Tomahawk Missiles Do Not Grow On Trees

A billion and a half dollars can vanish through “medical equipment” that never ships, and somehow the people who notice are the ones paying higher prices at the drive-thru. We start with a jaw-dropping Medicare and Medicaid fraud story out of South Florida, then pull the thread all the way through incentives: who gets audited, who gets ignored, and why “duct tape infrastructure” plus unlimited spending creates a perfect environment for organized crime and institutional shrugging.

Then we move into the darker side of enforcement, where prevention gets blurry and stings start to look like manufacturing a plot. We talk through a case involving an alleged drone attack plan on a power substation, the role of undercover agents, and what accountability should mean when the state is both referee and player. Along the way we hit free speech concerns, surveillance databases that can be misused, and why trust breaks fastest when the rules apply differently depending on who you are.

Finally, we zoom out to the macro picture: oil and gas prices, debt to GDP, inflation as a money supply problem, and the historical habit of “printing away” obligations. That’s where Bitcoin comes back in, not as a hype trade, but as a fixed-supply, public blockchain that can change time preference, restore optionality, and pressure policymakers with real constraints. If you care about government waste, inflation, AI, and financial sovereignty, you’ll hear how the same incentives show up everywhere.

Subscribe, share this with a friend who feels the squeeze, and leave a review with your take: what’s the most realistic way to restore accountability?

Transcript

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Opening Banter And Simultaneous Sip

SPEAKER_19 0:25

We're getting screwed, ma'am. Every time we turn around, we're getting screwed. The revolution's gonna be true podcasting for sure. It's the only way to take it. It's the little guys, the little guys that take the point of everything. It's peasants, ma'am. We're just peasants. Every one of us. You watch those old movies, you see the peasants in the background with the kings and keens walking around. We're those people. We're those people. Good morning, peasants. Welcome to another episode of the peasants perspective. Braziers already in the house. Good morning. Glad you made it. They made it home safely, I think. I hope so. He drove the cyber truck this weekend. He got to experience the full space shuttle experience. You haven't been in a cyber truck yet, have you? No, I have not. Something different. Something different. It is very different. It is very cool. Fast too. Fast. Very cool. I got to drive it a little bit. Self-driver mode. I don't know. If anybody hasn't done self-driver in a Tesla, it makes you just go, wow. This is something special. It's pretty interesting. Prey the Rosary Daily. Good morning. Glad you made it. Glad you made it. All right. Well, let's jump right on into it today, Ron. It's time for the simultaneous sip. And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice, a stein, a canteen, jugger, flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hint of the day. The thing that makes everything better, the simultaneous sip, and it starts right

Bitcoin Versus Crypto And Maximalism

SPEAKER_19 2:07

now. Let's hear a little bit about Bitcoin versus crypto.

SPEAKER_06 2:11

George, I just met this guy. I think you two would really get along. Oh yeah? Why do you think that? He's into crypto, like you. Crypto. Elaine, I'm not into crypto. I'm into Bitcoin. Okay, what's the difference? What's the difference? That's like saying I like classic rock. This guy likes cold play, so we should hang out. I like cold play. George, this is Mark. Mark, George.

SPEAKER_07 2:32

Elaine says you're a Bitcoin guy. Yeah. You know, I've been thinking. Bitcoin should move to proof of stake. It's more secure, more efficient, better for the planet. And honestly, Bitcoin should probably be governed by a Dow.

SPEAKER_06 2:42

See? You already have so much to talk about.

SPEAKER_07 2:44

Yeah, it's uncanny. CZ tweeted funds were say foo and we bounced back. George, you got a problem with me? It's not you. I'm just Bitcoin. Come on, Maximalist. Nothing else? No. Gun to your head.

SPEAKER_06 3:02

Monero.

SPEAKER_19 3:05

Now that might be a little bit inside for people that are into that world. When I first met Tomaste, I don't know if he's gonna show up, not today. We had kind of a similar conversation, and he's like, well, what what what other crypto? He's like, maybe Monero. It's like the closest thing to Bitcoin. Oh, I just think that's really funny. John Attack says, now it's time to return to government work, reboot the brain, check the political weather forecast, and pretend the IT infrastructure is being held together by something other than duct tape. Yes, duct tape and middle-aged men close to retirement. Doug Wyatt says, Good morning, peasants. Pony boy, good morning. Good morning, peasants. Thundering, oh go, glad to see you here today. Happy Tuesday. John Atekas said, I was able to meet someone from Ron's family. Wonderful. Yeah, he met your mom, Ron. Oh wow. Met your mom. Lucky. You're famous. Everywhere you go, people come up to your parents. Are you Ron's mom and

Medicare Fraud And Missing Accountability

SPEAKER_19 3:58

all right? So big old South Florida scam happened, and uh Mehmet Oz was on Fox and Friends to describe the scale of this fraud. This is incredible. We're gonna do a little uh foray into what the FBI is up to and their day-to-day case files, their big top case files. It just boggles my mind that cases like this go unlooked at long enough to become they become these festering cancers, and the dollar amounts get to be astronomical.

SPEAKER_05 4:29

So when this came down, this is just another example of the examination of the crackdown on the fraud that's happening.

SPEAKER_04 4:42

Twice as many in Florida as McDonald's. It's not because Bobby's setting down McDonald's. It is a rampant fraud setup. We believe the Cuban government might be involved in supporting it. But the part that really is bothersome is that they've stolen millions of Medicare beneficiary ID numbers. They're like credit card numbers. You know, seniors put their numbers on a doctor's form. Sometimes those numbers get on the dark web. And these companies don't actually ship anything. They're not selling catheters or wheelchairs, they're pretending to ship them. They're just billing us Medicare, and they get the money, and that money's in the Cayman Islands as soon as it gets into the bank account. So we have a national moratorium that we just ended for six months. For six months, you could not sell if you're a new company these products. And that has allowed us to suck a billion and a half dollars of fraud out of the system. It dried the swamp up.

SPEAKER_05 5:29

You know what I like is that you're doing this here. I don't care if it's a red state or blue state. You're just trying to find out where this money's going. Ron, you're covering your face over there because it's just the what happened?

SPEAKER_19 5:41

A billion and a half dollars in fraud. These so the the Chiron here had two men in South Florida that were sentenced for stealing $35 million in Medicaid funds. Like that's just two guys, a billion and a half dollars going out the door in just fraud, non-existent wheelchairs being billed to Medicaid. It is unbelievable. And what has the FBI been up to? What what who who's guarding the chicken coop? You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_21 6:13

Well, I I don't know, but I mean the scale of this is so massive. I mean, I you could say, Whoa, you drive a Mac truck through it, dude. You could drive the whole world through this. It's like scale of it is in the case.

SPEAKER_19 6:25

Dude, that's the GDP of small nations. Yeah. We think Cuba might be in on it. What else has Cuba been doing for 40 years?

SPEAKER_21 6:33

But then you get the IRS all up everybody's ass. They can audit everybody in the whole nation, but you have this the scale of this fraud is so massive, and you keep finding new kinds of it. And this just is just like the newest flavor.

SPEAKER_19 6:47

And it's organized.

SPEAKER_21 6:49

Armenian gangs and it is so organized, it's like the intent when you talk about intention.

SPEAKER_19 6:56

Yeah, I mean uh there's that Ayn Rand quote we read a while ago. When people who get wealthy get get wealthy from graft and pole rather than doing anything, right? This is another one, this is one of those like why do you work so hard when you could just you know buy a Medicaid number online and bill the doctor? Like it's just they'll just give you money, they'll just give you money, like free millions of dollars. It this is it's one of those deals where it goes, what's happening, not just in our country with basic law enforcement, what's happening with the IRS and Treasury, who allegedly is tracking this money, like you said, they can be all up your ass over two, three thousand dollars that you missed on a tax return. You experienced this, yeah, right? Like years over a few thousand dollars. You're like, I don't owe this. You eventually paid it because you got tired of the letters. Yeah. How many letters did these guys ignore? The answer is zero because they let this just go.

SPEAKER_21 7:56

Still waiting, still waiting for my refund.

SPEAKER_19 7:58

They they had to stop funding all medical suppliers, which I'm sure there's a handful of legitimate ones out there, right? Stop funding them completely while they tracked all this stuff down, and there will be smidgents, tiny bits of accountability. Most of this is just gone. Oh, yeah. You know, they'll get a couple guys here or there, oh, these two guys for 35 million. How many people do you have to arrest at 35 million a pop to get to 1.5 billion dollars? Right. Like a lot more people need to go in the slammer. Like, we're talking J6 level numbers of people that need to go. This is real money being created. And the worst part is it would be one thing if it was just outright stolen, right? It's in the bank, they stole it. I get it. Go recover it, do what you can do. This is worse. They printed money, which means we will pay the interest on that 35 million that these two people did forever. Forever. There will be no paying it off. There will be no none of that. We will pay forever. Yeah, 1.5 million dollars at bond rate forever.

SPEAKER_21 9:10

Yeah, how much of our debt service is just to cover the fraud in this country? And it's starting to feel like it's the lion's share.

SPEAKER_19 9:18

The Doge folks think it's half of the budget is inappropriate. Inappropriate, like fraud slash waste, right? Correct. We we had that IRS clip. $50 million on this contract. What do they do? We don't know. Cancel the contract, nobody calls. It's just going into a bank account somewhere. There are no services rendered. The IRS is doing it. We pay interest on that money forever. So it's great. Hey, you cut off the fraud. Maybe you recovered a couple bucks. Can you cancel the bonds? Can you cancel the bonds? Because I'm sure the bond buyer, whoever it was, some Japanese businessman, some Saudi chic, maybe Bank of China, I'm sure they have no idea they were buying bonds that were created to pay some dude in South Florida falsely billing Medicaid.

SPEAKER_21 10:07

And the wild thing about this is we just continue to let this continue go on and on and on and on. You know, every single one of us, when we go through a drive-thru or you go to buy something, you're looking at the prices and you're like, well, and you're making decisions about those prices. And yet this fraud is at such a massive scale that it doesn't matter what you're paying for any of that stuff because you're paying 200% of just debt service on top of whatever you just bought.

SPEAKER_19 10:36

It's it is, you know, I can easily see how someone could look at the show and be like, oh, you guys talk about money, or you guys talk about Bitcoin a lot. I know. It is exhausting. Fix the money, fix the world. This this is one of those topics, it touches everything. The first debate our founding fathers had after the ink dried on the constitution was over money. Who has the money? Where's the credit coming from? Remember, Alexander Hamilton was a fan of central bank style financing. Jefferson and others were like, no, keep it local, keep it just this, you know, people who have been successful, eventually they stop working, they start lending. There's a compound effect to this, but let them succeed or fail based on the risk they take. Central banking encourages bailouts, right? I love the reason that Bitcoin is so uh attractive and why Kevin Wars says it's a way to hold policymakers accountable. You can't print more of it, right? It's what's in existence is what's in existence, and prices drive down in comparison to Bitcoin because of its fixed supply nature. Gold would be great, except you can mine more gold, but that's as close as we could come up until now, right? You'd have to go back a couple thousand years to that culture in the uh Pacific Islands that used rocks, and they would say who owned the rocks. Nobody could move them, they were very difficult to get, and that ownership signified wealth, and it was just a ledger. The rock was a public ledger. When transit when it rock changed hands, everybody would go, This rock now belongs to you, and then you could use it to buy other stuff and give away portions of the rock. It was actually as close as like comparatively to the Bitcoin public ledger. There's a rock in the center square that's this beautiful jade-looking rock, right? And you own the top of it. Go ahead and barter it away. And they would they would transfer ownership of these rocks with deeds, basically. It worked until the the colonizers showed up and they were like, Oh, where are you getting those rocks from? It's really hard to get to island, and they're hard to mine. And they went with some dynamite and some boats and brought back so many of these rocks, it completely devalued the supply, right? So, thus is the case always. So, fix the money, fix the world. Every little thing we look at, if the money was fixed, it would incentivize going after, for example, we're gonna talk about the FBI here, going after real crime, right? When you have an unlimited checkbook to go fight crime, eventually you start to make crime up. Make it up, right? Meanwhile, you ignore the real criminals, the $35 million fraudsters down in Florida, going on for who knows how many years, because, well, we're busy over here. We've got our own grift going on. You know what I mean? So there's this

FBI Stings And Vulnerable Targets

SPEAKER_19 13:20

interesting case. This guy's name is Skylar Philippi. He's scheduled to be sentenced next month, and his lawyers are asking for leniency. And we're gonna read a couple clips out of the motion that his lawyers put for towards sentencing. Okay. So when Skylar was approached by undercover agents in July 2024, and what what Skylar is alleged to have done is planning a terror attack using drones to blow up an electronic substation. Okay, so that's what his big deal, like very bad. Okay. When Skyler was approached by undercover agents in July 2024, he had recently moved to Texas and was homeless. So in July 2024, Joe Biden was still sitting in the White House. Who knows if he was in charge? He was he was lonely, sad, and confused, a confused boy who was looking for a friend group that shared his beliefs and values. When he met the agents, he found the friends he was looking for. Between July and November 2024, Skylar met and communicated with undercover federal agents who pretended to share his radical beliefs. Over the next three months, they talked on the phone, texted with each other, and met as a group several times at bars and restaurants. The agents befriended him, ate and drank alcohol with him, and made him feel special and part of the group. In many, many hours of numerous recorded conversations, the agents and Skylar discussed conducting operations and focused on a plan to attack the power grid with drones. In these recorded conversations, agents told Skylar he was smart, encouraged him to carry out the plan, and made him feel part of the group. Oh, that sounds completely reasonable, right? In normal society, you might have that small percentage of people on the margin that have some extreme view left or right, okay? But they're they're countered by their family, they're countered by their community, right? If we all rely on the substation, and even if we hate the power company because they're the big, bad, evil person, we're like, yeah, but we like the substation, right? Don't do that. Instead, he meets up with people who amplify whatever's in his algorithm, amplify his discontent, right? They befriended him, they raised him into this. What was once a thought of just youthful expression, going, I want to burn the world down. Admit it, every man's had those thoughts, right? He was amplified, it was pushed. So then it goes on to say this, right? It goes on to say uh he was autistic. So Dr. Brown also notes that Skyler's mental health and autism likely played a role in the actions in this case, kind of like the J6 pipe bomber and many others that we've seen, or the homeless guys that they got to decide to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer. She also concludes that his mental health issues and autistic characteristics made him vulnerable to the encouragement of the agents who befriended him. This is from her. While acknowledging the seriousness of his actions, it appears that he was part in part encouraged by the confidential informants and undercover agents who made him feel important, smart, and valued by providing him with the attention, praise, and recognition that he desperately wanted, and with which he has been absent most of his life. His background of mental health difficulties, social withdrawal and rejection, and abuse and neglect by those close to close to him left him in a vulnerable position to be influenced by others who encourage his behaviors. Thus, this psychological vulnerabilities left him easily manipulated by the individuals who he perceived were truly his friends and had genuine interest in him. This by no means excuses his behavior, but rather provides some explanation as to why his actions escalated in the few months that he was affiliated with these individuals. It also brings the role to light to light the role his mental health disorders and background likely had in the commission of this offense. Due to his autism, Schuyler was unable to recognize the social clues that may have led a normal person to recognize that the agents did not have his best intentions at heart. As Dr. Corbett notes, autism in adulthood may be marked by a failure to understand the thoughts, feelings, and perspectives of others. Thus, autistic people have difficulty perceiving the intentions of others. A person with ASD cannot discern between the true interests and friendships and a hidden agenda. And we've met people like that. You know the guy that you make fun of that doesn't know you're making fun of him until all of a sudden he's like, hey, you're being mean. And it's like, dude, you didn't pick up on that for 40 minutes, right? It's like you got so far into this, and all of a sudden you're like, once your intention is fully exposed, I and maybe I'm revealing myself as there were some real Lenny characters in prison where you just kind of, you know, yeah, good boy, good boy. Yes, go over there, beat up that person.

SPEAKER_21 18:01

And then 40 minutes later, they're like, hey, and but meanwhile, the party's moved on. Yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_19 18:07

This we know adults like this, people like this, so he's seeking encouragement. He's a child, he wants recognition. There's an old phrase, recognition, babies will cry for it, grown men will die for it.

SPEAKER_21 18:18

You know, I have just kind of a general question about these type of things where the FBI seems to be involved all the time. And it's like, you know, can these FBI agents ever be charged with something for knowing that a catastrophe is about to happen and they know who's gonna do it and where it's gonna happen, and they don't do anything to stop it or even say anything to discourage it? I mean no, who's who's watching the watchers? The OI they share an office? Like, no, no, they're never held accountable. Well, I just think it's amazing that they don't even say a discouraging word like, well, maybe you shouldn't do that.

SPEAKER_19 18:54

No, you think you'd think they'd be out there preventing crime and so.

SPEAKER_21 18:57

So, what is the intention? So, what is the intention, people?

SPEAKER_19 19:00

Come on, can we all be like realistic about what the intention is? Stats, numbers, headlines, kudos. Hey, we've got this huge thing going down in Florida, they're kicking us back 10% just for standing by. So we've got to justify our budget somewhere else. I mean, of course. So it continues. He had agents, he and the agents eventually agreed to work together to use a drone to bomb to one one, an unnamed electrical substation in Nashville to accelerate a change in society. Of course, the plan made no real sense and was frankly delusional. To this day, Skylar cannot rationally explain why he thought that bombing an unmanned electrical substation to cause a power outage would bring about a change in society.

SPEAKER_21 19:46

Well, he probably would say, Jimmy told me it would do that.

SPEAKER_19 19:50

I remember there was a case called uh about the Bundy Ranch down in Nevada, Oregon. And there's, you know, there were people kind of from all over the inner mountain west that got involved with that. There was one guy in Utah that got involved, went out to the ranch a couple times. I guess he had a ranch when he was younger, and the lease with the BLM was all messed up. And so he was bitter, but you know, he's just one of those normal guys that like ranched for four years and it didn't work out.

SPEAKER_21 20:14

Well, and he understood the pitfalls of the system, so he's gonna try to help out.

SPEAKER_19 20:18

Yeah, and you know, anyways, he had two agents basically become his best friends and they paid for him to drive around, paid for him to go to the Bundy Ranch, paid for him to go to some other meet and greet down wherever. He was totally broke. I mean, this is a guy that never didn't have a job, like he was a couch, a permanent couch surfer. Okay, so they paired up with him and they wanted him to bomb some different places, and they kept talking about and and they drove him by a mosque in Salt Lake City, Utah. And he's like, This is all recorded, this was all in his case. Are you out of your mind? We're not bombing a mosque. We like, I don't like Islam, but I'm not bombing a mosque. There's like people there, you know. So they drove him out, they found some abandoned BLM building out in the desert. Nobody worked there, it was just some pump station for, you know, like a one of these random, you know, servicing an irrigation line or something. And they built an inert Molotov cocktail bomb and he got arrested, right? So the interview that I listened to was while he was waiting for trial, and he's like, these guys gave me the parts, drove me out there. I talked them out of more serious bombings, and they were like, basically, by the time they got to the abandoned BLM set, I said, fine, we'll bomb something. Geez, guys, like no one will get hurt. Great, and it's against the BLM, awesome. So, you know, ridiculous. No change in society. He wasn't autistic, by the way. He was just, you know, Facebook algorithms into extremism. However, Skylar's extremely dysfunctional childhood and teenage years and his undiagnosed and untreated autism helped to explain why he was vulnerable to radical ideas and the encouragement of the undercover agents, who he thought were his friends, to attempt the ridiculous plan. Then, Guys, this is your FBI. The same ones that have ignored learning centers, the same ones who have ignored the Armenian mafias down in California running the Medicaid system drive, the Cuban groups down in Florida running the system drive, same people that have ignored election fraud, same people that have ignored, you know, bang bang swalwell or bang fang bang bang and Eric Swalwell. Same people. Twinkeding. Same people. Then, on the night of the planned operation to blow up the substation, the agents and Skylar participated in a bizarre Odinist religious ceremony to steal themselves for the fake attack. They prayed to the Norse god Odin. The agents even told Skylar that they loved him. All of this was recorded by the undercover agents. The agents and Skylar proceeded to an apartment complex near the electrical substation and arrested Skylar before he proceeded to launch the drone. Skylar was extremely hurt because he thought the agents were his friends. Skyler now serves, has now served nearly two years in pretrial custody in county jails. He has reevaluated his prior beliefs and has renounced accelerationism. That's the FBI took almost a year to take an autistic kid to an extreme point eating with him. In the case of the Fed Fred Whit uh Fed uh Gretchen Whitmer Fed kidnapping plot, one of the agents was sleeping with one of the defendants, sex with one of the defendants. Okay. What purpose do they serve when they don't go after real crime? Right? This conversation is not unattached to things like the flock cameras. Looks great. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a federal bureau of investigations that could cross jurisdictions and assist local jurisdictions in kidnapping and drug running and financial crimes? Wouldn't it be great? Wouldn't it be great to have these flock cameras that could track down carjackers? I mean, maybe we'll never have another kidnapping again because you can't go far until you get a flock camera, right? Wouldn't it be great? But yet we see cases where some random police officer can access this massive database to stalk an ex-girlfriend, to pull over a lover that never happened. You know, we see these cases. Seems like a good idea. What are your intentions? What are you preventing them from being able to do? In the case of this, the FBI shouldn't be in trapping people. People have bad thoughts, don't feed them. That's what my parents taught me, right? The FBI is feeding these bad thoughts, taking advantage of these vulnerable people. There's the woman up in New York that was supposedly going to bomb something again, too. They bought the materials. If the person who wants to commit a terror attack can't afford to commit a terror attack, that's called the free market, is not rewarding those thoughts. If it was a billionaire that wanted to build a Molotov cocktail, I'd be concerned. Okay. But it's not. These people can't build the Molotov cocktail because they're more concerned about getting a burrito for lunch. So when you need to use government money to buy the materials to commit the terror attack, you might be the terrorist yourself. Right? It's just stunning. Uh Thunder, uh Carlith says, good morning, everyone. Glad you made it. Glad you made it. All

Disbarred For Tweets And Retaliation

SPEAKER_19 25:29

right. So the other thing, too, is you'd think that in the system, right? The judicial system, judges, attorneys, there's rational people that are gonna go and fight this. And this is the system itself, right? It's the system itself. I find it very interesting that defense attorney, obviously, he's saying all the rationale why he was kind of entrapped. Where was that in the trial? I don't I don't know. I didn't follow it. Where's the alternative theory? Hey, the real criminals are these FBI agents. Like they're this guy's the Patsy, right? Why aren't they going down with them too? Of course they're not, because they were on assignment from Christopher Ray. This is a uh gentleman here named uh Vlad. Let's see, his full name. I don't like to open Google Drives. Vladmir Gagek. He's an attorney, okay, and he has he has been disbarred. He says, I was disbarred for tweets, not for harming a client, not for lying to a court, not for talking about a case I was working on, but for criticizing at Rachel Mitchell and her and others. So Rachel Mitchell is the Maricopa County attorney, Rachel Mitchell. So she's the Maricopa County attorney. Okay. My appeal is now before the Arizona courts, and the record shows Rachel Mitchell asked the state bar in writing to but depar me because, quote, he has been recreating repeatedly criticizing me on X. The FBI and DOJ reviewed the same post and closed the file. Protected speech, no crime. The one tribunal that never analyzed my speech took my license after denying me every subpoena, striking my answer, and canceling the merits hearing. Others said far worse with zero consequences. I got the maximum because of who I criticized and because my name made me an easy target for retaliation. No Arizona lawyer had ever been disciplined for social media posts before me. If an elected official can take a critic's livelihood without a trial, your right to criticize the government is next. If lawyers don't have free speech, then who is going to defend you when the police coming for you because you said that the police are coming for you because you said the wrong thing? My appeal I just filed with the Arizona Supreme Court, it won't alter the outcome, but I will make I will make them own it. Please read and share. Step by step, there's always a first. There's always a first. So if you criticize your local district attorney and you're an attorney, you're an attorney, they can take your license, take your livelihood. Who's gonna speak up after that? Right? One of the phrases that I hear all the time is well, if all the good people go, then what'll happen to the system? The answer is it'll break and then it can be fixed. But are you the sacrifice? Are you the good person that's gonna go be sacrificed and be with the bad? Right? You can't fix something where the intention is bad, right? Where the intention doesn't have the proper checks and bounces. You can't fix it. You become the sacrifice, you become the lamb that the wolves say, we're gonna eat that next. You know what I mean? There is no such thing as, well, if the good all leave, then what'll happen? Then the bad will either become good or they'll spin themselves into oblivion or they'll eat themselves. But I don't want to be on the dinner plate.

Oil, Gas, And The Real Economy

SPEAKER_19 28:37

So our economy is in a weird spot, obviously, depending on who you listen to. It's up, up, up and away, or the end is near, right? So we're at some confluence between the two. And one of the big things about our economy, everything is driven by gasoline. Again, everything kind of ties back to money. Why money? Money is a store of energy. What is energy? Energy measures the success of a civilization, right? I mean, this is common sense. And where does most of our energy come from, especially when it comes to transportation? Oil. Oil. So if the price of oil goes up, the price of everything goes up from your plastic straws that are an oil byproduct and transported by, you know, planes, trains, and locomotives. Everything gets touched by oil. And so oil, oil prices being at an affordable rate is incredibly important. What's affordable? Enough money that the oil drillers can make a profit, but not so much money that we can't make a profit, right? There's got to be that perfect value add margin there. And the war in Iran has disrupted that because initially we disrupted the flow of 30% of the world's oil supply. And early on, we were talking about other nations that were instituting energy lockdowns, can't travel on certain days. All that's gone, by the way. That was that was short. I think there was a moment there where they thought, is this it? Can we trounce on this? But Trump and the people involved with him were very brilliant in how they backloaded the oil supply, you know, to make sure that the world could get the oil they needed. So these lockdowns didn't continue on forever. And the price has remained within the range of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Right? It's remained within that range. So here is uh Trump's energy secretary talking about the price of oil and some of the things that are going to mitigate and drive it down. The futures on oil are lower than uh they are currently now, which means the people who watch this market and invest in it are seeing prices coming down. Let's again talk about gas prices.

SPEAKER_09 30:41

How soon should Americans see these go down? We know you have this deal with Venezuela that could take years before we see any effect of that. Will we see a change before the midterms? When will we see those gas prices go down?

SPEAKER_02 30:56

Well, if you look at the futures prices, you wanted to buy today in bulk gasoline for two months out in November. It's about 35 cents cheaper than it is today. So the marketplace thinks gasoline prices are going to move meaningfully lower. Um, so trust the market certainly don't trust my predictions, but we're doing everything we can to grow the production of gasoline. As we pass Labor Day tomorrow, uh you'll start to see demand decline as we move out of summer driving season. So the Trump administration is leaning in heavily in that area. And Venezuela, I wouldn't discount it. Things there are going well ahead of plans. Venezuelan oil exports are up 50%, their total national production is up 25%, and billions of dollars of new investment has been announced. Uh the United Trump administration is working on all fronts, from the Gulf of America to Alaska to onshore in the US to our allies uh in the hemisphere to grow energy production and long term to reset energy prices lower and more stable supply chain.

SPEAKER_19 32:02

That's again what I really loved about construction is when the incentives are right, things happen really fast. And everybody does like when the money, the bank, money's in the bank, projects paid for. You can build a house in six months, and it is just a flurry of activity. These oil boys, they don't mess around, right? Like once they we're drilling right here, it is time is money. Every day you're not drilling out of that hole, you're not making money. It is all in. Like, you know, I've watched like the YouTube videos of these mines being erected, dude. It is a flurry of like almost 24-hour activity. They got the floodlights on, they're getting that thing drunk. I imagine Venezuela is crawling with people cleaning up their refineries, fixing this, that, or the other, bringing in parts from you know, on boats and stuff like that. Like, I imagine if you're involved in that and you're like one of the contractors or whatever that's that's doing it, it is just like pedal to the metal, get the oil pumping. Uh, you know, I mean, we're talking trillions of dollars on the line here, anyways. I bet that's pretty incredible. Pony Boy says, Carlitz, I saw the stream on 1776 yesterday, was a little busy at work, so I so I'll watch it. I watched it as well, Pony Boy. It was really good. 1776 Live, you can go check that out. Carlitz and those guys did a Liberty Lounge. It was pretty pretty awesome.

Preparing For Shocks And Dependence

SPEAKER_19 33:20

Okay, so as peasants, I again, this is one of those things I want to drill home. To the extent that we can be prepared for what's coming, no matter what's coming, the farther out on the horizon you can see major events, the better you can position yourself to be in a good position when they happen. And time is a funny thing, right? The sun goes down, the sun comes up. You plant your crops in the spring, you harvest in the fall. There's a certain, there's a certain resiliency to nature. And we can be a part of that resiliency too. The the thing we have to avoid is being completely wrapped up in other people's stuff, right? When you're completely dependent on the system, that Medicaid fraud super affects you. When you're not dependent on the system, it's kind of like, oh, that's too bad. Right now, some people don't recognize how dependent they are on the system until they see their prices going up, right? Until they see, hey, I thought this uh I thought I was good. I I've I've worked my whole life, I've got a little savings and I have uh Social Security. Well, when you finally draw on Social Security, it's a fraction of what you contributed as far as spendability goes, right? It's like if you're dependent on the system, when these big decisions happen with people that are much higher up than we are on the food chain make big balance sheet decisions dealing with billions and trillions of dollars, the quote unquote trickle down effect can be pretty dang devastating. You know, for a couple of accountants sitting inside of a Boeing uh boardroom, it was really easy in 2008 to say, hey, we have to cut some labor costs by 5%. We gotta, they just tighten the belt, right? You know what that equaled out on the streets? Lost homes, right? That 5% was like one-third of one of the factory lines. You know, it's like look to your left, look to your right, who's not coming back tomorrow, kind of a situation. Very simple decision in a boardroom, very complex downstream ramifications, depending on how that person downstream was prepared. It was either, hey, an early retirement, I got a couple months severance, I go on to my next opportunity, or it was like my whole life depended on that. I maxed out all my credit cards, my car payments, my house payment, total devastation. And I saw both, right? I saw people that just took the sign early retirement and started building bird houses in their garage, right? And then I saw other people that literally had to walk away from 25 years of house and cars and college kids, you know, funds and just absolute devastating. Uh so the money matters, right? These big decisions

Debt, Inflation, And Printing Away Pain

SPEAKER_19 35:54

mattered. This is uh Elon Musk. This is back when he was finishing up with the Doge stuff, talking about the federal budget, how money kind of interplays in all of this. This is going to impact us, right? No matter what, we are at a confluence of debt and GDP, and so we either grow our way out of it or we inflate our way out of it, or more likely, some form of both. Depending on where you're at, right? Um, one of the guys I listened to was his family's from Ukraine. And back in like 1999 or 1998, they had a financial crisis in Ukraine. And he said, on a Friday, they had enough money in the bank to five, buy five cars. They were wealthy, they were a wealthy family. His dad was a doctor. They closed the bank on a Friday. They didn't open it for two weeks. They had a two-week banking holiday. When they reopened the bank, they got all their money back, but it was only enough to buy about a month's worth of groceries. Just like that. Just like that. Greece happened there. Argentina happened there. Brazil happened there. It happens over and over and over again. And every country that it happens to, it happens to before they get to the debt to GDP ratio that the United States is at. The only reason it hasn't happened to us is because we're the reserve currency. Because an American bill is treated like it's gold, even though everybody knows it's not. So this creates a huge scenario that eventually has to be dealt with. How it gets dealt with may or may not impact each one of our lives significantly.

SPEAKER_20 37:29

I think the last time the Fed raised rates going into a recession was 1929. What happened next? Yeah, the Great Depression.

SPEAKER_19 37:41

The whole system, everything about the system, if you own a home and you have a mortgage payment, you take solace in the fact that sure I pay a mortgage, it's about what rent is, but I have equity. I have equity. But what happens when that equity A completely disappears or B goes so stratospheric that it's not worth anything? What happens? You still have the debt service, right? So raising rates in a system that that requires growth, requires nobody pays off a 30-year mortgage. Everybody refinances out of them until you play the property ladder game, get enough equity that you buy your last home free and clear. Have you seen that happen before? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like a million times. You know, couple buys their first home 26, 27. It's the 30. 10 years later, they sell it. 10 years later they sell it. 10 years later they sell it, and then they go from their Mick mansion to their nice three-bedroom, two-bath, free and clear property that they can manage in their retirement. Or nobody pays off a third-year mortgage. Small fract, small, small fraction of people do. So what do you do?

SPEAKER_03 38:49

That concern, I'm gonna tell you nothing you don't know, but the concern is if the Fed drops rates again, then inflation will accelerate. And you can't do that in an election year.

SPEAKER_20 39:00

So inflation is gonna happen no matter what. If you increase the money supply, um, you get inflation. Right. So there's no there's not some magical cure for getting rid of inflation, um, except to increase the productivity, the output output of uh goods and services. So if you say like like what is money, um you've got you've got you've got these sort of um it's basically numbers in a database that's uh uh uh that that sum up to some come up to some total. Then you've got the uh output of goods and services of the economy. And the as long as the ratio of money to ratio of uh of goods and services stays if that if that stays constant, you have no no inflation. If uh if you add more money, if you add money to the system faster than you increase uh goods and services, then you have inflation. Um so all of these COVID sort of stimulus bills uh were not paid for. They were they just generated more uh currency, more, more, you know, uh more more money was was was created because the the federal government uh the checks never that's just the checks always pass, uh you know, until unless you hit a debt limit, which there's probably gonna be some debt limit crisis later this year. But uh provided you haven't hit the debt limit, the the federal government, uh unlike state governments or city governments uh or individuals can simply issue more money. Um and that's what they did. Um I mean, as the old saying goes, that there's no sh there's no free lunch. Um so uh if you could just issue massive amounts of money without negative consequences, why don't we just take that to the limit and make everyone a trillionaire?

SPEAKER_19 40:43

Yeah, why not? They're doing it with the Cubans and the Armenians, they've made them into millionaires, right? Why not make us all trillionaires? Why not do it? So it's easy to understand that, right? If you've if your money is equal to your pro goods and services, then as you increase goods and services, then you know, assumably you got a loan to invest in the capital, and so it's there's an asset there, so it kind of they kind of grow together, and you have this no inflation. There's more dollars, but there's also more goods and services, but it's like at a zero. It never works. It never works for one thing. By nature, prices are always rising, right? So that's one problem. And that because even even with that, it's always going to work out that way. And of course, there's no discipline with our governments, they'll print when they need to print. When you have an unlimited credit card that, by the way, to pay it off, you just get a higher credit limit to pay it off. Like, it doesn't work. It doesn't work. So, Ray Dalio, he's one of these headfunge managers, he's worth about 22 billion himself, and he's made an entire career of basically making the asymmetrical bets against the fiat system. He's one of these big cycle guys. He's looking at money from a big picture, and he's done some really great. He wrote a book, he did a he did a like an hour and a half long like video that had graphics. It was really good, very good for understanding the cycle. We went from Netherlands to Britain to America, and he talks about the rise and fall of currencies and how, you know, as you get more decadent, then you get a little lazy, you stop focusing on education and productivity because you're comfortable, and then you have a rising power, and right now China's rising and we're kind of declining, and Trump's trying to, you know, write the ship. There's really good stuff. But here he's talking about debt and how right now, at this moment, they have very few options as to what to do with the debt. And there's one and one option that has worked every single time, printed away.

SPEAKER_11 42:37

Um, they there is the loss of confidence in the reserve currency, which drives people to see alternative storeholds of wealth. So uh, for example, um, when there's a debt um issue, um, there are two ways of dealing with debt. There is hard money, you know, traditionally backed by gold. And when that happened, um then there was breakdowns in that monetary system devaluation. So in, for example, uh classically, March 1933, Roosevelt um in with the debt problem, uh, was forced to go off the gold standard, printed a lot of money, devalued the dollar, and then there and then it moved on. Um in 1971, uh we had the same. Uh Nixon um did the same thing, went off the gold standard um and devalued and so on. And the creation of a lot of debt and money means that money goes someplace else, and it traditionally, both of those cases, it went into stocks, gold, and other places. So money is always the holders of money, uh, which are the holders of bonds. Bonds are a promise to receive money, a lot of money over a Period of time. It's a very long money position. And when those become unattractive, such as now, let's say, you get zero interest rate or close to zero interest rate or even a negative interest rate. And there's a lot of creation of debt and um a lot of printing of money, that drives um that into other assets. They may not be another currency if there's not a good currency. They may be stocks, they may be gold, and they may be another currency. But it is that kind of time that we're in. So next year and the year after, no matter what, we're going to have large deficits. We are going to produce a lot of debt, and we will monetize that debt, and that debt will have a negative real return. And therefore, people will borrow in it, will find it more advantageous to borrow in it than own it. And then they will move to other assets.

SPEAKER_19 44:57

So, did you understand that there? Basically, our money's not good. Nobody wants to buy our debt because they're like, by the time you might repay me, yeah, I'll get my dollar plus three percent or four percent, but it will spend like 25 cents if I were to buy something else today. So, what do you want to buy? Something that's not gonna lose spendable power, right? Purchase power. That's what he's saying there. And it's the entire he's not speaking about your Starbucks barista that recognizes this. He's talking about the gold holders, the people who hold the goals and gold and make the rules. Everything in the world is about incentives, and everything has to be paid for. There's no free lunches. Tomahawk missiles don't just grow on trees. You know what I'm saying? Like it all has to be paid for. And how do you pay for it if you're not spending real saved value? You borrow against the future.

SPEAKER_21 45:58

We really should sell t-shirts because that would be a great t-shirt.

SPEAKER_19 46:02

Tomahawk missiles don't grow on trees, bro. Someone's paying for that. Exactly. But that's the thing. So no matter what, the options are print away the debt or print away the debt. Then there's door number three, which is kind of a moonshot. It's grow out of it, right? How can we grow out of it? Reagan chose to grow out of it. What did he do? Star Wars, ABC, fund every everybody that's not a communist on the planet, no matter how authoritarian and mean and bad they are. Give them money, you know? And he greatly expanded the money supply, but he also expanded places to put it. That was key. Places to put it. It wasn't real money. Nixon had come off the gold standard. What Reagan did was he he increased the places to put it. This is what the space race is under Kennedy. It was a place to put the money, right? A place to get it into circulation where you got some asset back, some technology, something that would produce revenue to pay the interest on the money that went into expanding that industry or whatever it is. Biden and the Democrats never invest in anything real. They never buy anything real. $8 billion, two charging stations for EVs. Right. There's no asset left behind from that money printing. When Republicans print money, not every time, but oftentimes there's an attempt to put it into something real, right? Something new. So Trump is obviously expanding Space Force and the space

AI Productivity And The Propaganda War

SPEAKER_19 47:33

race. He's obviously spending plenty of money on Tomahawk missiles, but he's also taking the moonshot on AI productivity. This is Trump talking about AI. AI is a whole new thing. I mean, this is this is the railroads, this is the uh telegram. This is all tied into one thing. This is so destabilizing to the way of things and the speed at which communication happens and analysis happens and information can be used all at once. You know, like you can have an expert in economics and an expert in engineering, but rarely do you see them in the same person. AI puts it in the same person. So now the engineer can go, what's my cost basis for this? What's the money impact of these engineering decisions? And the economic economics person can look at that Boeing balance sheet and go, what's the downstream effect of these little decisions? You know, when the bean counters run a business, they always run it to zero, right? How can they prevent that? Like AI, just huge brain can be an incredible tool, as well as the advancements, right? Some of the medical advancements that are coming out because of AI that eventually will be instituted will probably increase lifespan, it'll lower infant mortality, probably cure some of these um genetic diseases that we have. Like the it's unbelievable the things that AI can do.

SPEAKER_10 48:58

We're leading China in AI, and whoever wins, AI wins. That's the power. This is bigger than the internet. This is this is a revolution, you know. Had a few of them over the last 200 years, but this is a revolution. And and I've seen some results that are incredible medically. You know, what's things medically that we wouldn't have maybe in a hundred years. Whoever wins with AI wins. And really, right now, it's really between China and us.

SPEAKER_19 49:31

Thank you very much. Whoever wins with AI wins. I'd be okay if Ireland won the AI race. I mean, they're probably, you know, gonna share most of our values, right? But he's absolutely right there. Whoever wins AI wins. You know, this the the the United States won the information age. We want the internet, totally won it. Now we have to win AI. Otherwise, the new system takes its place, and you know, you don't have to study a lot of China to understand how negative that is. The other thing, too, that I find very interesting. China, they have opened up to Bitcoin, but China has focused on gold, right? They actually issue gold that's laced into their currencies and they're trying to get gold throughout all their citizenry. Okay. Now you have to understand, Chinese don't own anything they own, right? They don't have private property rights. So it's kind of like on loan from the government. But they have been huge proponents of gold. And one of the other things they're huge proponents of is cryptocurrencies, not Bitcoin. They've gone out of their way to try to avoid getting Bitcoin into the hands of their people. They've banned it dozens of times. They've destroyed servers, like they've really tried to limit Bitcoin's growth inside of China because they can't control it. But you know what they can control? Most cryptocurrencies, Ethereum, different currencies, they all are have, they're basically just mini central banks, like every single one of them, top to bottom. No matter what you think about the technology, how efficient they are. Oh, like Ripple, it's the rails of international banking. Sure, totally, but it'll be theirs. It can be controlled. It, you know, the nodes are under control, the mining is under control, it the whole thing is centralized. So, Lex Friedman on his on the all-in podcast was talking about AI as being painted as an existential risk, right? There's a lot of people out there that I admire. You know, Steve Bannon is very anti-AI and many, many others. And there's reasons for that, and you can articulate those reasons, but on a whole, the criticism of these data centers and AI is really unfounded. And when you look where the criticism's coming from, it's coming from this crypto slash fiat slash Chinese ecosystem that is trying to win the race. They're not saying, hey, it's bad for the world, they're saying it's bad for you. Right? We're doing it anyways. But oh, this is bad for you. This will be really bad for you.

SPEAKER_21 51:56

It's the same as, hey, we shouldn't have coal burning plants in this country. Meanwhile, China's building 70 new ones every year.

SPEAKER_19 52:04

Yeah, exactly. That's called weaponized virtue. Hey, you do the right thing because you think it's the right thing. Meanwhile, we're gonna do it regardless, because we don't think it's bad.

SPEAKER_17 52:12

Exactly. It was Dustin Moscovis, Jan Talon, and Vitalik Buterin. They've been spending hundreds of millions of dollars on these campaigns to make people be afraid of AI. Just on the influence op here. Clearly, there have been a lot of influence ops around data centers, and there's a lot of fake information about this. So there's a few different, I'd say, cadres here. There's the there's CCP, there's the DSA type wing of the Democrat Party, which frankly, I mean, both they and the CCP, they're communist parties who want to sabotage America, so it kind of makes sense. Then you've kind of got the Doomer groups, and there's um a writer named Nurit Weisblatt who writes a blog called AI Panic, who a couple of years ago traced that there were hundreds of these AstroTurf Doomer groups that were basically funded by three EA billionaires in Silicon Valley. It was Dustin Moscovis, Jan Talon, and Vitalik Buterin. Remember, Vitalik gave $600 million of dog coins to Future of Life Foundation. And then they've been spending hundreds of millions of dollars on these campaigns to make people be afraid of AI, and they see data centers as a good target. So you really can't underestimate how much of a difference, you know, a billion dollars of donations from these EA billionaires has how much damage that's done in terms of the public perception of AI. And to Miles' point earlier, I mean, we are gonna have like probably a hundred new EA billionaires as a result of the anthropic IPO. And as those people find their way into politics, it will be like George Soros times 100 or 1,000.

SPEAKER_19 53:52

It's gonna have VR people working for them. It's gonna be nuts. I I like that he said that. Those new billionaires that are gonna be interjected into the system, they're all fiat billionaires, right? So they want to move, they and it's it's about control. This is just one of those things. A lot of times, the criticism we have for AI, we have to ask where's the source of it and what's the benefit. I am totally like, you know, AI is either gonna liberate us or it's gonna destroy us, just like nuclear power, just like maybe, you know, maybe space is great, or that's when we finally meet the reptilians and we become the main cores, right? There's always a two sides to it, and uh, you know, we're along for the ride. The the difference with us is you have to decide how you want to go along for this ride, right? You have to decide where you're going to fit in and are you going to be prepared for what's to come? That's it. That's all there is to it. That just means make the smart investments, make the asymmetrical bets. Doesn't mean you have to change everything about your life, but be aware that everything about your life can change overnight, right? You could have hundreds of thousands in the bank. They close the bank on Friday, open the bank on Monday. You still have hundreds of thousands, but you can't buy what you could a couple days ago.

SPEAKER_21 55:11

You know, my grandfather described a bankers' holiday in you know, several times in my youth growing up, and I I kind of was like, Oh, that's a great story, grandpa. And now the older I get, I'm like, whoa, shoot, this could happen.

SPEAKER_19 55:28

It repeats itself. It does, it really repeats itself.

Robotaxis And The Limits Of Autopilot

SPEAKER_19 55:32

So with AI and the productivity boom, right? Elon Musk has put out these robotaxis. Apparently, there's some in San Francisco, some in Austin, and people have been asked, you know, can I buy them up here? Can I buy them there? And he's like, they're not for sale yet. We still have to work some things out. Remember, these don't have drivers, right? So if if if AI, if it, if it puts you in a funny spot, they can't exact you can't exactly like steer your way out of it, you know. And so this is Elon Musk describing kind of the learning curve that we have and the training of AI. This is one of the reasons why I think this transition will be a little bit softer than people think. It's not gonna be like everybody gets laid off and they never go back to work. I think there's just new opportunities, right? There's new opportunities because at scale, right? Even if you say, well, there's gonna be a billion robots, well, then there's gonna be a hundred million operators, people who know how to train them and work on, you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_21 56:26

There's going to be You know, we've heard heard lots of stories around um self-driving cars, you know, the all the accidents or the you know, the horror stories of something that have happened. I heard a story yesterday that blew me away. A gentleman was having a heart attack in his self-driving car, and it and he passed out and it took him to the emergency room.

SPEAKER_19 56:45

Yeah. I was like, whoa. Again, powerful tools. Very glad that happened. That's like the flock camera actually finding the carjack. On the other hand, it's watching, it's monitoring your biometrics. Right. Do you know what I mean?

unknown 57:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_19 57:05

One of the things I I don't know. I was, you know, I'm not an Elon Musk sycophant. Like, this guy could turn on a dime, and this could be like, yep, the intention was there, right? Control grid. Like, you got us all to walk in because the cyber truck just felt like your front room. Meanwhile, you know, you're it you're trapped. You know what I mean? It's driving you to the police station. You know, we've just read your thoughts, and you had a uh seditious thought, you need to go to the police station and have a report filed, right? So here's Elon Musk talking about Robo Taxi and the learning curve. This, I think, bod well bodes well for the grow out of it, the productivity argument. This productivity, I think Elon Musk is short on his time frames. It's like someone was saying, you know, the first self-driving car was like 20, 2008 or something like that, and it's taken 15, 16 years to get the first model.

SPEAKER_21 57:59

Guys like him have to be optimistic, otherwise they'll get stagnant, you know, so they're always pushing the curve, you know.

SPEAKER_19 58:05

There's also probably an assumption that everybody will get one. Right. The reality is it'll be a while before you're, you know, adoption. Someone up in the hollows of the Tennessee is gonna be getting their optimist robots.

SPEAKER_20 58:17

Right. It's it's gone pretty smoothly. Um a lot of things that we're learning um are uh just how to manage a fleet. Like because you've you've got to write all the fleet management software, right? So um and you've you've got to have write the ride hailing software. You've got to write basically the the software that Uber has, you've got to write that software. It's just summoning a robot car instead of a car with a driver. Um so a lot of the things we're doing, we're we're we're scaling up the number of cars um to say like what happens if you have a thousand cars. Like so we'll we you know, we think probably we'll have you know a thousand cars or more um in the Bayer area, uh this year, like I don't know, five hundred or more in the greater Orson area. Um and you know, if if if um you have to you you have to make sure the cars don't all, for example, go to the same supercharger uh at the time. Right. Um so uh or or don't all go to the same intersection. Um it's like what do these cars do? And then like sometimes there's uh high demand and sometimes there's there's low demand. What do you do during during those times? Uh do you have the car circled the block? Do you have a try to find a parking space? Um the um and then you know sometimes the like say it's a it's uh you know, disabled parking space or something, but the the riding's faded or the things faded, or the car's like, oh look at parking space, we'll jump right in there.

SPEAKER_02 59:46

Yeah, get a ticket.

SPEAKER_20 59:48

Gotta look carefully, make sure it's it's like you know, it's not a uh an illegal parking space. Uh or or or or it sees it sees a space to park and it's like ridiculously tight. But it's like I can get in there. Um with like you know, three inches on either side.

SPEAKER_16 1:00:06

Bad computer.

SPEAKER_20 1:00:10

But but nobody else will be able to get in their car if you do that. Um so um, you know, there's just like all these odd little corners.

SPEAKER_19 1:00:17

So my dad came up with the cyber truck, and he was just it he turned his Tesla in him, so he had a loner car, so they don't have a cyber truck. So we did the self-driving up to the gas station and back, and you have to see the hill. But we come down this long hill, we descend, you know, 350 feet, then you make a sharp, more than 90 degree right hand turn onto my street, like right at the bottom of the hill. Well, as you're making that turn, you gotta kind of cut the corner there because otherwise you end up a little farther down the hill, and it's a little tight. That 90-degree turn is like 98 degrees, it's more than a 90-degree turn into the road. And many people over the years have run into the bushes. The road, the the slope drops off on that side of the road, like down 10 feet. I've lived there for 15, 16 years. I've seen at least two cars with my eyes that were down that bank bit. They've knocked out the transformer there, so they've moved it, so it's not like in the path of being it. It's a problem. So taking the Cybertruck, it took the turn wide. So another car, like if another car is at the stop sign, that's when you have to take the turn right around them. Otherwise, you've kind of cut the corner where a car coming up would be. Anyways, it took the corner wide at night in the dark, where that corner becomes really dark and boy, and it was like, nobody ever has taken the corner quite like that. Like it was like, whoa, not a human decision. So when he says, like, oh, I can fit into that parking spot. Yeah, you can ride with one inch on the margin of the road. I know what's on the other side of that margin, it's a slope straight down, you know. I don't know that Tesla quite sees it. There's a hole right there that we can quickly go into.

Bitcoin, Stablecoins, And Public Money

SPEAKER_19 1:01:53

So Trump posted this back in July, and this is from an old hearing in Congress about Bitcoin. So, in this age that we're at, where fiat currency can be printed as much as they want, and all the cryptos will fall right in line, right? However, many crypto tokens need to be created to facilitate the stable coins and things like that, they're gonna do it. And what that what is that gonna do? It'll be good. It'll be good for us as Americans. Why? Because more people around the world will use our dollars, even if they're tied to stable coins. It'll make it easier for international travel. It mops up the liquidity as our government prints and prints and prints and prints.

SPEAKER_21 1:02:30

They'll have better access to it than they do to the dollar right now.

SPEAKER_19 1:02:34

And to the extent that the dollar remains the bully in the schoolyard and forces everybody to take it, then it's it's going to be a net positive on the whole for us. But the problem is it's kind of another one of those things. The higher you climb, the farther you fall. The higher you climb, the farther you fall. So, how do you hedge that bet? Nations need to hedge that bet. Ray Dalio was talking about the reserve currency, it is not quite the reserve anymore. You hear Marco Rubio saying in five years, we won't be able to do sanctions. If we were fighting this Iran war without the ability to debank them and do the sanctions, we would not have the same results we're having right now. We would probably be in a much uglier position, maybe boots on the ground, because they'd be able to fund terrorism. Right now, they're cut off. Like the difficulty on moving money around is astronomical for them, right? And so this is Trump earlier this summer. He posted this on his truth social. The guys that are in charge right now, Trump, Bessant, Kevin Warsh, they are all pro-Bitcoin. They're pro-digital assets because they need, they need by necessity of the public who are unaware of these types of things, the people who really have no clue why their bread costs what they cost, or why gas what they cost. These are the people who, when you say, where does milk come from? And they say, the grocery store, right? They have to be taken care of. They are going to get sucked into whatever system the people in charge create for them because that's what they do. They manage the masses. That's all it is, right? The masses equal power. How do you manage the masses? Keep them fed, keep them satiated, keep the pitchforks from coming to our door. I guarantee you, 99% of billionaires have said at one point, oh, the only problem with humanity is the humans. Like we have to do all these things to keep these guys placated. Fix the money, fix the world, because it changes the incentives.

SPEAKER_16 1:04:39

Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. My name is Peter Van Valkenberg, and I'm the director of research at Coin Center, an independent nonprofit focused on the public policy issues affecting cryptocurrency and public blockchain networks. What is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is the world's first cryptocurrency, and it works because of the world's first public blockchain network. What does Bitcoin do? It's simple. It lets you send and receive value to and from anyone in the world using nothing more than a computer and an internet connection. Now, why is it revolutionary? Because unlike every other tool for sending money over the internet, it works without the need to trust a middleman. The lack of any corporation in between means that Bitcoin is the world's first public digital payments infrastructure. And by public I simply mean available to all and not owned by any single entity. It's called the Internet. But the only public payments infrastructure that we have is cash, as in paper money. And it only works Face-to-face transactions. Before Bitcoin, if you wanted to pay someone remotely over the phone or the internet, then you could not use public infrastructure. You would rely on a private bank to open their books and add a ledger entry that debits you and credits the person you're paying. And if you both don't use the same bank, well then there'll be multiple banks and multiple ledger entries in between. With Bitcoin, the ledger is the public blockchain, and anyone can add an entry to that ledger, transferring their Bitcoins to someone else. And anyone, regardless of their nationality, race, religion, gender, sex, or creditworthiness, can for absolutely no cost create a Bitcoin address in order to receive payments digitally. Bitcoin is the world's first globally accessible public money. Is it perfect? No. Neither was email when it was invented in 1972. Bitcoin's not the best money on every margin. It's not yet accepted everywhere. It's not used often to quote prices, and it's not always a stable store of value. But it is working, and the mere fact that it works without trusted intermediaries is amazing. It's a computer science breakthrough. And it will be as significant for freedom, prosperity, and human flourishing as the birth of the Internet. And Bitcoin is just the beginning. If we can replace private payments infrastructure, then we can replace other private choke points to human interaction as well. Now why should we want to build more public infrastructure? Why should we embrace blockchains over corporate intermediaries? Why should we tolerate their inefficiencies and work to make them better? Why should we want the pioneers of this technology here in the United States and not fleeing overseas? A simple reason. Because the corporate intermediaries providing today's critical but privately owned infrastructure are becoming fewer, larger, and more powerful, and their failures are increasingly grave. So roughly half of all Americans, 143 million people, had their social security numbers exposed to hackers because of a breach at Equifax. The Swift network has relay hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent transactions because of hacked member banks in Bangladesh, Vietnam, Ecuador, and Russia. The FBI suspects now that the largest of these hacks was perpetrated by North Korea. Corrupt, low-level employees at an Indian bank, Punjab National, were able to fraudulently certify Swift messages stealing $1.8 billion. It's the largest electronic bank robbery in history. In fact, it's the largest bank robbery in history. In October 2016, an estimated 1.2 million internet connected devices were hacked and turned into a botnet that for several hours made prominent websites unavailable across Europe and North America, including CNN and Fox News, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Increasingly, physical machines are being connected to the Internet to augment their capabilities. They're wired through servers that are owned and maintained by private and trusted intermediaries, the so-called Internet of Things. Pacemakers from St. Jude's Hospital have been hacked. Baby monitors from TrendNet have been hacked. And Jeeps from Jeep have been hacked to the point where they can be remotely commandeered and driven off the road. Now those vulnerabilities are inescapable in systems that have single points of failure. It doesn't matter if the point of failure is a corporation or if it's a government. There shouldn't be a single point of failure. Similar choke points existed before the Internet. If you wanted to deliver a message, you'd have to go through one of three television broadcasters or a handful of newspapers. Private corporations are essential, but no critical infrastructure should rely on one or two. The Internet removed single points of failure in communications infrastructure and ushered in a wave of competition among new media corporations building on top of its public rails. Blockchains can similarly disintermediate critical payments and IoT infrastructure. The technology is not yet ready to answer all of those questions today, but it is our best hope. And as with the internet in the 1990s, we need a light touch pro-innovation policy to ensure that these innovations flourish in America for the benefit and security of all Americans.

SPEAKER_19 1:10:49

You could never

Sovereignty Through Optionality And Reserves

SPEAKER_19 1:10:50

forget when Kevin Walsh said Bitcoin, because of the public blockchain ledger, creates accountability for policymakers. There's no way if we made payments in Bitcoin or our payments were all based on Bitcoin, that you would see $1.5 billion going into South Florida for wheelchairs. We would catch that. You would never see the amount of military spending we do that just gets remember the magic money printers at the Pentagon that Elon Musk described? Yeah, just cut them a check. Who cares? Right? You'll never see that. There's a finite supply, and everyone becomes precious. And when it moves, you have to get equivalent value back. That's it. You would never spend a gold coin on the you know Tuesday tacos at Jack in the Box. Not a good exchange, right? Changes your time preference. What's great about Bitcoin, and I'll probably continue to harp on this for a long time, and it and it would go the same for gold, except you lose a lot of functionality, right? It gives you a way to opt out. It gives you a way not to be trapped in whatever system they built. If you own an oil well, you have a money printer. Bitcoin, because of its scarcity, will feel the same way. It's just gonna go up and up and up and up. As they print more dollars, chasing more goods and productivity in priced in Bitcoin, it'll all come down. It'll all come down.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:23

Bitcoin is what gave us optionality, right? Now we have the option to take our money out of the fiat system. And this optionality is specifically what sovereignty is. Sovereignty is not like separating yourself from the system completely, it's your ability to make decisions for yourself. And the only way you can make decisions is if you have the optionality, and that's why we Bitcoin, that's why I do what I do, and I sell passports. That's what I do to give people more of a jurisdictional optionality. Um, so with optionality comes choices. With choices, uh you are able to make decisions to yourself, and that's all human freedom is, right?

SPEAKER_19 1:13:05

It's what Victor Frankel discovered in the concentration camps. Your ability to react to any stimulus is the last of human freedom. When you can choose how you react, take away choices. If you can't figure out how to eat without the benefactor, they own you. If you can't figure out where to live without the benefactor, they own you. Right? If you can't figure out where to go without your benefactor's permission, they own you. Sovereignty is not checking out of the system entirely, sovereignty is being able to walk away when you want to. That's it. So I'm Space Race team player two, right behind Carlito, who doesn't believe in it at all. Right. But both of us are setting ourselves up, as well as many of our other audience members, are setting ourselves up so that our success is not dependent on their success.

SPEAKER_21 1:14:01

Well, it also makes that your choices are truly free.

SPEAKER_19 1:14:05

Your choices are free, exactly. If I own the asset that everybody wants to get because it's the true store of value in the internet age, then I have choices. I can walk away from my nine to five.

SPEAKER_21 1:14:16

Well, I should say they're freely made. They're not free, but they're freely made.

SPEAKER_19 1:14:20

They're freely made, exactly. Sovereignty is about having choice. And the more you put yourself in a position to have choice, the more free you are. And the less I learned this going through J6 because I saw other J6ers being, you know, I don't know how else to put it, attacked by our own government. Banking, attack that. Your children at school, 100% was a vector of attack. Your spouse's employment, totally a vector of attack. Your employment, vector of attack. You work at a company that is uh private, it has private equity from BlackRock, and they're pushing, you're fired. Like the the amount of people that lost their jobs because their company just will not allow them to associate with someone on the terrorist list or whatever. You know what I mean? Like it was uh, you know, one of our good friends worked at UPS, got charged with misdemeanors, fired. Oh, so this whole pension thing and this whole I'm part of the union, and yeah, no, that doesn't apply. He got his case dropped. He's the only guy that got his case completely dropped. You think USPS gave him his job back? I say USPS, UPS gave him his job back. Nope. Nope. Right? Don't be in a spot where you lose options. And even for our policymakers, even for President Trump himself. Remember that video we just watched was from 2008, but Trump reposted it this summer. Trump's a Bitcoiner. Trump got debanked. Where do you think he put his money? Bitcoin. They're one of the largest holders of Bitcoin. They're in the top, he and his sons collectively are in the top 10 or 20 percent, maybe 10 or 20 names of people that are top Bitcoiners, right? It's not just for us, the little guys, it's not just for the peasants, it's and but it's for the government itself. Cynthia Loomis, senator from Wyoming, who this is her last term. She's gone in November. She has encouraged the government to create a Bitcoin reserve for this very reason. Because just like you have to have sovereignty, we have to have sovereign. We're not very sovereign when we have to let Iran be a terror state for 47 years because we're afraid of what our friends at the Bank of London and Lloyd's of London are gonna do. You know what I mean? That's not very sovereign. It's not very sovereign when Canada is holding you over a barrel on trade deals, right? For what reason? Well, because they're tied in with the Bank of London. That's not very sovereign. You're not very sovereign when you rely on the ingredients for amoxicillin coming out of China and being manufactured in India. You're not very sovereign when your kid has a fever and you have to pay whatever price they want you to pay, right? That's not very sovereign. Bitcoin will not only produce your individual sovereignty, your ability to choose, but it can do the same for a nation state.

SPEAKER_08 1:17:01

Uh it's easy to forget that the Bitcoin Act did not require new money to be expended to get a strategic Bitcoin reserve. So, one of the things I would really like to do is call up Secretary Bessant, who's a very busy man, and say, You gotta make time for me. I want to go over again and remind you uh what um our thinking was. Um, and uh uh I hope the opportunity to do that will be sooner rather than later. Yeah. Uh it's easy to forget.

SPEAKER_19 1:17:35

What they what she proposes is that the US government rapidly accumulate over the course of like five years, a million Bitcoin, which would secure them, which would secure if the dollar collectively backed by Golden Fort Knox and Bitcoin, it would alleviate the dollar having to be backed by your house. Because right now, every asset, this is that Senate Act in 1933, 34, every piece of property that has a bank mortgage on it, the bank owns it, right? They have the deed. And who owns the banks? The feds own the banks. Every piece of property is collateralized all the way to where you fill out a loan agreement with a credit card company that's unsecured, you're the security. You're the surety. And if we had debtors' prisons, a lot of people would be in debt for defaulted credit cards, right? But you become the collateral. This is a refocus. Let's put the collateral on something that's inert and stable, like Bitcoin. In a world where your you vote with your eyes, your dollars, and your clicks, right?

Elections, Mail Ballots, And Internet Claims

SPEAKER_19 1:18:43

When the ballot doesn't work anymore, that's what you have. Your eyes, your dollars, and your clicks. When you take your dollars out of the fiat system, you render what's going on with the voting less uh impactful on you directly. It's impactful on society, no doubt about it. But it puts you in a position to be able to go and influence it because you can walk away. And you have to, you have to recognize our election systems are vulnerable. And while there's been some work on the margins, some work on the margins, all in all, they are still extremely vulnerable. Even to the effect in Georgia, this is Ray Favorito who's been involved in these lawsuits down in Georgia. Guess what, Ron? You know what the vulnerability in Georgia was for the Dominion, the Dominion, the Dominion voting machines? The thermostat.

SPEAKER_13 1:19:35

That uh in Savannah, Georgia, there is a uh remote, uh, excuse me, a smart thermostat in one of the tabulation rooms that is talking to a tabulation server and reporting the votes back to China. And that was traced by a Microsoft engineer, and he brought it to our attention yesterday. So um that's being monitored. We already knew that there was a huge overseas problem. And it's not just social media. Uh, your votes in 29 different states, your votes were going to Frankfurt, Germany. They were ending up on a server owned by Clarity Elections that uh in Savannah.

SPEAKER_19 1:20:17

Last night, when I was in the Republican meeting, they did a you know, how to deal your deal with ballots and how to register. And you know, it's kind of like a precursor to the election in two months. And on the back of the paper that we were going over, on the back of the paper was Kitzep County's like voter cute fact sheet. And the very first caption box was the servers are certified by an independent commission and the state secretary of state of Washington. Yeah, okay. I'm you know, not certified, don't actually qualify. Like, we know the issues there, but then it had one sentence that stood out on its own, and they are they are not connected to the internet in an inner way. And I was like, that's just not true. It's just a lie. It's not true by any stretch of the imagination. It's connected to the internet. The local people might not be connecting it, but they connect, they have SIM cards embedded in the hardware. They talk to the smart thermostats, they are absolutely on the internet. It's just the dark internet, it's the dark web. You know, the one that you don't get to through Google, you get through through a Tor server or you know, uh an onion network. Like they're on the internet. They are DARPA connection. Whatever Joe Biden thinks, the machine prints.

SPEAKER_18 1:21:36

I want to be the greatest president ever. Give me 20 million votes. I want to make Barack Obama proud of me.

SPEAKER_19 1:21:42

Yeah. Look at that. Look at that algorithmic punch right there in the middle of the night. How did he do that? Unbelievable. Now, there is attention on the machines. Mark Wayne Mullins is at DHS who has SISA inside of his purview. And he is the one who instigated the frying of that server in Belgrade that then up for five days that then allowed our election to basically go algorithm-free, right? Too big to rig. And so knowing that as Democrats, that the Space Force, the SISA, whoever could fry these servers, what are you gonna do? You're gonna try to move servers around and still get your access, but clearly they're watching. Okay. And it's probably easier for them to watch that than it is to watch ballot boxes because you can watch it with AI, you can watch it online, right? Now, I don't like the fact that Liberty Vote now controls the Dominion machines. I don't like the fact that it's a quote conservative company. They're gonna cheat.

SPEAKER_21 1:22:39

That's just cover.

SPEAKER_19 1:22:40

Yeah, it's just cover. They're gonna cheat. Like the globalists are still charged, or maybe it's the Patriots. Who knows? I don't like it because my vote may or may not represent an equal share of the voting population, right? It might be one ballot, but how do I know every ballot is associated with a real living person that's a U.S. citizen that has the right to vote? Do you see what I'm saying? Like, I don't know that, but the panic the Democrats have over their last vector of cheating, mail-in voting, says a lot.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:11

Limiting voting by mail. This comes as the midterms are less now than two months away. North Carolina already started sending out mail-in ballots, and more states will follow suit in the coming days and weeks. CNN's Betsy Klein is at the White House this morning. Give us some sense of this new push, this new push towards the Supreme Court to try to get a decision here, really wanting to sort of upend the way that mail-in ballots work when it goes through the post office.

SPEAKER_12 1:23:39

Yes, Aaron, time is clearly of the essence here. President Trump has spent years making unsubstantiated claims about illegal voting by mail. And he has really targeted mail-in voting during his second term. And we saw that back in March as he issued this executive order laying out new mail-in voting requirements. Among them, it requires the U.S. Postal Service to get this sweeping power to withhold delivery of mail-in ballots. It requires state and local election officials to upload lists of male voters to a special portal. It also requires special barcodes on envelopes for tracking. And of course, this was immediately challenged in court by dozens of states. The Supreme Court is now considering an emergency appeal that would allow the U.S. Postal Service to implement the rule before the November midterm elections, which of course are less than two months away now. And some states, including North Carolina, have started that mail-in ballot process. Many election officials are arguing that it's already too late to implement this. The Trump administration arguing for the urgency here. I want to read to you a little bit from this emergency filing sent on Sunday. The Department of Justice says, quote, once those ballot envelopes enter the mail stream, there is no retrieving them. And while the injunction allows the Postal Service and the states to continue taking steps to ensure that their envelopes satisfy the rules requirements, each day the injunction is in place, risks sowing confusion and chaos because the injunction makes those preparatory steps voluntary rather than mandatory. We should note that mail-in voting is becoming increasingly popular. Nearly 50 million Americans voted by mail in the 2024 election. And according to an analysis from Pew Research, roughly uh a majority of those voters voted Democrat by mail. And the states and voting rights groups now have until Wednesday to respond to the Department of Justice. The Supreme Court is going to be uh making a decision relatively quickly here in the White House, is watching this very, very closely, Sarah.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:43

Betsy Klein, I do appreciate you working on a house.

SPEAKER_19 1:25:48

So my dad in town this this week, we got into a really robust discussion yesterday morning about elections because he's like, Well, you have to prove you're a citizen. I'm like, no, you don't. He's like, Yeah, you do. So I pulled it up, looked it up for right there on the spot. Of course, he didn't believe me, you know. Never want to believe me. But I was like, look, it says you have to be a U.S. citizen to vote. That's a federal law. Like, God, everybody, you have to be a U.S. citizen. But how do you prove it? It's the honor system. You check a box. And when the box gets automatically checked at the DMV, you may not have proven anything. All you've proven is you're a resident and need a driver's license. That's all you've proven. You haven't proven you're a citizen, right? Checking the box is not mean you brought a birth certificate or a passport or something else that's verified. Getting a passport, you got to prove you're a citizen, right? Or at least whatever legal status you have to get a passport.

SPEAKER_21 1:26:36

We could ask some attorneys in DC about checking boxes.

SPEAKER_19 1:26:40

Yeah. Yeah. That is that is a lot of people are completely unaware of how the system actually works. In a high trust society where putting your signing something says under perjury, you take it serious. But when perjury never gets enforced, when checking the box becomes happenstance and you don't read it.

SPEAKER_21 1:26:59

Or when you walk across the board illegally to begin with, who cares what box you check?

SPEAKER_19 1:27:03

Because then you get the benefits and you're already, you know what I mean? It's not working. It's not working. So the margins is one thing, but really the biggest thing is take away the sanction. What you take away the sanction you give them by being dependent upon them because they know you can't walk away. When you can walk away, they don't own you anymore. And now they have to negotiate with you in good faith. And you have to have to accept the cost of the benefit, not I already accepted the benefit. And then afterwards you see the price tag. That's the difference.

Trade Leverage And The Canada Flex

SPEAKER_19 1:27:36

Another interesting thing, this is kind of fun. Donald Trump is really, I, you know, the things if Donald Trump stays true to some of the stuff he's done to other nations as far as tariffs and, you know, make it here, which some of it he's waffled on or he's gone back once he gets whatever negotiated thing he wants, but he definitely has the ability to cripple other countries. So Canada. Their GDP is not that big, right? Comparatively. They they have a they have a handful of industries that are larger than life, right? Lumber, critical minerals, they make those bombarder airplanes, right, which are very popular jets. Um it's a huge part of their economy. Like it's a chunk of it, 5% or something like that. But Trump says, no more selling bombarder in the United States. Their products aren't good enough. Over 50% of their revenue comes from the United States. So 50% of the planes they sell are being sold into the United States. They live off American buyers, American companies, American airports, and American service. All while Canada blocks our great American companies, banks, and companies throughout the USA. They even blocked the Gulfstream, the Cessna Gulfstream Aerospace from doing is it Cessna? Well, just the Gulfstream Aerospace from doing business in Canada. So if we take their bombarders and their direct competitor Gulf Stream, they won't let be sold in Canada. Can you believe that nonsense, Ron? That's unbelievable. Completely unjust and unfair. That era is over for the people, the globalists that preach free trade. Sure don't practice what they preach. If they want our market, they must build here and stop treating America like a piggy bank. Buy American, fly on American airlines, enjoy American liquor and beverages, sail on Lake America, America first. Thank you for your take Donald J. Trump. Woohoo!

SPEAKER_21 1:29:23

You know what I was thinking this morning would be the ultimate flex is if we just renamed Canada. Rename the country.

SPEAKER_19 1:29:34

America North. Oh man. You know, to the picture grow the myths and the monuments, that's what it boils down to. So all right, guys, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it. Again, fix the money, fix the world. You know, what is this show? It's news commentary. Sometimes we get sick of plants, you know, Lindsay Clansy and some of the nonsense. There's a lot of bread circus, there's a lot of distraction, but a lot of our problems boil down to money, right? The incentives, paying for things that there's no product delivered, the inflation, like these things affect the very price of milk bread. Absorbing and losing value. We absorb it, right? And it's on our backs. Um, that $35 million to the two guys, we're gonna play inflation, we're gonna pay interest on that forever. I mean, these that it's it matters. And in a world where you want to go in and doge things and you want to cut it off, Elon Musk walked out. It can't be saved. We have to the only way out is to grow out of it or to check out of it completely. All right, guys, we'll talk to you again tomorrow.

SPEAKER_14 1:30:36

Bye, ma'am, sorry.

Monty Python Tag On Power

SPEAKER_14 1:31:02

What the lips in that castle over there? I'm 37. What? I'm 37, I'm not old. Well, I can't just call you ma'am. You could say Dennis. I didn't know you were called Dennis. Well, you didn't bother to find out, did you? I did say sorry about the old woman, but from behind, you look what I object to is you automatically treat me like an inferior. Well, I am king. Oh, king, eh? Very nice. And how'd you get that, eh? By exploiting the workers, by hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society. If there's ever going to be any progress. How'd you do? How do you do, good lady? I'm Arthur, King of the Britons. Whose castle is that? King of the Who? The Britons. Who are the Britons? We all are. We are all Britons. And I am your king. I didn't know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective. You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship. A self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes. Oh, there you go. Bringing class is good again. That's what it's all about. If only people would. Please, please, good people. I am in haste. Who lives in that castle? No one lives there. Then who is your lord? We don't have a lord. What? I told you. We're in a narco-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week. Yes. But all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting. Yes, I see. By a civil majority in the case of purely internal affairs. Be quacked. But by a two-thirds majority in the case of quotes. I order you to be quacked. Or do you think he is? I'm your king. I didn't vote for you. You don't vote for kings? Why do you become king then? The lady of the lake. Her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water. Signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I'm your king. Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony. Big one! But you can't expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tarp threw a sword at you. Shut up! I mean, if I went round saying I was an emperor, just because some moistened binge had lobbed a scimitar at me, they put me away! Shut up, will you? Shut up! Now we see the violence inherent in the system. Shut up! Have we seen the violence inherent in the system? Help, help! I'm being repressed, bloody peasant! Oh, what a giveaway! Do you hear that? Do you hear that, eh? That's what I'm on about.

SPEAKER_15 1:33:45

Do you see repressing me? You saw it, didn't you?