like twenty something percent and they have already lodged a lawsuit because they're claiming that the they overhyped the i.p.o. you know even before the dot com experience i had in los angeles in the mid one nine hundred ninety s. i was a stock broker on wall street during the one nine hundred eighty s. when we had many i.p.o.'s and i.p.o.'s the ones that they're priced are priced in a way to get them out the door you've got to get them sold you got to get them out of the marketplace so there's a lot of hype but you know when i started on the last three when you had a prospectus for an i.p.o. you could not even have color photographs that was considered to be a deuce meant to just sell these days like in the case of facebook they made a major motion picture. about facebook during the i.p.o. phase right so it's become entertainment and so people who don't like the i.p.o. for lift are like people who don't like game of thrones you know they expected a certain amount of entertainment they weren't delivered that entertainment it's about entertainment first and economics second well yeah because this is it is now

more like a genuine casino when you go to las vegas you hear a lot of beings and pops and noises and you know all sorts of people serving you drinks in very skimpy outfits and give you very low cost or free drinks and when nobody walks away they're saying man i lost ten thousand dollars on the slot machines this sucks now they're like well that was so much fun but this is exactly what the markets are like these days generally speaking i.p.o.'s are not really suitable for the average investor there are plenty of things to put your money in various markets that are suitable but in i.p.o.'s are a black box you don't know what the arms are going to be that bad report is first time as a public company so it's not really a hedge funds play in the i.p.o. space they do well or don't do well but that's their heads if you're not hedged to them run the risk of being racked of course we did cover. report before they went

public and the c.e.o. of lift was saying that will probably never have a profit we might never earn a profit so it was already there they were telling you we've been losing money billions and billions of dollars and we're probably never going to make any money but people still it's like hey let's go for it but you know over the easter weekend the i.m.f. tweeted out a link to their study from february that also we covered on kaiser report but until they tweeted it nobody seemed to have ever paid attention to it but they tweeted that their their ideas for extreme negative rates how to basically take some money from the ordinary consumer the ordinary citizen who is refusing to spend that they're trying to save up their thousand bucks that they plan to retire on so everybody went crazy about this and it was back in the news and of course it could have helped when big coin then soared after that but here was a story from germany that i thought was really interesting good morning from

germany where germans hoard more gold than the buddhist bank has in its vaults germans own eight thousand nine hundred eighteen tons of gold about six point five percent of the world gold reserves a third is kept at home in the past two years alone two hundred fifty tons have been added just the ordinary citizens of germany have bought two hundred fifty tons in the past two years alone to scaling back this i.m.f. story another getting more open about their friend pushing negative interest rates and some a look the globe has two hundred twenty two hundred thirty trillion in debt and that has been the go to operand day for banks to bail themselves out is to get these central banks to the world to keep these banks from having to declare their insolvent like deutsche bank being a prime example but even this. lovell they've run out of runway they can't really

float another hundred hundred fifty trillion dollars worth of debt to keep these banks solvent so they're just going to take people's money take it out of their account doesn't negative interest rates that's what it is they just say hey you know guess what we just took money out of your account because the bank made to pretend like us thought insolvent but i stay and they're going to continue to go deeper and deeper into the black hole of debt you know it without any and really there's not there's no checks and balances doesn't stop that missile economics policy there's no law there's nothing to stop them there is a similar headline in the news as well this past week i don't have a right here but it was on bloomberg and it said economists are just figuring out that low interest rates help the economy or at least the stock markets but actually seems to cause inequality when again you and i have been covering the fact of the can till in effect and richard cantillon by the way was born in the sixteen eighties so everybody's known for

a couple hundred years now that it's free money to solve with zero percent interest rate. causes inequality because by the time it falls down to those who are being now going to be subjected to negative rates they're paying they're not only having negative rates on their savings on their meager savings but they're also having twenty percent interest rates on their credit that they're borrowing from the same banks being gifted as their zero percent that's naturally going to cause a wealth and income wealth definitely a wealth gap imagine that you run a blood bank and in one room are dead patients they've been dead since two thousand and eight that would be j.p. morgan goldman sachs deutsche bank be in a society generali just be say except are up and in the other room you have living middle class people and the point of blood bank is to take blood from the living middle class people into transfused blood to the dead banks next door that they've been dead now for more than ten years well eventually the people that are in the

middle class are going to start to suffer and suffer horribly and many of them will die and by the way they won't be getting any of the blood from the other middle class people to keep them alive all the blood all the plasma goes to the dead banks to make them look like they're animated in some way even though technically they are insolvent they are dead they stink to high heaven and they are in fact the dollars well actually that segues well into my next headline here because here you have you know the germans are very smart about financial shenanigans a monetary shenanigans that go horribly wrong they've have a bad history with that and they know not to believe in central banks but in terms of health and credit and that of course the us by the nature of having the reserve currency our our our citizens here we are the consumers of last resort and we have the huge amount of debt to keep the world afloat america has borrowed eighty eight

billion dollars in the past year to pay for. health care it's no secret that medicare is expensive but the fact that so many americans are forced to finance it is problematic roughly one in eight americans needed to borrow money in some shape or form to cover a medical bill in the past twelve months on nearly twenty five percent of u.s. adults had to cut back on spending to pay for health care meanwhile sixty five million american adults avoided treatment for medical issues due to cost involved of course you won't see this in germany you won't see that in france or the united kingdom or anywhere in europe or singapore hong kong or anywhere most of the world do not have to borrow and go into debt to pay for health care imagine you ran a blood bank that placed the word blood with credit because that is the blood of an economy and you have a bunch of dead banks in the one room and the credit. sellers are

putting all of that into the dead banks the plaza that is needed to keep people healthy are there having to borrow ever increasing interest rates and in fact killing themselves to make the dead banks seem like they're animated this is a suicide culture to keep dead banks looking like they're not dead it's not even like they're committing suicide to keep somebody alive to feel like they have some existential connection to some power or the cosmic universe these banks are dead and people are blowing themselves up they're chilling themselves to keep dead banks for being animated and look like they're not dead that's the us health care system is a pox on civilization absolutely we're going to cover that in our summer solutions we're going to go over some solutions about this because there's been interesting studies just recently and if you go to my twitter stream stacey herbert you'll see i've been talking about it because a lot of it has to do with the monopolization we you know we say we have capitalism

here but monopolies run almost everything or all of gaap liaison our telecoms. system there on the health care system but especially hospitals most places in the us actually only have one hospital group in the whole area so obviously you're going to most expensive treatment isn't a hospital i emerge and see care cancer care you know all that sort of stuff is done in a hospital and if it's just one group setting the price but and it's not just lower earners who find health care financially burdensome overall forty five percent of americans are worried that a major health issue could drive them into bankruptcy seeing how medical debt is the number one source still post obamacare of personal bankruptcy filings in the country that's not shocking what is surprising however is that thirty three percent of households earning at least one hundred eighty thousand dollars fear that a medical event can up and their finances completely and they can because it does

if you have those drive by doctors in the emergency rooms in the hospital you know the banking sector which is the insurance sector they conspired to send somebody in . outside of your net or to inflate your bill to like forty thousand dollars so nobody is especially if you're only on a one hundred eighty thousand dollars if you're one on one hundred eighty million dollars you don't mind but one hundred eighty thousand dollars us still thirty percent of your income on a drive by dr so the banks are owned by the monopolists that are connected to the banks so let's say you need an appendectomy and you're about to die so you go to the hospital and they say doctor doctor i need an appendectomy i'm about to die they say give you fifty thousand to fill out j.p. morgan like now it will operate do you think is right now all right and you're like well i mean to have my products taken out i guess i have to give j.p. morgan or goldman or wall street fifty thousand dollars some studies to make them at the bank look like they're not dead ok then you give the fifty thousand dollars then they you know will go in there they'll remove your appendix and do

a sloppy job more than often than not i know mad happened to me as our bill scar the guy used a separated bread knife. it's like all. right i mean what a joke it was a sort of baking bread down in the corner and not trying to perform appendectomies anyway so to wrap this story up and tie it to the on going for stories is you know you have people subjected to this health care system where you might suddenly even though you're paying thirty thousand dollars a year in premiums you might suddenly get hit by a drive by doctor who load you up with a seventy thousand dollars bill so you're going into the casino and hoping to win big time on a lift i.p.o. where the numbers don't add up but hey you know you're going to roll the dice and hope to make them become a you know rich enough to afford your medical care in the meantime the germans know best they're buying gold of course the germans are buying gold to keep themself

whole. anyway we'll take a break when we come back much more coming away don't go away stay right there. after the previous stage of my career was over everyone wondered what i was going to do next the multiple different clubs on one hand it is the logical place to go from fields where everything is familiar on the other i wanted a new challenge and a fresh perspective and i'm used to surprising. or not if you think. i'm going to talk about football not the or else you think i was going to go. by the way what is it that sliding here. facebook and google started with

a great idea and great ideals unfortunately it was also a very dark so. they are constructing a profile of you and that profile is real it's detailed and it never goes away turns out that google is manipulating your opinions from the very first character that you type into the search bar it will always favor one dog food over another one comparative shopping service over another and one candidate over another they can suppress certain types of results diced on what they think you should be see if they have this kind of power then democracy is an illusion the free and fair election doesn't exist the more growth we give them the sooner we are all paying. for. the trumping ministration is on an offensive around the globe as

a candidate trump. called out neo cons for supporting american military adventures now many of them work for the president and this administration the very idea of diplomacy is absent it relies upon threats and saying. welcome back to the kaiser report i'm nice guys are timed out to go to surrogate kotler he is the c.e.o. and founder of bit refill which is a crypto bit going company i should full disclosure tell you that we are making an investment in this company as it hits the market on banks of the future and we'll be talking a little bit about that but first circuit welcome thank you and i met you at such a she roundtable all in february and we got started to talking about that refill and it's an interesting story because you know we've been through what many call

the crypto winter and during that period of time a lot of companies have a lot of challenges some of them haven't made it through trip i want to bit re fell has been busy busy busy and growing and expanding and and doing really great things so tell us a little bit about that refill what we're trying to do you know the the vision of big corn was was never that it was going to be corn is there sent between exchanges that in itself is cool but we're trying to this is not what we nobody here showed up for that i think we all showed up for a vision of internet money where billions of people are transacting it's you know paying it show they're getting paid buying stuff and so on and so a bitter if of those is that we enable people to rely on bitcoin as money by making sure that they're able to buy whatever they want with their coins yeah this is interesting because you know as you point out back in the two thousand and eleven twelve and thirteen it was big coin was going to be the pay pal of benaud

crypto and it was about being able to use it to buy stuff and then at around twenty sixteen this idea well you know actually it's best use cases as a store of value it's digital gold and you had a lot of dissension in the ranks in the big going community in the crypto community had. for acts of big quiet and people claiming that this is what is for us actually for spending and buying a cup of coffee etc but what you guys have done is you've kind of like brought it all the way back and said you know what the problem is not really that merchants are not accepting it this point so much it's that we need to make it easier for users to spend their big call and it kind of looked at the problem in a new way and in so doing i think i've solved for the most part this whole bitcoin used as payments problem so if i'm not mistaken. it's kind of like you're in the gift card business if you will are valid your business i think one of

your biggest customers as hotels dot com and so i can actually go to your site and i could. buy big coin for a voucher on hotels dot com and i go to hotels dot com i can spell i can spend big one right but that's pretty much to the bread and butter of the business that is the bread and butter yeah and you've got one thousand mark since now who are signed up right and we're expanding quickly correct now where mostly most of our merchants it is in the u.s. and u.k. but there are we have a pretty aggressive plan for for covering the road there with it with gift card support country by country doing during the rest of the year and that referral essentially takes a fee for the transaction in most cases that the gift card of the customer and buys from us even if it's a hundred dollar gift card and it cost a hundred dollars but we actually bought it. and that's also what about hodler is for a second a car saddlers and this is the idea that well because people are skinflints they're

not spending their money they want to hold on to it because the price is going higher i believe if i've read your tweets and your blogs and your comments correctly well you've noticed is that no matter what the price is there is a subset of people who want to spend their frickin bet on right and ok the price could go to ten thousand one hundred thousand a million it just means that that ratio of people within that subset are going to be spenders a big going to need notice that throughout this bear market there are still people looking to spend but going correct completely unchanged in fact with growth three or four x. during it during this year asking about hardliners and so on is the wrong perspective and the way we see it is we're looking for people that have course to spam and someone who just bought a thousand dollars worth of bitcoins on as an investment they're not going to you know go and buy stuff with it the first thing they do. but so people with going to spend are people look the simplest example of someone who's getting paid a bit could write their whole salary is

a big question guess what they're going to be spending but couldn't because that's how life is you buy stuff with it right though this is a simplistic example and there's other cases in the in the bitcoin economy people that are trading the participate in the front the different programs that affiliate schemes and so on the earnings that way but but also people you know who started all this on there's the one thousand dollars of bitcoins you know three four years ago and i was worth quite a bit you know what they also coin spend now and they are suddenly you know both feeling rich and being rich and we offer them a great experience to buy things with the coins them i think looking at it from that perspective is a lot better than trying to resist the question of holding or not toddling it like let people do what they want of course you know if if if if you think the big going to go up of value and you want to hold it do it make it as fine there are going to be people who want to spend that pick on and the price goes up just means it's

going be more because you spend and so this is about your business or you could call to get card business but not everyone uses as gifts but it just is structured in that way and so you are basically have a relationship with all these merchants and if you want to go spend a big point at those merchants you guys a big client have the way to do it you get a code for that merchant you go to their site to happen to come home and you've just spent your big going now also and you have a technique or your strategy is zero confirmations just on the technical side you know because it is something where some merchants or some folks will want to wait for five or six confirmations before they totally accept the payment you say we've got zero confirmations which is that kind of innovation in the space if you well and speaking of innovations so you get there so it's a deep thinker and a technologist and a whiz kid you have jumped. on the lightning network right away that's captured the imagination of bitcoin world but those of the audience who don't know what

lightning network is what is it and how are you using it and the like thing that's work very simply is a way to make bitcoin transactions no fast and cheap and good sort of with a nice user experience and thickly how it's built up i think it's it's not as interesting it the important part is that it gives people these benefits it's what we thought the big quote was all along but but then learned that maybe it wasn't entirely and lightning is is is that acknowledging there was sort of always envisioned that one day we will have at the knowledge that it uses this this payment channels to to do transit a little bit of start lighting networking now she says if i find going to try to quote her here i hope i do a good job in doing so but she said look big cohen is like the basic protocol the internet and on top of internet where many applications were built right so you have a big point is a basic protocol level technology and on top of that there will be applications and

it's just to do payments you know just delighting that works and that's you know reminds me back in the one nine hundred ninety s. when i was in the technology business everyone sat around all day long asking when is video coming one is that it wasn't necessarily the best technology out there but it was adopted quite quickly educate people videos finally on the internet to dig a little bit deeper into a bit refill is doing you've got now what you call the thor product and really became quite prominent during the lightning network trusts chain or pound l. and t. trust chain as torchbearers confronted liquidity issues so now we're going to we're going to drop down into a bit of a technical level here right but describe your product a thor product in the lightning network and tell us a little bit about that the way the life networks like the network works is that there's channels between people and the channels. i think someone explained it as a be on the accounting book right so you open

a channel to you and usually in the beginning the money will be on my side that means that if i open a chance to you i can send money to you but you can some money to me not right away not until i sent them over to you right and this creates a problem because what if. where then to fight that a big part of creating this circular economy and bitcoin is for people to be able to earn points right to be able to that earnings both for big jobs and small jobs and whatever to get paid in the points and getting paid over lightning is difficult if you don't have a channel and so what the thought public does is that it lets people get a channel opened to them from us where one of the most connected notes on the like network with you know been. always first with all of the new technologies and so on so if you know you it's in a lot of ways it's like internet service provider if you think of. if you think of a nice be it interacts on one end it interacts with the whole internet with

everything is as fast as home and so on but on the other end it connects to someone's apartment downtown right that's similar to what sort of takes the sort of well connected parts of the light the network and it connects it to your place and your place and so on ok so i hear some you know maximalist screaming in the in the far away land saying oh it sounds like centralization vs decentralization. is at an issues and not an issue is a non-issue it's always good to destroy for for more decentralization and so. thor is a non-custodial service so we don't know once the channels been set up we're out of the picture kit where we are a lightning node but we're not the we're not exposed in all the phones we're not them on a service business prove things like that so it's still in a lot of ways it's as decentralized a smoke services and in the space are but obviously we are

a company break you know and the companies by definition isn't closed entity just like every other company in the space right so now what person what how much your business is is this lighting stuff down so. last month we hit the milestone of six percent of our of our purchases happening on the like network ok so many sounds like something like you know netflix was in the cd business first and then they want a streaming so you know your primary business isn't gift cards which sounds remarkably low brow but it's kind of a dumb solution to a very simple problem people spend their frickin decline right you're looking down the path or saying well you know lightning is kind of like are going to be are you know netflix point two or the next level do you think it will be the next thing the come down the pike and why not why lighting an outside change like liquid i think lightning is good enough. lightning is. the most sort of

decentralized solution the we have a scale. from the perspective i think it likely will be enough but it doesn't really matter if even if i'm wrong and it is a change the becomes a big thing the show will support that's how gyal are you as a start up because that's really an important feature and we will go around saying that we're the best in the world except encrypt the currency payments so. some people have challenged that but. in the world that's the thing cryptocurrency pain that sounds like a unicorn waiting to happen. we like to think as an investor well how long before the unicorn thing hits because i want to be able to buy stacey another cup of coffee. and i think about that were gas i could buy but anyway circuit thanks for being on the kaiser report thank you well that's going to do it for this edition of the kaiser part was me my skies are instanced herbert like to thank our guests are gay cutler he's the c.e.o. and founder a bit re felt a bit re felt. yeah we own shares of the company so if you want to catch us on

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my son doing drugs my nephews was still in drugs my sister just with doing drugs it was like an epidemic of drug abuse america's public enemy number one in the united states is drug abuse we started going after the users in the prison population sewer we started treating sick people people who are addicted to these drugs like criminals while i was on the hill i increasingly became convinced that the war on drugs was a mistake there are countless number of people who are in prison for inconceivable sentence in this for minor minor offenders in the drug trade it's a lot watching your children grow up and miss you in waves and say bye daddy as

you're walking out of this is just it doesn't get easier. they had lies this hour russian national media blitz and they sentenced to eighteen months in prison by a us federal court for failing to register as a foreign agent. it's very dangerous because if other countries adopt the same attitude you can get a tit for tat situation with countries grabbing civilians of other countries as leverage or for other reasons a. journalist started to be hold in front of french intelligence officials for questioning over their publication of sensitive information about sciences arms sales to saudi arabia. a project of truly. britain and germany hailed china as a balance and road tracing that fork initiative that.