WBD024 Audio Transcription

Max Keiser & Stacy Herbert on the Death of Paper Money and why Bitcoin is so Important

Interview date: Friday 6th July

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Max Keiser & Stacy Herbert. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

In this interview, I talk to Max and Stacy about Brexit, the inevitable death of paper money and why Bitcoin is so important.

“There is no win for the UK economically, you can change the colour of your passport and you might feel good, but you are not going to have any economic benefit at all from Brexit.”

— Max Keiser

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Hi Max.  Hi Stacy.  Thank you for coming to meet me here in London today.  I don't think there's a better place for us to start than to talk about Brexit.  So Max, it would be great to hear your perspective on this.

Max Keiser: It makes sense.  It's not consistent with what we've seen in the EU.  The way the EU treated Greece, for example, is the same way they're treating Great Britain.  They're quite nasty in their negotiations.  So, economically it makes no sense.  They're not going to negotiate in good faith and the UK, at the very most, would end up kind of where they started.  There's no win for the UK economically.  You can change the colour of your passport and it might feel good, but you're not going to have any economic benefit whatsoever as a result of Brexit. 

Peter McCormack: So why do you think we've ended up in this position where it's happened and the political elite have allowed it?

Max Keiser: Well, David Cameron was kind of pushed into a corner where he pushed the referendum out into the future and then he was pushed to do it and then he did a simple 50% or 51% majority, which seemed a bit strange, and I think it was quite by accident in that the -- but if you give people in the UK, particularly in the North, an opportunity to put two fingers up to David Cameron, they're going to do it, because he's part of the establishment and everyone outside of London, you know there's a huge rift between London and everyone else, and the rest of the country was like, "Hey, sod off, David Cameron.  We're going to vote.  We know you want this so we're going to…".  So it was all very personal and it felt great for a week or so, but it doesn't make any economic sense.

Peter McCormack: Do you think there's a chance it won't happen?

Max Keiser: I think that there is a lot of pressure to postpone it and -- look, governments like to become bigger, that's one of the things governments like to do and Brexit means hiring another 20,000 or 30,000 bureaucrats in the United Kingdom to deal with this.  So government loves this.  It completely repudiates everything that was talked about over the past 20 years about making government smaller and being more entrepreneurial and, "We want to reduce the size of government", etc, but this just increases the size of government. 

So the government, to the extent that they like this because it creates a lot more government jobs, they're going to keep hiring people and then in the end, they probably will do it because this is a government work programme for government bureaucrats.  They love this kind of work because it's meaningless, it's high pay and they love it.

Peter McCormack: Do you not think though it's kind of obvious that it's -- I mean, I voted to remain, but it's become more obvious since the vote that it's a bad idea than it was beforehand.  I don't know if you saw the demonstrations recently, but there's growing pressure against it.  I can't see why the political elite have anything to gain from this.

Max Keiser: There was a huge protest against the Iraq invasion, you know "Shock and Awe".  There was two million people on the streets, the biggest post-war demonstration in this country, but they went ahead and did it.  The public has no agency in this country, in my opinion.  They are routinely subjected to the propaganda of the state through the BBC, which is the farthest thing you can possibly get from being impartial.  The public makes do but they live in a very strict, controlling, authoritarian regime called the British government/monarchy. 

Peter McCormack: So you're not a fan of the UK monarchy or the government or the way we do things here or is this something you've seen across the world?  What's a good example for you?

Max Keiser: Well, I mean as far as this country goes, I am particularly distasteful of it because of the presence of the monarchy, but that's because I'm American; we already fought against the monarchy and it's still very fresh in our minds.  I was just in France.  The revolution is very fresh in their minds.  They quote it all the time.  So I just have an historical combatant attitude toward a monarchy and so, when I meet people who are royalists, who actually love the monarchy, the hair on the back of my neck sticks up.  I feel revolted by it. 

Peter McCormack: And what do you hate about the monarchy?  Is it just the fact that it's an unelected rich family, privileged...?

Max Keiser: Because it's the opposite of the enlightenment.  You had monarchy in the Middle Ages, then you had the enlightenment, then you had the rights of man and you had democratically elected governments and the Constitution of the United States, the government by and for the people, which is a novelle approach and so that's the way forward. 

Going back to the Middle Ages doesn't appeal to me, although the serfs in the Middle Ages probably lived better than the majority of the poor in both the UK and America, but nevertheless,I don't think returning to the Dark Ages and Middle Ages, no matter how good it looks on Game of Thrones, I don't think it's really what is in everyone's best interest.

Peter McCormack: Do you not see though the royal family just as something for tourism?

Max Keiser: No, because they own an incredible amount of the global surface of the earth; something like 30% or so of the land mass on planet earth is owned by the royal family.  They have a lot of say in policy, more than people like to really talk about, and they weigh in on all kinds of issues.  Certainly, through their land-owning position, they have incredible sway on the direction of this country. 

For example, in the banking industry it's 90% geared toward lending into the property market.  In the case of the Royal Bank of Scotland, they actually have contempt for small businesses.  Royal Bank of Scotland, notice the word "Royal".  They killed off 30,000 small businesses to chop it up and sell for pieces.  That's not entrepreneurial, that's not even democratic; that's feudalism.  So, it's still very much alive.  So, if you're not in the property business or on the property ladder, you're considered to be contemptible and that's a holdover from these land barons and this mentality from the Middle Ages.

Peter McCormack: How about Marmite?  Are we okay to keep that?

Max Keiser: Well, Marmite is kind of a unique local delicacy that is easily identifiable with Great Britain.  So when you say Marmite, there's no place else, except Australia with their imitation Vegemite, that I'm aware of that has this foodstuff that's made from rancid bar drippings that you spread on toast.

Peter McCormack: I can appreciate a lot of what you say, but I thought you stepped over the line with Marmite!

Max Keiser: That's mostly the reaction I get a lot of times, is the Marmite's going too far.

Peter McCormack: So I know you as a Bitcoin activist and a Bitcoin fan and that's obviously where I first came to discover you, but obviously going back in time on YouTube, I've seen some of your videos pre-Bitcoin.  In some of your news interviews, I've seen you argue with anchors and it seems like you've been some kind of economic activist for a long time and other people probably don't know that. 

A lot of people will just know you as Max from The Keiser Report, so can you tell me, because I don't know, it would be good for me to know, can you tell me where this economic activism came from this fight against the banks, the governments?  What's the background here?

Max Keiser: Well, I was a stockbroker on Wall Street for many years.  I made a lot of friends in high places; wealthy, rich, powerful people, and I don't see any difference between my years as a stockbroker and my years as a financial activist.  I'm fighting for different asset classes; gold, silver, Bitcoin, against fiat money, against the same people.  The same people are in power as they were then and so I'm still basically an advocate for my clients.  The population of the world would be better off adopting hard money, like gold, silver and Bitcoin.  So I don't see any difference.

Peter McCormack: Is that the Aristotle thing I saw you talk about?  What represents good money?

Max Keiser: Aristotle said that good money is fungible, portable, divisible, desirable, and he identified gold as being the perfect store of money.  Here you've got the original Bank of England set up by a famous mathematician here in the UK whose name constantly eludes me; Newton, yes, Isaac Newton.  He was a big gold standard advocate for similar reasons, and this has been a thread throughout monetary and economic history. 

The fiat money system by the way -- okay you have about 5,000 years of gold as money, so let's look at the fiat money system.  Well, the average lifespan of fiat money, paper money, is 27 years and they've all gone to zero.

Peter McCormack: So I saw you talk about that before actually.  Where does that come from?

Max Keiser: It comes from central bank papers and Bank of International Settlements and other banking research entities that do research into paper money and fiat money.  So this data is collated and that's what you end up with.  Fiat money has all gone to zero; none of it has lasted.

Peter McCormack: What does 'go to zero' mean though, like if you talk about the current situation, say the US dollar.  How does that go to zero?

Max Keiser: Well, historically during the revolution, you had the continental that went to zero, you had the greenback during the Civil War went to zero.  The US dollar current iteration goes to zero against a central bank failure that's cooked into the system at the moment and periodically throughout history.  There's always a return to gold and they say, "Okay, all the paper money is worthless", like they did at the Bretton Woods agreement after World War II and, "We're going to restart it all; it's going to be based on gold again and all the paper money is being essentially reassigned a new value.  Your current money is worthless".

Look at what happened in India recently.  They said, "All the paper notes are worthless, we're going to redo the entire system".  Okay, that's another paper money system that went to zero.

Peter McCormack: Was that the 500-rupee note they just eliminated or something?

Stacy Herbert: Demonetisation.

Max Keiser: So they just declared demonetisation.  So that's just another example that money went to zero.  If you had that money in your pocket, it went to zero.  The French francs from 20 years ago, they're not worthy anything are they, because they went to zero.  They were replaced with the euro.  The euro then would last for a while, and it probably will also go to zero.  It's already under tremendous stress. 

That's what it means; it means you have paper money and you can't use it anymore, because it's just a piece of paper.  They replace it with another piece of paper; that's good for a while and then that's useless.  Meanwhile, the purchasing power keeps eroding and you have this problem with fiat money which is that it has a horrible store of value.

Peter McCormack: And before we just expand on that a bit further, with you as well Stacy, what's your background and were you similar to Max before you met him, were you fighting the banks, or is this something that's since you've become the Posh and Becks of the economy?

Stacy Herbert: The Posh and Becks, wow!  I worked in Hollywood, so I had always worked on stories, which by the way, the basic text you read there is also by Aristotle.  Aristotle rules Hollywood screenwriting and Aristotle is the basic framework by which you understand monetary policy.  So the guy was smart.  Yeah, I worked in Hollywood and when I first met Max and he was telling me all these stories about being a banker, it really offended my sense of what was a good story.  The bad guy can't win like that over and over without any justice.  I really didn't believe Max at first that these things were possible, that it was there all around me, and then I started reading the Financial Times every day and they were openly talking about these things.

Actually, Noam Chomsky says it's a good way to learn information, is read the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, because they do inform their class of people all these stories that are happening.  It's important for them to know and they're quite open about it, but most people are taught that unless you have an economics degree, unless you're a special person with banking background or any of this stuff, you can't read this stuff.  It's only for the elite to look at this, but it's very plain and simple stories they're telling there and it's pretty shocking. 

They obfuscate with fancy words like 'credit default swap' and you peasants can't understand this, but at the end of the day they're just simple tools to basically control a lot of the financial system and yet create an illusion of a meritocracy that it's your fault.  If you're not winning, it's your fault, there's something you're doing wrong.  And so, I was fascinated by the fact that this was happening all around me and I somehow did not see it.

Peter McCormack: Is there any correlation here between what you were doing in Hollywood and -- I read about an exchange to do with --

Stacy Herbert: Hollywood Stock Exchange.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Was that like a meeting of the minds?

Stacy Herbert: No, we met in the South of France.  I had actually left Hollywood in 1994 and moved here, and Max moved to Hollywood in 1994?

Max Keiser: In 1995, yeah, and I created the Hollywood Stock Exchange in 1996.

Peter McCormack: Right, so you've become more of an activist or more aware since you've met Max, and this has become like a teamwork thing?

Stacy Herbert: I did study economics at UCLA, just simply because it was a liberal arts education there, so I had to take mathematics courses, which really put me off.  The options were calculus and geometry and all this stuff that I was like, "Oh no, I can't do that", so I took economics; that was one of the options within mathematics.  So I did study economics and my mother worked at Shearson Lehman; she was a broker.  So I did have a bit of background. 

Peter McCormack: Okay.  So ultimately then, your goal here is to make people more aware of what things you think most of the population isn't really aware of?

Max Keiser: Well our primary goal is content.  We make content.

Peter McCormack: But the content has an objective, right?  There's a story behind it?

Max Keiser: Well, we're journalists.  We cover this world, the financial world and economics world, and at the moment and for the last 15 years, the story has been that it's driven by a very corrupt global central banking system.  If the story changes, we'll cover it if it changes, but it hasn't changed in 15 years and I haven't known it to change in 30 years.

Stacy Herbert: One thing we do have that no other financial news programme has and why I think we kind of stand out -- again my background in film and working on scripts and working on a lot of television products and films -- is that one of the basic things about film making is the fewer words you can say the better, because it's a visual medium, a visual storytelling medium, and juxtaposing images is the ultimate in storytelling. 

So if you could tell something by just juxtaposing images from one scene to the next, it can tell you a lot about the character, about the story.  I do that.  When we look for headlines, I juxtapose headlines.  So I tell you everything you need to know by -- all the data is out there; thousands of articles and headlines a day in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, everything, all these headlines out there and most news is presented like that, "Headline, headline, headline", etc, and they don't tell you a story.  They don't provide any context for you; where we provide the context of juxtaposing headlines.  Like here's a headline from today; oh by the way, here's a headline from four years ago, and this is telling you the story of what happened in those four years.

Peter McCormack: But there is also like a naked truth to the way you tell things.  There isn't any censorship.  You don't hold back.

Stacy Herbert: Ah, no!

Peter McCormack: Whereas if you're watching any standard interview on Sky News between a bunch of commentators on anything to do with economy, it's quite standard.  You bring Max in the middle and there's -- you're not afraid to challenge people.

Stacy Herbert: Well they present it -- all those people in the news by the way, the people who show up on Sky News, they believe it's an elite endeavour that economics and finance are for the elite and that the ordinary person cannot possibly understand this; and I think they themselves are also intimidated by these headlines and news, they feel like they don't know what it's about.  But if you understand, you know, if you've ever watched a Martin Scorsese film, I mean that tells you all you need to know about the banking system; it's just ordinary thugs working in an ordinary way.

These are not highfalutin concepts, and by the way, nobody knows anything.  That's one of the basic tenants of what Max and I do as investors, is really nobody knows anything.  They might be brilliant economists in their field and win Nobel economics prizes and stuff like that, but at the end of the day, if they knew what they were doing, well there wouldn't be tens of thousands of textbooks on economics and tens of thousands of new theories coming up all the time because well, "I thought we already knew what it was all about, right?" but nobody knows anything.

Peter McCormack: Economists will argue with each other.

Stacy Herbert: Yeah, and markets wouldn't crash and recessions wouldn't happen and all these things if they knew what they were doing… So nobody knows.

Peter McCormack: So it kind of makes sense and I understand now why you discovered and got into Bitcoin so early, the ICO was like $3 and I understand why that makes sense from your point of view.  But then at the same time, how do you feel with the likes of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan now starting to dip their toes into the world of Bitcoin?

Max Keiser: Well, it was talked about in the early days that as it got more successful, it would attract Wall Street and attract bankers and central bankers.  The fact is that they can't compete.  So already, we've had a few failures where a banking consortium have tried to create similar products and similar coins, but they have basically failed and Bitcoin keeps getting stronger.  It's got now I think 40 thousand quadrillion calculations per second, so the hash rate keeps growing.  It's growing at a 1,000% a year; it's compounding. 

So that's a force of nature that cannot be overcome by any bank or group of bankers in the establishment.  It's like shovelling sand against the sea; there's nothing that they can do at this point.  They are responding to shareholder requests because they have a fiduciary responsibility to respond and pretend like they are going to be competitive, but there is now nothing they can do.

Peter McCormack: But they are involved, they have trading desks.  You've talked a lot about manipulation in the gold and silver markets or across all markets; do you fear that the banks could come in and manipulate the Bitcoin market to its detriment?

Max Keiser: Well they're involved and they have trading desks which adds liquidity.  So look, Bitcoin is a messaging app that's growing like a technology.  Gold is a commodity of which 99% of all the gold ever going to mined has already been mined; that's a diminishing, wasting, scarce resource that is in short supply, and so there is a lot you can do in the banking sector to manipulate that price. 

But in the case of Bitcoin, you have to look at like Facebook, Google or any other messaging app or technological app that's exploding in growth rates and devouring the landscape.  So, Bitcoin is devouring fiat currencies.  It will devour probably the Venezuelan currency and the Argentinian currency, one of these currencies, as it works its way up the food chain before it devours the British pound or devours the Japanese yen, and it's this what I call a black hole.  It's just sucking in all this bad fiat paper.  And to be able to manipulate it, you'd need to have hash power to manipulate it, which nobody has the hash power.  There's no computer system or systems or combination of systems equal to the Bitcoin hash power. 

Now in the case of gold, you can create paper gold and manipulate gold.  It's a lot easier to do that, but this is where Bitcoin shines.  It's one of reasons why it's superior to gold.

Stacy Herbert: And I have to say that banks at the moment, how they manage to always win and why Jamie Diamond's a billionaire and why Lloyd Blankfein is a billionaire, when it's just a mere utility really; the banking system, is they have asymmetric information.  They have private ledgers that only they know whether the gold is there, only they know whether the commodity is there, only they know whether the asset is truly there, whereas Bitcoin is a public ledger and all can see what is happening there.  So it's harder to play games if it's publicly auditable. 

Peter McCormack: So I interviewed, do you know Alejandro Macedo?

Stacy Herbert: No.

Peter McCormack: He writes for Caracas Chronicles and he's from Venezuela.  He works in crypto as well.  I interviewed him recently and he was talking about how Bitcoin is being used in Venezuela; a very interesting interview.  So do you see the Bitcoin takeover starting in basket-case countries where the fiat currency is collapsing, and then it spreading across the world in that way; and can you see a world realistically where Bitcoin would become the primary currency in a country like the UK or America?

Max Keiser: Bitcoin is definitely huge in Venezuela and Argentina and it's also now huge in Africa.  So countries across Africa are now using Bitcoin and crypto mining, because it leapfrogs the entire infrastructure.  You don't need a third party; you don't need a central bank.  The unbanked, as they're called, can now become banked and so it's flourishing, it's thriving and a lot of companies are relocating.  There's a lot of jurisdiction shopping where companies in the crypto space are going to countries that are friendly as far as the legal framework. 

So that's growing and the legacy system that's concentrated in the UK, US and Japan is going to be the last to get devoured but devoured they will be.

Stacy Herbert: I would also add that with Bitcoin, you're responsible for yourself.  It's genuine individual economic sovereignty and some people prefer to be subjects.  They love the Queen, they want to be subjects, they don't want to be citizens.  Being a citizen, a genuine citizen, is a very difficult thing and it requires always being curious, always learning, keeping on top of things, understanding the political and economic reality around you.  A lot of people don't want that.  It's hard work to be a citizen.  Look at the French people.  They're annoying, but they're citizens.  They fight all the time; they fight their government.  Their government is terrified of the people.  There are very few countries where you see the government is actually afraid of the people.

So I think there is a global class of people who want economic sovereignty.  It's hard work; I have to say it's been hard work to maintain.  All the onus is on you, there's nobody to bail you out, there's nobody who you can offload all the responsibly to and then sue when they fail on your behalf.  You're responsible for yourself, so whether or not a country would want something like that or that even most of the citizens would or subjects, I don't know, but certainly it's not going away. 

It's kind of now what the gold standard used to be in forcing the countries around the world to be honest and to develop sound policies, because if you had a basket-case economy, you had to send gold, your national wealth, overseas to other countries.  They haven't had that discipline since we had the US dollar standard, but now the Bitcoin standard is forcing certainly the global financial system to have to operate in a more sound, responsible way.

Peter McCormack: So it's a change in the way money works in a country, but do you ultimately see that will then change government and change policy and change the fundamental nature of how a country works?

Stacy Herbert: Well, it provides a better example.  So during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, capitalism was so good and strong and providing so much wealth creation, opportunity and fair distribution of wealth, because there was this thing called communism that was an alternative.  They had to compete with that system and that ideology. 

Here when you see all this economic sovereignty and people able to totally be free, completely free, no government restriction on what this person can do as an individual, that provides an alternative.  So see how those people get to live, see how Binance can set up a firm, and if one country doesn't want them, they move to Malta and they could live and be and do and create any way they want.  That provides, in this globalised world, an alternative that governments have to be a little less abusive to their own population, they have to be a little bit less violent in terms of seizing assets and taking from taxes and things like that; they have to provide a better option for them.

Peter McCormack: Using taxes for missiles to attack countries, which is a lot of people's problem.

Stacy Herbert: Well as Americans, yes, we obviously are the biggest of all.

Peter McCormack: It's funny you say that, because one of my questions here was to ask you, "Is capitalism failing?", because $200 trillion debt in the US and I think I saw that you'd put the debt has grown 36% quicker than the economy.

Stacy Herbert: Yes.  Debt's grown faster than the economy.

Peter McCormack: Is this where fiat fails?

Stacy Herbert: Well, feudalism always fails, it's just a different form of feudalism.  We have a lot of gatekeepers, a lot of oligopolies, the big four accounting firms, the big four banks, the big four telecom companies.  Like I said, they've got better since the feudal times and that's why it's kind of a neo-feudalism, is they pretend; it's all a meritocracy really. 

Anybody can become rich, anybody can set up a company and run the world and be a huge success, be a Steve Jobs, and there are people like Steve Jobs who end up becoming fabulously wealthy and creating a product that everybody wants; but at the end of the day, there's a certain point where they all become oligopolies.  Mark Zuckerberg basically started from nothing, from a well-off family obviously and from Harvard, but nevertheless, now he has an oligopoly.

The tech giants that run Facebook and Google have had something like 95% of all new ad revenue through those two companies alone.  That becomes a dangerous situation and it's a form of feudalism, whether or not it's free markets or capitalism, I don't know.  There seems to be some sort of barrier to entry.  Capitalism and free markets suggest that all of that profit that Facebook and Google are gaining, it would drive people to compete, right; they want to grab some of that pie.  But why is that pie only being divided between two companies?

Peter McCormack: Is it because the barrier to entry is too high now?

Stacy Herbert: I think it is and you see all this well-meaning stuff of like, "We need to protect our democracy from all of the ideas out there on the internet and Twitter".  I mean they might say it's the scary Putin guy, but at the end of the day what they're saying, what the media is telling you is, "We need to shut things down.  We can't allow all that free speech.  Let's have Facebook monitor everything and keep the news out and have our government tell you what is the good news to read and what the sources are".  So, that's going to consolidate their power by giving them this power, this authority to control the flow of information.

Peter McCormack: But also, the technology and the flow of money kind of keeps them in this monopoly position, because if you think with Facebook, they can pretty much buy anyone they want now.  So if a photo app comes along, they buy Instagram for $1 billion, which seems really cheap now.  They paid $19 billion for WhatsApp.

Stacy Herbert: Yeah, they buy up the competition.  As soon as anybody might compete, they offer the CEO a deal they can't refuse.

Peter McCormack: And I read rumours yesterday of a Facebook interest in Coinbase, I'm not sure if you saw that?

Stacy Herbert: Yeah, they're definitely doing something with a crypto.

Peter McCormack: Without doubt.  I mean Coinbase was valued at $8 billion, but I'm sure if Facebook wanted to buy them, it would go for a lot more, but they could afford it and then they could end up monopolising the onramp for Crypto.  I would assume you guys would distrust what they would do with the data and their relationship with the government and that data.

Stacy Herbert: Well you can't stop anybody from coming up.  Certainly Coinbase, for example, is very good for an ordinary person who doesn't have time to research Bitcoin and how to access it and how to keep it on your own wallet and how to keep your own private keys.  Like I said, a lot of people don't like the responsibility of having their own sovereignty.  It's difficult.  I always liken it to a Western.  If you look at any of those Clint Eastwood films, it was hard fricking work to be a sovereign man out there with no law.  You had to guard all your gold, you had to defend your own property, you had to fight off all the bad guys.  It was hard work.  So a lot of people like to just hand over their private keys to somebody, "You take the responsibility and I'll sue you if you get it wrong", but they're giving up a lot of power to certain companies.

Peter McCormack: Are you a fan of Coinbase?

Max Keiser: Am I a fan of Coinbase?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Max Keiser: They're a good company.  They are growing.  They have provided, as was mentioned, an onramp into the crypto world, but Facebook if it has its own token, again it can't compete with Bitcoin's hash rate.  It'll just be a token used on their website.  It would drive interest in crypto currency, it would drive interest in Bitcoin, but you wouldn't change the path of Bitcoin in terms of Bitcoin now being considered as a strategic reserve for central banks, Bitcoin being accumulated by sovereign wealth funds.

Peter McCormack: Do you believe that's happening?  Do you believe governments are --?

Max Keiser: That's the path that it's on.  So, the price is on track to hit $100,000 per coin and go beyond that.  That path is not going to be stopped by Facebook.  Facebook would just be another distraction on the path of Bitcoin toward ubiquity and toward the global Bitcoin standard.

Stacy Herbert: And by the way, they're also competing.  One of their competitors is Twitter and Jack definitely has had an earlier involvement in Bitcoin more on the cypherpunk side.  So, he's more of a Bitcoin maximalist, whereas probably Facebook is coming up with their own coin and crypto, I'm pretty sure.

Peter McCormack: He needs to fix the ETH giveaways though.  They're relentless.

Stacy Herbert: True!

Max Keiser: Right, well they've tweaked the platform many times you know.  They've done lots of stuff, so I'm sure they're working on it

Peter McCormack: So, outside of Bitcoin and I'll come to Maxcoin, but where else do you have interest in crypto? What other projects do you like? Are you keen on ICOs? Are you keen on other crypto coins?

Max Keiser: The ICOs not really, because they would be more appropriate as conservative security offering.  So, it's a very different beast if you will, and then in the crypto space --

Peter McCormack: But why is that not something you're keen on?

Max Keiser: Because I'm still totally fascinated by Bitcoin and love the story so much.  If I had 100 hours a day I could spend looking at 30,000 white papers… I don't right.  I haven't seen anything -- there's no reason yet to dissuade me from being completely a Bitcoin maximalist, as it's known, but there are projects that are out there that we know the people involved and we look at them and there's interesting combinations --

Stacy Herbert: I also want to jump in and say like we're involved with SUNEX, which has their own token, and I like that because one thing I've always said over the years is people say, "Should I buy Bitcoin?  Should I buy it now?  Is it the right price?" and one thing I've always done is earn Bitcoin, because I'm not like an adrenaline junkie trader.  A lot of people get really high on losing great deals of money!  I just would rather if I lose, I lose my time; like okay I spent eight hours earning that Bitcoin.

SUNEX has this programme.  It is a token, it is an ICO and it's an ongoing ICO where you can basically from $10, invest in a solar panel on projects that they have.  They're doing something with the UN development programme in Moldova right now, they have a programme down in South Africa, and you invest in their solar panels and you collect a Bitcoin stream of revenue from that.

Peter McCormack: That's very cool.

Stacy Herbert: That's a great way to earn Bitcoin.  We also have mines.com, so we're very anti-censorship and this is a censorship-resistant online platform like Steemit, Facebook and Twitter all in one.  So we're advisors to them and they'll be doing an ICO in the future, but not right now; they're developing their platform.  A lot of ICOs -- I mean, I don't mind it myself because if you're disrupting the VC system then great, but I do think a lot of people, I don't think perhaps intentionally, raised far too much money.  People got a little bit crazy and gave too much money to these guys. 

Peter McCormack: But also at the time they raised, I saw a table the other day is it DigixDAO?  Because they raised in 2016, and the price of ETH back then, they now sell on a $0.25 billion in ETH.

Stacy Herbert: So, I'm interested in trying out some stuff, because I'm not an engineer and I have to do to learn.  So, we have been Bitcoin maximalists and we have our Bitcoin investments, but we are branching out into these other things in order to learn, like the master node system or the delegated proof of stake with EOS.  We're involved with a block producer candidate, eosfishrocks. 

For me, that's like doing is helping me understand not only what people are trying to do, what the technologists and engineers are doing, because if they tell me, if you read about it on a paper, "delegated proof of stake", I don't know what they're talking about; but if I do then I see, "Oh, now I understand", and now I understand Bitcoin better.  Somebody who's an engineer, like Jimmy Song or Jameson Lopp and those guys, they don't need to do.  They already understand what the terms are and what's going on and the concepts.  So there's a lot of stuff.

Peter McCormack: I understand.  I think the ICOs are quite good as well for, like you said, it disrupts the VC model where I've raised money from venture capital before and it's weighted entirely out of your favour.  You have to be very lucky to exit with any life-changing money, but also again it disrupts the banking system for small businesses raising funds hopefully in the future and I thought that's kind of interesting.

Stacy Herbert: Yeah.  Well there's also another company Max is an advisor on, which is Sweet and that's kind of like a natural offshoot of Hollywood Stock Exchange.

Peter McCormack: And tell me about Maxcoin.  Shouldn't you be a Maxcoin maximalist?

Stacy Herbert: We are Maxcoin maximalists as well.  This is a great story, because again we wanted to learn on the Keiser Report.  At the end of 2013, there were all of these new altcoins coming on and I had only barely got my head around Bitcoin after two years and we were well, "How are all these coins being developed and does this ruin the case for Bitcoin if so many coins could just be created?"

So two young cryptographer students from University of Bristol reached out to us and said that we can come on your programme and create a coin.  So they came on the programme and created the coin live.  So we went through the experience of actually choosing the various elements that go into a coin and just being presented with those options each step of the way.

Peter McCormack: Like a menu.

Stacy Herbert: Yeah.  It made you think and then we even went through the process.  They did say, "By the way, whether or not you want to film this, but when you generate the genesis block it says, 'Failed'.  It will tell you that you've failed, but that's a notice that comes up" and I said, "Yeah, if that what happens, then show it".  A lot of people in the comments were like, "It failed!", but that is what it was supposed to do.

Nevertheless, they went back to school at University of Bristol and Nigel Smart was their professor.  He's a very famous cryptographer.  He ripped out a lot of the stuff we had put in like SHA-256.  He said that's created by the NSA, we don't want that in there and he put SHA-3 in it which at the time,  this was in 2014, I didn't really understand it until questions were being posed in the past year about Bitcoin and quantum resistance and one of the options is that they could fork to SHA-3. 

Nigel Smart also put in Schnorr signatures, which is now being considered for Bitcoin as well in order to reduce the block size and all these sort of things.  Anyway our coin had all these advanced features in it from way back in 2014 and these new developers have found the coin and been working on it and we have a really great team of devs on it.

Peter McCormack: So what's the objective with it?  How far can you take this?  Could this be a competitor currency to the others; is that your goal?

Stacy Herbert: Well, it's a competitive market.  I think it's a great coin.  If other people think it, then the price could go up.

Peter McCormack: And what are your challenges with it?  Has it gone from just a baby project to something quite serious?  Because I looked and the price has done fantastically well recently.

Stacy Herbert: This is because of this amazing team of developers on it.  We even have a 15-year-old developer who first learned about Bitcoin when he was 8 watching Keiser Report.  So he is training to be a developer and he's done an amazing job, a kid named Oliver Morris, and now they're helping out with Startcoin as well, which is another project we have.

Peter McCormack: What's Startcoin?

Stacy Herbert: Startcoin is a project.  Before the master node system and before ICOs, we had a site called startjoin.com with crowdfunding and it had its own crypto.  It was one of the first sites to do that where basically, you would be rewarded in a crypto by sharing the projects and participating in the economy.  Then the whole scene got disrupted by ICOs and by master node systems and the treasuries that emerge, like Dash, from that.  So they're working on a roadmap for that coin now based on all this success they've had with Maxcoin and bringing that back from the brink of death.

Peter McCormack: And how do you keep on top of all of this?  It seems like a lot!

Stacy Herbert: As long as we're learning.

Max Keiser: Just follow Twitter.

Peter McCormack: Well listen, I'm conscious of the time and I appreciate the time you've given me.  I'm sorry we started late.  I do have one final question.  I've got loads I didn't cover.  I'd love to do this again some time, but there was one thing I wanted to ask you about, Max, because for me it's something that's really important right now. 

I've got a 14-year-old son and I've got an 8-year-old daughter and I have little faith in the education system anymore.  I don't think it's grown with the economy, with technology, I don't think it's evolved.  I question the need to go to university to get £50,000, in the UK it's £50,000, of debt, probably much more in the US, and to then face a life possibly of just from one debt to another.  What are your views on the education system and the college system and where do you think we're going with this?

Max Keiser: Well, yeah.  This guy, Oliver Morris, who's a developer who's working for us, he's being home schooled.  His dad, who's on the UK, noticed that his son had an interest in programming and he said, "Well those courses are not going to be offered for many years and by then his interest might be gone".  So he pulled him out of school and he home schooled him.  So I think that's the lesson really is that the system is not really fit for purpose and if you do have an interest, pull them out, home school them.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay.  Really appreciate your time.  Can you tell people how to get hold of you, how to stay in touch, who you want to hear from, if you want to hear from anyone?

Stacy Herbert: Go to Twitter and I'm @stacyherbert.

Max Keiser: Yeah.  I'm at Twitter too @maxkeiser.

Peter McCormack: I will share those in the show notes.  I appreciate your time.  Enjoy the rest of your time in London and hopefully, I'll see you again soon.

Max Keiser: Thanks, Peter.