#842 Bitcoin Stops Politicians From Having Too Much Control w/ Marty Bent

Marty Bent is the founder of TFTC, a media company focused on Bitcoin, beauty and freedom in the digital age. In this conversation, we discuss Bitcoin, mining, authoritarian states, the World Economic Forum, digital freedom, and why you should start paying attention to Bitcoin now. Marty joined us in the studio as a guest on "The Best Business Show". To see the video of this episode, head over to "The Best Business Show: LIVE" Youtube Channel. ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp ======================= Imagine coinmarketcap - decentralized. 3X in valuation is 15 billion dollars from the current price. Cryptotoday.com starts at zero, at fair launch on 7th of March. No VC. No pre-sale. Team tokens locked. For the people, by the people. For decentralized crypto. Visit http://cryptotoday.com and read the whitepaper for the details.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Marty Bent is the founder of TFTC, a media company focused on Bitcoin, beauty, and freedom in the digital age. In this conversation, we talk about everything from Bitcoin to mining to authoritarian states, and also the World Economic Forum, digital freedom, and why you should start paying attention now. I really enjoyed this conversation with Marty, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by BlockFi. BlockFi provides financial advice for crypto investors. Those products include the BlockFi Wallet, a US dollar loan collateralized by

• 0:43Anthony Pompliano?

  your crypto, and a no-fee trading product. BlockFi also released the world's first crypto rewards credit card. It's a Visa credit card that gives you crypto back as your rewards instead of cash back or airline miles. They recently introduced Rewards Flex, so customers choose which crypto assets they receive from their credit card rewards from the BlockFi Rewards credit card. For people in the US who own or are interested in owning crypto or stacking more stats, the BlockFi Rewards credit card provides the easiest way to earn more crypto, because you earn 1.5% back in crypto on every single purchase, and you have no annual fee. I'm an investor in the business and a very, very happy user. The BlockFi Rewards credit card is the easiest way to earn crypto. For a limited time, when

• 1:25Anthony Pompliano?

  you sign up using my link, blockfi.com/pompcc, you will get $75 back in crypto on your first swipe. Use your everyday spending to diversify your crypto portfolio. I've got the credit card, I love it, and I think you will too. Head on over to blockfi.com/pompcc today. Next up is Choice. It's time to stop paying capital gains taxes on your Bitcoin, and Choice is here to help. Choice is rebuilding the way Bitcoiners approach retirement by making it possible to invest in Bitcoin and 19 other digital assets inside your IRA. Right now, every time you make a trade, you have to pay capital gains taxes that can be as high as 37%. Choice enables you to trade real Bitcoin, other cryptos, and stocks without having to pay a dime in capital gains.

• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

  The best part, they just released an iOS app, so you can open an account in less than 10 minutes and take control of your future from the palm of your hand. Join me in the 20,000 other Bitcoiners who have started their tax-efficient stack and open your Choice account today. Search "stack sats" in the App Store or visit choiceapp.io/pomp. Again, search "stack sats" in the App Store or visit choiceapp.io/pomp. And one more thing, if you want to hold your private keys, Choice lets you do that, too. Start stacking tax-efficient satoshis today and visit choiceapp.io/pomp. This episode is brought to you by cryptotoday.com. Exchanges got decentralized, money got decentralized,

• 2:53Anthony Pompliano?

  and the only bottleneck is the very sites listing them all. cryptotoday.com is like decentralized coin market cap. It's the first of its kind. There's no bribes, no connections, or heavy fees are needed to get listed like on the centralized sites. You can simply request on the blockchain and disperse the prize on-chain to the community and get fact-checked by thousands of eager crypto users. cryptotoday.com treats very differently. There's no pre-sale, no VC money, and all of the team is locked up for at least one year. All the centralized competitors have valuations in the billions of dollars. cryptotoday.com started out at $0 as the first decentralized token information site. You can read the white paper at cryptotoday.com.

• 3:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Again, go to cryptotoday.com to learn more. All right, let's get into this episode. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 4:07Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a lot going on in Kanye's world. Speaking of somebody who may have thoughts on that, how are you?

• 4:12Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm doing well. I'm actually, I'm happy I didn't wear that shirt today because I almost did.

• 4:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, you almost wore that shirt?

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, we could have been twins.

• 4:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes. Is that, is that like a special shirt?

• 4:22Speaker 03

  I need to go on Fox News, though, for us to be twins.

• 4:23Anthony Pompliano?

  John walked in the office this morning and he literally, he goes, "Ah, Marty Fox News Ben."

• 4:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Can we talk about Fox News first?

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe we talk about whatever the hell you want.

• 4:35Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, so does Tucker Carlson like text you on your cell phone and say, will you come on the show or what happened?

• 4:43Speaker 02

  Not Tucker.

• 4:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Somebody else?

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Particularly, it was, yeah, one of his producers I've been speaking with via text for a few months, obviously.

• 4:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Trying to get them orange pilled or are they?

• 4:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, it seems like he's really putting a concerted effort forward to learn more about Bitcoin, what's going on and how it fits into the macro view of the world. And so she's been texting me every once in a while, like, all right, can you explain this for me? And that's what Friday, I thought it was just one of those situations where she's like, can they freeze people's Bitcoin accounts in Canada? I was like, eh, not necessarily.

• 5:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Depends if they know how to use Bitcoin.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  And then she's like, oh, by the way, we want you on tonight. I was like, oh, all right.

• 5:21Anthony Pompliano?

  And then did you go to a studio or did you do it from like your house?

• 5:24Speaker 02

  They had a, they had a van studio show up to our Airbnb.

• 5:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Like a car pulled up and you got in?

• 5:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, we, it was funny. It was my father in law's birthday dinner on Friday night. So we're down here, a little family vacation around his birthday.

• 5:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, that's right, because you were in Miami.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I was like, I could go to a studio in Miami. And they were like, no, we can have a van show up. So I literally went from blowing out birthday candles to a van in our driveway.

• 5:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Were you drunk?

• 5:50Speaker 02

  No.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  I waited, I had one beer before, just to like.

• 5:58Anthony Pompliano?

  We need you on in five minutes.

• 6:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Hold on, real quick. All right. So let's talk about the Canada stuff first. I think everyone generally is like, this is crazy. But there's a couple of different pieces to unpack. The first being, I think that there's nuance around the protests themselves of like, I always think of like, if I was trying to live in a city and a bunch of people came and just parked their cars in like, literally it was a gridlock and you couldn't go anywhere, that'd be annoying for the local residents. Now, there may be a good reason for doing it or not a good reason. But like, I do think that there's an element of like, the people there are like, hey, this sucks. But that's not what's going on anymore. Like, that was like, for like, a day or two. And then it seems like they got cleared out pretty quickly. And then it just became like, what a normal protest would be, right? Where people are like voicing their opinion. But the government

• 6:45Anthony Pompliano?

  like, kept pressing. And that, to me, seems like where people are like, okay, that's crazy. Is that kind of your read on it as well?

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, obviously, it's very heavy. It's an ongoing situation. And I've spoken with a couple of Canadian friends. One actually DM me the other day and they said, they were talking, they're living in New York now, but they were talking to some of their friends that live in Ottawa. And they said that their life didn't really seem all that different a few weeks ago when the truckers were there. Yeah, the honking was a bit annoying, but the government said, stop honking, you'll get fined. And a lot of people stopped honking.

• 7:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Funny how that works.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  It was fine. They said, like, funnily enough, like, as soon as they started cracking down, the police did. That's when they actually noticed that there was this disruption in the city. It was like when the police started doing blockades on the road. And I just think with the whole situation and the reaction to it, I just, I'm somebody who just likes logical consistency and consistency with particular situations. And when you compare the reaction by these governments to what happened in the summer of 2020 in reaction to George Floyd and that whole situation to what's going on now, I just don't think

• 7:56Speaker 02

  there's a lot of consistency across the reactions. There was a lot of damage and destruction in the summer of 2020. And we can have the debate if that's a viable form of protest or not. And then this one up in Ottawa seems very peaceful. You literally have kid bouncy houses like in the middle of the city. And that's their form of protest. And it doesn't seem like the reaction is really because of the disruption of everyday life in Ottawa. But the fact that they really don't like what these particular group of people are actually protesting, which is civil liberties.

• 8:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. One of the things that I'll never forget, watching, because I don't really watch like the news, right? Like in terms of like the live news. But during, I think it was the summer of 2020, remember when The protest, and I'm gonna use that as a terminology of I don't know who, what cause, what side of the debate, whatever, but there was a group of citizens that basically set the police department on fire in like Minneapolis or something. And like, they like, got into the police, and I remember watching that as it was developing, just being like, holy, like, like, this is like another level, right? It's like, okay, protest, got it. Okay, even like, the violence or property destruction, like in New York City, there was,

• 9:20Anthony Pompliano?

  you know, multiple situations where they were breaking glass or whatever, like, again, you get drunk people, who knows if they're part of the protest. Like, when you get to the point where you're literally setting the police department on fire, like, that was like, okay, we, we've breached into a level of this that like, is not gonna be well received by most people.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  Right. Again, it goes back to like, the inconsistency, like, and there's that famous meme of the CNN reporters, like, literally in a gas mask, and there's a city on fire behind them, and he's like, the, the tagline on CNN is mostly peaceful protest. The, the media apparatus, the political apparatus back then was vehemently against, or excuse me, with the protesters in that situation, and they are fighting for civil liberties too. A lot of them, I believe at least, thought they were, and then here, again, in Canada, it's mostly peaceful, and it's, it's, people need to get trampled with horses and put in place. Like, in Philly, where I'm from, they were ghost riding cop cars down Broad Street,

• 10:22Speaker 02

  and they were blowing up ATMs and like, taking stuff, and there, there was nowhere near the reaction that, that the protesters in Canada are, are, are going through right now. But again, two different countries, so.

• 10:37Anthony Pompliano?

  There's also this part of like, I think the police, and, and I wanna be as thoughtful as I can about how to present this idea. I have a theory, which is, when the people who are protesting have like, signs, they're honking, but they're generally.

• 11:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Willing to adhere to the rule of law, the cops actually are emboldened and they can have like a very, very kind of iron-fisted response and they know these people will basically comply at some point, right? But what we've seen in France, in the United States, in many other places around the world is that when the dissent is much more formidable, much more violent, et cetera, actually a lot of what happens is that the police, basically, they walk away, right? They back up and like, it's almost like when two strong forces meet, the police are the ones who back away and they don't become combative, usually because they're outnumbered or whatever.

• 11:43Anthony Pompliano?

  And so it's like very interesting dynamic of like, the more peaceful you are, actually in some way it elicits a stronger response from the police versus if you're, you know, setting the city on fire, the cops seem to be a little, you know, less excited about going outside, I don't know.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the violence begets violence type of mentality, like if you're, if you're gonna meet that violence, that was happening in 2020 with, with police violence, it could have certainly just poured fuel on that whole fire. I think, again, what the, what's going on in Canada right now specifically, what we should really hone in on is that this is a, like, people are fighting for their right to actually be able to live within an economy, to go to work, to

• 12:27Anthony Pompliano?

  It's crazy.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  Make, make a living, put a, put a home over their, their families and actually feed their families and the fact that it's gotten to this point where you have Justin Trudeau and their government enacting the Emergencies Act to freeze people's bank accounts and put people on list if they were supporting the truckers and anyways, it's pretty frankly scary and it's even scarier is that there's not Politicians from the United States or other quote unquote, Western free democracies standing up and saying, Hey, Justin, why don't you chill out a bit? You're

• 13:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Have we seen anyone other than the El Salvador president? I think he had some tweets about basically just being like, Hey, if I was doing this, you guys would be like invading my country.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? But other than that, I don't think we've seen anyone really.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  No, no. And I think that's the silence is deafening and I would consider it somewhat of an endorsement of what's going on up there. Because this is to be real, they want to do this stuff in the United States too. I mean, it's pretty clear that they want to usher us into the central bank digital currency world. The feds talked about it. ECB has talked about it. They want to do it up in Canada, the UK as well. And I mean, I think Majid, which is on Rogan, like this, listening to that on the way down. I think the way he described it was extremely cogent, like they, it's the vaccine passports, which is what's being protested in Canada are the Trojan horse.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  You get people showing QR codes at a restaurant just to go eat and starts there, but then it's, oh, you actually can't eat this burger because it's deemed too fatty. You gotta eat this soy burger instead. And that apparatus, that QR code app, is sort of the Trojan horse that leads to that control over people's lives and economic freedom.

• 14:23Anthony Pompliano?

  People think this stuff is crazy, right? Like, like, and trust me, I wrote this morning about how central bank digital currencies are going to be one of the greatest violations of human rights in history. And people are like, what are you talking about? Like, well, did you read the piece? Right? But I want to walk through a couple of things that are direct examples. This isn't you and I pontificating about this. This isn't like us all putting our tinfoil hats on and like, oh, wouldn't it be crazy if they did? This is real life examples. So first, let's start with the central bank digital currencies. We've got the Bank of England, who's explicitly stated, and Majid brought up the kind of this article that said, hey, look, they want to basically say, here's what you can spend money on, here's what you can't. We know China's already pursuing this. We now see that

• 15:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Canada, quite literally, is saying, if you donate money to this cause, right, we're going to come after you. Business owners, who were literally just serving coffee to the truckers, right? We've seen that video that's gone viral. And so this is not like a crazy idea. Like, this is happening in real time. The other thing is around this idea of like, what you can eat. Because I think when people see that, like, oh, they'll never get to that point. I saw the video of the New York City mayor saying that he's gonna get everyone on like, his vegan diet.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:37Anthony Pompliano?

  It's like, wait a minute, like, who said vegan diets were the best diet, right? Like, I don't know, it just sounds crazy to me.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's trying to institute like Meatless Mondays, or something like that. I mean, that's the thing about all of them. This is something Bitcoiners, myself included, I've been covering for some time, is this encroachment, it's like a slow drip towards these systems. And we've seen it over the last two years, specifically, like, two weeks to flatten the curve. Let's just get the old people vaccinated. Now, actually, if you're over 40, let's get everybody, now we need to vaccinate the kids. And it's just like this constant moving of the goalpost. And the thing about it, like, I've read on Twitter, you can go check them out, like, these people, these people in power, I mean, Augustine Carson's, specifically, is the head of the Bank of International Settlements, the BIS, came out

• 16:27Speaker 02

  a couple of years ago and described exactly what they want to do at the CBDCs. They want to be able to control where you spend your money, how quickly you spend your money, what you can spend it on, whether or not you can actually spend it, depending on what you've done or said in the past. And that's part of, I guess, the great psy-op that's going on right now, is that these, these people who want to usher us into these digital panopticons, will say it publicly, there's video, there's receipts, and Like you said, people think we're crazy for for calling this out, but you can literally point to it. They tell you exactly what they want to do.

• 17:05Anthony Pompliano?

  So I'm just gonna read for a second here. I just typed in New York City Mayor Meatless Monday. That was my starting point. Real genius over here. And the first thing that comes up is a Politico article that talks about the mayor, Eric Adams, former New York Police Department Captain, traded jelly donuts for kale smoothies when diagnosed with type 2 diabetes five years ago. Since then, he reversed vision loss and nerve damage. He shed 35 pounds and he anointed himself a spokesperson for a plant-based lifestyle. That was written in December of 2021. Okay. What surprised me is the next result. Mayor de Blasio announces citywide Meatless Mondays. So not even mayor, before he even got there, got de Blasio, and he said

• 17:48Anthony Pompliano?

  that cutting back on meat a little will improve New Yorkers' health and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So, okay. So then I went and I looked and what he did back in 2019 was de Blasio introduced Meatless Mondays across all New York City public schools. And the idea was the 1,800 public schools will no longer serve meat on Mondays to their 1.1 million students, which started in July of 2019. And then there's an article in the Indy 100 that says New York's first vegan mayor, and I'm not talking about Eric Adams, makes history with meat-free Fridays in schools. So we now have 40% of the school week, kids

• 18:32Anthony Pompliano?

  aren't eating meat in school. And this is not, as a parent, somebody making the decision, it's not, hey, I as the student don't want to eat meat. This is the government telling the kids what they're gonna eat in a one-size-fits-all dietary mandate, which seems pretty crazy.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  Well, it's really crazy. And again, it's compounding and doubling down on the problem that got us here in the first place. So just like top town control the food pyramid and like the food pyramid that they released in the 70s or 80s, whenever they did that, it was telling people to eat like 12 servings of bread a day, to have like sugars and like insane amounts of fruit, which It of itself isn't bad, but like then they demonize me like steak and I think it's I eat steak, eggs and bacon is pretty much my diet. I had diabetes runs in my family and I don't have it. I have 2020 vision still. I think when it comes to diets is another area. We've been talking about the government trying to top down control money with CBDCs, but now with diet too, they just want,

• 19:31Speaker 02

  they're trying to granularly control complex systems, the human body being one of them by saying, hey, here's the pyramid of food you need to eat. And that is arguably what's led to the spike in obesity and diabetes that we've seen in this country the last 40, 50 years. And it's like this government is not have, I don't know, maybe they do have your best interests at heart, but their, their advice has never really led to good outcomes.

• 19:57Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. I don't want to leave the Canada topic yet because I have a question and I don't know why nobody talks about this in the mainstream media. I saw your article on the Cuban, on the Cuban nipple crisis. Explain this theory that people have, which is that Justin Trudeau is actually the son of Fidel Castro.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  Yes, you just got to look at the nipples. A French Canadian should not have brown nipples. He should have pink nipples. And if you go back and you look at the timelines.

• 20:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Hold on, we gotta really break this down. So there's obviously photos of Justin Trudeau was shirtless just throughout his life and he has brown nipples.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Which if you're a French Canadian, you should have fairer skin and pink nipples.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:45Anthony Pompliano?

  So the question is from the naked eye, why do you have brown nipples, not pink nipples? And this leads to then people looking at a timeline.

• 20:53Speaker 02

  Then you do some digging and you find out that Margaret Trudeau and Pierre Trudeau, who's claiming to be Justin's actual father, did took a trip to, I believe the Caribbean and may have stopped in Cuba right around like nine months before Justin was born. And it's very apparent that Margaret Trudeau was very fond of Fidel Castro, the then communist dictator of Cuba. And there's a lot of video evidence of those two looking at each other very fondly. And there's

• 21:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Pictures of them together.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  Yes. And there's been books written about Margaret Trudeau and I believe she was bipolar and it was very well known. At the time, in the social, social circles, at that political sphere that she was known to sleep around, and I believe my own eyes, you can just look at the pictures of Justin Trudeau throughout his own life, Fidel Castro throughout the course of his life, and then compare that to pictures of Pierre Trudeau.

• 21:54Anthony Pompliano?

  We're gonna pull the picture here of the nipples, just so people realize that we're not, uh, we're not joking around.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:01Anthony Pompliano?

  That this is serious stuff. And then also, I think that we have a, a couple of images that I think we can pull up of Trudeau's supposedly biological father, Fidel Castro. Now, the reason why this is important, right, as much as people joke around on the internet, etc., is that people started to say, well, hold on a second, like, there's a lot of similarities between the governance under Castro and now what appears to be the governance in Canada. And so, forget for a second who's actually, who's father, like a episode of Maury, right? But instead, like, there is a lot of comparisons between these governments now.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's whether or not there was some long con where behind the scenes, Fidel was colluding with, with Justin to bring communism to, to Canada. Again, this is all theory. I think there's a non-zero probability that he is the child of Fidel Castro. And, like, regardless if it was planned or not, like, it is undeniable that Justin Trudeau's turned into a tyrannical, I mean, you can, maybe you can say dictator with what they're doing with the emergency.

• 23:15Anthony Pompliano?

  So we have the images, you can't see these, they're on the screen right now, of Pierre Trudeau, Justin Trudeau, and Fidel Castro. This comes from Marty's Bent, which you should go subscribe to. But, uh, a lot of eyeball in here, you don't gotta be a genius to ask some questions. And I think that we pulled up also, I actually don't know will we get kicked off of YouTube for showing male nipples, maybe, you know, who knows what happens on, on the internet these days.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, YouTube's a pretty, pretty late with the trigger figure of these.

• 23:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, we have you guys ever here's a little nipple gate for you. Those are brown nipples according to my eyes. By the way, the reason why it's funny is because it's like a great joke where like every comedian you have. You have to have a hint of truth and like it makes it funnier like that's kind of why everyone's like, ah. That's an interesting conversation because another topic of conspiracy theorists over the last two years like lethal track record of accuracy compared to what I think people would have wished for them to have. Right. And so you can go back to pre what I'll call Western world pandemic where, you know, Blaji, a couple of other folks were like, dude, hunker down like, you know, there's a pandemic underway and people are like, okay, crazy person.

• 24:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Bam, there we go. Then vaccine passports, you know, was a whole other and like you just go through these things and you're just like, yeah. Like there was a lot of accuracy and a lot of those conversations early on.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  Lab leak. I mean, I think it's becoming abundantly clear. I'm sorry, this like there are treatments, I won't name the specifics to be to be cautious for your YouTube channel, but there are treatments.

• 24:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Appreciate you protected us from the censorship czar.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  There are treatments that were discussed early on and villainized early on and even midway through the pandemic that that are proving to be pretty effective. I can say from personal experience, I've taken one of them myself and it helped me have a rapidly quick turnaround from pretty frankly brutal.

• 25:19Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, we're now at the point like, and I think part of what ends up happening. So whether it's the treatments themselves. I remember the day that Zero Hedge got taken down and I literally turned to my wife and I was like, that's definitely true then.

• 25:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Like it's just like, we were just at this point of like, okay, you guys are going to take that down like probably we should ask some questions about that theory. To now, I mean, what is this? This is, uh, what's the date here? February 17th. So literally, you know, five days ago, uh, in the Wall Street Journal, uh, they published an opinion piece. Another potential COVID-19 lab leak clue was the title, uh, investigating the pandemic's origin is still worth the effort. And this is an entire article about why the literally one of the sentences from the Wall Street Journal piece is yet the world already knows enough to take the lab leak theory seriously. Like, that would not been okay to say two years ago on the internet. And now, conversation's changed, which leads to this whole conversation around like, you

• 26:17Anthony Pompliano?

  may not know what the truth is. How can you be the arbiter of truth if you don't even know what the truth is in these situations?

• 26:23Speaker 02

  And it's also, they highlights that the Overton, like, the media and political sphere can control the Overton window where they can just gaslight the people into believing, like, oh, it's okay to talk about this stuff now. Like, yes, it's widely known that it probably spread from a lab. But like, you can go back, I mean, there was emails between Fauci and the, one of the lead doctors in the UK, early on, basically trying to collude to, to squash the, the lab leak theory. And those are public information that were accessibly via the Freedom of Information Act. And again, you have, like, very hard proof that you can prove cryptographically

• 27:05Speaker 02

  via, like, email encryption, that, hey, they were colluding early on to bury this theory. And that's what blows my mind, is that, and we have all this evidence. And again, it goes into, like, the gaslighting tactics of the power structure, if you will. Like, you're not allowed to say, like, all right, now that we know, it's pretty obvious that Fauci and crew were trying to squash this early on. Like, why does he have any power now? Like, why are we still listening to him to this day, and having the information that we have now, that he, he was actively trying to sweep this under the rug? Like, how can we trust this man, or, or the people that he's, that he's built around him to actually?

• 27:51Speaker 02

  Act in the best faith, which

• 27:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 27:54Speaker 02

  It's, yeah, the world is.

• 27:56Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up with the, the World Economic Forum? I keep seeing people talking about this. I saw you post a video. Oh, we got the leg crossed. Okay. Now get to the good stuff. What, what is, what's going on? Uh, why, uh, if you had to summarize in like a couple of points, why is that specific organization, the one that people continue to point to and say like, it seems like that's the epicenter for ideas that are antithetical to a citizen's best interest?

• 28:24Speaker 02

  I think it's just, again, like, watch what they say. They say all this stuff in public. There's plenty of receipts out there that you can go back and look through. I mean, they are, they pushed, like, they, they memed Build Back Better into the world. They memed The Great Reset into the world. Klaus Schwab, I believe it was in 2017, was bragging

• 28:42Speaker 02

  to, to a forum of people that the, the World Economic Young Global Leaders had infiltrated cabinets throughout the world. And I think the specific example he was talking about during that conversation was Canada, Trudeau and Trudeau's cabinet. And so, I mean, again, these people say, the World Economic specifically says very publicly that they, they believe that we will transition to a world by 2030, where we have reset the global economy. People don't really own anything anymore. You have these central bank digital currencies. You have biometric ID systems. You have social credit systems. And then, and then you see them spouting all of this, placing people in positions of power

• 29:27Speaker 02

  throughout governments throughout the world. And it's hard not to point at them like, hey, why are you pushing this? And why are people listening to you? Especially now, last few weeks specifically, I think people are really starting to wake up in Canada where it's pretty evident that the will of the people is not being respected by, by the government there. And you had, you had another situation last week where

• 29:49Speaker 02

  you had an MP in the Canadian Parliament say, hey, I had one of my constituents really asking me about the influence the World Economic Forum has over our politics. Klaus Schwab bragging that that their organization had infiltrated Canadian cabinets. And he was zooming in, I believe remotely. And you could hear him clear as day, but the Speaker of the House like interrupted him when he got too far down. The the theory of the World Economic Forum having influence on the Canadian government. He's like, ah, we can't hear you like we're going to come back to you.

• 30:22Anthony Pompliano?

  And never came back.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, again, it's it's pretty obvious that they have an agenda and they're again, putting people in positions of power to try to push that agenda forward. And I think, yeah, they're an unelected organization that really doesn't have the the best interest of individual citizens of different countries around the world at heart. They care about forcing their view of the world on the rest of us. And it's really creepy, number one. And then number two, they've been very effective up to this point. But I think I think the tides are beginning to turn as people wake up like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  I don't I don't want to live in a pod or eat soy burgers or like be forced to have something injected into my body with the threat of not being able to spend money somewhere if I don't do that.

• 31:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Crazy. Let's talk Bitcoin. Obviously, I think you, my brother, many, many people are watching this. Believe Bitcoin is this piece of technology that is created regardless of what happens outside of it. It's going to continue to execute and do what it's built to do. It is kind of immune to the pressures and complexities of the world. It's neither a good nor bad technology, right? It can have a positive impact. Bad people will still use technology for bad purposes. But it's just like this, you know, I joke like it's not really an inanimate object, but it basically is right in a digital form. What's your kind of read so far on the progress we've made from like an actual building of the protocol of the network? The mining infrastructure?

• 32:03Anthony Pompliano?

  It seems like we're headed in the right direction, but is that how you look at it?

• 32:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think the progress Bitcoin has made over the last 13 years. It's been incredible. I mean, it's in terms of mind share and people knowing what Bitcoin is, I think it's pretty much a household brand name at this point. It works like you described. It's the beauty of it. It just works. It's providing people the utility of access to a distributed digital cash system with a hard cap money supply that is desperately needed, an alternative to the incumbent system, which is just stealing your wealth via the inflation and the basement of your savings every day. The software that enables you to interact with

• 32:50Speaker 02

  the Bitcoin network is only getting better. The UX is getting better. Privacy still severely lacking, but that is getting better as well. And then the mining industry specifically, that's one thing I'm most bullish on is because you have this integration of the Bitcoin mining industry with the just overall energy sector throughout the world. And I think that's going to be extremely powerful. I mean, energy is the base layer of our society. We cannot do what we're doing now without a shit ton of energy. And Bitcoin incentivizes, Bitcoin mining specifically, with a proof of work consensus mechanism, incentivizes humanity

• 33:28Speaker 02

  to be as energy efficient as possible. And it's only going to really supercharge the ability for humans to harness energy and bring cheap abundant energy to the masses. And I think the energy sector doesn't know it yet. And this is like one thing I pitch a wheel and gas people when I talk to them is they are replacing central banks, like the energy companies due to the fact that they're most incentivized to integrate Bitcoin mining is they have the lowest, they have access to the lowest cost electricity production just due to the proximity of the source of the energy that they're either pulling out

• 34:10Speaker 02

  of the ground or creating via other means. They're going to replace the Fed window. They're not going to replace the Federal Reserve in terms of being able to. Dictate an interest rate associated with Bitcoin or the amount of Bitcoin that will ever be distributed to market. That'll only ever be 21 million, but these energy companies by proxy of being the largest miners in the world, which I think will happen by the end of the decade is they'll, they'll have the most hash rate and they'll have control over block production, distributed control over block production, which essentially replaces the Fed window. They, they will be the, the, um, the area through which money is newly created and distributed to the market and facilitated.

• 34:55Speaker 02

  Where right now you just had the Fed with their window and the primary dealers that have access that to that window. That's going to shift from the centralized central bank to a more distributed energy sector. And their window will be accessible by many more people than just primary dealers at the Fed window.

• 35:15Anthony Pompliano?

  We saw recently, uh, news of, uh, Konoco.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  Konoco?

• 35:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Konoco, yeah, was, um, uh, it seems like offloading a lot of their, what would be, uh, gas flare, uh, and selling that to Bitcoin miners. Uh, there's been plenty of rumors about everyone from Aramco all the way on down, uh, also doing this. You're talking about some of this energy, um, that, you know, obviously Bitcoin, I think, is the most profitable monetization of energy in the world right now. Is it just a foregone conclusion that the energy sector will become, uh, enthralled with Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining? And it's just game on and it's just who's kind of early and builds the infrastructure the fastest they win? Or how do you think of it?

• 35:58Speaker 02

  I think so. I think it's, it's already happening. I mean, the.

• 36:01Anthony Pompliano?

  What are the secrets? I know you know a lot. So.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  I mean, there's, there are many more super majors, either mining Bitcoin or doing a lot of research into figuring out how they can do it in terms of oil and gas alone.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  The Houston meetup, the Houston Bitcoin meetup, if you're in the Houston area and you're in the energy sector and you want to get to a meetup where you can really understand what's going on between the convergence of Bitcoin mining and energy, that's an incredible meetup and that's actually this Thursday in Houston, if you're in town. And just having been to like four or five of those now, it's just packed with Bitcoin miners and people that work at these oil and gas companies or other energy providers and a lot of capital allocators in that energy space too. And they're all spitballing on how to make this work and integrate Bitcoin mining into their their operational stack. And I do think it's

• 37:00Speaker 02

  a foregone conclusion. Like I said, it just makes sense. They have access to the cheapest electricity by having access to the cheapest energy as well.

• 37:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. One of the things that happened, I don't know, it was probably a couple of weeks ago now, was when Texas was going through somewhat of like a winter storm, all of the miners were turning off and basically redirecting that energy back into the grid. And I don't think that people quite understood until they saw it in practice, how good Bitcoin mining can be for the grid, for the balancing of load, and then also in some way serving as like a battery, right? And allowing for all this excess power to go somewhere, get monetized, and then also be able to retrieve it in times of need. Is that like the right way to think about it?

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of nuances to this topic, and it's actually highly debated in the mining industry specifically. Like, so it is true. Like, if you, the way energy works and electricity delivery on grid system works is the grid typically they'll build out enough capacity for what they estimate to be peak demand for that electricity at any given point in the year. And so peak demand is usually in the middle of the summer, in the middle of the winter, when it's hottest and people want to turn their air conditioners on, and when it's coldest, and they want to turn their heat on. And so grids will build out trying to guess that the necessary capacity to to supply that demand to the market and...

• 38:27Speaker 02

  So the rest of the year, you have all that electricity being produced, but not really being utilized because people don't need their air conditioners or heater as much. So you just have a bunch of excess energy. And so if you don't estimate peak demand correctly, like we saw last year, which was one of the part of the problem was just not enough electricity, then you had a bunch of things failing as well that led to a disaster with the Texas grid going down in some parts. And so with Bitcoin mining, what it incentivizes is like, all right, you can, you can build your grid capacity much larger than you would ever imagine peak demand to be.

• 39:07Speaker 02

  So you know for sure, you could have a 10 sigma weather event where it's, it's extremely cold for an abnormally long period of time, but you will have enough electricity because we've overbuilt the capacity for the grid to, to basically overcompensate by, by a large degree. And we're confident that we can do that because we know that Bitcoin miners will there to purchase that electricity when you have off peak hours. So you're always going to have a customer and you're always going to be able to have a profitable business. But that being said, when it comes out to building out these grid systems, you want the baseload of energy to be reliable. And so that's, there's a lot of strategic mistakes that could be made by just running

• 39:50Speaker 02

  with this meme and, and going after like building out more capacity. If you build out more capacity, I'm a believer that you need to do it with reliable baseload energy. So like natural gas, nuclear, maybe coal even on the backend is like a last resort. But in a lot of areas, what you're seeing is people just build out a bunch of wind and solar capacity, which are unreliable sources. And so you can build out gigawatts of hundreds of gigawatts of wind and solar capacity, but that doesn't really fix the, the, the problem at peak demand times. Like I was another thing we saw in Texas, their grid went down because a lot of the wind and solar that was feeding the grid stopped producing electricity because it was

• 40:34Speaker 02

  cloudy out, so the sun wasn't getting. To the surface to for the solar panels to convert it into electricity and then the wind stopped blowing or the turbines froze up because it was so cold out. And so you had all this capacity of potential energy that could have gone to the grid if the sun was out and the wind was blowing, the turbines weren't freezing, but it just wasn't there because the weather acted a certain way. And so that could have been avoided if you had natural gas peaker plants or nuclear power plants that had sufficient heated lines and sensors that didn't go offline that are more reliable. So, long story short,

• 41:16Speaker 02

  I do think Bitcoin is very good for the grids. It creates an economic incentive to create an abundance of electricity on grid that far surpasses what peak demand would ever be. But it has to be done wisely and with intention, with reliable energy sources.

• 41:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Nuclear, is that going to be a thing?

• 41:35Speaker 02

  It has to be. It has to be.

• 41:37Anthony Pompliano?

  I did an episode in, I want to say maybe 2018, with a guy who had been a nuclear sub engineer. And he walked me through, you know, here's what nuclear is, here's why it's important, here's why the public's perception is incorrect, etc. And I walked away from there and I was like, either that guy's like an amazing salesman, or like, what are we doing? Like, why would we not have nuclear? And so it seems like if that's the best power production methodology, then of course Bitcoin miners will find it, right to some degree.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's, I think it will incentivize the proliferation of small modular reactors. It's going to take time. Here in the United States specifically, we've got a terrible nuclear regulatory body that I don't believe it's okayed the construction of a new reactor in many decades. I mean, nuclear is the densest and cleanest form of energy that humanity has ever harnessed. Yes, there have been disasters throughout time. I see Chernobyl, Fukushima, but the technology has become far superior over time. There's, again, there's nuance to it. Maybe, maybe you don't build a nuclear reactor on the ocean, right on the coast or near a fault

• 42:59Speaker 02

  line, but there are certainly many areas where nuclear reactors make a lot of sense and will provide humanity with cheap, abundant, dense energy and reliable energy. I mean, just look at Germany, what they've done over the last two decades. They're one of the most incredible case studies in the folly of trying to transition to unreliable, quote unquote, "green" energy generation sources of wind and solar. I mean, they are considered one of the economic powerhouses of the world. They have one of the highest residential electricity rates hovering around like 40 cents a kilowatt hour. And that's because they've shut down all their nuclear power plants, replaced them with unreliable wind

• 43:44Speaker 02

  and solar over time. And this isn't to say like wind and solar don't have their place. They certainly do, but to think that we can just transition society to an electricity grids run on these unreliable sources is not wise. It's caused great economic strife in the places that have tried it. And it's actually like a regressive tax on poor people. It's funny because all the environmentalists and hysterics who are like, "We need to go green. We need to go green." They like to pontificate that it's helping poor people and minorities, but what you find is it actually hurts them the most. Like in New York City

• 44:24Speaker 02

  last year, they shut down Indian Point, the power plant, which was up on the Hudson and was serving very reliable electricity to New York City, Manhattan for decades. And they shut it down for environmental reasons, which are bogus, the environmental. All this group that got that nuclear PowerPoint plant shut down did so on the basis of it was killing. There were fish eggs getting sucked up into like the reactor and it was killing like the fish, which wasn't true. If you look at the fish populations in the Hudson, they were not affected at all.

• 44:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Have you ever looked at the, uh, one of the bills, what was the two, the two trillion dollar bill? I think we, we broke down one day, we went through the bills and like one of it was like they gave half a billion dollars or like 250 million dollars or something to, uh,

• 45:14Anthony Pompliano?

  or no, I'm sorry, it was billions of dollars, I think, well, whatever the number was to study like exotic plant species impacted by the building of highways.

• 45:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. And then there was another part that like, uh, studying people's impact of driving high.

• 45:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Like you're just like, like, what is going on right now? And it's the same thing, right? It's like the fish eggs. You're like, okay, like, let's say that the fish eggs are getting sucked up and getting hurt, which I don't know anything about this, but let's just say that's true. But if the net population of the fish triples, then obviously the population growth is, is not being affected, you know, in terms of the fish eggs. And so it's always like, do people lose the plot?

• 45:53Speaker 02

  Not only to lose the plot, but it's like anti-human. It's like, yeah, like, all right, the fish are fine. Like we can prove that by population and then like what you're doing, you're shutting down this reliable energy source for one of the largest cities in the world. And what we've seen right away, like New York, at the beginning of the summer had like rolling brownout warnings. Like they were asking people to turn down their, their, their, uh, air conditioners.

• 46:14Anthony Pompliano?

  While Times Square was lit up.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  Yes. Well, that, well, Times Square should be lit up. Like you can like it.

• 46:21Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm so scared to tell you this, so scared, so, so scared. Let me see if I can find it real quick. Yeah, here it is. So, uh, somebody that works with us, uh, lives in New York. Uh, I don't, I don't believe you know this person. And, uh, they sent me their power bill and, uh,

• 46:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Back, let's call it six, seven months ago, they were paying 6.68 cents a kilowatt hour. And now they are paying 19 cents a kilowatt hour. And the bill went from $54 to $243. So they used more power because it was winter time, right? But also it exploded in terms of almost 300% increase to the cost of power. Now, probably a bunch of different stuff in there, but still like, how does, how does a single mother with two young children who works two jobs pay a $240 electricity bill?

• 47:16Speaker 02

  Exactly. I mean, you're putting these people in a position where they have to decide, do I keep the lights on or I buy food to, to feed my children? Like it's, it's, I mean, that's the thing, like people like to use fields and like, oh my God, we're saving the environment, but you're, you're hurting people at the end. And people are part of the environment. We are part of nature. It's something that's been completely lost in our modern day cultures. We, we think that humans are detached from nature where we're not. We're actually a beautiful part of nature. The, the fact that we have the ability to harness all this energy and use it to leverage our productivity by multiples of 100, 1,000 X to, to bring about modern societies as a feat of human ingenuity and genius that should be celebrated.

• 47:59Speaker 02

  And yet we have a bunch of people, the WEF included, trying to make the masses believe that, that we're bad, evil people that are destroying the planet. And by any objective measure, I think we're, we're, we're net positive for, for nature in the sense that we're actually able to do incredible things. And that's not to say that we should just be mass polluters and not, not take care of the environment. I'm a surfer. I'm, I'm that, that weirdo who yells at people for like littering on the beach. Like I hate when somebody goes to the beach and they like leave shit on the sand. It pisses me off. And I'll be that guy walking back to the beach path and I'll be picking trash up. And people think just because I, I don't think we should transition to wind and solar, then I'm like anti-environment.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  Like it's, it's not the case. These things aren't mutually exclusive. Like you can, you can celebrate humanity and our ability to do all these things. You can be energy efficient, which Bitcoin miner is going to help, help in a massive way. And, and you can do. And you can actually uplift humanity from poverty. Like, think about going to like Africa and India. Like, there was a stat out there. India, over the first two decades of the 21st century, brought electricity to 900 million people. It was just crazy. Almost a billion people. And that has an insane amount of benefit or positive effect on those people's lives.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  Like, they can then go do things. They don't have to, like, walk miles to go get water to bring back. Like, they have the facilities to actually do that now and uplift themselves from poverty because they can focus on other things.

• 49:38Anthony Pompliano?

  John went, what did you do? You went lizard hunting?

• 49:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, iguana hunting.

• 49:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Iguana hunting, because they have-

• 49:43Speaker 02

  Which is good for the environment, so.

• 49:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but that was all things. Like, in that situation, like, literally, there's so many of them that they're like, they don't pay you to do it, right?

• 49:52Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 49:52Anthony Pompliano?

  But you get a, they'll take you to go and do some iguana hunting. What questions you got?

• 49:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, I agree that, like, big companies, one, need to transition the way that they use their energy and using that to mine Bitcoin is very, very good for them. What do you think about the average retailer buying an ASIC, going to a company that will store it all for you, set it all up for you? Like, is there really much incentive for them to do that and kind of go down that route if the energy is so expensive for them?

• 50:19Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I mean, so, again, it depends on your particular situation. Why are you doing it in the first place? Do you want to help the network out? And are you just doing it for altruistic reasons? You want to be, you want to own an ASIC to have a part ownership in the overall hash rate of the network so you can further distribute it? And you're okay at mining Bitcoin at a loss to do so? If you're willing to do that, go ahead. Bitcoin mining has been very profitable last year, obviously, because of the China mining ban, which caused this migration, but that should correct itself moving forward. So, yeah, you do, if you're a retailer, you have to, like, take into consideration, why are you doing this? Do you want KYC-free Bitcoin? Is that why you're doing it?

• 51:04Speaker 02

  Then maybe you're willing to mine at a loss to do that. But it's not to say that all retailers- Wouldn't mind a loss either. There's if you have cheap electricity anywhere between probably like three and seven cents, you can probably mine profitably for for a good amount of time moving forward. With that being said, like if you are hosting at a hosting facility, that's third-party risk that's entered into the equation. And you have to take that into consideration is that hosting provider going to get rug pulled, which has happened many times over the last year specifically. So you have that third-party risk if you're willing to take the ASIC at your house

• 51:43Speaker 02

  and set up your electrical infrastructure to do it yourself. That's certainly worthwhile as well if you want to get no KYC Bitcoin. Yeah, it just depends on your particular situation. If my advice would be if like your goal is to stack as much Bitcoin as possible, and you have a amount of SATS in your mind that you want to have, I would try to purchase those SATS first, get that, and then use the mining as a nice added benefit on the backend to learn. It's a great learning experience in and of itself. Me personally, I have personal miners that I run, but this is a product of me being in the mining industry. For a few years, I was able to find with a couple of

• 52:28Speaker 02

  buddies a natural gas well that was abandoned, provides very cheap gas, and got a good deal on a generator. And so like our all-in cost is relatively low, and I'm comfortable that we'll mine profitably, but it takes a lot of know-how to do that. But luckily for retail miners, there's more information than ever to access to learn how to do it if you do want to do it yourself. Econo, Alchemist, Divertor, KYC, no KYC. Those are two individuals who are putting out really good content there.

• 53:00Anthony Pompliano?

  My last question for you before we let you go. Is it time to finally bring back the phrase, "The virus is spreading"?

• 53:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, can we bring that back now?

• 53:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, you got it. You got it. You have to. I mean, it was re-appropriated from you.

• 53:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, they stole it.

• 53:16Speaker 02

  You had to re-appropriate. It was appropriated from you.

• 53:19Anthony Pompliano?

  John, I don't even think John was on Twitter at this, but pretty much from what, 2016 to 2017, until March 12th of 2020, every time anything good with Bitcoin would happen, I would just type out, "The virus is spreading," and then it kind of took on a different meaning.

• 53:35Speaker 02

  And then he stopped.

• 53:36Anthony Pompliano?

  I chilled out a little bit and I consulted with a couple of people. I was like, is this just like a power-through-it moment or is this like a chill-out? And they were all like, chill-out.

• 53:44Speaker 02

  Now it's time to take that, because honestly, the virus is spreading. After what's going on in Canada the last week, I've seen an insane amount of tweets of people being like, "Oh, I actually get Bitcoin now." Like, people were like, ah, you had DHH, the founder of Basecamp, come out yesterday. You had some strong leader in the Libertarian Party come out and be like, "I always dismissed Bitcoin, but now I get it. I set up a Bitcoin wallet." You have a bunch of Canadians coming out and being like, "My boomer dad, who never saw the value of Bitcoin, thought it was a Ponzi scheme, is dumping 80% of his net worth into it because finally realizes why it's important."

• 54:19Anthony Pompliano?

  The orange pill is a powerful man.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  Well, and that's the beauty of it, too. Like, we don't even need to market it. These governments are doing it for us. They're like...

• 54:27Anthony Pompliano?

  I did have a tweet that I didn't tweet and I typed it out. I deleted it. I typed it out again. I deleted it again, which was, "Dictators are this..." Or I don't know what I said. I said, "Justin Trudeau is the CMO of Bitcoin right now," which like, is true, right? I feel like, because you're here, we're gonna do this. So just all caps, "The virus is spreading." We'll see what, we'll see what happens on Twitter. If we get canceled, it's Marty's fault.

• 54:54Speaker 02

  I mean, it seems like the other virus has gotten to a point where it's like, yeah.

• 55:01Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know if we could say that, that it's over. Of course, by the way, when I said the Justin Trudeau comment, Louis immediately on Slack, "That's a good tweet."

• 55:14Anthony Pompliano?

  It is Lou. For those that don't know, Louis is a, somebody who works with us and is a mutual friend of Marty and I. I think you actually were the one who first taught him about Bitcoin, right?

• 55:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I was the first one to sit him down. I was like, this is why Bitcoin's important. He was into it at that point, but we met, I'll never forget, we met at the Smith and Flatiron. And we sat there at the table and we talked. And he was like, all right, what the hell's going on? And we talked for like a couple of hours. And then he was like, all right, you need to start a podcast. And that's how TFTC started. As Lou was like, all right, you're starting a podcast. I was like, all right, can you teach me how to do that?

• 55:55Anthony Pompliano?

  The first time I ever met Marty was literally, we met at like 7:30 in the morning or something at the Barstool office. And we went in there and I was like, man, this is way too like professional of a setup. Cause Marty was like going over like pressing a button and like running back over.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  That was, yeah. Shout out to Barstool for letting me sneak in your studios and record in the early days. Podcast was never officially associated with Barstool, but while I worked there, I leveraged the.

• 56:24Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, you have to have good quality audio capture. So it was a good place to do it. They seemed to know what they were doing.

• 56:29Speaker 02

  We've come a, come a long way since that, that first episode of Pomp. It's crazy to think.

• 56:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I mean, if you think, that was probably 2017, probably.

• 56:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:39Anthony Pompliano?

  How long have you been doing it?

• 56:41Speaker 02

  It started in September 2017. I think we had you, you came through. Yeah. It was either winter, early winter 2017 or early 2018.

• 56:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Man, it's pretty crazy.

• 56:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:55Anthony Pompliano?

  To, to think about everything that's transpired since then. I actually was talking to Pliny the other day. And her and I met before any of the, like the Bitcoin stuff, right? It's how she always thinks about it.

• 57:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And you just think about like, the first time that I like started to do anything, I think she was like, this is crazy stuff, whatever. Uh, I remember the first time that I met her father, uh, and she was like, oh yeah, he like, you know, does like this technology stuff. And like, he's been like researching this Bitcoin thing and he's like, oh, this criminal, right? You know, whatever. And I was talking to him and, uh, and, uh, he told me, he was like, yeah, he lived through two hyperinflationary events in Bulgaria. I'm like, dude, you're like, you're like the poster boy, like you. And I explained it to him and he was like, this, this is interesting, you know? Like, where can I read more? He's engineer. So immediately he was like, you know, where's the white paper type thing? And, uh, now he, you know, he, he believes, right? And, uh, and kind of sees it, but like, it's crazy to think about.

• 57:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Personal experience is important. How it's presented to you is important. All that stuff. And here we are.

• 57:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. Did he, did he ask for a Bitcoin dowry to take us?

• 58:00Anthony Pompliano?

  No, don't be giving any ideas out here.

• 58:06Anthony Pompliano?

  My brother and I did go to, uh, to India, uh, in 2016, probably in 20, I think 2016. And, uh, you know, I don't think we quite understood how the dowries actually work. And, uh, a buddy of his from work, uh, was from India and was there. So we met up with him. He's explaining the whole thing and we were like, dude, this is wild. And then you like, start realizing like, like, how big are the dowries? You know, like some are like $10,000, some are like $10 million. You're like, okay.

• 58:34Speaker 02

  Very happy that's not an Irish Catholic.

• 58:39Anthony Pompliano?

  It's all right. The, uh, the, the thing that I just keep telling myself is, uh, the Bitcoin that I hold, you hold or anybody else is just, you know, it's like our grandkids Bitcoin, whatever. Just don't screw it up for them.

• 58:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. We, we hold it for our progeny.

• 58:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Exactly. All right. Where can we send people to, uh, subscribe, follow, like, share?

• 59:00Speaker 02

  Subscribe, tftc.io. Very simple. Um, our YouTube's currently down, so you probably, we're probably gonna walk away.

• 59:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Suspended?

• 59:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, we got a strike. Um, we're in timeout right now.

• 59:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Susan, what's up?

• 59:14Speaker 02

  Susan.

• 59:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Don't worry, we're not, she's not fans of us either.

• 59:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, you think for yourself you're on the bad boy list?

• 59:23Speaker 02

  I mean, she was just asking the governments to.

• 59:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that what you guys got the strike for?

• 59:29Speaker 02

  I had a doctor on who was prescribing treatments and we talked about that and they didn't like it.

• 59:34Anthony Pompliano?

  We also had a doctor on, we had McCullough on and I, although we made it abundantly clear, I'm not here to talk about the efficacy and neither are you. I just want to know like, follow the money, like who's making money in this situation?

• 59:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course, you know.

• 59:50Speaker 02

  There's a lot of money being made. We should all be aware of that.

• 59:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 59:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Literally tens of billions of dollars.

• 59:55Speaker 02

  It's a good way to put it.

• 59:56Anthony Pompliano?

  But of course we got, you know, messages from people and they're like, I can't believe you're spreading, you know, and you're like, did you, did you watch it?

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  No, they saw his name and were just like misinformation.

• 1:00:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, of course. Yeah. And by the way, the, the best part is that, uh, uh, the video's got like, you know, 600,000 views, like some crazy, it's like, I think people want this information, right? Like nobody held a gun to their head for them to watch it, but whatever, it's fine. All right. So tftc.io, they can go there and they can get everything.

• 1:00:28Speaker 02

  And at Marty Bent on Twitter, if you want to follow me there.

• 1:00:30Anthony Pompliano?

  We, we pulled it up there. Uh, my favorite part about any piece of content that you create is founder of tftc.io, a media company focusing on Bitcoin beauty and freedom in the digital age. When I read that this morning, I was dying. I was like, beauty and freedom in the digital age is the perfect combination.

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, we need to bring back a beautiful world. Humans are beautiful. We're good people.

• 1:00:55Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, we're just going to end it there. Anybody who, uh, is watching this, make sure that you go subscribe to the email. Make sure you follow them on Twitter. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to pompscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three-week time period. Go to pompscryptocourse.com to learn more and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.