Shownotes
Our very first interview!!! Today I welcomed our very first guest to the show. I met Gary on the podcastindex.social mastodon instance where I post as @macintosh@podcastindex.social. I had posted about todays news and he and I began a conversation. As a world traveler (many times over) he has a great perspective on what bitcoin adoption can bring to emerging countries.
We talk about lightning network adoption as well as nations using bitcoin as legal tender. Hope you enjoy the discussion!
news
links
Gary's travel website https://everything-everywhere.com
Ya'lls: https://yalls.org
Stacker News: https://stacker.news
Podcasting 2.0 Apps Available at http://newpodcastapps.com/
I can be reached by email at mcintosh@genwealthcrypto.com and on twitter at @McIntoshFinTech. My mastodon handle is @mcintosh@podcastindex.social. Looking forward to hearing from you!
Website
Music Credits
Protofunk by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4247-protofunk
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
The following music was used for this media project:
Music: Ethernight Club by Kevin MacLeod
Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/7612-ethernight-club
License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Artist website: https://incompetech.com
Transcripts
everyone. No one on this podcast is a financial advisor and all information presented on this
Speaker:podcast is for informational purposes only. Now that we have the legal stuff out of the way,
Speaker:let's jump on in. Welcome to the Generational Wealthwood Cryptocurrency Podcast. I'm your host,
Speaker:McIntosh, and today is a big day. Our first guest interview.
Speaker:All right, so tonight we've got a special guest, our very first guest, Gary Arndt. He is a
Speaker:travel blogger. Is that what you would call yourself?
Speaker:Travel blogger, photographer, although nowadays I'm mostly just podcasting.
Speaker:Right, and we'll talk about that in just a second here, but I've taken a look at his website. We'll
Speaker:have a link in the show notes, of course. It's everything-everywhere.com. But first of all, Gary,
Speaker:you take beautiful pictures. I wish I could take pictures like that, but Gary has quite the story.
Speaker:So in March 2007, he sold his house, and up until the pandemic, he's been traveling around the world.
Speaker:He was not always a world traveler. Other than the occasional summer vacations, his family did
Speaker:not travel very much. So Gary is a cheesehead. I think that's what they're called, right? And
Speaker:grew up in Wisconsin. Are you a Packers fan? Or people of cheese.
Speaker:People of cheese. But, and he never saw saltwater until he was 21 years old. In 1998,
Speaker:he sold his business to a multinational corporation, and they sent him on a whirlwind
Speaker:three-week tour of their offices in January of 1999. In three weeks, he visited Japan, Taiwan,
Speaker:Singapore, France, Germany, Belgium, and the U.K. And as someone who has traveled through
Speaker:three time zones in a week and a half, went to China, and then to San Francisco, and then back
Speaker:onto the East Coast, that was bad enough. I cannot imagine doing what you did.
Speaker:So that trip stuck with Gary for years. He made a few other international trips after that to the
Speaker:Bahamas, Iceland, and Argentina. But I don't think at that point he made a real commitment to travel.
Speaker:In 2004, because you didn't have anything else to do, you decided to go back to school and study
Speaker:geology. After seeing what PhD students were going through, the idea of going to graduate school
Speaker:became very unappealing. And while Gary does enjoy learning, he didn't enjoy doing research,
Speaker:so he decided he'd rather travel around the world. It took him about two years to tie up all the loose
Speaker:ends and sell his house, and on the 13th of March in 2007, he turned over the keys to his home.
Speaker:He's lived on the road, traveling nonstop for nine years. In 2016, he did actually get an apartment,
Speaker:a base, so that he could return home between trips. And I assume that's where you are now
Speaker:because of the pandemic.
Speaker:No, that was in Minneapolis.
Speaker:Oh, okay. You don't live there anymore.
Speaker:I moved. No, I moved because I lived right where the riots occurred, and my neighbor had burned
Speaker:down, so I left.
Speaker:Wow. Did you take pictures of that?
Speaker:Oh, yeah. All right. Very quickly, I'm going to go through. You've got a stunning set of facts up
Speaker:here. You have visited all seven continents and actually done it. You did it, excuse me, in one
Speaker:year, in 2012. You've set foot in 2004 countries and territories around the world. You traveled to
Speaker:all 50 states and every US territory twice. You've explored each Canadian province, province, sorry,
Speaker:three times. You've been to every state in Australia, Germany, South Africa, and several
Speaker:other countries. You do like to explore. You've been to over 220 US National Park Service sites
Speaker:in your quest to visit all 420 in the United States, and you have visited almost all 60 of
Speaker:the US national parks. And you've photographed and documented trips to over 4,000 UNESCO
Speaker:World Heritage Sites around the world. You're one of the world's foremost authorities on the
Speaker:World Heritage Sites. And very quickly, you've landed and launched from a nuclear aircraft carrier.
Speaker:That must have been exciting. Gone dog sledding in the Canadian Arctic, bungee jumped in New
Speaker:Zealand, floated in the Dead Sea, crossed the Arctic Circle in the Yukon. You've ridden road,
Speaker:rode in a Formula One car at 180 miles per hour, been in the water with great white sharks in South
Speaker:Africa, dove in the ruins of the Great Lighthouse of Alexandria in Egypt, swam with the whale sharks
Speaker:in Australia. You've been splunking in Borneo. You've rode the world's highest zip line in Puerto
Speaker:Rico. You've rode out a tsunami in Hawaii. You've visited an active war zone in Cambodia, and you've
Speaker:got to talk about this one, resisted the temptation to take a $5 million moon rock in
Speaker:the Solomon Islands. You've been kicked out of the nation of Kiribati. Is that correct?
Speaker:Kiribati. It's pronounced Kiribati. Although I don't blame anyone for mispronouncing it because
Speaker:there is no way you would know that it's pronounced Kiribati from the spelling.
Speaker:Oh, it's in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It's actually quite large.
Speaker:Oh, it's in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It's actually quite large. And it's where the
Speaker:Battle of Tarawa was fought in World War II. Okay. Okay. Very interesting. You experienced
Speaker:the Tide New Year in Bangkok, Holy Week in Jerusalem. You were in the middle of a political
Speaker:protest in Thailand. You've swam with the jellyfish in Palau, and you have visited many of the greatest
Speaker:museums on Earth. That makes me exhausted. I thought I got out a lot. I know you love what you do,
Speaker:obviously, and it shows on your website. For my listeners, they should take a look at his website.
Speaker:I know it's not the kind of stuff we normally talk about, but Gary really is a great photographer.
Speaker:But what we are here tonight to talk about is Bitcoin. I'm going to go through some news
Speaker:real quick because the news is directly relevant to what we're going to discuss.
Speaker:So we'll jump into that first. There's actually very little news since the last episode,
Speaker:and it actually only came up yesterday. All right. So y'all might remember a few episodes
Speaker:ago. Well, it's probably been more than a few at this point. Sometime after El Salvador adopted
Speaker:Bitcoin, I kind of speculated that the next country that would adopt Bitcoin as a legal tender,
Speaker:and I want to make that clear, not just as they'll accept it, there is a difference.
Speaker:Would either be in kind of Central or South America or in Africa. I actually thought it
Speaker:was going to be in South America or Central America. I thought it was going to be Brazil,
Speaker:to be honest with you, but it turns out I was wrong. So we have the first African country to
Speaker:adopt Bitcoin. It happened apparently over the weekend, very, very quickly in terms of timing,
Speaker:apparently. But the Central African Republic, which is in Central Africa, has adopted Bitcoin,
Speaker:or they will do so very shortly. And they're going to be making it legal tender. Now,
Speaker:I do want to point out, and it's very relevant for the discussion that we're fixing to have,
Speaker:that this country, which we're going to abbreviate to CAR, if that's okay with everybody,
Speaker:Central African Republic, C-A-R, they are on one of the systems that are based on the French franc.
Speaker:So these were countries that were controlled by the French. The French actually exited kind
Speaker:of stage left in 1960 in this case, but they left behind their currency. And that causes problems,
Speaker:and that causes problems, in my opinion. I don't have it right here in front of me,
Speaker:but they call it something like Central African Franc or something like that. But it is actually
Speaker:pegged to the euro. It's similar to El Salvador's. They use the US dollar, and with the exact same
Speaker:results in that we have inflation, we do things here in the United States, and that impacts them,
Speaker:and they have no control over it. And in fact, one of the notes that I have while I was researching
Speaker:tonight, El Salvador in 2020, just a couple of years ago, saw a drop from the year before of
Speaker:their income from basically $4,000 in 2019 to $3,600. Now, what was going on in 2020? That
Speaker:was the start of the pandemic and all of that. Now, some of that certainly probably was related
Speaker:to the pandemic, but at the same time here in the United States, what are we doing?
Speaker:We're printing out, I know we printed a stimulus check. Actually, there was two in 2020. There was
Speaker:one in the March-April timeframe, and then there was another one at the very end of the year. Some
Speaker:people got it in December. Some people got it in January. And those checks, that's just money
Speaker:printing. That's just my opinion, but I think I'm correct. I mean, they're backing it with bonds,
Speaker:but it's a gigantic show game. Regardless, I believe in part, and I think that the president
Speaker:of El Salvador backs this up with some of his tweets, they ejected from that system, so to speak,
Speaker:in part because of that. They didn't want to deal with that anymore. They didn't want to be tied to
Speaker:the US dollar. And in the same way, I think the end game here is they didn't want to be tied
Speaker:with the Central African Republic. They didn't want to be tied to the euro, because the euro
Speaker:is going through the same things that we are here in the United States. Inflation,
Speaker:I don't know honestly offhand if they're doing stimulus checks, but I don't think they are.
Speaker:It's the same type setup. And this country down in Africa gets no benefit from that,
Speaker:but they're tied to it. So, I think probably these choices are being made for much the same reason.
Speaker:And I think we will see down the road that these countries that will be coming on board over the
Speaker:next few years, there's a lot of countries that are either tied to the euro or tied to the US
Speaker:dollar. It's an amazing number. I think pegged directly to the US dollar is like 65 countries.
Speaker:The euro is not as high, but it's 20 or 30 or something like that. And so, there's a large
Speaker:boatload of countries that are tied, I would say directly, to the European Union or the United
Speaker:States. Well, I don't know. That's what Gary and I are going to talk about tonight. We actually met
Speaker:on Mastodon earlier today. I've never talked to Gary before. Gary's probably thinking I'm a
Speaker:freak at this point. But anyways, I have an account on Mastodon. I've actually never talked
Speaker:about it on this show. It's McIntosh. I will list it in the show notes. You have to have the
Speaker:full address. It's similar to Twitter, but it's not quite the same. And I post the same content
Speaker:there that I do on Twitter. But Gary responded to a post that I made about this. And we started a
Speaker:conversation. And ultimately, I asked him if he would come on the show. I'm actually going
Speaker:to read this, Gary, if you don't mind the very first thing that you said. You said that you're
Speaker:a big believer in the actual adoption of Bitcoin and the real use case for it will come out of
Speaker:Africa and other developing countries first. In a developed world, it's mostly an investment with
Speaker:lots of theoretical benefits at this point. And you can see very little downside to the CAR to do
Speaker:this. I agree with that. I would point out, Gary, one thing though, I would argue that we are starting
Speaker:to see real use case for it here in the United States. And subsequently, we'll see it around the
Speaker:world. Going back to a year ago when El Salvador, the president of El Salvador got up at the Bitcoin
Speaker:conference and said, we're adopting Bitcoin. Well, this year, Jack Mollers got up and said,
Speaker:basically, we're integrating the Lightning Network everywhere. Strike is his company.
Speaker:And of course, the listeners know the Lightning Network is a layer two protocol that runs on top
Speaker:of Bitcoin, very low fees, very quick transactions. And when you go into a standard company,
Speaker:business, McDonald's, Starbucks, whatever, and you can pay with Bitcoin over Lightning, that's
Speaker:real usability. And he's talking about integrating with a number of companies. And he had a whole
Speaker:list. I don't have it in front of me. NCR was one of the big companies, and they do the point of
Speaker:sale terminal type thing. So you'll be able to probably ultimately take your phone and tap it
Speaker:down on there and have it pay out of your Lightning wallet, which I think would be incredible, really.
Speaker:Well, what I mean by that is setting this up at point of sale is just replicating the same
Speaker:function as a credit card. People can already use a credit card. So there's not like, you know,
Speaker:my mother is 76. She doesn't need to know anything about Lightning. There's no problem that it solves.
Speaker:You can already take your phone, use Apple Pay. You can purchase things. You can
Speaker:complain about the US dollar, but it's probably the least worst currency in the world.
Speaker:We'll talk about that some more too, but you're right about that.
Speaker:If you're in a developing country, you can't trust your banks. You have corrupt political
Speaker:institutions. There's a good chance your currency is awful. And there are a lot of just horrible
Speaker:currencies out there that are like, you know, if you go to Vietnam, you're paying in literally
Speaker:hundreds of thousands of, I don't even know what the exchange rate is now, but it's like a hundred
Speaker:and twenty thousand dong to the dollar when I was there. And I think it's gotten a lot worse.
Speaker:And the really big thing is remittances because there's a lot of countries where that is a huge
Speaker:part of their GDP, including El Salvador, where they make their money by people leaving the
Speaker:country, working overseas, send their money back. And the primary way of doing that has always been
Speaker:Western Union. And it's just so much faster and easier to do that via the Lightning Network than
Speaker:it is with using Western Union and paying their fees and having to deal with the operating hours
Speaker:of the local Western Union store. It can literally be, I send you an email. Hey, I need, you know,
Speaker:send me ten thousand sats and you can do it instantly. And so that's a real problem that this
Speaker:solves. And the only real thing that I found for developing countries that the Lightning Network
Speaker:can do that we can't do in anything else is micro payments. This is something that's been talked
Speaker:about ever since the 90s. People saw the benefit. The problem is micro payments never happened
Speaker:because you cannot do micro payments using the credit card network. It's inefficient to do a
Speaker:one cent payment or something like that. Whereas with the Lightning Network, you can actually do
Speaker:that. And there's all sorts of examples that I can think of in how the Lightning Network could solve
Speaker:a lot of problems on the Internet. The biggest one being spam. You know, what if you set up a system
Speaker:where for, if anyone sends you an email, it will cost them the equivalent of like ten sats, something
Speaker:like a penny, right? A very low amount. I was thinking this very thing literally yesterday and
Speaker:I've thought about it a number of times. I'm like, I just don't know how you do it. I'm almost like,
Speaker:can we do something like what the guys at Podcasting 2.0 did where they just kind of went out and did it
Speaker:and started bringing people on? I am so tired of spam. Everybody is. Would you be willing to pay,
Speaker:you know, a few bucks a month just to be able to send several hundred emails of normal email
Speaker:and then not have to deal with spam on the backside? I mean, I would. I don't even think
Speaker:it would cost money because if it cost you a penny to send an email, you would also receive a penny.
Speaker:Yes. Any time. So the net balance for a regular human being would be zero, approximately.
Speaker:That's true. Yeah. Run a business. But you're right. And the thing is like, so you email me
Speaker:the first time, it's a penny. I respond to you the first time, it's a penny. And thereafter,
Speaker:we can just whitelist each other. Right. But for a spammer, it's a penny. It's a penny.
Speaker:Spammer, you have to send millions of emails in order to make it effective. So you're looking at
Speaker:ten thousand dollars at least to, you know, add a penny for a million. Right. Then the economics
Speaker:of spam just don't work anymore. Same with comments. I was doing that actual calculation.
Speaker:I kid you not. It's so funny. I was doing that very calculation yesterday. I'm just like, man,
Speaker:I don't know. I don't know. I mean, maybe I'm just too tired to do it myself. I don't,
Speaker:but I would love to see the system. It's not just that, but I'm sure you've
Speaker:clicked on a link to read an article online and it takes you to some site like
Speaker:Washington Post or whatever, where you have to subscribe and you don't want to subscribe.
Speaker:You just want to read this one article and you'd even be willing to pay, right? You pay a dime or
Speaker:a quarter or something to read this one article, but there is no system that lets you do that.
Speaker:And the lightning network will let you do it really easy. That is a use case I've never thought of.
Speaker:That's brilliant. And there's other, I mean, the guys over at Podcast 2.0, of course,
Speaker:are cooking up all kinds of things in regards to podcasting along these lines
Speaker:with the lightning network. There's so much what I would call ferment going on right now.
Speaker:It's going to be a very exciting, you know, a few years coming up.
Speaker:You know, I even think that what they're doing is in many ways they're undershooting,
Speaker:you know, if you could, so I have a daily podcast that I do. It's about 10 minutes long.
Speaker:Mm-hmm. And if you would pay, if everyone would pay me one penny per minute that they listen to
Speaker:my show, I'd be making six figures a year right now. Right. And that doesn't sound like a lot,
Speaker:a penny a minute. So it'd be a dime every day, $3 a month, way less than Netflix, you know, anything
Speaker:else. But you just multiply that by the number of people, number of minutes, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker:And it can add up to a lot. And it's not asking for donations. It's literally just like a metering
Speaker:system. So there are so many. And that's why I think what they're doing is great. I support it.
Speaker:But the potential here is much bigger. I'm shocked that no one's made a WordPress plugin
Speaker:that just lets you put in something to have people pay in sats. There's a couple that exist,
Speaker:but you got to tie into some preexisting thing. And I just want something to hook up to my
Speaker:to my lightning node, just something really simple. And there's all kinds of, you know.
Speaker:So if I go to your site, which is everything-everywhere.com people,
Speaker:and I go to your blog posts and what you're saying is you've got a button on there saying,
Speaker:you know, support me or whatever. And you just click on it and it pulls sats out of my wallet
Speaker:and sends it off to yours. Well, no, what I would do is you could basically set up a paywall
Speaker:like a publication, but the difference being you don't have to subscribe. You just get access to
Speaker:that page. Okay. So there's walls.org, but they do that. You can, it's like a hacker news for Bitcoin
Speaker:and you pay per article. And it's like, I don't know, seven cents depends what the exchange rate
Speaker:is, but it's a tiny amount of money, but it works. Have you been to, not to get completely off track
Speaker:here, but let's see. So the website is called stacker.news. And if you go there, you just see
Speaker:a list of articles. You can click on them. I actually post my content on here when I do it.
Speaker:I used to be able to do it about once a week. I haven't been able to do it very much lately,
Speaker:but anyways, read it and there's no charge upfront. So this is kind of more of,
Speaker:I guess you could say the donation model, but then you can, you can upvote stuff. You can comment.
Speaker:And when you do that, it's, it's sats in the background, right? You're paying in sats.
Speaker:So like I've done, I've done, I don't know, half a dozen articles or so, and I've probably,
Speaker:and it's not a very much, I mean, frankly, it's not a whole lot, but this site is just taking off
Speaker:really, it's, I don't know, like a thousand sats or something that I've collected up,
Speaker:you know, from people commenting and boosting the, the article or whatever. So there's going to be
Speaker:all this kind of stuff going on and there'll be different ways that people will figure out to make
Speaker:money, but it's a, Lightning Network is a frictionless medium, right? It makes it very easy
Speaker:once it's set up to use. I think one of the things that throws people off is they're like,
Speaker:oh, you got to have a wallet and you got to have money in there. And if you've ever used the Strike
Speaker:app, it's super simple, right? I can pull money straight out of my bank account. I can actually
Speaker:buy Bitcoin on there. You can even, I think, set up recurring payments. And then I can also use that
Speaker:to send money off to say a podcasting 2.0 app in order to put sats in that wallet. And it doesn't
Speaker:cost anything again. It's very, very low cost. And then I can just feed out, maybe I'm listening
Speaker:to your podcast and I'm streaming 10 sats a minute or whatever, a hundred sats a minute.
Speaker:And we throw around these numbers and I think people like, when I say like a hundred sats a
Speaker:minute, that's actually not much at all. If you think about there's a hundred million sats
Speaker:or satoshis in a Bitcoin, it's like a thousand sats to a cent or something right now. I mean,
Speaker:I don't know exactly. I'd have to look it up. I think it's about 2,500 sats to the dollar.
Speaker:Okay. So, I mean, these aren't pennies, right? I mean, even if they were, is it really?
Speaker:I think part of the thing we're dealing with is people's mind shift, right? We're so used to
Speaker:seeing an endless barrage of ads and garbage, both on our pages that we view, our web pages,
Speaker:and the media that we consume via our ears or video. And we just say, well, it's free,
Speaker:but I mean, for me, I kind of look at it this way. I'm like, my time is worth more than that,
Speaker:right? And I want to skip all these things and it's annoying. And I talk on my podcast quite a bit
Speaker:about how I don't ever take sponsors or advertisers because I do view this podcast as a journalistic
Speaker:endeavor. And I don't want to ever be in a position, like I heard a podcast today and I'm not going to
Speaker:name names, it's not relevant, but they're a news podcast about Bitcoin and they literally have,
Speaker:they're sponsored by Coinbase and they're sponsored by FTX. And I'm thinking, are you ever going to
Speaker:give a bad story about either one of those? No. Right? So anyways, I don't want to get off on
Speaker:that, but sorry. Fun stuff. So the question that, or the way that I posed this though,
Speaker:is I said that one of these countries, El Salvador, one of these African countries,
Speaker:one of these early adopters, right? I think that 50 years from now, that they could be one of the
Speaker:world leaders. And are we going to talk about timeline? I think back, I still stand by that,
Speaker:actually, but I do want to add a lot of color around that, so to speak. I expect over the
Speaker:next few years, frankly, and you may not hold this view and that's fine, probably most of my
Speaker:listeners don't, I hope I'm wrong really, but I expect over the next few years that the United
Speaker:States and the EU is in for a tough time. I think we're going to see inflation right now,
Speaker:we're at, I think, eight and a half percent. Inflation is what I think is the CPI measure is.
Speaker:I really actually think it's quite a bit higher than that, but that's okay.
Speaker:I think we'll get a lot higher than that, even officially. I could see,
Speaker:and this is like heretical when I say this, but I could see us defaulting on our debt.
Speaker:The United States, we have $30 trillion in debt. We're very rapidly getting to the point where we
Speaker:can't pay for it. I see the potential, certainly, for hyperinflation. I think we're past the point
Speaker:where we're going to get kind of a modest recession like what we had, say, back in 2007 or so when the
Speaker:banks went crazy and the government bailed them out. I think, minimally, we're looking at something
Speaker:more along the lines of what we saw in the 1930s with the Great Depression.
Speaker:I don't think you're ever going to see both hyperinflation and a debt default
Speaker:because if we're printing that much money, we can pay off the debt.
Speaker:You're absolutely right. That's a great point.
Speaker:We're never going to default on the debt because we can print our way out of it.
Speaker:Well, you're right. That's a great point, so thanks for bringing that up.
Speaker:But here's the thing. With countries like the Central African Republic and these other countries
Speaker:that are desperately poor, most people have never been to these places. Even if a financial worst
Speaker:case scenario happened in the United States, all of the buildings and all of the fiber optic cable
Speaker:and all the roads and everything else is still going to be there. It's not like it's getting
Speaker:destroyed. That infrastructure will still exist and people will find a way. This has happened
Speaker:before in history. It sucks, but something would arise in its place. A place like
Speaker:what you have in the Central African Republic has nothing. They have no infrastructure.
Speaker:I've looked up some stats on them. I didn't know very much. It is very depressing to be honest.
Speaker:So yeah, and I've been to places like Togo, Haiti, Sierra Leone. To give you an example,
Speaker:Sierra Leone, I was in the capital city, Freetown. About a million people live there.
Speaker:You can see the stars at night in the middle of a city with a million people
Speaker:because there's no light bulbs. There might be one bulb operating per block.
Speaker:So these are very, very poor places and they have a long way to go. Now, with a stable currency
Speaker:that allows people to save money, help them? Absolutely. But to say that in 50 years,
Speaker:they could somehow overtake the US, I think is absurd because even in, like I said, China
Speaker:has probably done more in the last 40 years as far as growing. They were basically North Korea
Speaker:when Mao Zedong was in charge. I don't think people realize how, probably a little bit better
Speaker:off than North Korea because they had something before that started. But they've come a long way
Speaker:and they're still, you know, Shanghai, Beijing, yeah, those cities are very well developed,
Speaker:but in a lot of the rural communities, it's still not. So I don't foresee anybody growing faster
Speaker:than that. And while a stable currency absolutely will help, I'm not along with a lot of these
Speaker:people that think Bitcoin is this magical wand that will just, you know, at the end of the day,
Speaker:you still have to have an economy for this money to do stuff with. So let me counterpoint that
Speaker:just a little bit, okay? So I mentioned China is actually the one country I have been to outside
Speaker:of Canada and the United States. I go there for business. I've actually been, let's see,
Speaker:the first time I went was in 2000 and then 2001. And then I skipped a few years and went again.
Speaker:And then over the last few years, I've made like, I don't know, half a dozen trips from there.
Speaker:I've been out in rural China. In fact, those first couple trips, I went about 600 kilometers
Speaker:out of Beijing to a place, to one, what they would call a village, which is actually a lot of people.
Speaker:Um, I've been to another spot that was fairly near, um, Xi'an, um, Xi'an, where the Terracotta
Speaker:soldiers are anyways, both what would certainly be considered rural. And even, uh, even then, um,
Speaker:I think people don't understand the dichotomy between say Beijing or Shanghai or any of the
Speaker:dozens of major cities and the rest of the country. Right. And we don't really have clear data on that.
Speaker:Um, the Chinese government frankly is very tight lipped about that. Uh, but there's a very, very,
Speaker:very significant income gap between those people in the countryside and the people in the cities.
Speaker:And that's why you see all of these people come out of the countryside into the cities,
Speaker:because they're just trying to make more money. Right. And so, um, 50 years ago,
Speaker:within a couple of months from now was 1972 when Nixon and Mao Zedong met. And that opened up
Speaker:relations between, um, the, the China and the U S. Um, I have looked back at their kind of economic
Speaker:data. Now, for one thing, I was a little surprised in 1972. Uh, they were actually still ranked
Speaker:seventh, uh, in terms of GDP, gross domestic product, which is really just kind of a measure
Speaker:of all the economic activity of a country. Yeah. But you have to remember that's based on the,
Speaker:the size of the country and the number of people. Exactly. And that's exactly what I was fixing to
Speaker:say right now. They're number two, but what you w that's exactly correct. 1.3 billion people in
Speaker:China to get that. So a country like the central African Republic that I, that it's not very many
Speaker:people. It's like 5 million or something. I don't know. It was a very small number. They're never
Speaker:going to have that kind of economic output, but I would like to kind of reframe this argument.
Speaker:I do believe it's possible. Well, for one thing, if you give people a stable currency and I may,
Speaker:Gary, I may be wrong about this. I just, first of all, and like I mentioned 50 years from now,
Speaker:I'm either not going to care or I'll be dead. So I'm just kind of prophesying out here and maybe
Speaker:it'll happen or maybe it won't. But a lot of these countries problems, especially in Africa
Speaker:and South America, they're tied to corruption of government and currency. And a lot of that is
Speaker:manipulated. The reality is a lot of it's manipulated, I would say by us, at least in
Speaker:central and South America. Now that's maybe not a lot of people's views, but that's okay.
Speaker:Okay. You know, if you can give them a solid
Speaker:currency, it gives them a chance. Now, I don't know what they can do with it. They certainly do have
Speaker:issues with infrastructure in both of those countries, really, that have adopted Bitcoin.
Speaker:And they've been fighting a civil war for 10 years.
Speaker:Yes. And that's still going on, apparently. I did read about that. They have to solve those
Speaker:problems. And part of my worldview is, frankly, they have to do it themselves. I'm not really
Speaker:a big advocate on everybody jumping in and trying to solve everybody else's problems.
Speaker:But regardless, if they can figure out a stable form of government and they have a stable currency,
Speaker:they have a shot. But I would like to reframe this discussion. A lot of people think of China,
Speaker:China, the number two in the world in GDP and all this. China, by the way, is actually in at least
Speaker:as bad an economic shape as we are. And I would argue not only is the U.S. and the EU going to
Speaker:experience a severe depression, at least, you're going to see the same thing in China and probably
Speaker:Japan and a number of other countries. It's all tied to debt, and it's all tied to the money
Speaker:printing game. In China, because of the corruption of government and kind of the whole,
Speaker:not to get off on this, but the whole philosophy of thinking, they will do things like they'll
Speaker:go and build an entire city and there won't be anybody in it, or very few people. Or they'll
Speaker:go build a building and then they'll tear it down and rebuild it. And why do they do that? Because
Speaker:somebody's getting kickbacks because they're friends with the party leader in the area or
Speaker:whatever. It's just a mess, really, and a lot of people don't realize that.
Speaker:I'm amazed they've gotten as far as they have, to be honest. But where was I going? Oh, sorry.
Speaker:I would argue that because of China's vast inequality between the countryside and the city,
Speaker:talk about the lights. It might not be that bad in China, but I do remember one of the places we
Speaker:went. Now, this was in 2001, so it's been 20 years ago now. Literally, a single light bulb in the
Speaker:house kind of thing. It blew my mind. I'm like, really? Power would just randomly go off and
Speaker:all those kinds of infrastructure things. Even as recently, the company that I work for,
Speaker:we have engineers in China. That's why I go over there. They rent what they call Class A space,
Speaker:or the best kind of space, basically. I would go over there and visit. It would be the middle
Speaker:of the summer in Beijing, July, freaking hot, freaking humid, and there's no air running
Speaker:because they don't have air conditioning because they just can't. I don't know. We could argue
Speaker:about whether air conditioning is a good or bad thing, but as I sit here in my 72-degree house,
Speaker:I kind of enjoy it. The point is, circle back. Let's close this up before we get going too long.
Speaker:I do think that there's a possibility, and not every one of these countries is going to make it
Speaker:or suddenly become some super... Well, none of them are probably going to become superpowers
Speaker:simply because of the number of people, but they have a chance with a stable currency.
Speaker:If they have a stable government, they can build things. People can start investing,
Speaker:saving, not being worried about their currency deflating. In fact, they should see currency
Speaker:go up in value. We would hope. What do people need for a good standard of living?
Speaker:You start Googling standard of living for countries, and you get stuff all over the map.
Speaker:I don't think we very accurately map that because I think a lot of people would think people in
Speaker:China have a fairly good standard of living. I would patently disagree with that. I think the
Speaker:people who are doing well in China have a very good standard of living, but the rest of the country,
Speaker:which is a lot of people, maybe not so much. Well, if you look at it based on are they at
Speaker:the level of the United States, then that's a very high bar. I would say a country like Mexico
Speaker:is not a poor country. They really aren't. People think that, but they're a middle-class country,
Speaker:and there's a lot of countries like that. If you really want to see the difference,
Speaker:cross the border from Haiti to the Dominican Republic night and day.
Speaker:Right. If you think of the Dominican Republic as poor, they are not compared to Haiti, not at all.
Speaker:It really is one of the most jarring transitions when you cross the border from Haiti to the
Speaker:Dominican Republic because Haiti is very, very poor, lots of problems. You cross over to the
Speaker:Dominican Republic, they have roads. I remember being right on the border once with Cambodia
Speaker:in Thailand. This was 2008. I took a dirt road on the back of a motorcycle in Cambodia to get to
Speaker:this one temple, which was literally on the border. Traditionally, everyone who visited this temple,
Speaker:it's in Cambodia, but they would visit from Thailand because I could see on the other side
Speaker:of the border, you have paved roads, you had coach buses that would come and bring the tourists,
Speaker:and it was a proper infrastructure. They didn't have that at all in Cambodia.
Speaker:Right. There are huge differences between, even if you just look at the stats for the
Speaker:Central African Republic, it's looking like $500 per capita GDP. El Salvador is like, I think,
Speaker:$3,400. There's a world of difference between $500 and $3,400. There really is. Most people don't,
Speaker:if you're an American, you just can't fathom that, but that's almost an order of magnitude difference.
Speaker:Yeah, I saw very, very similar. I think I saw $3,600 for El Salvador, at least back in,
Speaker:I don't know, 2021. And then it was somewhere around that $500 or $600 range. But even,
Speaker:I mean, what does all these numbers get to be so confusing? I wished it were, and maybe I'm just
Speaker:not smart enough, but I wished it were simpler, right? I wished it was how much income per
Speaker:household, right? You can't always tell that because like the United States, in comparison,
Speaker:I believe with those same numbers is like $65,000, right? Well, then the problem is what is a
Speaker:household? If it's a rural, still an agricultural country, primarily, that's going to be very
Speaker:different than an urban country and things like that. You can tell. I mean, I've been to enough
Speaker:places where I can tell the difference between a place that's genuinely poor, of which there are
Speaker:actually not as many anymore as you might think, the truly desperately poor places. And I would
Speaker:put the Central African Republic definitely on that list. The only place I can think of in the
Speaker:Western Hemisphere is Haiti, where it's really in a class of its own as far as poverty. And a lot
Speaker:of the other countries are basically all in West and Central Africa. Is it, I want to say, is it
Speaker:Ecuador or Bolivia? One of them has a, and I may be wrong, thinking they had a very low,
Speaker:you know, income or whatever, however you want to phrase it. Ecuador, if you go to Quito, it's a
Speaker:modern city. Again, maybe some of the buildings, other things are not up to American standards,
Speaker:but not poor. Well, and that kind of gets at the core of some of what I, as I worked my way through
Speaker:all this, part of what Bitcoin does is it, it hopefully gives everybody the same platform,
Speaker:right? I want to, I almost said same chance, but that's not really true even then. But take a place
Speaker:like that. If you have one place that's reasonably modern, but then everybody else, if you go out,
Speaker:you know, they have the one light bulb. Is that really, I would argue that's not,
Speaker:you see what I mean? I mean, you can have both in the same country. We can even argue you've got
Speaker:the same thing here in the United States, maybe not as bad, but you know, we have some areas such
Speaker:as in parts of Appalachia, which are, I mean, the people are just desperately poor. But then right
Speaker:down the road, well, there's Richmond, Virginia, right? Where everything's, you know, there are
Speaker:certain things that are in that in terms of culture, infrastructure, that are other issues
Speaker:that need to be solved. And that's why a lot of these people that talk about the magic of Bitcoin
Speaker:that solves all problems, it's like it'll solve many problems. But at the end of the day, if there
Speaker:are no jobs or no factories or no enterprises, you know, I remember going, this is a while ago. I
Speaker:don't know if it's still the case, but I was on the island of, I was in Samoa on the island of
Speaker:Savaii. And while I was there, I drove around the island and I noticed there were no signs of
Speaker:commerce whatsoever. Like no stores, no restaurants, nothing. Every village would have a tiny little
Speaker:concrete shack that sold stuff for the village. And that was it. And I asked people, it's like,
Speaker:well, why, why is there nothing? Because I, you go to other countries like the Philippines, you'll
Speaker:see everyone hustling to make a buck, right? Right. And I didn't see anything. And I asked them what
Speaker:the, you know, a cab driver, it's like, well, why isn't there, there anything? And he just says,
Speaker:it's, it's very difficult because the, you have to give most of your money to your friends,
Speaker:most of your money to your family and your village. And what happens is most people just leave,
Speaker:they go to New Zealand or Australia, they make money and they send it back.
Speaker:Right. But that's a cultural thing. And I also remember being in Hong Kong once,
Speaker:I was walking past this Burger King and it was full of flowers in the front window.
Speaker:And I was like, why are there flowers in a Burger King? It's like, it was like a funeral.
Speaker:Right. And like, who would, who would hold a funeral at a Burger King? So I walk inside
Speaker:because I wanted to know why these flowers were there. And there were notes written on the flowers,
Speaker:mostly in Chinese. And I eventually found one in English and it said, congratulations on your grand
Speaker:opening. And the launch of a new business, whoever owned the franchise was clearly a reason for
Speaker:celebration. It was a reason to send flowers and gifts. Again, that's a cultural thing.
Speaker:Right. To celebrate entrepreneurship. And, and those differences I don't think are necessarily
Speaker:going to be solved by having Bitcoin. No, you're right about that. Certainly.
Speaker:Well, I want to wrap things up. It's been a very interesting conversation.
Speaker:I told Gary before we started, of course, this is my first interview,
Speaker:so I didn't know how this was going to go. But I hope you guys enjoyed this discussion.
Speaker:We'll, we might do more of this in the future. We'll just have to see. We'll have to see
Speaker:after this. Gary might be like, I won't tell everybody not to talk. I'm just kidding.
Speaker:So, all right. So that's going to wrap things up for tonight. Gary, I really do appreciate
Speaker:you jumping on tonight. I would highly recommend that you all check out his website.
Speaker:It's everything-everywhere.com. He is quite the varied person. We had a great talk.
Speaker:And I hope that was helpful. I don't know down the road, if we'll be doing more of these, we might.
Speaker:We'll just have to see how that turns out. So, the Generational Wealth with Cryptocurrency
Speaker:podcast supports podcasting 2.0. It is a value-for-value podcast with no sponsors
Speaker:and no advertising. You can support the podcast in three ways, time, talent, and treasure. Want
Speaker:to support the podcast and have some time or talent? I could use some help with such things
Speaker:as chapters for the podcast, transcriptions, and probably a few other things. Treasure is
Speaker:just what it sounds like. If you find the content valuable, you can support the podcast
Speaker:with streaming sats from a podcasting 2.0 app or sending support via PayPal to mcintosh
Speaker:at genwealthcrypto.com. You can get a podcasting 2.0 app for the optimal listening experience
Speaker:at newpodcastapps.com. If you'd like the content, I would love it if you would tell your friends
Speaker:about the Generational Wealth with Cryptocurrency podcast. Hey, thanks again for being here.
Speaker:I hope this has been helpful and I would love to hear from you. I'm on Twitter at McIntoshFintech,
Speaker:and you can reach me by email at mcintosh at genwealthcrypto.com. Of course,