#766: Gold and Bitcoin Are Your Survival Kit with Porter Stansberry

**SPEAKER_1** (0:07)
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.
When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bold case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

**Marty Bent** (0:36)
Porter Stansbury, welcome back to the show.

**Porter Stansbury** (0:38)
Hey, good to see you again, Marty.

**Marty Bent** (0:40)
Good to see you again. I had a whole slew of questions. I was going to ask you to follow up last year and jump into your book, 2029, The End of America. And then I was sitting here looking at your Twitter account. I saw a tweet you sent out yesterday about the fact that we're not actually celebrating our 250th anniversary as a country. We're going to be celebrating our 165th anniversary because the country changed during the Civil War. I think maybe starting there is a great spot.

**Porter Stansbury** (1:10)
Sure.
Yeah, I'd argue that what we're celebrating is the 165th anniversary of the end of our republic.
Unfortunately, the government that our founders created didn't survive 100 years. The invasion of the South by the North in 1861 started a whole different country. The South was conquered. 90% of its wealth was destroyed. And the entire structure of our government, the federalism that really defined how the government was kept in check, and how the central government in particular was limited to a very specific set of powers was all cast aside. Through that terrible war, which I still don't think most Americans understand how absolutely catastrophic the Civil War was, or how completely unnecessary it was. If you know anything about economics, you can understand that chattel slavery was not going to survive industrialization. It's not possible. And if you look all around the world, within a single generation, chattel slavery was eliminated, even in places that had no concept of civil rights like Russia and Brazil. So there was no way that slavery was going to continue. And of course, the other thing is, most people don't know this, is that the war wasn't actually about slavery. It was about the fact that the southern states believe they had the right to leave the union, and the North didn't. So the North conquered them and won. And slavery was eliminated as part of that because slavery was at the time driving the South's economy. So it was really a war.
It was a tactic of the war. It wasn't a political goal at the start of the war at all. But anyways, I think that it's really important that Americans understand what was lost in the Civil War in terms of federalism, and that Americans used to believe that they were citizens of their states. And that concept, I believe, is going to come back in part because the central government has been off the rails for so long, has acquired so many debts, has destroyed our monetary system. And I think Americans are beginning to realize that the prosperity that we think we enjoy is really a house of cards, and that the things that matter most to us, like our ability to have our liberties and control our communities through voting, has really been destroyed by an all-powerful Leviathan central government. And I think there's a lot of Americans that feel these things, but they may not really understand all the facts and all the economics behind why. And that's part of what my book, 2029, is about, and it was certainly about, it was certainly what was behind that long ex post I wrote yesterday.

**Marty Bent** (4:00)
Yeah, well, it seems like the 1860s set in motion a cascading event of death by a thousand cuts of new acts, new laws, new administrative state actors operating below this or as part of this Leviathan. And I certainly feel it as a millennial. And I've been talking about this a lot.
As it pertains to this AI build out, I think a lot of people are looking at the tea leaves particularly as it pertains to entropic and open AI having to have their models tested and approved by the government first and saying, this technology is so powerful, like it's crazy, like we need the government to do this. And I'm looking at it like the government should have no part in this.

**Porter Stansbury** (4:50)
Now, it used to be there was a lot of first-members protections for software, because software is a form of speech.