Hey everybody. Well welcome again to FICON. How was last night? Do you guys have fun? Do you go to the AFF-CKI thing at Sidebar? There were like so many twists and turns there when you go downstairs. It's like another bar. It's really cool. Well, I'm happy to see you here this morning. We've got a great program set up for you. Before anything else though I want to mention a few more of our sponsors because again we couldn't do this without them. The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, the Basiat Society, Think Freely Media, the Charles Koch Institute, and Turning Point USA. Let's thank them for their sponsorship. It is my great honor to introduce to you Patrick Byrne. Patrick is an entrepreneur, an e-commerce pioneer and CEO of overstock.com. He is advocated for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and that's really going to be the subject of his talk today. Let's welcome to the stage Patrick Byrne. I hope the cameras can do a close-up and so this doesn't get confused with other red hats that are floating around these days. Make Bitcoin great again. What an honor it is to speak to you and thank you Richard for the lovely introduction. I'm starting to recognize more and more friends in these groups when I come to them. I saw Caitlin Long out here earlier. Caitlin is one of the great friends of Liberty in the United States. You'll be hearing a lot more about Caitlin than years ahead. My subject, I have three subjects. Liberalism, its discontents, and the blockchain. How the blockchain cures it. What I really am and the next speaker, Magat Wave, just correcting me on my pronunciation. I view myself more and more these days as a glio. Liberalism is a glio. What a glio is in West Africa is the old man in the tribe who remembers the traditions and tells the stories. Tells the stories to the tribe, to the youngsters, where they came from. It's important that the young really know the history of their tribe and where they came from. This is a tribe and the reason I took this invitation was because I heard how many students were going to be here. I generally don't fly across the country to speak anymore, but I do when I'm going to be speaking to students. Because it's important that students understand where liberalism is, where we come from as a tribe. So I'm going to run through that, through things quickly, and just tell a story of stories. Many of you, this will be old hat. I am, as Richard said, who Wired Magazine calls me the Bitcoin Messiah. Not true, overstatement. I'm the CEO of Overstock. Scourge of Wall Street. Guilty as charged. But what I really am is the glio of liberalism, I think. So I'm going to tell you these six stories about six insights that were had historically that really gave birth to liberalism. Starting with the book of Daniel, something from the Greeks, the Romans, the English, the Spanish, and the original swamp people. The real swamp people. From the book of Daniel, there's this wonderful scene where Daniel is brought into the chambers of the king. I have a hand that has appeared and written, a message that no one can decipher. And Bouchers are asked Daniel to interpret it. And Daniel says to him, one of the parts, it means you have been judged in the balance and found wanting. I used to teach philosophy, and I used to teach, this is the first moment that I understand. I perceive a distinctly Western tradition emerging. The concept of authority until then, divine and political authority, were not distinguished. The sun kings and such. The king had some element of divine divinity about him. This is the first time it was conceived of, that there is some balance within which political authority can be judged. That it is not absolute, that it's not divine. Next we get to the Greeks who of course gave us voting. They gave something else that we still use. It's called sortition. And sortition is what we use to pick a jury. It's random selection. The Greek democracy of Athens had basically over 250 year history. But its only really stable period was when they embraced sortition as a way of choosing their legislators. It's a concept I'm going to have reason to get back to, so stick a pin in that. The Romans. Now our founding fathers were very familiar with the history written by Polybius. And Polybius was actually, he was a Greek who lived in the Roman Republic, about 110 or so AD, or BC, I'm sorry. He wrote a book where he described the cycles of history. And in his view there was a cycle that repeated itself over and over. And oh by the way the clock isn't running and I'm going to lose track unless somebody gives me a watch. Or Mike in the back, thank you. I'm going to leave time for Q&A by the way because we're all in here with that more. So cycles of history is the view that authority starts, we start with some sort of primitive barbaric state, some king emerges. So every type of government has a benevolent and a malevolent form. The king emerges, but over time the kingship turns into tyranny. So when it turns into tyranny the people around the king and the nobles take over and you get an aristocracy. That degenerates to an oligarchy. And then the people take over. That's democracy and then that degenerates into mob rule, collapse and you start all over again. The Romans he felt had arrested this cycle and the reason they had arrested it was because of polycentricity. Polycentricity is in political theory, it describes that there are many different centers of gravity of decision making. Decision making doesn't come from one place, but decisions get broken up and put into different parts of government. The English of course give us 800 odd years ago, 802 years ago now, the Magna Carta, which while imperfect, gives us the idea that it really just secured rights for noblemen in England. But at least it's a step towards limited government. And in particular section 39 describes something that in the next century William of Occam developed. Now those of you who study philosophy have probably heard of Occam's razor, which is the view that if you have two different explanations for the same phenomenon, the simplest explanation is better. Occam was also a great legal theorist and philosopher and he developed a rule that had been put in the Magna Carta that the king can only take things, practice what we call eminent domain when he provides just compensation. It actually goes back to the Magna Carta in the next century.  They're just declaring it progress. I'm in favor of progress. Well, if they can hijack the word progress, I get hijacked the word freedom. And so if you're going to be pro-freedom, you want to know about a particular Spanish school called the Scholastics and the main figure is Juan de Mariana. And he wrote a book called The History of Spain that Jefferson read and gave it all the founding fathers. The Scholastics were Jesuit and Dominican priests who arguably were the first economists since ancient Greece. They saw this great influx of gold and silver from the New World and it led to inflation in Spain and they were the ones who put those two phenomenon together and so they advocated sound money. They also, the subjective theory of value is something if in college you study economics, they teach you that the Cambridge economist named Marshall figured this out in like the 1880s, 1890s. Until then, but it's not true, the Spanish actually did 400 years ago. For centuries philosophers wondered well what gives an object its value and there were all these lengthy medieval debates about it and of course the labor theory of value dominated that it's somehow the value is an expression of or a function of the labor that went into it. And it was the Scholastics who first said that's rubbish. The value is everybody has different subjective interpretations of value and there is no philosophical way to ascertain what the true value of something is outside of the value to individuals and it's a subjective theory of value which gives rise to pricing and so far. Under this view value of price is just a piece of information about value and scarcity to people. So they get short change because really after this golden age of Spain when Spain declined and Britain rose, kind of everybody forgot about the economics that had really been unearthed here. If you don't, if you understand the subjective theory of value and the value of items of things has to be some function of the value to individuals and you'd have to know how every individual values something to calculate what, if you were going to try to calculate value, you'd have to know all these facts about what, how individual people think. They said that even in the infinite mind of God that would be too complex an equation to ever solve. Well, that question came back in the 20th century with central planning and there was a Hungarian economist Janus Kornai who actually saw a speak once at Stanford in his old age, won a Nobel Prize. Well anyway, the question of the possibility or impossibility of socialist calculation was a question that occupied economists in the 20th century and there were those of them who believed it was possible, like Ken Arrow who was another friend of mine, and DeBrow, they thought that they did general equilibrium theory. When you hear about general equilibrium theory, it was really building the toolkit so governments could plan an economy. Well, the Spanish understood that was always going to be impossible and even in the infinite mind of God it'd be too complex a calculation and instead we need to rely on property and markets. Property and markets are, property rights and markets are like a calculating machine. They let us collectively calculate what the prices of things should be. Therefore, entrepreneurs are not, they're not parasites on society. People who make money aren't being parasitic, they're not taking it from people, what they are to this class. They're people who are seeing misprices and they are apprehending. They're perceiving this misprice and reaching in and taking advantage of it and by doing so they're doing God's work. They're moving us towards more accurate and correct pricing. They're moving society forward. They understood entrepreneurship then as not a parasitic activity but as a productive activity. They also were pro-peace. They had a legitimate what we now call a peace movement. They opposed the Spanish. They saw everything that you would see wrong today with what the Spanish did in South America. They understood to be wrong and they publicly declared that. This set of beliefs of sound money, subjective theory of value, the value of having property and markets and entrepreneurship moving society forward. These views migrated to the eastern edge of the Spanish empire and of the Spanish rule. If you remember your European history, Spain was, most of Europe was Spain, with the exception of France. The eastern edge of Spain, the eastern realm, was called the Øster Eich. The eastern realm and that Øster Eich is Austria. These ideas moved to the eastern edge of Spain and they sort of went dormant there. They went into hibernation there for 250 years. They lived in Vienna in the university system. They came out about 150 years ago as the Austrian school of economics. And if any of you have heard or studied or considered yourselves Austrian economics, there's a very good argument that actually all traces back to this school in Salamanca 400 years ago. And lastly, the swamp people, the lowlanders, who really get short shrift in our teaching and our school system. We get taught that England was the cradle of liberty. Well, maybe, but it's not really where it was conceived. Social contract theory, you study in college that justice can be, Hobbes saw, let's all imagine what the world was like before government. Life was solitary, nasty, brutish and short, and that we would agree to form a government that was a tyrant, a Leviathan that had all power within it. John Locke, we know who influenced our founding fathers, said no, we would adopt a much more limited view of government. What they don't tell you, what I never got taught in college, was there actually was a social contract situation in history, only one that I can really think of. Bunch of Germans who didn't want to live under anyone else's rule, moved to these swamps on the northwest of Europe. And they figured out that if they collaborated, they could drain the swamps and create a nice place to live, and that's the Netherlands. And what rose there, and so they actually had to go through a social contract reasoning process, much like what Rawls and Hobbes and Locke described, but they actually did it. And what they came up with was a minimal state. Erasmus, a Catholic theologian, wrote about peace and religious toleration. First time that I can think of that there was real, well in Islam, early Islam there was a tradition of religious toleration, but political pluralism and religious toleration. Spinoza, a Jewish philosopher who was actually excommunicated for his views, but for 150 years if you refer to the West, in the educated West, to the philosopher you meant Baruch Spinoza. And Baruch Spinoza wrote the ethics and other works where he identifies, you might say the birth of modern psychology, where he identifies us, not as just beings under the rule of the prince, but beings with individual consciousness, and individual, well, individuality, that we are beings whose consent matters, in other words. And so this view of consent of the governed is what justifies government, is what rose first in Holland. And with that then government people are not, they're not people we battle down to, they're a stothold or the leader, it's just a steward, it's just a first among equals, as the Dutch say. So they really the first proper understanding of the relation of the citizen to the state that I can think of in modern era anyway, was in the Netherlands. Oddly, and this is why they don't really get the credit they should, some Brownians, a type of Protestant in England, left fled religious persecution in England, and then when they lived in Holland for 20 years, after 20 years they decided to leave because of the licentious and wicked effects that Amsterdam was having on their children, which is why we all love going to Amsterdam. And they moved, they sailed to the New World, landed on Plymouth Rock, we know them as the Pilgrims. They gave the most great credit to these English Protestants who came and the Pilgrims were not Puritans, they were much more like what we think of as Quakers. And they, and tolerant, we think it came from England it didn't, they learned it all by living 20 years in Holland. As well as John Locke himself, who we give all this great credit to for the second treaties on government, John Locke sat out the glorious revolution because there was a warrant and he was going to be hung. He lived in Amsterdam for three years. And he learned this Dutch attitude and approach to government and political theory. And then he went back to England when the war was over and he wrote the second treaties on government, which is what are influenced the US so heavily. And that leads to, in my view, the US Declaration of Independence and Constitution are the great flowering of liberalism. By the way, I'm using liberalism correctly. I can't stand the way it's used in America. In the 1930s, socialists couldn't sell socialism as socialism anymore, they started calling it liberalism. Liberalism does not mean what Hillary Clinton believes. It means it's a complete corruption of the word. And you will find that these ideas, these inspirations all show up. Just the framework of the Declaration of the Constitution as the individual is the principal and government is the agent. We are the principals, like the principals of a law firm. We're in charge. And we hire this agent to do something for us. And the great Milton Friedman had a wonderful twist on this. He described a way of getting people to see this. He described how, what was it? Kennedy's inaugural address had this famous expression, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Milton said, in any society that understood freedom, that would have been considered deplorable. Because your government is an agent, it's like your plumber. We've hired a plumber to come in and do something for us, stuff we can't do ourselves. And if your plumber came over and did a lousy job and stuck you with a bill three times what you thought it should be, and when you griped said, hey, don't ask what I can do for you, ask what you can do for me, we would all understand that the plumber had everything inverted in his head, our relationship to him. And so did Kennedy have everything inverted in his head. We're not here to ask what we can do for our government. And my country, he clearly meant government. The government's only existence is to do the things we ask it to do. What we have empowered it to do. And polycentricity, how did this enacting as we empower it, we have, or the contract we made with it includes polycentricity. The idea that political authority will be moved, will be broken up. So it can't become too consolidated and tyrannical. It's expressed both in the constitutional articles one, two and three on the Congress, President and Supreme Court, but also in the federal state structure, which is embodied in amendments nine and ten, that the listing of certain rights here should not be interpreted to, or construed to mean that the citizens don't have others and that the powers not explicitly granted to the federal government have stayed with the states or the people. So polycentricity. And by the way, there's a wonderful Oxford historian, a classicist named Cole, I'm blocking out his name, Nicholas Cole. And he's turned from being classicist to sort of recreating what the founding fathers knew of the Greeks and the classical influence of Greece and Rome on our founding fathers. And he's actually got it down to like what books people had read and such. Peace and sound money. Peace is expressed. The power to wage war, remember, resides in particular in the House and in Congress, not with the presidency. We see how well that's lasted. And political and religious pluralism. Again, First Amendment. The Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or freedom of the press and so forth. Defense against an expansive state comes, one big bulwark on it is the Fifth Amendment, the Takings Clause, that government shall not deprive people of property for public use without just compensation. It took until 1985 for some law and economics guys, in particular Richard Epstein, pointed out the tremendous economic wisdom of this because suppose you have a field worth $100 and the government wants to take it to make a ballpark. Well, if the ballpark is worth $150 to the people, then the government is able to afford to pay you your hundred, seize it, and they've still created $50 in value. But suppose they're only creating something with $20 in value. They're seizing something for $100, they're not going to seize it if they've got to pay you $100 to only create something for $20. And the reason is, although the principal was there for 800 years, they only figured out why this is so important in the mid-80s. And it's because if you don't follow this principle, there's always a Pareto dominant alternative to any deal. So if the government is seizing $100 worth of land to create a $20 park, then there'd be some other deal where they could take, say, $30 and give $30 and both sides are better off. It's strictly Pareto dominates. So unless you follow the rule that the government has to provide just compensation, then the government will embark on all kinds of projects that lower that destroy value. And then also, of course, the Second Amendment. You know, the right defense of the Second Amendment is not really about individual self-defense, but ultimately, Isaac Asimov said an armed society is a polite society. I would add to that. An armed society is a society where the government has to stay polite. The government can't get too big for its britches. And that was really the understanding behind the Second Amendment. The discontents, where this has failed, our founding fathers saw one big flaw in this, and they described it, Madison described it, in Federalist 10. And it's worth taking a moment to read two paragraphs. The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much concern, alarm for their character and fate as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice. The instability and justice and confusion introduced into the public councils have been mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished. So they understood factions or what we call special interests or regulatory capture or capture in general is what they saw is what brought down previous attempts at democracy. And while they had studied all these previous attempts and designed the Constitution to be able to defeat what made them fail, they weren't confident that they had defeated this problem. The valuable improvements made by the American Constitution on the popular models, both ancient and modern, cannot certainly be too much admired, but it would be an unwarranted partiality to contend that they have as effectually obviated the danger on this side and as was wished and expected. So they knew the thing that they thought, the chink in the Constitution was its ability, that special interests. We had not found a way to deal with special interests. Philosophical mistakes in applying these principles come from the Supreme Court and I have to say, and it's not noted, the real philosophical mistakes we made in the 19th century really can all be traced to racism. We made these horrible, the Supreme Court made some horrible decisions that bent the Constitution out of shape and they were all based in racism. Dred Scott, of course, the case that started the Civil War, it was an activist court, I think it was Taney, and an activist court didn't read the law, they acted like super senators. They thought of themselves as senators and they decided Dred Scott the wrong way. A really important case, I'm going to describe in detail is the Slaughterhouse cases. So this whole point of the Civil War was to get what was codified in the 14th Amendment. Well, of course, freeing slave stuff, but the 14th Amendment says has two key clauses. One is that privileges or immunities clause that states cannot deprive citizens of any privileges or immunities that they would have under federal law. And that's really what completes and perfects the Constitution. Until then, the federal government was one thing and after that, it was... Until then, any rights you had as an individual and federal government couldn't take away, after that, any rights or powers that you had through the federal government, a state couldn't take away. That's the whole point of fighting the Civil War. And it was 1868 that reflected the Civil War, reflected the political compromise that came after. And it worked just fine. And New Orleans, so the Republicans, of course, dominated the South, occupied the South, reconstruction. New Orleans passed laws against black people being butchers. And they said, if you're black, you can't be a butcher. And this went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1872. And it absolutely was crystal clear by the 14th Amendment that, given that the right to earn a living is something that the federal law had always recognized, there was no way a state could deprive black people of that. And again, the activist court broke the political bargain that had been made and they said you could. And that's what gave rise to the Jim Crow South and he blessed it further in Plessy versus Ferguson 20 years later. Gangster, what really happened to this country is gangsterism. We got gangster. That's how you were started, started in Italy. And here's a story most libertarians don't know, I can promise. There was an Italian socialist, a very hardcore socialist, hard left. He was a syndicalist. The only syndicalist I know of today is Noam Chomsky. He's an anarcho-syndicalist. And he, this hardcore left, he was actually the editor of the socialist newspaper of Italy. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin met him at a convention, wrote favorably of him. He went to World War I and after, and his view of syndicalism is the view that we all should kind of belong to guilds and then guilds, the bosses, the heads of the guilds work out differences and set prices and such under some sort of government supervision. This was his view after he fought in World War I. He came out saying, well, with a little bit of an addition, just those of us who have been bloodied in war are really the ones who know what is good for the country. And his socialism got nationalistic. But his fundamental view of how he organized society remained on this unchanged socialist view. This was, of course, Benito Mussolini. Benito Mussolini had great fans in the United States. In the West, actually. It was only after he invaded Ethiopia in 1935 that he became an enemy. But he was very well regarded.  Well, that was written in 1928 when Mussolini, he was viewed as the man who made the trains run on time. The Columbia University Economics Department was to Franklin Roosevelt what Breitbart is to Donald Trump. They were his intellectual, they were his think tank. And there was one economics professor who went and studied this stuff for 18 months and came back all excited about how Mussolini had made Italy work. And it became the basis of the New Deal. The first person in charge of the National Recovery Bureau was actually a man who described himself as a fascist. He was a retired general. And so they tried to implement, so fascism doesn't come out of the right. History got rewritten after World War II. If you go back before World War II, a Ron Paul position would be considered right-wing. The fascists and the communists and socialists were left-wing. It was only after World War II that we got told fascism was a phenomenon of the right. It wasn't. It's national socialism, Nazi-ism. National socialism. His deals, his New Deal got struck down by the Supreme Court. And he couldn't get it through for three years. In 1936 Roosevelt said to the Supreme Court, if you keep doing and striking this down, I'm going to pack the court. He said, look, in the Article III, there's nothing that says how many judges should be on the Supreme Court. We started with five, now we've got nine. I'm going to add six, said Roosevelt. We said the other judges are getting old and can't keep up the work, so I'm going to add six to help them. But it was going to be six hard left guys. And they came back from the spring 1937 term the Supreme Court did, and they rolled, and they rolled over on everything. And that was the great gangster moment that punctured the Constitution. The case, one specific case to know, would be Wicked v. Filberg. It was the case that, you know, so Roosevelt had these policies, the agricultural board that was going to manage pricing, agricultural prices. And a farmer named Philburn was growing wheat. I think it was in Nebraska or Iowa was growing wheat that he fed to his cattle. He made his own food out of it. He got charged under these federal laws for doing so. It went all the way to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court on the argument that, well, here the president is trying to have a national market in agricultural prices, and this farmer, by growing his own wheat and eating it, that's wheat that he would have had to buy in the market, so even infinitesimally he's affecting the national market, so what he did is illegal. Well, that's such a obviously tortured interpretation of the Commerce Clause, because the federal government has the right to manage commerce among the several states that was so causuistic, but that's where our Constitution got punctured, and that case really is what opened the door to the massive administrative state that has risen ever since. Lastly, I know this is a difficult and touchy thing to talk about, but Sharia, I've spent a lot of my life in the Middle East. I probably spent four or five years of my 54 years in the Middle East, collectively in different places. Can we reconcile a belief system emphasizing submission with a view that just government arrives from consent of the government? I don't know. I think it may be like a carbon-based life form and a silicon-based life form trying to meet and have an offspring. I don't know if we can ever, but what I would love to see is a rise out of our Muslim communities as some attempt to reconcile Sharia with the view of consent of the government. If you believe that just law comes from divine authorities interpreted by clerics and stuff, how can that be reconciled with consent of the government? And lastly, blockchain solves all this. Blockchain solves all this for a very simple reason. For 6,000 years, we have been involved in consensual exchange. We've had to rely on centralized institutions to enable it. If you want to buy a camel from me, I'll give you my camel, give me a gold coin. I don't know whether the gold coin is debased or not, so there's a business model. He who has the monopoly on violence in an area says, I'll make gold coins, put my face on them, anyone who debases this gets killed. That's a business model. It's a way of monetizing one's monopoly on violence. Land titling. If you could buy land from me, I can give you a piece of paper that says... In that case, I just described the mint, the central institution. We don't have to trust each other for our exchange. We just trust it. If you're buying land from me, I can give you a piece of paper that says you don't know whether to trust that, so we all agree there's this one office, the land titling office that we'll go to and what it says is the truth is the truth. And you can go through... Well, I've been in a Silicon Valley company where they had on the wall 160 examples of institutions, both government and private, whose real purpose is the same business model. Strangers can't trust each other, so we each just trust this central institution. Well, with a blockchain, we don't need those anymore. And that's good because those institutions, we have this thousands of years of history of seeing those institutions corrupted, taken over by predators, philosophically distorted, gangstered in the different ways I've described, but we don't need them anymore. Because due to the blockchain, the fundamental, you know, value is... Or the breakthrough is the blockchain lets us exchange value for the first time without needing any third party to trust. And that makes it what the internet did to publishing. I think the blockchain is going to do to those 160 other institutions across society. So I think this is the most politically revolutionary moment, maybe in history, the evolution of the blockchain, because it reverses 6,000 years of the way we have solved this problem of consensual exchange. So with that, I think I've got time for one question. Yes. Well, the technical questions on the length of the blockchain and stuff is I'm not qualified to address. But the... I think that at this point people... It's still a novelty thing. People are storing value. They're getting that value can go up and such. But what really needs to happen is adoption. Adoption in commerce. A happenable website where you can spend all the Bitcoin you want to spend, and shortly, shortly not to let the cat out of the bag too much, but it's not out of the question that someday in the near future you'd be able to spend any altcoin at Overstock. Okay, thank you.


Thank you for joining us. We have with us this morning our fearless leader Jake Fidel, entrepreneur, spokesperson, videographer, and podcaster, and man of bumble, recognized by many. We also have with us Jeff Portnoy, our leading First Amendment lawyer, senior partner in one of our most respected law firms, and himself also a very articulate sportscaster, as well as Man About Town. And, Jay, Jeff, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Jeff. Okay, we're 75 days from the election. We're in the middle of the Democratic National Convention being done virtually, with highlights each evening. Jay, what do you see affecting our rule of law systems, our government systems, our electoral systems, that fuels you the most concern right now? The ballot selection is a threat on our democracy. Even before Louis D. Joy and the sabotage of the post office, you know, there have been a lot of suits about mail-in ballots started by, started by the administration in various states. Aside from all the suppression issues, that's been threatening in the sense that all this litigation, it sounds like Florida and the hanging chads all over again, but worse. So you get all this confusion about, you know, whether it was done right, whether it was rigged, whether he should leave the White House or not. There was a peace in the Atlantic a couple of weeks ago, you know, giving you a timeline between November 3rd and January 20th, where they identified all of their reflection points in making a decision with the counting of the ballots and the Electoral College and all that. And they pointed out that actually Trump had a lot of opportunities between those states, you know, between November 3rd and January 20th to screw it up and create issues that would be litigated.  And most recently, his communications spokesman yesterday said it's not clear that he will leave voluntarily, even if he loses the election. So I'm very worried about the election and I'm a good company. So, so, so does Barack Obama is very worried about the election. And I wonder, Jeff, if you're worried about the election. Well, you mean about whether it'll be challenged? We first have to, Democrats first have to win. And I think the plan is that they win, hopefully, by so much that any challenge would be totally futile. Obviously, if they win in states by five or six or 10,000 votes, I think you're right. I think he's going to challenge. I mean, his whole life has been lawsuits. The attempts to intimidate. He grew up under Roy Cohn and many of us lawyers know what that means. And I think you're right. The signals that are coming from the White House, from his spokespeople are that it's going to be a fraudulent election. He's already made that clear even before he loses, which, by the way, I think is a good sign because I think it means his people know it's very likely he won't be president after January 20th. But I do think it'll get tied up. I'm not sure about this post office thing. I think it was a convenient political. The Democrats were handled, handed a very nice political issue. I think most of that has now already been allegedly remedied, except for the post office boxes that are sitting in a warehouse somewhere. But yeah, I think the selection will get challenged. I give it a unless the Democrats went overwhelmingly. I'd give it a 90 percent chance of being challenged. And I know Trump has groups of lawyers already around the country getting ready to file lawsuits, as the Democrats have already done, by the way, to try to increase access. So it's not a pretty time in America. I think Obama yesterday was brutally frank if people didn't already believe that we're in a very perilous time. And the next 75 days are not going to get any easier. But let's let's go to the post office for a minute. So he appoints a guy who appears to be in conflict because he's a major stockholder in UPS, which if the post office fails, UPS will be a beneficiary. Does that bother you? The post office failing, yes. No, that the fact that he's a major stockholder and Trump appointed him. Are you are you no longer remune to knowing that happens in this administration on a weekly basis? Look what happened to Steve Banyan today. And look what happened to Steve Banyan and million dollars allegedly going to fund the wall, at least a million. And it went to this cohort of his three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in personal expenses, trips, jewelry. It is the most corrupt administration. It makes Calvin Coolidge look like Mother Teresa. You know, that's quotable. Let's let's go to the let's go to the sorting machines. You know, to me, it's so obvious what he did and it may have an effect. I think it will have an effect on a number of levels. One is that they can't do it fast enough. And that'll that'll add, you know, issues to all this litigation that Trump will mount about the election. And a lot of people won't have a chance to vote. It's it's already slow now. I've heard from people here in Hawaii that it takes 10 days for a letter to get to you now. So whatever has happened, it changes things. And I think the other, you know, you can say that the the blue boxes can be returned to the street corners. A lot of them were damaged when they were pulled up. I'm not sure all of them can be returned. But the sorting machines cost millions and they process millions of mail objects every day. And they've been removed without any reason. It's kind of gross. And and now the postal workers have to sort the mail by hand. So one hand, these machines, and there is something like 600 of them have been removed and they're offline. They're not going to be able to put them back in time for the election. And he never promised they would put them back. He just said he was going to stop. This is the joy. He's going to stop what he was doing. But he didn't say that he was going to return them. There'll be some testimony about this what on Saturday in the house. And so, you know, I think the the election has already been wounded. And it's it's caused for great concern because it may have a substantive effect. And even if it doesn't have a substantive effect, it's confusing. It's a loss of public confidence in the system. It's chaos. You know, you don't know whether your vote's going to going to count. This is a great concern. And it goes to the, you know, the identity of the show. Chuck, rule of law. What rule of law? How can you be confident in a system which can be crashed for no good reason by the president and query? What can happen about it? What's the remedy? Congress cannot act. It doesn't act anymore. The Republicans are not going to get behind a solution. For example, one solution would be to, you know, give the post office some money. That's not going to happen. And Nancy Pelosi may not be able to do anything just alone in the house. I hope you guys brought your checkbooks. I feel that we ought to tip the postal service worker who appears at our doorstep as much as we can to make him feel that we care about them and we're giving him some money to work overtime because nobody else is going to pay him for the overtime. Anyway, but, you know, my my concern about this is that he has he has violated the law as far as I'm concerned. And at the same time, we don't have a remedy. You're going to go to court to somebody trying to get an injunction on him. I don't think that's going to happen fast enough. So whatever damage has been done, even if DeJoy says, I'm going to stop what I was doing, that damage is already wounded. The system of the confidence, the post office is just one impediment. There's a there's an equally significant problem. And that is the lack of personnel in all of the county offices to count these ballots. I mean, that's the other issue. Mail got delivered in the primaries in most of these states. I know there's, you know, instances in which mail got delivered a day later, something even in New York, there are still two elections they haven't figured out yet. They have to count every one of these mail in ballots. Now, all you have to do is look at our wonderful state of Hawaii and particularly our state election administrator who hasn't gotten it right yet. What they find 15,000 ballots the day after here is not what I read or something like that. It didn't make much difference, except potentially in a couple of races. Four years ago, they ran out of ballots. I mean, you know, so let's not just blame Trump and the post office. There's plenty of blame to go around even in our home state. We were going to file a lawsuit. We decided not to on behalf of Common Cause because of the time problem in trying to get the state to fund more in person voting locations in November. Do you know how many in person voting locations there are? On a Wahoo for this upcoming election for people who don't have a post office address or living on the street or moved. Guess how many, Jay? There are in November to two. 500,000 people per voting location. There's a million people on a Wahoo to voting locations. Our legislature would got millions of dollars from the government to help make sure that access to voting would be improved. We have two locations on Election Day. So if you live in Kailua, you got a choice or Kaniyoi or all the way out on the North Shore in Haleva. You can drive to Kakaako on November 3rd, or you can come downtown. So there's plenty of blame going around about ways to restrict access to voting. I wouldn't argue that. I agree with you. And when they say here in another states, they're going to put voting, voting boxes where you can drop your ballot in a box on the street. I don't think it's enough time for that either. They can't get it together and they don't they don't know how to do it. The state does not know how to do it. And I suspect that'll be the same in other states. So what you have is a cumulative effect of all these things. If I'm John Q. Voter, I'm saying, oh, my God, is this really going to work? Or is this going to be a complete chaos chaos?   Very right wing politically. There are 30 to 35 percent of the United States population that already agree that this will be a fraudulent vote in November already. That's really talk about the rule of law, what it's done to democracy. Forget about the practical issue, which I know you're concerned about and you should be and others are to that a vote may not be counted. Think about what it's done to people's perceptions of America's voting. Up until recently, we thought about that in Russia, in China, in Belarus. Now we got 30 to 40 percent of the population, who if your poll tomorrow will say they believe this will be a fraudulent dishonest election in a democracy. That's really the sad thing about all of this. Well, yes. And the question is, I know this is beyond the title of the show, but what what happens then? What happens? That claim will be made. I think we can agree 100 percent that claim will be made. And what's ironic about it is that most most of the fraud, if not all of the fraud, is on the part of the people who would claim that it was a fraudulent election. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Anyway, let me ask you guys a practical question. Generally, in all the elections before this, we've seen elections handled by localities, by the states, administered pretty much locally with, as far as we could see, very little federal intervention or interference. Right now, we have an administration which is exercising all of the interference it possibly can to try and limit opposition voting to try and control and suppress voting to engage in gerrymandering, voter suppression, taking voters off the rolls, all of the measures that can possibly think of what's the risk of federal interference in or affect on state and local management of elections this time? Well, I think that's an interesting question. I mean, obviously, if there are going to be challenges, the challenges will be made by the political party. Right? It'll be the Republican Party that's hired all of these lawyers and will challenge. But as we've talked about on prior shows, the one thing that still seems to be holding steady, even though there have been dramatic attempts by the Republicans, particularly in the Senate, to change the playing field are the courts. And every day, we still see the court standing up for the rule of law. Today, the federal judge just ripped Trump apart on his refusal to or his efforts to stop his accounting firm and others from turning over his tax returns. He's just said, enough of this BS. I'm not putting up with your attempts to delay anymore. You've got a week to produce it. And an hour later, they went to the Second Circuit. We'll see what happens. You know, we had a court today. You know, we've had courts in the last several weeks try to stop various things. And sometimes the courts don't rule the way we want. Right, Jay and Chuck.  But at least we have the courts, which ninety nine point nine percent are still free of direct political interference, even though we have the Justice Department that's doing everything it can to interfere. Well, you know, I I I keep thinking, what is what would be a good solution? All this kind of moves that if you're in Canada, Canada, Jay, I was thinking of Tasmania myself, Jeff. The you know, what who could you know? One thing is clear. And that is if you if you are the president and you want to create chaos, it's not hard to do that. I mean, remember, not too long ago, he said he was going to postpone the election. And that turned out to be a tribal loon, and he backed down on it. But that would that would be completely illegal. Talk about the rule of law. So I mean, my point is I got I got interrupted because this is perfect Trump. You see what he said when New Zealand's Prime Minister postponed the election in New Zealand for two months because they've had this little mini outbreak. He ripped her apart, saying, oh, you were telling the world how you were so much better than the United States. And now you've had to postpone the election, which is which is legal, by the way, under New Zealand law, because it's a parliamentary thing where they call elections. The guy has no credibility at all. It's amazing. No shame. You know, if you were the president, you wouldn't have let this happen. And the question now is, you know, what do we do? Is this correctable? Can this, you know, be avoided?  What is it, 75 days? It's getting real close now. Is there anything anybody can do, practically speaking, to fix the post office, to get it straightened out, to give public confidence, which to me is so critical to, you know, to minimize the risk of crazy litigation after November 3rd. And I don't think, I don't think, the answer is no. Right. Thank you. The answer is no. So we can say to ourselves, you know, this is going to be a real mess. So then the question is, how do you correct the mess? How do we come out of this deal because we're going to have crisis between November 3rd and January 20th? How do we fix it? How do we apply it to the UN for the impartial election observers? Those of us who are old enough, we might have seven days in May. You know, it's really funny that that that movie has applicability these people should be watching it these days. Yeah, they should. It was Kirk Douglas and Bert Lancaster. The military might take on a role it never wanted to take over. In this country, right? Yeah, it might become under even more political than Trump has tried to make it. And thank God, these former chief of staffs and four star generals are standing up, you know, to Trump. Even the president chief of staff knew to get out of the way of the post, the church photo op as he started down the road with Trump. You know, it's crazy to say that, right? Because we're one country that's always said the military should be totally apolitical. But they may be the ones that have to go in and invite Mr. Trump to leave on January. I think he's don't you think he said talk about the rule of law? Don't you think he's setting it up? I mean, for example, the last rumor was that he was going to fire Mark Esper and find somebody else to run the Defense Department. Somebody who would be perhaps more loyal than Esper has been Esper has made comments that are negative. Is Steve Banyan available? Well, maybe he'd be in jail by then. Who knows? Yeah, but I really think that Trump thinks about that. He thinks about who will circle the White House and protect me. Maybe the brown shirts that went to Portland, he would use them. But there's going to be a showdown here and it'll be the people who were loyal in uniform, the people who'll be loyal and the ones who think clearly, this is a tremendous ethical moral choice that the leaders of these organizations will have to make. Because I think he will call on them in a matter of loyalty and have them defend him on some ridiculous claim that he's entitled to stay. Do you remember that case in law school? It was the Montgomery Ward and the guy's name was Avery and he was the president of the Montgomery Ward. And the board of directors voted to remove him. And he said the board hadn't done it right and he was staying in his office and the sheriffs came and he wouldn't leave his office. They lifted his chair and carried him and the chair out. I'll never forget that case. We need that case now. You know, I'm a little bit more optimistic than maybe you guys are about the future though. You know, it's not the first time the country's had turmoil.  And that was, you know, 40 years ago and we thought then country's over, assassinations of presidents and presidential candidates and civil rights leaders and attempted assassinations of others in high office. We survived. I'm somewhat optimistic. It won't happen a year or two into the next administration but it'll happen that even though they'll always, we'll go back to the 10 or 15% crazies that we've always had.  But I think some of the Trumpers will be reborn and that the country will move forward the way it was for 40 years until four years ago. So I could be wrong, but I'm optimistic. Reborn, that's, you know, I've been waiting for the Senate to be reborn for three years now. They haven't even come. Well, maybe some of them are breaking ranks but mostly they haven't come close. You know, I worry about, you know, you talk about the tipping point back in the 60s and I think every time or any time you have people out in the streets in large numbers complaining and protesting and the like. The larger the numbers, the more risky it is and see how easy it is to turn from a peaceful protest to a violent protest. That's easy. You can predict that. And I think, yes, we will have protests. The question, we will have protests on either side. If Trump wins, you'll have those kids in the street protesting and some of them will be violent and they will foment more violence. If Trump loses, the skinheads will be in the streets and they believe in the second amendment in the streets. So we'll have that. And, you know, so anytime you get people in the streets in significant number with significant animus, you run the risk of having a violent experience that could change the way the country work. But we survived. We survived.  And that goes to the legitimacy of the election and where people are being led to even now. You know, even the Democrats, and let's be honest about this, in countering what they claim or the Republicans' efforts to de-legitimize the election are enforcing, you know, reinforcing people's beliefs that it's not gonna be a legitimate election. You know what I mean? I mean, it's a terrible conundrum because even reacting to what the Republicans are doing what Trump is saying just adds credibility to it. I don't blame them. I don't blame them.  And we're talking about that.  So it's kind of sad. And by the way, a little political note here from me, these protests are not doing the Democrats any good.  And if they keep this up in New York, in Portland, in Chicago, they are just increasing the chance that Trump gets enough votes to win. You know, it's done. It's over. The point's been made. Let's get through the election without giving Trump more talking points. Yeah, or brown shirt points. But let me accept everything you said and for argument only. Of course. I wouldn't expect anything else. Let's assume that Trump, one thing or another, through the vote, through a whole group of possibilities that he actually stays in power for another four years, arguably longer than that. Okay.  Or will he be worse? Cause it seems to me he's gotten worse. Will, as a pathological individual, what'll he be like in the second term? Your question answers itself, Jay. We're in our last minute. So let's each wrap up with a little 30 second shots. Biden and Harris offer a team of people who at the very least are decent, honest, integrity-based people historically. They are not tainted by corruption. They are not tainted by the kind of behavior, the kind of personal attacks Trump has. That's our choice. Jay, Jeff, what do you see the choice? I'll answer the question.  Agreed. Agreed. Agreed. Wow, there it is. That's flat out. Gentlemen, thank you. We are in agreement. We've reached our consensus. We'll see you all again in two weeks. 10 a.m., Thursday, September 3rd. Jeff and Jay, thanks so much. We'll have Walter back with us then. Aloha. Thank you guys. Aloha.


وَأَقُولُ فِي القُرْآنِ مَا جَاءَتْ بِهِ آيَاتُوهُ فَهُوَ الْكَارِيمُ الْمُنْزَالُهُ وَأَقُولُ قَالَ اللَّهُ جَلَّ جَلَالُهُ وَالْمُصْطَافَ الْهَاديِ وَلَا أَتْ أَوَّالُهُ قَالَ لَهُ عُمَرْ رضي الله تعالى عَرْ عُمَرْ they'll set to the Prophet فَإِنَّهُ الْآناْ نَا وَاللَّهِ لَأَنْتَ أَحَبُوا إِلَيَّ مِنْ نَفْسِي now you are more beloved to me than my own self قال صلى الله عليه وسلم then the Prophet said الْآناْ يا عُمَرْ now now you have completed your Eman so this claim that I love the Prophet and I give Presidents to him is not a mere claim this is what we have to truly understand many of us if you were asked today is the Prophet most beloved to you than yourself you'd say yes I do I love him عليه الصلاة والسلام so this is not brothers like he said it's not a mere claim that a person just claims because it's easy لأنه من السهل على كل اللسان every tongue everyone can say that it's the easiest thing that a person can do but what is it that we will do what we need to do is to put that love of yours which you've claimed to the test right الله تعالى كبارك وتعالى he sent an ayah an ayah that tests the person's claim of that which they love if they pass this test then their claim is right and if not then their claim is it is from the mere claims that are out there what is it that the Prophet says in the Quran وإن كنتم تحبور الله if you love Allah فالتبعوري follow me يحببكم الله و الله will love you ويغفل لكم دلوبكم أنا الله وفقيبي for your sins والله وفور الرحيم الله تعالى is what he forgives the shortcomings and the errors of his slaves حسن البصري يسر إدعاء قومن محبط الله a group of people came out and they claimed the love of Allah فبتلاه الله بهذه الآية الله تستخدم with الله تستخدم with this aya many people brothers and sisters they love Allah on a noom day on a noom day when they enjoy themselves and everything they say good things and they happy and they say masha Allah Allah loves me I love Allah الله سلم القرآن من الناس يعمد الله على حرف فإن أصابه خير لتما النبي وإن أصابته في تنتن قلب على وجه there is a group of people they worship Allah على حرف on the edge فإن أصابه خير لتما النبي if good comes his way he is calm, he is tranquil he is enjoying himself, he is smiling Allah loves me وإن أصابه فتلاه when calamity is hidden trials and tribulation is put towards him انقلب على وجه this person turns backwards خسر الدنيا والأخل great misguided and great loss ذلك والخسرات من المبين الله تباركه تعالى he told us that there is a group of people who made the love of Allah and is messaged equal to the others الله says ومن الناس من يتخذوا من دون الله أندادا يحبونهم كحب الله والذين آمنوا أشد حبا لله ولو يرى الذين ظلموا عذاب أن القوة لله جميعا وأن الله شديد العقاب اتبرأ الذين اتبعوا من الذين اتبعوا ورأوا العذاب وتقطعت بهم الأسباب وقال الذين اتبعوا لو أننا لدى كرة فلتبرأ منهم كما تبرأوا مننا كذلك يريهم الله أعمالهم حسرات عليهم وما هم بخارجين منها الله توزس الإسآية ومن الناس من يتخذوا من دون الله والذين يحبونهم يحبونهم كما يحبون الله والذين آمنوا أشد حبا لله ولكن الشخص يحبون الله أكثر من أي شيء من يأكد المحب for the believers الله سبحانه وتعالى لماذا؟ لأن المحبين يحبونهم ليس فقط يحبونهم ليس فقط ماذا يحبونهم؟  لذا, من قلت؟ سرحاديد القرش، قرارة القرش قلت، أبو جهل قلت، عتبة قلت، بيغمان، أميط بالخلاف، لقد قلت في البداية. لذا, when قرش came the children of these اكرمة and others with the children of who they were the children of who أبو جهل and others they came back to Madinah Makkah they tell Abu Sufah listen has this caravan made it to Madinah sorry Makkah has this caravan made it back to Makkah Abu Sufah he said yeah of course it did they said everything on this caravan now is not going to be used for anything except to prepare for the war they're going to prepare so all of the merchandise and everything and the money and everything that was on that caravan they used it to prepare for the army money they put in it a whole year these men were getting ready the whole year رمضان the battle of bedel was when it was in the second year the 17th of Ramadan right the second year of Hijriah it took place on the 17th of رمضان and the battle of Uhud took place the month of Shawwal the third year of Hijriah the different three call something 11, something 15, something 6 a different Aqwal what day it was there is a khilaf but the Ijmaa is at Shawwal and it's the third year of Hijriah so the one year difference and one year, one month right قريب for preparing نبيلهي محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم قريب for making their way they're making their way to what مديلة they're making their way from مكة to مديلة so the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم told that he led the Salat Al-Jum'a he finished the Salat Al-Jum'a he turned and finished and then went to lead the Jalaza the Prophet there was a man from the companions who died the Prophet led the Jalaza he turned around to his people and said listen all companions what do you guys see that we should do today عبداللهي محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم رئيس المنفق he put his finger up and he said I have an advice what is it or mission of Allah which is fight for Medina the Prophet liked that idea he said I think what عبداللهي محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم is good anyways the overwhelming majority said let's go out look at the quwa and the iman of the Ansar look at the quwa of Muhajireen look at the quwa of the Sahabas and their true love for this religion what did they say there was a noble companion his name was called ماليك ماليك his name was ماليك الأنصاري رحمه الله he said to the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم يا رسول الله لا تحرمني don't prevent me from entering Jannah I did not participate in the battle of Badr I wasn't there I wasn't alive I wasn't able to fight then or because he came to Islam late I wasn't there I now see the opportunity of Jannah don't prevent me from it he said to the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم I don't think we should fight in Medina I think we should go out there wherever the number is يا رسول الله we're gonna fight the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم he got up he went into his room he put on his arm he came out when he came out before the Prophet came out فيما بينهم amongst themselves they started to converse we pressured the Messenger of Allah into this decision he didn't want it he wanted to fight in Medina this was his decision we have now come and we clouded the Prophet's decision we've discussed we've pressured him into it he did not want to do this so when he comes we'll say the Messenger of Allah was sorry we'll fight in Medina in the city as you wanted and the reason why the Prophet wanted the city is because the city the roads are coming are very narrow and if they're large in number their number is not gonna matter now because the people who are large in number they need to spread out if they all narrow themselves on one road it's easy for them to be destroyed with arrows and he said that the cities are so we could go on every little corner every little hill every benefit from it like that and it was a process and by the time he came out the Messenger of Allah was sorry we apologize now we're gonna fight in Medina look what he said to them he said to them he said to them he said it is not befitting for a Messenger after he puts his armor on for him to take it off unless he sees the enemy and he fights with them that's the way that a Prophet is he can't just take his armor off now it's too late we have to go we have to now go to the enemy so the process I said we'll prepare everybody he gave because he's from Abdul Dar he said look he organized the companions he took some of the companions like Abdullah ibn al-Jubeir he placed him on top of the mountain and 50 men and arrow men he said you guys be here and everything he sorted everything out but on the way Abdullah ibn al-Sullah took 300 of the companions away I'm at 300 men sorry from the Prophet 300 men and he said look at the Munafiq he's always seen this time ومن الناس who worship Allah على حرف what did he do he took 300 men from the Prophet and then not only that two noble groups of companions from two powerful tribes بني سلامة and بني حارثة both of them even intended to leave الله سلم القرآن اضهام الطائفة تاني ملكم انتفشلة والله وليهم وعلى الله فليت وكل المؤمنون there were group of companions two big large tribes these were the tribes جهبنا عبدالله was from جهب رسال فينا نزل هذه الآية this ayah came down on us this ayah اضهام الطائفة تاني ملكم انتفشلة والله وليهم but he said I'm so happy that this ayah came down on us why? because he said الله سلم آية والله وليهم الله is their ally بني حارثة and بني سلامة both of them Allah is there he's their ally سبحانه وتعالى and it's true they didn't leave because Allah made them firm they threw about it their decision and they said how can we leave the Prophet of Allah today that he needs us look at the believer his iman shakes in he's it wasn't like this what shows you that he wasn't a claim it wasn't مجرد دعوة he's got ثبات قوة they stood by the Prophet عليه السلام and only they just 300 men I guess how much the companions their effort was put to gather them together how much are they now or were they they were 1 1,000 men they were 1,000 men عبد الله how much is left now 700 men 700 after the struggle 1,000 they reached كفارة القرش they divided their men in two sides the right side and the left side they gave the right side 200 men they gave the right side 2 who and the right left side Khalid and they divided them like that they said you guys go and they directed them towards where the companions were on the mountain the point and the I'm trying to come to it is that يا اخوة these people if you look at the battle of bedar and how it took place every struggle Islam went through what did the Sahab as they said to us look what Ansar said to the Prophet of Allah لموسى we're not going to say to you what Benu Israel said to the Prophet of Allah موسى ادهب انت وربك فقاتل إنها هنا قائلون we're not going to say that to Muhammad that you and your Lord go and fight we're not going to say that to you رسول الله that's what we're not going to say that to you ادهب انت وربك you and your Lord fight فإنها معكم مقاتلون we are with you fighting so look at the difference between the followers of Mousa and the followers of Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم the difference between the two and the statements that came from them صح if you look at the battle of Uhud how the companions you know the battle took place مخالفة أمر رسول الله the Prophet was opposed عليه الصلاة عليه الصلاة was opposed and the companions when he told them don't come down from that mountain they did come down right because of the fact that they saw two spoils of war عبدالله من المسور it's something very powerful because the ayah came down الله says منكم يريدوا الدنيا ومنكم يريدوا الأخيرة ثم صلافكم عنهم ليابتريكم ولا قاد عفا عنكم عبدالله من المشور it's that I never thought from amongst us the companions there were those who wanted the dunya I never thought that he said I never thought within us until this ayah came down منكم من يريدوا الدنيا ومنكم من يريدوا الأخيرة it's that I never thought amongst the companions of the Prophet there were those who wanted the dunya never thought that these Sahabas they stir it into their hearts it was the furthest from their hearts رضي الله تعالى عنهم so the fact that the Prophet his companions their iman was tested and it was put to the test and they passed it so the iman يا إخوة القرآن and the love of the messenger is not مجرد الدعوة it's not a mere claim so it's something we just say and then when we found the times when it's جد and اجتهاد the times of hardness and the times of toughness when we looked at we're not there we're missing from that circle or we're missing from that place يا إخوة that's not and the guidance of the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم and he's sunnah and everything is what it's present on you والله one of the powerful things was that شيخ من عثيمين was diagnosed with cancer رحمه الله رحمة واسعة and when he was diagnosed with cancer they told him the doctors they said شيخ we're going to have to do chemotherapy on you you're going to have to do chemotherapy and when they said to him you're going to do chemotherapy they told him what's going to happen how is it going to be and then you know the chemotherapy what does it involve you're half lying off and then the شيخ said we're buying a bid they said شيخ even your bid is going to go he said I don't want to meet الله without a bid I don't want to meet Allah سبحانه وتعالى the day of judgment with no bid شيخ تهد because of that you throw cancer رحمه الله رحمة واسعة they were serious about the deed now it's chemo it will kind of freeze this cancer it will make you you know if your things will be smooth your life will be better for a period of time شيخ رفع ذلك why because this is الله says do you think Allah will not distinguish between who's truthful about this Eman and who's lying about it the person will be tested الله wants to see who's saying the truth and who's what and who's lying all of that has to be put it has to be put to the test رحمه الله رحمة واسعة and الله I'll tell you something you can only be steadfast you can only be in love of the prophet and be the one that you want to be if you're like that at the times of ease then you can be in the times of hardship you prepare yourself and you nurture yourself at the times when you're in the glory days of your life and the times of ease and simplicity and fun if you hold up to that Deen and you're real about it والله brothers by Allah والله when the time comes hardship hits الله سبحانه وتعالى إن الله لا يضع عجل من أحسن عملاء الله will not forsake you the good that you did here will come and intercessor for you and it will bring you through the calamities and hardship that you're going through so this is powerful يا إخوة محبت الرسول loving the prophet عليه الصلاة والسلام there's a point I wanted to mention when the battle of Urud happened the campaign is all dispersed and of course they ran away nine men came back to the prophet عليه الصلاة والسلام how many men? how many men? everyone ran away from him the prophet Qudi يا إيها الناس إليا the prophet said oh people come back to me come back to me I'm the messenger of Allah don't leave me the battlefield so they came back to him nine managed to make it seven of them Ansar two of them والله if you look at and you read the way they defended the prophet عليه الصلاة والسلام in that battle and the way they put their chests out out seven of them he sends them and he says do this they'll do it all seven of them died before they made him reach the mountain عليه الصلاة والسلام يا إقرأوا تاريخ الصحابة read their biography then you will realize what real love is do you realize what true love was point number two انتتخدوا إماما لك في عباداتك that you take the prophet as your Imam in عبادة واخلاككك in your manners بحيث تستحظر عند فعل العبادة أنك متبع له that you bring in your heart that when you're doing an act of worship أنك متبع له that you are in accordance to him وكأنه أمامك and like he's in front of you تترسم خطاه وتنهج نهج هو and you're taking his footsteps and you're training on his path like he's in front of you and you're following him like that footsteps he puts his foot up and then you put your foot right where he took his foot from وكذلك في مخالقات الناس and also in the way that you deal with the people and your mannerism is towards the people أنك متخلق بأخلاقه التي قال الله عنها that your etiquette and your character and your mannerism is in accordance to how he was عليه الصلاة والسلام the prophet in which Allah said about his frustration and his affairs وإنك يو محمد لعلا خلق العظيم you're of great mannerism you're of great character and etiquette ومتل تزمت and whenever you are brothers بحالة if you are like that you're in accordance to what brothers you follow him in his عبادة you follow him in his etiquette you follow him in everything فستكون حريسا غاية الحرسة على العلم بشريعته وخلاقه you will then trust brothers you will then strive greatly in knowledge of his شريعة and his mannerism if you look at what Allah said in the Qur'an that supports the statement of this sheikh رحمه الله تعالى is الله said in the Qur'an لقد كان لكم فيه رسول الله اصوة حسنة لمن كان يرجو الله واليوم الاخر وذكر الله كثيرا الله tells us in the ayah that in the prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم is a great example many people say to you the youngsters nowadays don't have role models and that is not true that is not true to say that they have the prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم he is a true role model for them عليه صلى الله عليه وسلم and anyone who ponders on the verse realizes the power of how Allah spoke here Allah did not say there is the prophet is a role model for you all in his etiquette or he is a role model in his عباد or he is a role model no Allah says that the prophet is a role model in and within himself he said in the ayah لقد كان لكم في رسولنا in the prophet is a role model in him so that means everything that comes from him is an example for you that you need to follow him in عليه صلى الله عليه وسلم and the thing that is needed from us all is to follow him in his عباد as much as we need to follow in his etiquette عليه صلى الله عليه وسلم if you complete عباد and you have a role model and you haven't completed the etiquettes that the prophet came with then there's deficiency in you اهل العلم the people of knowledge they didn't believe to the concept of etiquettes and mannerism that's where you find بقص العقائد at the end they mention it mention it the كتاب عقيد طلاصطية what's the ending etiquettes and mannerism he talks about it I don't know he talks about عقيد at the end so it's no point believing in the articles of faith and coming with ايمان and coming with عقيد اهل السنة والجماع باب الاسماء والصفات باب الاسماء والاحكام والمسائل القضاء والقدر والراعد والوعيد للصحابة and then you have deficiency in the etiquettes and the way you carry yourself الله said to the prophet وإنك لعلا خلوق العظيم محمد you are a great character صح what did the prophet say بوريثتو I was sent out as a messenger this is my job this is my mission I was sent بوريثتو I was sent to complete good etiquettes بوريثتو this is the purpose in which I was brought out to complete the good etiquettes in the people ولي ذلك it's sad والله it's extremely sad when we find Muslims Muslims who are supposedly meant to be practicing when you find them have the lowest and the weakest of etiquettes صح خلق is really the way they speak the way they talk the way they deal with people the way they react the way they act all of it you are you are shocked to what you see from them and it makes it even worse when it's meant to be brothers who are meant to be practicing who got who understood منهج أهل السنة they've understood منهج السلفية and you see good bad etiquettes from them it's shocking did you just think that following the prophet is only in عقيدة and منهج don't you think you need to follow the prophet and the etiquettes and the way you deal with others don't you think if a woman a sister who is متحجب who is wearing hijab and some of the characters that you see from her والله it's غريب it's عجيب it's something that's amazing so we have two brothers and sisters follow the prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم and all of that and the way we carry ourselves the way we are the way we talk the way we act all of it point number three عمالك اليومي غير المفترضات now the sheikh moves on to the last and final one which is your daily doings your daily your daily doings what you do daily I think there's one more he finally mentioned which is طريقة طالب العلم a part how to seek knowledge so the sheikh he now moves on to عملوك اليومي what does a student of knowledge need to do daily I missed number three okay انتكون داعي اللي سنته that you are a person who calls to his sunnah ناصيرا لها and you give victory to the prophet sunnah مدافعا عنها and you defend the sunnah of the prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم فإن الله سيانصورك بقدر نصرك لخاريعة and Allah is going to give you victory as much as you give victory to his sunnah if you give victory to the sunnah of the prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم الله will give you victory in accordance so that you give to the sunnah of the prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم but what is it that the sheikh first mentioned first of all let it be found in you وفقك الله يا عبد الله may Allah give you توفق السداد let it be found in you الي اتمام به ولي اتداء بهدي you be in accordance to his guidance in your mannerism and in your عبادة and all of that and the way you take his path then the sheikh رحم الله then says then be a person who will not accept this low finger of anything being changed from his religion and the way of the prophet no one can add anything whilst you live and no one can deduct from his the prophet's statements and his doings اي دعان مله this much don't accept it defend it because if you give victory to the sunnah of the prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم and you help and aid it and support it remember that all going to come back for you and deal with you in the way you deal towards his religion and the prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم he told us عليه صلى الله عليه وسلم that the people are three times the prophet told us this لا يزالوا طائفة من أمتي ظاهرين على الحق منصورين the prophet told us that the people are three times the first people are the people who are طائفة المنصورة the victorious group who are giving victory to the religion and they are being given victory to Allah that's the first group صح طائفة المنصورة the second is what لا يزالوا طائفة من أمتي ظاهرين على الحق لا يضروا منخذهم the people deceived them a person used who is meant to be from the sunnah who is deceiving you who is pulling the plug on you he is meant to be with you he is infiltrating you what is he doing he is an infiltrator he is deceiving you he is lying to you he is very what he is very corruptive and he is bringing about problems for you he is mentioning your little shortcomings here and there you did this you said this خلام ما ينبني he is a big agenda though so he discriminates you it's a deceptive individual that's the second the type of people لا يضروا the prophet told us لا يضروا منخذهم the one who does خدلام to them he won't harm them ولا منخلفهم and the third one is مخالف a person who is opposing him there is no line with him there is no agreement with him there is no respect with him لا يضروا منخذهم ولا منخلفهم حتى يأتي أمر الله until the time of the hour comes they won't be able to harm him so Allah سبحانه وتعالى is going to what give that person victory now the sheikh رحمه الله moves on to عملوك اليومي your daily doings your daily doings that which are not obligatory so the sheikh is going to mention things that are واجبات and مفرضات he is only going to mention غير مفرضات things that are voluntary that a person needs to do and the sheikh رحمه الله he has placed منها جن محرر جميلا جميلا a very beneficial and a very amazing methodology places that a person of knowledge needs to take the first one is إذا قمت من الليل when you stand up at night فدقوا لله تعالى remember Allah ودعوا الله بما شئتا and call on to Allah and supplicate to him بما شئتا of whatever you want فإن الدعاء because supplication في هذا الموطني because the دعاء at this particular place when you build ijabati is most likely going to be accepted وقرأ قول الله تعالى and read the statement of Allah إن في خلق السماوات والأرض read that حتى تختمة until you complete صورة آلع عمرانة وهي عشر آيات and they are ten verses read them الشيخ رحمه الله he goes into here what is known as قيام الليل standing at night this period of time that we're living in you even come across a person who would pray قيام الليل back in those days it wasn't even seem to be a very virtuous person to pray قيام الليل it was it was like you have to do it's to do list for a student of knowledge that he prays قيام الليل and كثير and many brothers a lot do I say that a person who doesn't have a portion of the night where they pray and they don't remember Allah at that time at the time at that time does he really deserve the title of student of knowledge does he really deserve it so the الشيخ رحمه الله he mentions but here there is an issue which is that and a scholar they used to dislike is that the person he shouldn't spend the whole night praying the reason is because as the Imam of Shah Tabeer رحمه الله mentions he said that Imam أمالك إبن ألس he disliked إحياء الليل to give life to the whole night means he stand up all night كله all of it وقالة he said لعله يصبح مغلوبا because it could happen that if he's praying all night what's going to happen to you you're going to be overcome for Fajr the person may not you might miss Fajr or you might even be overcome at that time so the person should try to stand up through the Lail the last third of the night the last third of the night and pray and remember الله سبحانه وتعالى الله descends as the prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم وقال ينزل ربنا أو الله descends تعالى كل ليلة إلى السماء الدنيا حين يبقى كله في الليل الليل الله descends يقول الله says من يدعني who's going to ask me فأستجيب له in which I will respond to him and give him what he wants من يسألوني who's going to ask me فأعطيه I'll give him what he wants من يستغفروني who's going to ask me for forgiveness فأعوفر له and I will ask forgiveness for him so the time that the du'az accepted is now الإمام ابن مفلح in his Kitab أهداب الشرعية he mentioned the story he said بات عند الإمام أحمد a man spent the night over with إمام أحمد إبن حمد رحمه الله فوضع عندهما إمام أحمد place water for this man in front of his place فلم أكم بالليل لما تلعين wait up at night ولم استعمل الماء I didn't use the water فلم أصبحت قال لي ونا وقب في الموني أحمد ستمي ده تستعمل الماء didn't you use the water some of the story mentioned that إمام أحمد he broke him water before after Isha أحمد went to sleep prayed his Qiyam finished when Fajr was close أحمد wanted to get him أضع a new water why? because he had to have used the first water for Qiyam and then the second water is for what? for Fajr so he broke the second he broke the second water when he came and he broke the second water he saw that the first water wasn't utilized and it wasn't used and then إمام أحمد said to him when he saw that the water wasn't used سبحان الله سبحان الله إمام أحمد said ما سمعت بصحب بحنيت إلا يقوم بالليل أحمد said أحمد said I never had a person who's seeking the knowledge of Hadith and he doesn't pray at night I've never had that أحمد said


Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE Live coverage here in Toronto for the untraceable Blockchain Futurist Conference, two days of wall-to-wall coverage. We were just singing here in theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, my coach Dave Vellante, Tony Ling, CUBE alumni with Culture, and we have James McDowell, Head of Strategy at Sentinel. He's also a PGA professional golf professional and a boxer extraordinaire. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having us. Thank you for having us, yes! We had some fun here before we came and came on. Super exciting, even though the market's kind of in a downward trough and about to do its normal cycle in crypto, tons of energy, the culture's changing, there's a real energy around focusing on high quality builders, high quality individuals. Absolutely. This is a real dynamic. Projects for good, projects for profit, there's great engineering going on. What could be better? For sure, and we've been through the trough so many times. We've gotten to the certain point that now I just kind of like, I'm like, well, I mean, we're here again. You know what I mean? And now it's time for we figure out right now who's really in it to win it and who's just playing the game. Tony, you know what I love about you? You've got great energy, great aura, you've got great culture. You've been around, you've seen it early, you've been involved in a lot of the iterations of the industry that's just now growing to be a baby and it's growing up into its elementary school years. Yeah. What's your take on this? I know you do a lot of retreats in self-reflection. What's the industry? Where's it come from? Where is it now? How do you feel about what's happening? So I've been in blockchain since 2011 and from a price perspective, there's actually a science fiction story that came out on Reddit in 2014 or 13 by someone named Luca underscore Magnata. And it's called, I am from the future and I am here to stop you from what you are doing. And in this science fiction story, he outlines this pricing curve that basically shows for the first five years of Bitcoin's existence. If no other market factors happen, no outside influence, no qualitative influence, the first five years, 10X every year. Second five years, every other year, 10X every other year. And what's crazy is that if we wouldn't have had Mt. Gox and some of these other events, like Bitcoin was only supposed to go to 10K last year, but it's a 20K at double. So if we wouldn't have had those external events, that pattern would have actually unfolded. So what's really easy and simple to remember about Bitcoin is that it has a scarce supply. I think that's the easiest way to put any of this. And so this is just a period of time, the market overextended itself and it shouldn't have gone realistically past 10K, it doubled. So yeah, I mean, that's to be expected, right? To be expected. And it's still unknown in my opinion. I looked at, I did an exercise about six months ago with my friend. We looked at the NASDAQ during the pre-bubble days and we looked at the expansion of the NASDAQ. And that's just a small scale relative to global crypto. It's actually in line with some of the expansion we've seen in other financial markets. So I kind of think it's good to have a little curation going on culling out some of the dead wood, bringing in the better projects. This is kind of the reality now. I mean, RIP good times. Well, you know, Bradley Rodder yesterday at the Cloud and Blockchain Conference posited that he wasn't talking about Bitcoin, he was talking about Ether. He said there's just too many damn coins and every ICO is, most ICOs anyway, tied to Ethereum. Yeah. Buy it? Well, I mean, and you can take this one too, but yeah, I mean, what I see is there has to be a decoupling at some point, right? There has to be some sort of decoupling. At the moment, everything is very correlated. And yeah, I think as time goes on, you will see it's like survival of the fittest, right? So you've got a lot of blockchains and you've got a lot of tokens on Ethereum that want to come off Ethereum. It's survival of the fittest. I feel like, yeah, the best ones will prevail and the ones that aren't trusted or aren't secure. So you talked about who's in it to win it. What do you look for in the contenders versus the pretenders? What are the attributes that you as kind of deep experts in this field look toward the winners? Well, ICOs right now are kind of like a candy that you love coming out with a new flavor. It's like everyone's like, oh yeah, like remember this candy, gotta buy it now, but at the end of the day, it's pretty much the same candy. It's just like a little different sweetener. And so we will experience obviously a market correction, oh yeah, for sure. But I think what's really beautiful about this is it's actually enabling creative potential. Jobs of the future are not going to be, oh, I know how to do C++. Now I have a job forever. It's going to be about reinvention and that is the real economy of the future. And blockchains a huge enabler for that. And new markets are opening up, too. So it's not just the reinvention, which I agree. Reimagining the reinvention, and new markets, Artej was on earlier saying on his 80 day tour of 10 countries, new markets are exploding. That's just a new market, it's re-changing. So it's not your grandfather's venture capital model, it's over the valley, or New York or London. It's completely global. There are many, many reasons to tokenize the world. And the thing that stands out to me is when you look at tokenizing securities, the fact that this opens up the free market to everyone. These things can be traded 24 seven, 365 from anywhere in the world. Traditionally, if you want to buy stocks, Wall Street's open for less time than it's closed.  And to me, that's probably sure. And to me, that's probably sure.  Some of you use a golf analogy, I have to, because I love golf.  Excellent golfer, not a pro, but he could be if he played for it. What's your handicap? I don't keep score. No, he's really good, I play with him many times. And he never plays. He plays like, well, once or twice a year. How many times a year? Consistently, he shoots good score. I'm an awesome player, it's a little bit of hockey in me, but obviously with Happy Gilmore, we're gonna get it going on. Okay, let's use golf metaphor. Okay, so the world that we know that's the centralized, governed, world banks, big corporations that are being decentralized, consider them like the wooden shafts and the old clubs. Now, all of a sudden, graphite shafts, new club heads, new technology. The game doesn't really change fundamentally, but it changes the performance. Do you buy that? Is that a good analogy? Totally, it's a perfect analogy, you know, when you go to the golf clubs and you've got the older members and they don't buy it, they say that the performance doesn't increase with the new technology, but really, we know that it's done. It'll stodge members. And it comes down to that people are naturally averse to change. People don't really like change. Something that they don't quite understand, they naturally dismiss. If they don't want to delve in, they'll dismiss it. And everyone here today is going down this rabbit hole, but there's a hell of a lot of people out there that, you know, I don't really get it, I don't want to get it, but so, and they'll dismiss it. And they'll even talk it down if it threatens them. Let's hope that the game changes though. I mean, come on, like if you look at the current distribution over time, we've moved from tribalized to, you know, kings and queens to nation states. Let's hope that we actually enable a redistribution of wealth. I want to see Blockchain create the Garden of Eden. Not say, okay, well this is, because what we're experiencing now is basically same incentives, slightly less bad people. And I feel that if we really use new technology as an opportunity for change, change is going to happen. And if we make the integration of new technology about experiencing compassion in action as a humanity, when we change human perception, human behavior, your understanding of your own limitations, when we enable real freedom, not just the illusion of freedom as money. Well Gabriel on the bed was on yesterday, which he's with Ben, he's done an amazing work. What he's doing to transform the Caribbean islands with exchange, changing a society. They're digitally connected, almost 100% penetration of mobile. Yet, they can access some basic services of society. This is now a new game changer. And you're taking an integrative approach to how you interact with people, and it's part of your persona. Maybe I'm pushing the golf analogy too much here, but- No, bring it, bring it. Okay, so I'm watching the end of the PGA this week, and they're interviewing Tiger Woods, he's back and he comes to check it. And they're interviewing him and he wants to be on the Ryder Cup team. Now if you've observed him on the Ryder Cup, not great, this is a team sport, right? The Euros always kill the Americans when the superstar is on, right? And it's sort of the same thing that you're saying, it's the, they get the haves and the have-nots, it's a team sport, and it's community driven. Yeah, yeah.  Which is great for the sport. Yeah, and I think- And bad for the Americans because they always lose when he plays. Yeah, I know, I know. I think it would be, you know, why not put him in the team? Because it's good for the game, it's good for viewings, it gets people more engaged. Tiger's been humble too. He knows, he's been humble. He's the world bank.  That's what I'm saying. You're biased, James. Yeah.  Yeah. All right, so guys, let's take it back, let's do reality. You guys are working together on a project we were talking, you guys, what are you guys working on? Talk about the projects you guys are involved in. Definitely. My core focus right now, what James and I do together is we take these skills we've learned integrally through my life as a performing artist and in his previous life, and also career life as a professional athlete, and we really take what we've learned through these dynamic industries and use our knowledge and our network to help entrepreneurs who are driven with integrity and a pure heart to be a success. And so it's really what we do together is we just really help people. And that's what we do both for fun and for enjoyment. And what I'm working on personally, James is the head of strategy at a company called Sentinel. And I'll let him get into that. What I'm working on personally is global citizenship, and my company culture is actually focused on something really integral to blockchain, which is capitalizing the market share on the tradition, the transition out of nation states and into community-oriented governance models. So we have one layer that's open source, for free, for the world, forever, to own your agreements and to own your identity as a self-sovereign individual stewarded by your community to give everyone more context on each other. And then our for-profit business is basically Facebook connects people to their friends. Culture connects people to communities and connects communities to dapps that are services and economies basically. And we build that whole ecosystem. So that's really what I'm up to at culture. And then James and I have our own venture together. And James is also head of strategy at Sentinel. Yep. What do you work with that? So Sentinel is an interoperable network layer for distributed resources. So let me break that down. What blockchain technology allows is for you to monetize excess resources, like excess bandwidth, excess GPU or CPU power. And so our first working product is a decentralized VPN. So you know what a VPN is? Yep, sure. Okay? So the Sentinel DVPM is distributed. So what that allows you to do, for example, is you could monetize your excess bandwidth by hosting a node that people can connect to. And the beauty of the decentralized VPN is that it's provable. So all the code is open source and there's proof that the data is actually being kept private, it's encrypted. And there's no centralized body or company that can be shut down or forced to give up data or paid for data. It's distributed, so it's fair and it's secure. So, yeah, there's a lot of big companies in the crypto space that are very concerned with data privacy and they may not trust central VPN, traditional centralized VPN. And you get paid, so if you host your own node, you get paid, it's a marketplace. So anyone in the world can set up their own node, run their own node, help other people obscure their traffic if they don't want, like, for example, GDPR. If you don't want every website that you visit to monitor literally everything you do, you might want to consider using a VPN for the sake of preserving your own personal privacy and the integrity of your data, which you own, and rightfully should actually own the monetization value of. So anyone in the world, you can have a cube node and you guys can pay, people could pay $5, your whole network can use it. So I can sell my XX compute capacity network bandwidth. Exactly. The storage too, we're not touching that. Storage, I mean, it's essentially down the line. So it's a marketplace for distributed resources, that's sent to now. The first working product is the DVPN, and down the line, yeah, we're going to come up with much more. So others could actually plug into that platform. Yeah, so you want to do a live stream in China, I can pop on a VPN. There it is, run Google apps on China through VPN because you can't run Google on. Yes, we know. As we know, we can stream in China, let's just use Google. Cool. All right guys, well thanks so much for coming on, appreciate Tom and Jerry, great to see you. Yes! Very inspirational. I think there's a lot of missions ribbon, cultural change coming very fast. This next generation coming up is going to be the stewards of making the change happen. It's our job to set the table and get these services out there, congratulations. Okay, cube coverage here live in Toronto at the untraceable Blockchain Futures Conference two days. It's the cube wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, stay with us. Day one's continuing. The best guests, the most important people, bringing the great Blockchain crypto world together here in Toronto. We'll be right back.


I'm Mary Gregory and I'm at statistician at the Department of Energy and Climate Change. The UK data service provide a really good platform for us to give them data and then others can get access to that data. So they combine lots of different data sets all in one place. One of the data sets we have is for every property in the country, their electricity meter readings and their gas meter readings. We combine that with lots of other data sets so that we can look at things about the households and how things are changing. And there's masses more that can be done with the data. I mean we've scratched the surface to date but one of the things about getting it on the UK data service is that many more people can get access to it and provide new insights. Things we would like to do but haven't and things we've not even thought about yet.