. I mean, we can do it. We can fix this place, you know, I mean, Apollo can grow up in a great country and he will, but, but between here and there, you know, we gotta, we gotta fix it. And that may not be easy. Let's not kid ourselves. Let's not kind of sugarcoat it, you know, you can't go through a fourth turning without some eggs getting Hogan.
- [30:44]
Walker America
Amen. And you know, as you know very well, you know, you're a, you're a family man, right? You've, you've been in the family game a lot longer than I have.
- [30:53]
Larry Lepard
I'm still, they're adults.
- [30:56]
Walker America
Yeah. I'm a novice, you know, very much. But, well, you know. Yeah, you're forced to learn fast.
- [31:01]
Larry Lepard
Right.
- [31:01]
Walker America
Once that light switch flips. But you know that one of the things is, and I've talked about this before, just that men, your time preference really changes when you become a father.
- [31:11]
Larry Lepard
Oh yeah, Really?
- [31:12]
Walker America
I mean, you, you know, I, I, everything is academic until then, but you become a father and you see your child there and you're like, oh, no, now I get it.
- [31:21]
Larry Lepard
Yeah.
- [31:22]
Walker America
Now I understand what long term thinking means, but you can't before. Not really.
- [31:26]
Larry Lepard
You know, maybe, yeah, it was a long time ago when I was single. But yeah, I agree with you. Yeah, I mean, you just, you recognize the responsibility that you have and, you know, and then you, and you look into legacy and that's, you know, as you get older, your chain, your views change. I mean, you know, you're young, it's about running up the score. I mean, you know, now it's more about, you know, your legacy and how you're going to be remembered. And again, that's part of why I wrote the book. I just wanted to try and contribute to a change that I think has to happen, you know.
- [31:52]
Walker America
Yeah, well, I think people, I think that people are primed for it now to your point, you know, because you can only, you know, what's that? Forget what's that? I don't remember who originated the quote, but it's something like revolution is only six missed meals away or something to that effect. Basically, society is always right on the edge of tearing this thing down. If you stop being able to eat, you get people hungry and they get pissed off. And luckily our mass produced shit fiat Food is so cheap now that takes a lot longer to get to. But I think people are fed up. They're fed up because they know there's a problem, but they can't put their finger on what it is. And every politician, you know this. They feed people the symptoms of the problem, and they say, this is the problem itself, this symptom. This is the problem. The Elizabeth Warrens, and not just Elizabeth Warren. That's not even fair. I mean, she's garbage. But it's on both sides of the aisle.
- [32:54]
Larry Lepard
It's all of them.
- [32:55]
Walker America
They feed you the symptoms, and they tell you it's the disease, but it's not. The disease is deeper. The disease is that the money is broken and that we have a cabal of banker bureaucrats who decide the price of money. So we don't live in a free market.
- [33:08]
Larry Lepard
Correct.
- [33:09]
Walker America
And it's so damn frustrating to see this. And I know you've seen it a lot longer than I have, obviously, but you see it and you hope, why don't other people see it? And that's where. Honestly, like, I think that, like, books like yours are really important because sometimes it just takes something explained a little bit differently. It just takes that one interaction. You know what I mean? Yeah. Just to push you over the edge and say, you know what? This is bullshit.
- [33:32]
Larry Lepard
I'm not sure young people like my book, but I think it's good for boomers. I've heard it's really landed with a lot of boomers, because, you know, I'm a boomer, and I'm writing from that voice, and so they kind of get it. But, yeah, I mean, you have to have it kind of, you know, peeled away and shown to you. You also have to, you know, have to have a need and an understanding of it all. I mean, you know, I mean, I would say sadly, among some of my friends or acquaintances, you know, they've. They've actually been huge beneficiaries of the system. Do you know what I mean? And to them, there's. There's nothing wrong with it. And they know their kids can't afford houses, but they figure out, fuck, I'm rich. I'll buy my kid a house. You know, I mean. I mean, you know, it's. It's like the. I love the meme that shows the guy holding the kid with the basketball up to the basketball net, and the caption is the kids, you know, me thinking I'm good at basketball, and the person holding him up or, you know, or me think I'm Good at real estate investing. And the person holding him up is inflation. Do you know what I mean? Any boomer who bought real assets during their lifetime, houses and stuff has gotten just an incredible ride on the inflation. I mean, my parents, my parents paid 40, 30, maybe 30, high 30s, low 40s, for a house in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1966. One of the nicest houses in town. I mean, it's a very. Not that that's a big deal. I'm not bragging. It was just a damn nice house. And today that house is worth, you know, a couple million bucks. I mean, it's nuts, right? I mean, so, I mean, they don't own it anymore. They sold it. But the point is that, you know, that's. That's kind of what the debasement of money does to you. And, and the sad thing is that the working class, I mean, those people who have assets have been somewhat benefited by it. You know, the working class, they don't have the capital to buy that house or they don't necessarily have the credit to buy that house. And so they suffer at the cost of that.
- [35:17]
Walker America
And I think that that's one of the reasons you can only kind of pun intended, paper over inflation for so long before people say, like, no, what are you doing? You can only put people in so much pain before they start asking, what is money? What even is this? What is happening here? Why do things have to keep getting more expensive? That doesn't make any sense. Robots are replacing all of us and AI is doing this and things are still getting more expensive. Why?
- [35:48]
Larry Lepard
Why?
- [35:49]
Walker America
Except on a flat screen TV that keeps getting cheaper because it's literally outpacing inflation. Shout out to flat screen TVs.
- [35:55]
Larry Lepard
Yeah, right. Well, in all technology. And that's all of it. Yeah, that's the really amazing thing is that the technology world has actually shown us how great deflation is and how wonderful deflation could be. I mean, I think about, you know, I mean, I remember, I remember as an example, you know, buying my first, you know, stereo or buying my first Sony Walkman and how much it cost and how shitty it was. Do you know what I mean? And now, you know, you can get the same thing for 20 bucks. I mean, it's just. And computers, I mean, all of it. And so, given all these technical developments, we all should be living like kings. I mean, we really should. I mean, you know, the world is so much better as a place. I mean, that's the one thing today that is better than the 70s. I'm talking to you, we're in different parts of the country. It's real time. It's virtually free. I mean, we both pay for an Internet subscription. But it's modest. You know, I can call you anywhere in the world, real time. I mean, hell, I was in college and I had to, I had 10 minutes on every weekend when I could afford to call, make a long distance call to my parents to tell them I was alive and doing okay and tell them what my grades were. You know, I mean, that's really the way it was. And so, you know, there's so many things that have gone right in the world. And the technology, and by the way, it's that technology that's going to save us. Because the microprocessor led to the distribution of information, led to the Internet, led to the breaking down of the sclerotic big organizations, and has now led to Bitcoin. Really. Because, you know, without technology and the microprocessor and, you know, distributed networks and everything else, you know, bitcoin sound money in a digital form would not exist. And so, you know, thankfully, technology is going to save us. But you know, and it's a good, it's a beacon of where we need to be going, you know, as a society. And just the notion that we have to have this, you know, asset based debt to grow is just, it's so flawed and, and it's, you know, how did it get that way, right? How do we ever get to a place where we had 12 people setting the cost of money? You know, it's, it's barbaric, right? It should be the free market, should be the balance of interest or balance of savings against the need for capital. Set the interest rate, right? Free market pricing. But we got there because we had two parties in the country that were very, very interested in not having that system. One of them was the financiers and the banks and wealthy people. And the other was the government. And so what happened is they kind of figured out a way to make a deal between themselves where they would both benefit and the average person would suffer inflation. And so it started with the Fed in 1913. They immediately broke their charter and, and helped finance World War I. So the government got its war paid for and you know, the Fed and the banks made a ton of money on war profiteering. And the effect of World War I was the price of everything doubled, right? So we paid for World War I. We just didn't pay for it through taxation. They paid for it by, you know, the price level went up. 100%. So, and. And that, you know, wash, rinse, repeat that story since 1916 to present with a lot of interim bumps and developments, probably the biggest of which, which I heavily talk about in the book, was abandoning gold in 1971. I mean, pre bitcoin, gold was sound money. It was your only choice. It was your soundest choice. And obviously bitcoin is sound money too. It's digital sound money. It's in so many ways superior to gold. But, you know, I always remind bitcoin people, you got to remember what got us here, you know, and you got to remember how good things were on the gold standard. They weren't perfect, but they were better than they were on a fiat standard. And. Yep. And when we got off the gold standard, that started the slide. And of course, it's that slide that then led Satoshi to develop bitcoin, because as we know, in block one, he said, you know, chancellor on the brink. And, you know, and he. In a lot of his writings, he talked about how the, you know, the abuse of the money printing privilege was a big reason for the invention of bitcoin because central banks will always and have always abused that privilege. And the thing I think is so unique and interesting about bitcoin, I think it makes it very hard for most people to understand, is this is the first form of money. And this is why Jesse Meyer, who I love, says this is once in a millennium or once in a species kind of event. Is every form of money used by mankind. And we've used tons of things. We use beads and salt and grain and livestock. There are lots of forms of money, yap, stones, whatever. But every one of them had some, you know, you could create more of it. There was a. There was an additional supply somehow available. And we all know that any commodity like gold or oil or anything else, the price goes high enough, we'll find more of it, because somebody will be rewarded to do so. Here you are with bitcoin, okay, so turn that on its head. And this is why it's going up forever. Laura, turn that on its head. Turn that on its head. We actually have a form of money with a fixed supply. And it's like, boom. I mean, just mind blown. That just did not exist. So forget all your, you know, this is why sales is. Your models are broken. Forget all your models. Forget the past. Try to think outside the box and ask yourself, you know, if something really like that changed, it's that significant, what are all the implications? I mean, it would be similar to, you know, The Wright brothers fly. I mean, did anyone see that we'd go to the moon or that we'd have a conquered, that could go across the, you know, the ocean in three hours or all the kinds of stuff that would happen as a result, and that's the same kind of a thing. Or, or, you know, Berners Lee and, and you know, TCPIP and the Internet. Right. Did anyone foresee in those early days of linking computers together that you and I would be speaking real time, halfway around the country and able to broadcast it out to millions, you know, for free? I mean, for essentially, essentially for. I mean, it's like, wow, so, so we now have a form of money that is fixed in supply. It solves mankind's largest running issue, which is monetary debasement. It killed the Romans and it's killed hundreds of societies since then. And so. But we fixed it. Right now the entire world doesn't know that we fixed it. And actually that's the opportunity because, you know, it's one of these first mover advantage kinds of things. I mean, you can wait until everybody knows about it and then it'll be pretty fairly priced and it won't have nearly the kind of the growth potential versus other currencies that it now has. But right now, as we all know, there's $900 billion trillion dollars of assets and $2 trillion of Bitcoin. And this is a superior asset. And guess what? Some of that 900 is coming for the two. And just for comparison, gold is 20 trillion, you know, of value. So Bitcoin's two. So just if bitcoin were to equal gold in market value size, we'd be at a million dollars a coin, which I actually fully, and I'm sure you agree with me, I fully expect in the early 2000 and 30s we'll see that. And then sometime in the 2000 40s or 50s, we're going to see Tana coin. And so, you know, this is how Saylor gets to his going, it's going up forever, Laura. And I agree with him. And, and it's just, it comes back to that basic understanding that a monetary unit of fixed supply did not exist before Bitcoin. That's the key. That's the insight I think people need to get their heads around. And once you accept that and say to yourself, okay, given that, what does that mean in terms of the difference? Then, you know, you can kind of start to say, all right, well, I got to think differently about this stuff. I mean, in the book I talked about How I really effed up. I missed investing in Amazon, I missed investing in Google, I missed investing in a lot of the things. I invested in the Internet early on, made a lot of money. But some of the big Internet apps, I missed them because when I look at them, they were just too damn expensive. And I thought, I can't, you know, because I had the old investment model, I was like, well, you got to price earnings and price to revenue and price to book value. And you know, all this, you know all this stuff I've been taught, right? And I didn't think that, no, this is really actually a Metcalfe's Law deal where these things grow at the square of the value of the number of users. And so, you know, although they seem pricey, guess what, they're about to get more pricey. And they just kept growing. And so, you know, the Internet took over the world. Amazon took over the world, Facebook took over the world, Google took over the world. And, and these, these networking businesses became a new model because there had never been a World Wide Web kind of network before they existed. And Saylor was brilliant enough to see that that's how he made a lot of his money before he actually got into Microstrategy. I mean, he owned enormous pieces of Apple and, and all these other companies that he could see were going to benefit from that trend, Google, etc, And I missed it. I mean, I thought they were too expensive. I didn't buy them. But guess what? I'm not going to make that mistake again because that, it's deja vu to me. That exact same model is going into this monetary network called Bitcoin. And the exact same thing is going to happen. You know, we're at under 10% of the world uses it, or really much, much smaller than 10% of the total world. But under 10% of the Western world or developed world uses it today. But that's going to go to 90% in my view. And you know, Apollo and my kids and your. And their kids are going to be. Things are going to be priced in satoshis and the dollar is going to be something you look at in a museum. You know, that's, that's gonna, that's gonna be the old currency that they used back when we were, you know, back when, before we, before we realized that Keynes was a fraud. So, you know, it's, it's a, it's a bright future coming. And I'm so excited about all that. And that's why I'm so crazy about all this fitness Shit. Because I want to be around to see as much of it as I can. Yeah, yeah.
- [45:18]
Walker America
No, I mean, is really something I've been beating the drum on just as much as possible lately from my podcaster Bully pulpit is just that we are still so early because it's really. I mean, unit bias is very real, undeniably so. And it's so easy to look at something that's over $100,000 per unit. Of course, that sounds expensive. Of course it does. I don't blame people whatsoever.
- [45:46]
Larry Lepard
Absolutely. First of all, and a lot of them don't understand, you don't have to buy a whole unit. You know, you can buy. Yep. By a tenth of a unit, you can buy a hundredth of a unit. It's going to make a difference. And yeah, I mean, I in. In talking to my friends and getting them convinced to get into it. That's probably unit buy is probably the biggest obstacle I'm now facing. Well, yeah, sure, Larry, but you bought it at 400. I didn't buy a lot, by the way. I was scared of it, and so I bought a little. I bought some more at 10. And I mean, you know, I kind of. I continue to buy all the way along. And I just, I was like, yeah, but you can't look backwards. I mean, Max bought it at $2. I mean, I'm jealous as hell, you know, and he told me about it back in the early days, and I didn't believe it because there are five others that had failed. I thought this one would fail too, so I effed up there. But set that aside. You know what they have to ask themselves? If it's a million dollars in five or six years and they knew about it 100, aren't they going to experience regret? You know, and if it's 10 million in, you know, 20 years, aren't they going to experience more regret? And so to me, it's not a matter of whether you buy it or not. It's a matter of what's your sizing on it. And you know, it's volatile and there's some big drawdowns. And the way you and I both know, there are people who get hurt in it. If you bought right at the top and you panicked in a drawdown, you get hurt. That would be wrong. But if you hold for four years, it's always come back. It's higher highs and higher lows. And the other model I use a lot, I try and use an analogy, and some say it's a little bit extreme or doomerish. But I like to use it, which is, you know, the US dollar. And the monetary system is, in my view, the Titanic. It's going down, it's broken, they can't stop it. It's going down. And so there are these lifeboats floating next to the Titanic and one of them is called bitcoin, the other one's called gold. And you were fortunate. I was fortunate. I bought seats in these lifeboat a while ago and I'm glad I did because they're more valuable today. And so you, Mr. New Investor who's now becoming aware of the monetary problems that we face, you know, the seat for me might have been $400 or you know, in Cold's case it was 300 or might have been, you know, I bought coins at 60,000, don't get me wrong. But and to you today it's been, it's 108. But remember, you're on the Titanic. Do you want the seat? Do you know what I mean? Do you want, you know, it. So you gotta, if you really, if you see, if you, if you understand the risk and you don't have to buy a full seat, you know, I mean, so take a 5% allocation, you know, I mean, but just don't ignore it. I have a lot of clients, many of whom are older, many of them hold a lot of gold. And I've tried to convince them. I said, you know, that's, that's fine and gold will protect you, it's good. But you know, for, for the optionality and the asymmetry of it, you really need to think hard about having a piece, you know, of this. And whether that's 1% or 5% or 10%, I mean, obviously in your case, my case we're higher than that. And that's because we fully believe and understand it. But, but the point is to have zero is really a mistake. And I try to emphasize that to everybody I talk to. Yeah.
- [48:35]
Walker America
And for people, people that want to know, I, I will. I have bought all the way up to whatever the all time high was recently. I bought up to 123k because that dollar cost average. And so, you know, it's, it's like, you know, it's like I, I, yep, I have, I buy. I may, I am a buyer at every price, no matter what the price of bitcoin is.
- [48:54]
Larry Lepard
Same here. And I, and I typically, the only thing I typically do is I typically, I go to strike. I love strike, by the way. Big shout out. And I just have a ladder buy underneath you know, I. I know there's more I want. And so, I mean, I got hit on, you know, 112, 111, 110, 109. I don't think my 108 got hit. I can't remember. I'm pretty sure it didn't, but I. I had a 107 and a 106 and a 105, and, you know, and yeah, it's just. That's the way I go about doing it. Everybody does it differently, but, yeah, it's. It is. You know, and. And the thing that's the other thing I want to. I think I want to emphasize to you that and to the audience, I think it's very important. Is it. As you know and as I know, I mean, we're smiling, we're happy. Once, Once you cross over into this, once you really understand it, once you see where we're going, it's a very peaceful and nice existence. I mean, and you kind of. There's a certain sense of calm and. And just positivity that. That emerges. I mean, it. Bitcoin changes you. And in my case, it really changed me because I remember my dad retiring with some money that most people would say, that's a lot, but it really wasn't. It was modest, but. And I remember by the time he passed, you know, it wasn't really. He'd run through it all or it wasn't very much. He didn't live high or anything. It was just inflation had eaten it up. Right. And I think. I know many of these stories where somebody will have worked their whole life to be 65 years old. Maybe their house is paid for, maybe they have a decent savings and. But they think, you know, I can't really stop working because I don't know if I have enough. You know, if there's a lot of inflation, I live to 90, I'm going to run out of money. And that really makes their latter years stressful. Do you know what I mean? And, you know, I'm 68 right now, and, you know, I can kind of sit there and think, gosh, you know, what if what I've saved doesn't really debase? In fact, maybe if it even goes up a lot in value, I'm fine, you know, I mean, because I'm protected from inflation, so I'm fine. And. And, you know, maybe I, you know, I can. I can relax a little bit. I don't have to have that existential fear of running out of money. And I think a lot of human beings have an existential fear of running out of money. And understandably so. It's no fun to think about being poor, you know, and so that's why they, they just keep working themselves. In fact, I saw something on one of the networks this morning, talked about, you know, a lot of people are saying, you know, they're basically going to work until they drop because they really don't have much choice. And I, you know, and I find that sad. I mean, I think it's, you know, one would think that after a lifetime of hard work, if you live somewhat responsibly, you might be able to take some time to enjoy it with your grandkids or traveling or, you know, not, not, you know, you don't want to be a greeter at WALMART when you're 80 years old. But, you know, sadly, that doesn't happen for some people.
- [51:28]
Walker America
Well, I think, I think fiat, one of the really insidious and sick things that it has done is it has taken so much of the dignity out of life.
- [51:36]
Larry Lepard
Yeah.
- [51:36]
Walker America
It has taken the dignity away from people where you used to be able. And you should be able to put in an honest day's work.
- [51:44]
Larry Lepard
Yes.
- [51:44]
Walker America
And you know, work, work hard, you know, do, do right and come back and take care of your family and live a, you know, a comfortable life. You know, you don't have to live lavishly. But to live a comfortable life and to be able to retire, you know, at 65, that's after whatever 40 plus years of work, almost 50 years of work, that's not so unreasonable.
- [52:04]
Larry Lepard
Right?
- [52:05]
Walker America
You should be able to do that. That's not so unreasonable.
- [52:07]
Larry Lepard
No, it's not.
- [52:08]
Walker America
You can't do that. You can't do it. Because also, in addition to working all day, you need to be an expert investor. You need to figure and a gambler and a speculator and everything else. And it's just, it's insane.
- [52:21]
Larry Lepard
Yeah, it is insane. Yeah. And there are so many scams out there and there are lots of ways to lose money and it's, it's, yeah, it's actually very, very hard. It's very, very hard. I mean, and so for that, you know, for that as well as multitude of other reasons, I think bitcoin will defund war and you know, I think bitcoin will defund the government, you know, in a lot of ways. And you know, we need a government. We need, you know, I don't want to live in an anarchy. I want, you know, I think the, the, the original premise of the founding fathers of the country and women too, is that, that, you know, we'd have a fair set of rules and you know, I want the government to enforce the laws and have courts and have police officers and defend, defend us. Insofar as we have legitimate overseas threats. I don't think there are many of those out there, but we invented a lot that we pretend are, you know, fine. But I think my guess would be that a 10 or 15% consumption tax levied equally across the whole populace got all that covered easily and then all the other stuff just shut it down. You just don't need it. So. Yeah, but that's, you know, that's, that's for the bitcoiners to decide because I think what'll happen is the other thing I would, you know, two, two points I'd like to make that I think the average person doesn't fully understand. And if I get some, we were talking earlier, I'm trying to get on some major media and I'm going to emphasize two things. One, I think that inflation is going to really be the story of this decade and I think people are underestimating the size of that risk and they need to be much more aware of the size of that risk. It's about to get worse in my opinion. Two, if that's the case, the transfer of assets from those who understand that and can adjust their behavior according to that versus those that don't is going to be really kind of mind boggling. I mean it's, you're going to really, you know, in 10 or 15 or 20 years, just like, you know, who went to work in tech and was an early employee at Microsoft or Google or whatever it might be, you're going to know in 10 or 15 years who understood sound money and saved in things that couldn't be debased and you're going to know who didn't because they're, they're, you know, they're not going to, they're financially going to be in much worse shape. And to me the transfer, you know, the wealth transfer is going to be really significant. And so people, people need to think that through because it appears to be going slowly right now. But to you and me who are in it, we're watching it, it's actually going really quickly, it's happening fast. I mean we're going to be, you know, we're going to be at two hundred thousand dollar bitcoin, you know, probably sometime tail end of next year. I mean this, you know, it's pretty amazing what's happening and and, and in turn, if you think these prices are bad at the grocery store, hang on to your hat. I mean, sadly, it's. I think it's going to get worse, you know, I mean, I don't know, the whole pricing thing. I'm turning into my grandfather. I had a grandfather who's from Maine. He was very conservative, he was very cheap. And everywhere he went, he complained about prices. I mean, everywhere. We'd go to a restaurant, he'd get a bowl of Soup, it was 50 cents. He was bitching. This used to be a quarter, you.
- [55:24]
Walker America
Know, and he was. But he was right. You know, he was right.
- [55:28]
Larry Lepard
Yeah, I'm turning into that guy, you know, I'm trying. Old guy who bitches about prices. But frankly, we're all going to be cranky. Old folks, not old. We're all going to be cranky and bitching about prices if they keep printing the way they're printing.
- [55:40]
Walker America
I mean, that's the thing. You can only lie to people, lie straight to their face and just bullshitting them straight to their face for so long before they say, well, but what you're telling me is the exact opposite of what I'm experiencing in my life every single day. So you can tell me things are all fine and it's all going according to plan, it's all under control, but I can't afford to eat the same things that I ate before. I can't afford to have a steak. Like, I can't afford to do that because it's 4x the price. People will only believe the bullshit for so long.
- [56:17]
Larry Lepard
Exactly. And it's across so many spectrums. You know, take this jab and you're gonna be safe. You won't get coke, the after effects. And then people are having myocarditis and dropping dead. I mean, it's just, they're, you know, what we're coming to see. And, you know, this is all. I mean, I loved yesterday. Robert Kennedy went after all these senators. And, you know, the, the, you know, this is because the pharma complex has just basically made the entire country sick. And, and they live off of us being sick. And, you know, food companies live off of us eating too much sugar and processed crap. And so, you know, in, in the 70s, 13% of the country was overweight. Now 65% of the country is overweight. I mean, it just goes into every single facet of where we are. And, and, you know, you know, as you and I like to say, bitcoin fixes this. I mean, if we, you know, if it just takes the grift away from a lot of these industries. There was a question, I know you put out a request for questions about things and one of the ones that got asked I thought was a really good question, I'll try and answer it for your audience is what am I looking at to see, you know, where we are in the whole process? And it's, there's no magic to this, folks. I mean, it's pretty simple. I mean, I'm watching the bond yields, the 10 year bond yield, I'm watching the price of gold, I'm watching the price of silver, I'm watching the price of bitcoin, I'm watching the 20 and 30 year bond yields, I'm watching M2 growth. And you can find that on the Fed's website, I'm sorry, on the Fred website. And then I very carefully watch what the Fed says, what the Treasury Secretary says, what Stephen Mehran, who's the Council of Economic Advisors just been nominated to the Fed says. I mean, I watch what, you know, what Trump says. All these guys, I mean, and there've been a lot of interesting clues. I mean, Trump said something like, he has to make gold, makes the rules. Another interesting thing that occurred was, you know, Trump said, they came in, remember, and they said, well, you know, we're going to audit Fort Knox, right? I was pretty excited. That's great. And then Trump's a gold guy. I mean, he gets it. I mean, he nominated Judy Shelton to the Fed board. Of course she was savage. I talk about that in my book inappropriately savage. And well, what's really interesting, they got in there suddenly that got all, you know, kind of like Epstein, right, they got in there suddenly really quiet about auditing Fort Knox. And so what I'm thinking happened is that they got read in that, you know, it's just not all there. And there's an old, there's a really old hand gold guy in London who I know quite well and he's old enough to know, he knew people who were in the treasury administration for Johnson, So this is, you know, 60s, right? But he knew the people who were there. And the word from them is that when the London gold pool was spun up in the 60s, the mid-60s, and this was the first effort to suppress the price of gold before we broke the gold standard in 71, Johnson shipped gold from Fort Knox to London to help support that effort. And then of course, we didn't get it back. And they were just rip shit pissed that we didn't get it back. Yeah. And so I don't think all the gold is in Fort Knox. Neither does Ron Paul and he told me that once. So, so that's interesting.
- [59:20]
Walker America
It is amazing how, how quickly that just kind of just let's forget I talked about that. Let's just.
- [59:25]
Larry Lepard
Well, and if you listen to Andy Schectman who's very smart on the, on his gold guy and knows the flows because he's in the business, we've had a lot of gold imports. Hard to tell exactly how many get different conflicting reports. But, and somebody would, somebody's, he's argued and others have as well that those imports were actually treasury on the buy trying to refill foreign Fort Knox, realizing that potentially that would be what we would use to do the reset. Now I think there's another interesting possibility here that we should talk about though. And, and it goes to the Jason Lowry thesis and the thesis of what is the soundest money? So the soundest money is the one with the lowest stock to flow right now that's bitcoin. And it's only going to get sounder because every four years the flow gets cut in half. And so it's pretty clear to me that the government understands this. I mean Moran is, Steve Moran is a bitcoin guy, you know. You know Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant is a self proclaimed gold bug, right. I mean he said, you know, I am a gold bug. It's my largest holding. So he gets it. And I think he's bitcoin positive. You know, Trump has said gold makes the rules. Trump's son is actually out there shilling for a gold company saying, you know, my dad believes in the gold standard. Judy Shelton says that Trump told her that he would try her gold gold backed treasury bond on the anniversary next summer. Is it the 250th anniversary, whatever the country on July 4th next summer. So that's an interesting data point. So, so there are sound money thoughts bubbling around in the administration. They're also in the felon defense and intelligence community. Some things going on that I thought were interesting. So I'm in Washington D.C. or I'm in Las Vegas. Guy comes up to me, I can't dox him. But a senior looking guy, very conservatively dressed and said hi and told me his name and I wanted to send him some on his phone. He said I don't communicate that way. You can't do that. And he said I'm in defense work in Washington D.C. and I just want to tell you your book is burning up the halls. And I said, I was like, what? And he said, yeah.
- [61:31]
Walker America
Really?
- [61:32]
Larry Lepard
Yeah, he said, yeah. He said, because? I said, why? He said, well, you know, our job is to look at all threats to the country and to understand, you know, things that could go wrong and what could happen. And obviously hyperinflation is one of the risks. And your book kind of pretty well lays out how that all happens and what the risk is. And then I went, I googled him and I found him. It was hard, but I found him. And he had been and is at three letter agencies, big ones like NSA kind of stuff, actually that's one of them. But. And so, you know, it's legit. And so, you know, there's a possibility in my view that ultimately the federal government will come to understand this is why they're pushing the, you know, the stable coins and you know, the genius act and the clarity bill and all that. Because I think they understand that if this is going to be the winning form of money and we're trying to move towards a monetary reset, it might be better to just skip the whole gold piece and go right to bitcoin. I mean, you know, in the, in past, you know, as many people say, when you have Gresham's law, only one can win. And in the past, you know, gold and silver competed for that role, but silver had worse stock to flow and India and China bet on it and unfortunately, you know, they suffered for doing so. And by the way, you know, India and China also own a lot more gold than we do. Although not reported, it's off the record.
- [62:51]
Walker America
Well, China's warrants have started going, well way up, right. They're making these attestations, say, look, we own all this gold. I mean, whether or not it's just tungsten wrapped in gold leaf is a different story. But I do want to ask you about that because I think there's a really interesting bit of game theory there. Because the US by and large both with the government owned bitcoin, which is minuscule even compared to Strategies Holdings. But government owned, confiscated bitcoin, corporate bitcoin holdings strategy being obviously the most massive of all those orders of magnitude. And then individual holdings. The United States is far and away the largest nation when it comes to holding bitcoin.
- [63:30]
Larry Lepard
Absolutely.
- [63:31]
Walker America
Now, now that is advantageous for us. Have you thought about how do you see this playing out in terms of the game theory? Like it seems maybe it's more likely just because old habits die hard, that if we were going to resort to a sound Money stand or revert to a sound money standard, we'd go back to gold. Because, you know, it's like. It's what? You know, but for. To me, the game theory makes more sense for it to be Bitcoin. If you want to advantage Americans and disadvantage our adversaries, it makes sense for it to be Bitcoin. Right?
- [63:59]
Larry Lepard
Totally. And I think, you know, what? I don't know and what's so hard to tell Walker, is, you know, he's only got four years. I just don't know how bold, daring he's going to be. But I'm pretty sure that the Jason Lowry is the CIA, you know, the. The defense intelligence community that's watched our nation get hollowed out. And I mean, you know, in a funny way, it's kind of good. I mean, we couldn't fight a war right now with China if we wanted to because all the rare earths they have are necessary for us to fight that war. And so I don't think China's going to attack us, and that's a good thing. And I don't think we're going to get into a war with them because, frankly, we couldn't. So. And by the way, I think wars are kind of going to kind of ultimately just kind of fade away as part of humanity's existence, because I think we're getting more enlightened and we realize that they don't do much and they're just. They're destructive. So. But yes, you're right. I mean, that would be the absolute, you know, boss move to make, to just jump over and go to a full bitcoin standard. And, you know, I don't know. Stranger things have happened. It could happen. I mean, you know, if you told me three years ago, we'd have ETFs and we'd have a president who supports it, and we'd have a strategic bitcoin reserve being talked about. And I mean, I would have said, you're out of your mind. That'll never happen. And yet look at where we are. It's happened, right? So, you know, yeah, it could definitely happen. And I know. I know which one I want to own in the longer run. And by the way, they could coexist for a while. I mean, you could, you know, you could have a standard of sound money based on gold and bitcoin. I mean, I think in bitcoin is going to continue to go up into the right in gold terms. I mean, just no doubt. But gold is going to continue to go up into the right in fiat terms. And so, you know, they both will play a role in demonetizing, you know, fiat and making fiat worthless, which is where I think it's headed. So yeah, the politics of it are, it's hard to know and it's complex. But, you know, I'm pleased, but I'm pleased at knowing that. I think we have an administration that actually somewhat understands the issue. And, you know, the solution to this all really is a monetary reset. And the hope is that we don't, things don't have to get too bad before we have that reset. What I would hope is that we get to very high rates of inflation, everyone's screaming in pain, and we get some very enlightened and intelligent monetary people involved and they say, okay, look, this is really bad. Here's what happened. We had all this debt, we're going to devalue it massively. It's kind of a soft default, you know, and they might even do things like say, hey, China, you know, those bonds, we're just not going to pay them back, you know, I mean, I know we gave it to you, but we're not going to pay them back, you know, and, and you know, we're going to, and we've sinned in the past, but we are going to, you know, balance the budget and commit to be on a sound money standard going forward. And you know, if, if a budget's not balanced, it can't be passed and there will be, you know, and maybe we'll shut the Fed down too. I mean, it's, you know, again, all kind of laid out as possibilities in the book and pretty tricky to implement and maybe only implementable after there's just enormous pain. I hope not. I hope what will happen is we'll get to more. I mean, right now most people don't even realize we're in the problem. But I think that'll change. I think in the next five years inflation's going to be at the top of everybody's mind. Everybody's going to be saying to themselves, oh my God, this is horrible, I can't stand it anymore. And some, somebody, some politician will emerge, Thomas Massie or whoever, and we'll say, look, I know what it is, I know why it is, and I know how we fix it. And you know, and by the way, it'll be one time very inflationary because all the old fiat will get marked down against whatever this new sound money is. So there'll be a one time large burst of inflation, but that old debt will be Cleansed. And we will now go forward on a new sounder money standard and the world will get a lot better really quickly. I mean, that's the other thing. And writing the book, I researched many, many hyperinflations, read all these various histories and it's kind of amazing to me when Ecuador went through one, I think in 2000, when these countries have a hyperinflation, if you don't get into a war and you don't elect a madman like Hitler, if you have a hyperinflation and your currency becomes worthless, everyone who has currency obviously loses all their money. But then some new form of money has to emerge naturally, organically, whatever. And generally speaking, it's either a foreign currency that sound like you go to a dollar standard when you're, you know, Ecuador, or it's, it's gold based. And when you go back to that sound standard, things get repaired pretty quickly. I mean most people, they just kind of want to go to work and they want to be paid fairly and they want to be know the money they paid will buy them food and you know, the economy will kind of recover and it'll actually be a lot better and things will be okay. So. So it's not if we have this big inflationary event, this reset, even something as terrible as hyperinflation, unless that drives us into either complete political dysfunction and terrible behavior a la the mandibles, or a war where we get into shooting each other, killing each other and lobbing nukes around, destroy the world. If we can avoid those two outcomes. You know, going back to a monetary reset, all it really does is there are winners and there are losers and the winners are the people who own sound money and the losers are the people who own bonds and obligations that just don't buy as much as they used to because those obligations just could not be kept. That's really how it works.
- [69:35]
Walker America
Yeah, I mean, it's one of the things that I love that you talk about in the book is just the fact that in the United States at least, because obviously that's the kind of the main focus of, you know, your book, but that the system has never been allowed to do to go through that natural reset process. It's never been allowed to actually have a reckoning, to come to terms with the reality. And instead the can is kicked down the road. Kicked down the road. The future, the future generations are. Their lives are mortgaged to basically prop up the present time and time and time again. And I think that's why you see so much nihilism and apathy and just depression amongst the youngest generations right now. Because, of course, how would you not be, you know, you're looking at. You're looking down the barrel of never being able to afford anything meaningful that your parents and grandparents had.
- [70:25]
Larry Lepard
Yeah. Fentanyl deaths, all of it. Yeah. No, it's suicides. It's. I asked Chat GPT how many deaths inflation has caused. You know, like in Alaska, we. I don't know how the heck it computed it. I mean, it's just an AI engine, but it came up with like $5 million. Five million. I mean, it's just, you know, inflate. I mean, look, running the world this way is not a good thing. In the book, Right. In the beginning of the book, it shows as the inflationary era began, you know, how what I call deaths of despair, you know, suicide, you know, drinking, alcoholism, drug overdoses, just rose incredibly. I mean, when you take the economic foundations of an economy and make it unfair, you take away people's lives, livelihoods. I mean, you know, watch the documentary. There's a great documentary called Dopesick. I don't know if you watched. It's about the Sackler family. It's really worth watching. It's depressing, but. But excellent in terms of explaining how the Sack. What criminals the Sacklers were. And it just shows how, you know, as we, you know, we joined the wto, China started taking away all the manufacturing jobs. And so much of the Midwest, you know, was able to borrow cheap. And. And then, you know, these drug agents, you know, got in there with the opioids and so forth, forth, and. And, you know, we had a nation of drug addicts, and all these people's kids were dying from opioid overdoses. And. And then the parents were dying from opioid overdoses because they felt like they lost their job and their life was hopeless. I mean, it's. It's just. It's terrible. It's just absolutely terrible. I mean, this is not America. This is not what we. It's not what we were meant to be. It's not who we are. It's not, you know, this is not the. The ideal. The Founding Fathers and. Yeah, so it's. Yeah, it's. It's some pretty. It's some pretty grim shit, to be frank. But. But, you know, like I say, your generation, I mean, you know, you got yourself, you got Jack Mahlers, you got, you know, you. You got these young people in their 20s and 30s who, you know, Marty Bent and all. You guys realize and understand that you're fighting for a better system. And, and you're, and your numbers are growing, you know, I mean, and, and you, and you get it, you get how broken this all is. I mean, I've got a son who's 24, and you know, I asked him the other day, I said, you know, I said, I said, you know, you realize that, you know, the CIA killed Kennedy and this was, you know, and Johnson, the CIA killed Kennedy and our government's incredible. He said, oh, fuck, yeah, dad. All my friends know that. Well, I'll tell you, my father was an army vet, and before he passed, I remember saying to him once, you know, dad, you are aware that the CIA murdered Kennedy. And he was so fucking pissed off, you know, he was just. Yeah, well, is a great. The notion that some, that our country could be that corrupted, that that would have happened just shook him to his core. And he was, he was angry at me for even suggesting it. And yet the evidence is just so totally overwhelming. He can't take a crime like that and hide it forever. Right? And, and so, and that's, that's what's happening. I mean, the Overton window shifting, the gaslighting is falling apart, all of it. You know, the New York Times used to tell us what to think. Now you can listen to Tucker or Rogan or anybody, you know, and, and you realize that half of what you're being told is just blatant out and out lies, you know, by people with a self interest of protecting their privilege. So, you know, it's, it's all, I'm very encouraged. It's all going in the right direction. And I think, you know, every, every generation's got kind of their burden to bear. And, you know, I don't know, maybe as a boomer generation, I haven't had much of a burden. We had a pretty good ride and it wasn't all that tough, to be frank, but, but I feel like in the later years of my boomerhood, I at least ought to try and contribute to helping you guys get it right, because I care about my kids and grandkids and, you know, you guys are going to be the greatest generation because you're going to figure this shit out and fix it. You know, it's. You got to. I mean, I mean, perfect example, my kids are all doing really well. They all have really good jobs. And the notion that, and one of them's 30, one's 27, one's 24, then the notion of them buying a piece of real estate it's like zero. I mean, it's just. It's not even a possibility. They can't even begin to think about that. You know, they, in fact, just. I mean, I've told them they need to save 10% of their wages and compound it, and even that's tough, you know, at the levels they're at, just if they want to live a normal life. So it's hard. It's really hard for young people today. And I get it. You know, it's.
- [74:42]
Walker America
I mean, the nice thing is that we have. And you touched on this, we have so much access to information now where things that would have been unthinkable to believe in prior generations are just. Yep. Like, yeah, of course the CIA killed Kennedy. You know, who else would it be? You know, who else could it possibly be? So, like, that is powerful. And with that, of course, not everybody's going to use that information and actually go down those rabbit holes and learn these things, or maybe they do. And that just makes them even more depressed because it's like, well, if the CIA can just kill Kennedy, then what chance do I. Like, I don't know what. This is all just fucked. I guess I'll just give up. But if you can escape that nihilism, and I think one of the big parts of escaping that nihilism, which is an understandable tendency, a huge part of escaping that, is finding bitcoin, because then you realize there is a path out of this for you and for everyone. You just have to find that.
- [75:45]
Larry Lepard
Absolutely. And I, you know, I was fighting this battle forever as a sound money gold guy. And, you know, a friend of mine said to me, hey, Larry, I'm going to. You know, we've got these bitcoiners over here, and these are the angry villagers, and they got pitchforks and, you know, and torches, and they're storming the village and the central bank village, and they're gonna win, and I'm gonna jump on their team. And he did. He went off. He went from all gold to all bitcoin, like, instantly. He was very impressive. He's really a neat guy. He bought. He retired in 2001, and he put all his money in gold at 300. Okay? It went to 1900. Did pretty well. And he stayed with it. And bitcoin was around. He wasn't paying attention. In 2011, Bitcoin was still quite early, and gold went from 1900 back to a thousand in 2015. But in 2015 or 16, he figured out bitcoin, and he took all that Money, and he went from gold to Bitcoin. He's done fine. He's done really. He has a neat guy. He's done very, very well.
- [76:37]
Walker America
And that's conviction.
- [76:39]
Larry Lepard
That is conviction, and it's monetary knowledge. And so, yeah, this is the tool, and this is hope, and this is the way out of it. And so. And that's why. That's why we do what we do, you know, that's why you do what you do. That's why I wrote the book. That's why I do all these podcasts. I mean, we're trying to make a difference. We're trying to fix the money so we can fix the world. And we, we have a belief. And so you can, you can argue and say we're wrong, but I, you know, I don't think we are. And time will show us. Time will tell. But, you know, it's. It is hope and it's going. It is going to fix it. I mean, I, I'm, I'm extremely. I'm an optimist at heart. I mean, really, I'm very optimistic about it. But, but I think to, you know, I mean, you know, consider prior fourth turnings. Consider, you know, the depression of World War II, consider the Civil War. Consider the American Revolution. If you really study them hard and you look deep into it. I mean, there was a lot of turmoil, a lot of trial, a lot of people had to suffer to make it through those transitions. And sadly, there's going to be some of that. I mean, I, I hope it's. I mean, World War II is 40 million people dead worldwide. I don't think it's going to be like that. But, you know, there's. There's going to be some turmoil. There's just. There's no way. There's no avoiding that. There's going to be some economic. Some serious economic turmoil. And I think on the other side of that, one group of people is going to be in a much better position than another group of people. And, And I think the people, you know, who could see the future and bet on the future and move towards a better system are going to be advantaged versus those who are kind of stuck in the past.
- [78:23]
Walker America
I couldn't agree. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I think regular listeners of this show may be bored of me hearing this or me talking about this right now, but just talking about the fourth attorney every time somebody brings it up, because it's obviously, if you've read the fourth turning and you're aware of what this is you can't help but say, well yeah, obviously this is what we're going through. And every time someone brings it up, it makes me. I'm again still working and I'm basically fleshing it out with each guest as I come on the show. Trying to think through this a little bit more. But this idea that we're at actually a moment, it's more than just the fourth turning. It's a cyclical convergence. It's a super cycle, let's say in the bitcoin sense, but more so in the convergence of these different cycles. A confluence of cycles, if you will. And it involves multiple different ones. So it involves the fourth turning. Like we are in the middle of a fourth turning. Undeniably so. Right. It'd be weird to deny that. But we're also in the middle of what Polybius defined as anacyclosis and he was a Greek historian and philosopher a couple thousand years ago. And that's a cycle of political evolution. So you're fourth turning, that's your cycle of. That's generational cycles.
- [79:33]
Larry Lepard
Right.
- [79:34]
Walker America
This anticyclosis is about political evolution. So it starts with monarchy. Rule by one, and it's virtuous, but monarchy declines into tyranny eventually. Tyranny, then that's still ruled by one and it's corrupt. Then tyranny is replaced by aristocracy. Rule by a few, but they are virtuous. You know, those virtuous few stand up against the tyrant, but then that corrupts itself into oligarchy. Okay, now we've got rule by a few, but they're corrupt. That is eventually replaced by democracy. The people rise up, we have rules by the many, and it's virtuous, it's great, everything's good. But democracy ultimately degenerates into oclocracy, which means mob rule, and that is corrupt democracy, right, that then eventually kicks itself off into a strong. Into a strong man, rises up and becomes the new monarch and is virtuous again. And we're back at the start, but we've also got the like. If you're familiar with the Kondrative waves, which is basically, you know, techno economic capitalism, super cycles proposed by a Russian who they killed for doing it. We're also in the middle of or at the end of one of Ray Dalio's long term debt cycles. We're at the end of a fiat currency cycle. And at the same time as all of this is happening, we have Bitcoin and AI. We're reaching this massive convergence. Everything's building To a head. What does that mean going forward? That means that we're going to have a reset of everything. All these cycles are resetting at once. And, you know, it's funny, I actually, I brought this up to Jeff Booth. Not on camera, just off camera. We were chatting, and, you know, I said, you know, so, like, what do you think about this? And he's like, well, Walker, that would make a lot of sense, except for the bitcoin part, because we have never seen bitcoin before, so we have no idea what's going to happen after, but it's not going to be what happened before. And, of course, Jeff always puts you in your place a little bit, but it's crazy to think about. Undeniably, there's going to be a massively chaotic period. In the short term, I think we're in agreement on that. But in the long term, I'm very hopeful, optimistic, and bullish on humanity. It just may take a little while.
- [81:45]
Larry Lepard
Absolutely. Absolutely. There's just no doubt about it, the outcome. You know, human beings. Most human beings are good. Most human beings want to advance society. And if you look at the long. The long arc of human history, we've made a ton of progress. But that, you know, you have to, you know, steel gets forged with heat. You have to go through these tough periods before you can, you know, get to the next, next level. It's like we're playing a video game. You got to get through a certain period. Now you're at the next level, and we, you know, we got to get to the more enlightened level where, you know, we don't want to kill each other with nuclear bombs. And wars kind of become a thing of the past, and, you know, we take care of more people. I mean, one of the other things I love about your generation is I don't think you're as selfish and greedy as my generation. I mean, I know my kids are much more about everybody doing okay, not them doing okay, and winning. You know, boomers were very much about winning, you know, so, yeah, you're right. These cycles are. There are a lot of. There are a lot of them coming together, and we don't know how it's going to unfold. But. But I do think. I think actually, I think we're going to be pleasantly surprised. I mean, I really do. It's going to be a lot of. A lot of really great stuff that's going to come out of all of this technology. And, you know, it's. I mean, people are going to be able to live longer. People already are living longer. I mean, in spite of all this bad food and all the lack of fitness that we have in the United States. I mean, when Social Security was set up, everyone was dying in their 60s. And, and part of. The, Part of the problem with the math on Social Security is people live longer.
- [83:19]
Walker America
Yeah, that's. I mean, talk about Ponzi schemes, huh?
- [83:22]
Larry Lepard
Right, Exactly. Yeah, it's huge Ponzi scheme. And I, I mean, I know from your point of view, paying any money into Social Security just has to feel like throwing it in a rat hole. Right. Because, I mean. Right. I mean, you know, I mean, I'm.
- [83:33]
Walker America
Not going to see a dime of that.
- [83:34]
Larry Lepard
Yeah. Are you going to see it or, or, or more importantly, I mean, maybe see a dime of it. But is it going to be. In real terms? It's going to be worth a dime. No, not close. Right. It's gonna be a joke. So. Yeah, so that's. That's true. But I, Yeah, that's. I think that's right. It's. It's interesting to think it all through. Yeah, it's, it's. It's all. I mean, in my, in my take, it's all good. And I think the, the important takeaway for all of us who are in it and have at least an understanding of it is to try to help other people and to try to tell other people what's going on. Because the sooner, I mean, you know, my view is having a limit, a less. Less Runway than you on my life. You know, my. My view is I'd like to see as much of it as possible. And I think there are a lot of people suffering under the existing system. So I think the faster we, you know, to the degree that we can, quote, unquote, accelerate, I guess it's. Use a phrase. Everyone used to use this today. If we can accelerate this change, that'd be great. You know, let's. Let's just, you know, it's going to be okay. There's some pain. Fine. Let's just, you know, it's like ripping a band aid off. Let's just do it and get on the other side and my kids will grow up in a fair world and things will be much better. I mean, I think that's. I think it's all possible. But I, But I. But we do have to go to work on the monetary system. The politicians, the way. The way things currently operate have to change. But, and I, you know, I've said this in other podcasts, too. I really Think there's kind of a higher power working here. I mean, I think bitcoin was kind of, like, divinely granted to us. I really do. I mean, we, you know, man, can. We were just. We're screwing it all up so bad, and, you know, along comes Satoshi or the Satoshis, and they, you know, and God gives us this solution to the problem, and we're going to embrace it and we're going to solve it, and then some other problem will arise. I mean, you know, AI agents will become. Will have their own agency and, you know, we'll be fighting them for our survival. Who knows? But that's, you know, that's. That's two or three generations down the road. So we'll have to figure out that.
- [85:35]
Walker America
When we get there, at least the AI agents will probably want bitcoin. So you may as well get some just in case it catches on with the AI agents.
- [85:43]
Larry Lepard
That's. I say that to everybody. I think it's one of his greatest lines. Yeah. Hell was brilliant.
- [85:49]
Walker America
Yeah, absolutely. You know, man, Larry, I could. I could go on with. We should wrap. I want to say to. First of all, thank you for writing the book. Thank you for allowing me to narrate it. For those I highly recommend. Wherever you are, if you're listening right now, search for the big print. You shouldn't need to even put Lawrence Lepard, but you can if you want to. You can get it on Amazon. You can get it. Yeah, it's on Amazon. It's on Audible. It's also on, I think, Apple Books, because that's pulled from. Yeah, pulled from Audible. I do want to share with you. Somebody commented in the NOSTR live stream and they said that this year all of their friends got copies of the big print for their birthdays. So really nice.
- [86:33]
Larry Lepard
Thank you so much for doing that. And I think that's. To me, I mean, you read it and then pass it on. I mean, I want it to be these, you know, like, common sense. Just pass it on. Thank you for supporting it and thank you for everybody who's bought it. Everyone supported, everyone who said positive things about it. I think it is an important message. It's written to try and help people, help, you know, help improve the world. And I'm kind of floored and honored and shocked. I mean, we've sold 40,000 copies, which I'm told is very good for a book. But in turn, I look around and I see there are 300 million people. I'm like, God, we're just getting started. 300 million Americans. And I've gotten close to Robert Kiyosaki, who's a great guy, wrote Rich dad, and he likes the book, he supported it, but he sold 50 million books. So now that's, now that's in 30 years. So.
- [87:19]
Walker America
Yeah, yeah.
- [87:20]
Larry Lepard
And, and Safe has sold over a million copies of his book. So I just hope it continues to sell. And I hope, I hope, more importantly, I hope the message, whether through this book or you can get the message through Safe's book or Lynn's book or Jeff's book, I mean, the message in, in lots of different places, I think what happened is we, you know, we all just. I figured I'll come at it from my point of view and, you know, that'll resonate with some people and then other people won't like it and I'd rather read something else. But I think for, for boomers in particular, I've heard it's doing well. I've had a lot of people say, you know, I gave this to my 80 year old dad and I think he finally kind of gets it. You know, he wants to, he wants to buy some bitcoin and that's very satisfying. I'm like, great. You know, that's, that's, they, they under. They kind of understand it.
- [88:04]
Walker America
So I love it. Is there anything else you want to leave, folks, with, Larry, before we close? We covered a lot today.
- [88:10]
Larry Lepard
Yeah, we covered a lot. No, not really. Just, you know, again, thank, thank you to everybody who's bought the book. I'm humbled and honored and very much in your debt. If you think it's good, don't keep it yourself. Spread the word. You know, let's, let's. And if there's, if you have any ideas for how I can promote it, you know, anybody in the media, I'm always kind of. I mean, I do podcasts, I do everything for free. I mean, I travel places. I'm doing everything I can. You know, it's kind of my last thing before I retire. So I'm doing everything I can to try and spread this word and have an impact and, you know, if you got any suggestions, I'm all ears. So, as most people probably know, I'm very active on Twitter and I do answer DMs, so that's probably your best mechanism to get in touch with me.
- [88:56]
Walker America
You're pretty active on Nostr as well.
- [88:59]
Larry Lepard
I check Nostr every day. I try and make it a policy. Check Nostr, check Twitter. You know, I like Nostr a lot. I really do. It's such a beautiful thing. And I'm. I'm not a super big Twitter fan, but as you know, we all kind of have to use it because it's just such a big platform, so. Yes.
- [89:16]
Walker America
And. And on the Nostra subject, thank you to everybody who joined in on the live stream, which is Noster only and will continue to be Noster only. So if you are listening to this after the fact and you're wondering, why didn't I watch this live? It's because you're not on Noster. So the great thing is you can be and nobody can stop you. But, Larry, seriously, thank you for everything you do. Always great catching up, and, yeah, looking forward to seeing you in person again soon.
- [89:40]
Larry Lepard
Yeah, thank you for doing a great job reading the book and my love to Carla and Apollo. You're building a great family. You thinking about number two? That's too personal.
- [89:51]
Walker America
Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, no, that's okay. I mean, how could I not be with a wife like that, you know, doing what I can. But, yeah, now I better. Now I better take this off in case she actually listens to the podcast for once. And here's what.
- [90:04]
Larry Lepard
Okay, Good to see you.
- [90:05]
Walker America
Take care, Larry. Cheers. And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin talk episode of the Bitcoin podcast. Remember to subscribe to this video podcast wherever you're watching or listening and share it with your friends, family, and strangers on the Internet. Find me on noster@primal.net walker and this podcast@primal.netcoin on X, YouTube and Rumble. Just search at Walker America and find this podcast on X and Instagram at tcoin. Podcast. Head to the Show Notes to grab sponsor links. Head to substack.com walker America to get episodes emailed to you. And head to bitcoin podcast.net for everything else. Bitcoin is scarce, but podcasts are abundant. So thank you for spending your scarce time listening to the bitcoin podcast. Until next time, stay free.