BTC Sessions - BREAKING: $22.5T Economy Just Signed EVIL Law To Steal Your Wealth — Bitcoin Is Now Your ONLY Hope

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

A $22.5 trillion economy just passed a terrifying new law — and it could quietly strip citizens of their wealth. This move proves why Bitcoin may be your only financial escape route. Join BTC Sessions for the urgent breakdown you need to see before it’s too late.BOOK private one-on-one sessions with BITCOIN MENTOR! Learn self custody, hardware, multisig, lightning, privacy, running a node, and plenty more - all from a team of top notch educators that I've personally vetted.https://bitcoinmentor.io/—------------------------------FOLLOW BTC Sessions on X: x.com/BTCsessions—------------------------------SHOW SPONSORS:BITCOIN WELL BUY BITCOINhttps://qrco.de/bfiDC6COINKITE/COLDCARD (5% discount):https://store.coinkite.com/promo/BTCSessions ABUNDANT MINES:https://qrco.de/bgYKPBAQUA WALLEThttps://qrco.de/bfiD8gNUNCHUK HONEYBADGER INHERITANCEhttps://qrco.de/bfiDARHODLHODL NO KYC P2P EXCHANGEhttps://hodlhodl.com/join/BTCSESSIONDEBIFI LOANShttps://qrco.de/bfiDCp#btc #bitcoin #crypto

We are beginning to see what I think might be the normalization of something very, very scary. And that is the normalization of unrealized capital gains tax, aka you own something that goes up nominally in value. And the government says you now owe part of that thing back to them, even if you don't sell it. I think one of the big takeaways here is in a world with fiat currency, everything you own always has a capital gain because the money can always purchase less, meaning the dollar price tag on your items is always more and your investments is always more, even if your purchasing power hasn't really been affected that much. And so we find ourselves facing a time where the trope that we've heard a number of times,

you will own nothing and you will be happy, is maybe coming to fruition. We're going to talk about a country that seems to be on the warpath to make that a reality sooner rather than later. And we've got our special guest Joe Consorty here to talk about that and plenty more stuff happening across the market. It's today. It was a bit of a wild day. So, strap in, drop a like on the video. I'm Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your weekly session.

All right. Want to welcome to the stage. Of course, my co-host with the most, Nathan Fitzsimmons, BTC mentor. And of course, special guest, Joe Consorty, gentlemen. How are you guys doing? Doing very well, Joe. How are you doing, pal? Doing great.

Thanks for having me on again, guys. These are always my favorite shows to do and talk about all the crazy mania that's happening. Some days crazier than most. And I'm excited to talk about the net. Netherlands today. That's... Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I'm going to bring up a couple things here just to kind of frame this and then I'm going

to get your thoughts. So this tweeted by Bitcoin News, but they tweeted out this video of somebody from Dutch Parliament explaining how this capital gains, this unrealized capital gains thing could work, especially in a nightmare scenario. And so they basically lay out, hey, maybe you have a position in a company and it's a It does really well in a particular year and maybe it doubles. And so you had a 50,000 euro position, it goes up to 100,000 euro. At the end of the year, the paper gain is a $50,000 or 50,000 euro profit.

But if it then continues to drop into the new year, regardless of the fact that it's now down, you're still stuck with the capital gain from the prior year and you're forced to pay taxes on it. And they're looking at an unrealized capital gains tax of 36%, which is just wild. So, I mean, you could end up in a position where just by owning an asset, if the timing is bad, you would have to sell off some of that asset and end up with a net worth lower than where you started just by having owned an asset in a particular calendar year. this kind of stuff is absolute madness. Now, right now, so my understanding is that Parliament approved it, but it does have to go to Senate, but the breakup of the Senate and the people that are in it seem to be very reflective of the same people that just approved it in terms of policy.

But it's not officially into law yet, but they're eyeing 2028 as a potential start for this. So I guess to start, Joe, I'm going to toss it to you. Do you have some thoughts in and around what you're seeing here out of the Netherlands? And is this going to be a trend moving forward? It will be a trend moving forward. And I'll explain why in a moment. And it's a really sad trend. But you're exactly right.

So this passed the House. Now it has to go through the Senate. But the Senate, as you mentioned, has an extremely similar political makeup. So like the brass tax is that 36% unrealized capital. capital gains tax. This is going to cause massive capital flight from the country. And this is something that the Netherlands is trying to do, just like Norway tried before it, Denmark tried before it in order to plug a funding shortfall that they have. When this happened in Norway in 2023, it was instituted the following year, January of 2024, I believe, they saw $5 billion

worth of wealth leave the country. And about 50% of the top 400 taxpayers in Norway left the country than a six-month period. And so after that, they also instituted an exit tax, where you get an additional tax in your assets, even if you don't sell them upon leaving the country. So this is awful. It's failed everywhere that has been tried. The idea is to raise taxes, like it was a projected $500 million, or dollar, excuse me, in dollar terms, speaking in dollar terms, increase in Norway when they tried this. And then they ended up seeing a loss of $100 million worth of annualized tax revenue over there when they did this. Now, obviously, in the United States, it's a pretty small amount of tax revenue. But speaking about a country like Norway,

it's a pretty sizable hole. So the Netherlands, their GDP is about $1.3 trillion. They're the world's 18th largest economy. So certainly in the West, you know, they're a small player, but relative to the rest of the world, it's a pretty large country. If this does pass, and I'm pretty sure that it will, there won't be any changes until next year. And then these changes will take effect. So everywhere this has been tried, it's been failed. Obviously, the natural second order consequence of doing this is that capital leaves the country to find a better home. So it's going to cause capital flight from these countries to nations like the United

States where capital is treated better. But the broader reason they're doing this, and this is the most important thing, is that when you are not a global reserve currency or when your currency isn't widely held by other countries, your sovereign debt market isn't very liquid and popular, you don't have the option of printing money out of thin air in order to plug funding shortfalls. you have to plug funding shortfalls by raising taxes. And when you've run out of ways to do that, the last resort, the last ditch effort that these countries, you don't have a really powerful printing press, as it were, is to raise taxes

on the wealthy. But every time a wealth tax or an unrealized capital gains tax has been instituted over the last couple of years, as it's grown more popular, it's failed and fallen on its face miserably. The country loses a bunch of tax revenue. Capital floods the places that it gets treated by their like Dubai, other places in the Middle East, and if you're looking to stay in the West, the United States. So that's my take in the story. It's an interesting development, but it's not one that's surprising, unfortunately.

Yeah, I want to touch on one thing you said, and that was exit tax that was implemented in Norway, you said. But I was looking it up, and the Dutch, they do have an exit tax, if I'm not mistaken, and I believe it's somewhere between 25 and 30%. So in terms of their goals, they definitely did it in the right order. Because now if somebody wants to leave, it's de facto exit tax on the way out. However, I would say if I was there and I'm looking at unrealized capital gains of 36% in perpetuity forever, or a one-time 25 to 30% exit tax, I'm getting the F out right away and never having to deal with that again.

That is unbelievable. They kind of dropped the ball. If they wanted to do it right, they would make this unrealized capital gains tax slightly lower than the exit tax. 10%, so this capital stays around for a little while longer. But yeah, they did it in terms of order of operations, they did it right. But I think math-wise, they should have made it a little bit lower if they want folks to actually stay in the country for a little while longer. Absolutely.

And I do want to show you, we played this on the show last night, but this is just so out to lunch that I think it's worth showing again. This is in regards to New York and Mayor Maldani and some of the new taxes and things like that in New York City. And one of the New Yorkers talking talking about how New Yorkers, what if the top 1% leave, how do we deal with that? And I just want your honest reaction to seeing this person's talking points here. So I'll bring it up.

It is a sight to behold, my friend. It is absolutely wild. One sec here. Quite the bodybuilder there. Oh, yeah. Look at it. Here we go. X millionaires, they're going to leave the city and the top 1% pay is 40% of the taxes in the city.

So what happens if they leave? What's your response? Well, that's what I would say. It's like we should take their business and we run it like for our, like the city ourselves. So if they take their business to Florida, you feel like you can make it keep it here? I mean, they can't leave the building. They can't like just bring their whole entire workforce to Florida, right? They can't bring all of like the resources that they have to like build the business here to Florida. Right? That's a whole thing. And that's where you would even say, like, we're building a real movement, right, to, like, stop that.

We'd also, like, make it illegal for them to, like, actually, like, leave, right? We would find, like, find them to hell if they're going to try to, like, abandon their property here, right? Because clearly people do need to work, right? People do need to, like, you know, make a living. So what do you? So, Joe, how confident are you with this state of people in places like New York City? Goodness. Well, the first thing that came to my mind was Donald Trump,

when he said they're not sending their best. And so I was like, man, oh man, right? The socialists are not sending their best. Because this idea that a business is a building and you can't leave the place that you're operating the business from because your building is there, that's totally insane. We've already seen businesses leave New York. Look, California too.

We're seeing this. Mark Zuckerberg just bought a massive mansion in Key West. They're looking to move over there. Peter Thiel's company has already founded an office over there. The groundwork is already being laid for these companies. that make up massive portions of their state or their city's respective tax revenue to leave and go to Florida. And so it's just completely wild that somebody thinks that they can seize their business and continue operating it. Imagine like a financial services firm exiting New York City

and then a bunch of socialists, the most financially inept people on Earth, walk into the building and try to decipher what type of business it is. They would begin in a very short amount of time after they cleared out all of the food and the vending machines. Golding would be laid to waste and there would be nothing to do with it. So it's a completely insane thing. And it's no surprise to me that we're seeing this sort of movement is what happens when money dies. Like on one side of the spectrum, you have people becoming even more optimistic and driving toward hard assets like Bitcoin.

On the other side, you have people who are stammering and clamoring for handouts and free money. So really it's no surprise that that clip came out of New York. But yeah, typical socialism, typical socialist economic illiteracy. see is what I'm seeing there. Wild. Nathan, do you have any other quick questions in around this before we do a little pivot? No, but it basically covers most of it. Like if they were intelligent and understood economics, it wouldn't be communist to begin

with. So, of course, you're going to roll out these sort of plays. The only thing that I could basically throw in there is just the idea that you're right, with the examples that we've seen before with Norway. We know, like, it's obvious what's going to happen here. You have smart people who have generated wealth are going to find ways to get their wealth the hell out of there. So first and foremost, there's the part of me, and I saw Simon Dixon talks about this

a little bit as well, too, that it feels like it just, can't be an accident. Like, you know this isn't going to go well. We have every example, this isn't going to go well. And so if I wanted to take a shot at the Netherlands or for some reason have capital move elsewhere, I would lobby to get this sort of this sort of shit passed. And the other thing that immediately jumped out of me is like, man, if I was stuck in the Netherlands, I'd be liquidating everything I have and probably using it to buy a whole bunch of A-6s and paper, a whole bunch of energy so I could leave with nothing. I swear I'm leaving with nothing. Absolutely. Okay, Joe, I wanted to

I'm going to do a quick little pivot here. It was an interesting day. That's a fun one. A trillion dollars wiped out from the U.S. stock market today. So I'm not going to preamble this too much. I'm just curious, what the hell is going on? What was going on today? So this is the software Armageddon.

If I look at the first couple of headlines on my Bloomberg terminal, here's one. So the Asian market open just happened. And we already see here, first headline, Asian stocks to drop as AI jitters hit Wall Street. So the reality here, what's happening is that the acceleration in the capability of artificial intelligence to create software off of one or two prompts by somebody who's totally non-technical has accelerated to such a point where software as a service companies, whether it's Salesforce, whether it's even names like Apple that you just saw up on that board, people are starting to feel the rumbles of the fact that now you don't need to subscribe for your whole team and pay $500,000

a year to use this specific software. You can spin one up yourself. And so that's really what caused the market-wide sell-off today. More broadly, it's what's caused the sell-off since October. A lot of folks have pointed to this idea that Bitcoin is selling off in a vacuum. But in reality, it's selling off in tandem with software, which has really been selling off as a result of this AI-Mageddon or this software-Meggadden, whatever you'd like to name it. And I don't think it slows down anytime soon. Really, I think that we're really only at the precipice of what will become something much larger. And that's a market-wide repricing of the valuation of these companies now that you can create software with your words.

You don't need expert engineers. You don't need VC funding. You can spend this thing up with a free GitHub account and a cloud subscription. So that's what caused the sell-off primarily today. And look, like when when sell-offs of this magnitude happen, correlations tend to shoot to one. So that's why you saw gold sell off really bad today. It's why you saw silver sell off as well. You know, ironically, Bitcoin, having already sold off so much, it didn't fare too poorly today.

So I suppose we can be grateful on the Bitcoin side that a lot of the pain has already happened for us. It's not to say we can't dry down further. In fact, I think we do. But a lot of those software jitters are finally making their way to the broader market. So it's a good thing to see. It's a good cleansing, particularly after this, you know, multi-year, basically uninterrupted bull market that we've seen in U.S. equities. There's a few things I want to pull apart that quick, Joe. First and foremost, would you say that maybe there was a bubble and said bubble has popped or are getting anywhere

close to that sort of territory? And then additionally, like, I just immediately thought of Jeff Booth, right? This is the going to the marginal cost of production. If software costs nothing to produce anymore, it's going to basically drive down the cost to zero. For sure. Yeah. So I'd say, you know, the bubble is closing in on being popped. I think you'll start to see the bubble really pop in earnest when you, when you see Invidia make an even longer downturn that it has had. particularly because like you have sort of this you have this sort of like snake eating its own tail this or a boros of AI funding so open AI is investing this amount of Nvidia then Nvidia is taking this money investing it over here then they're taking this amount of money and

investing in an open AI and so you know ultimately when the gravy train stops I think Nvidia stock will go lower AMD stock will go lower and the bubble will proverbially pop but you know then again we can only look at you know the day the bubble popped in hindsight you can't really put your finger on it. So this may be a start of something much bigger, but I'd say the broader move in software started last October. And I think we've got plenty of room to ride down on a lot of these names. And then as far as the Jeff Boothies, it's like you hit the nail on the head, the marginal production of software going to zero means that, you know, all of these equities that are being held up by software prices, by earnings, by the fact that Salesforce is growing year over year,

despite the fact that you could take a couple of days and a couple of people who have no engineering experience and spin up a Slack clone for the company. that costs a fraction of the price. You could put your entire team on it. It may have less of the functionality that you need, but it's workable and you're saving hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars a year. Then that ultimately drives a lot of these equity valuations much lower.

And like gravity, eventually the price will follow what these companies are valued at. So I expect that trend to continue. And eventually a lot of these names that are mainstays in the market right now may eventually be zeros over the next couple of years, depending on whether or not the pace of AI development can continue as it has been. By the way, two things I want to point out.

One is I'm curious, you said Bitcoin could draw down lower. I'm curious what you think about where we're going to where we're headed. I'm kind of playing around with the idea that we're basically going to be range bound between like 60 where we kind of hit there in like 71. They were going to hang out in this range for a little bit while. But if you see something different, I'm really curious what you're seeing. And then additionally, I was also just reminded I had a conversation with Dave Collum today. And he told me about Google basically offering a hundred year bond.

And the idea of having a hundred year bond for a software company, essentially, just seems absolutely ludicrous to me. So I feel like if it's not popping yet, I feel like things are getting to insane positions. Yeah. So Nathan, I just say, I just say with your price targets there, that is an insult to the 58K gang, my friend. It's not going to happen.

They're going to get teased. You would say 60 and not acknowledge 58K gang. So anyways, Joe, you have the floor. No, absolutely. I mean, we saw Austria create a 100-year bond, right? Google putting forward a 100-year bonds, not necessarily a great look. Google stock is down. I don't know by what percent has been selling off for quite some time.

And ultimately, that's sort of what you see when financing means hit a level that the market just can't satisfy. Google can't raise money in any other way, or at least as efficiently as it needs to, for its AI spend in any other way. So it issues a 100-year bond, right? That's not a great vote of confidence on the future of Google. And if Google is sort of the mother of all software, the future of software equity evaluation. So that's what I'll say on that front. And not to mention even quickly, sorry, they're going to put it into AI hardware and infrastructure, which has a shelf life of like, what, five years?

So you're doing a hundred year bond for infrastructure that'll be out of date just a couple of years. Sorry, I just want to throw that in there as well. That's exactly right. Yeah. And so, you know, ultimately, if you cannot predict 10 years out where a company is going to be or 30 years out, you certainly shouldn't be putting your capital on a bond that's going to last 100 years, right? Because the chances of repayment are virtually easier.

Obviously, Google has a monopoly, right? As far as search engines are concerned, hardware, they're also doing quite well. They're really pushing an AI, but certainly at this point in time, Open AI and Anthropic are winning that race. But it remains to be seen. So talking about Bitcoin specifically, one chart that I want to show first and foremost is Bitcoin in the long-term holder realized price. So this is the cost basis of all people who have held Bitcoin for 155 days or more. And you can see here, unfortunately, this level is currently right around 40,000 And we have never had a Bitcoin bare market where Bitcoin does not touch this level. So you can see all the way back here in the 2013-2014 bull run, the bare market that followed.

We went underneath the long-term holder cost basis. Same thing in 2019 and in 2023. And so a lot of people are looking at the 200-week moving average, which is another key level that I ascribe to. Speaking of the 58K gang, that is also at $58,000. We haven't yet touched that. I think we are going to see that at the very least. And then if that level gets broken, my next downside target would be long-term holder realized price purely because Bitcoin has never gone a bear market without at least touching it.

And so in absolute terms, the move from $126,000 to $66,000, it feels insane, but it's only a 50% drawdown, right? Roughly 50% peak to trough when we touch $60,000. We were about 53, 54% off the all-time high. But the last Bitcoin bare market, we were overest. 70% from the all-time high. So this can get much worse, right? And touching the long-term holder realized price would mean a peak to trough drawdown of about 64%. So not the worst in the world, right, but certainly not great. Now, like we're sort of in this phase. If you can imagine going back

to 2022, we had a massive puke lower from $40,000 to $30,000 very quickly. It happened in less than a week. And then everybody thought, okay, this is it. We're fine. We were range bound there for a couple of weeks, I think six or seven weeks. And then we puked lower. We were range bound there for a very long time for about three or four months. And then FTCS happened. And we finally went underneath the long term holder realized price put in the bottom. So I'm not saying that that can happen again. Obviously, there's you can't really predict exogenous factors on price. But if we're just looking at history and just taking these charts at face value, then I would say we're probably going to put the bottom in at or around the long-term holder realized price, which is currently at

$40,000. So, Ben, if you like the Bitcoin obituaries now, I think you're going to like them even more over the next couple of weeks. Yeah, we were just saying before the show, I went on a little bit of a rant, but I was just saying, I am super bullish on the fact that there are so many people parading out in the streets declaring victory over Bitcoin that Bitcoin is dead because the, the people, people that when people get the loudest, it's it's in and around the worst times. And those people are typically the most wrong in a relatively short period of time, a year or two, they're

eating their words. And so, yeah, I'm really, it hadn't felt that way yet. And then all the sudden this past little bit, like this, this dip down to 60 and us kind of skirting around sideways for a little bit here. It has really felt like, I mean, we get people in the chat coming in saying, oh, it's dead, it's a Ponzi, it's Epstein coin, it's whatever it is. And we've had people gloating for some time now. Great. I hope it keeps up because that is absolutely absolutely to me an indication that it won't last forever and we'll be back. No problem. Now, Joe, I wanted to mention something else today. Nathan, you brought this to my attention, was silver today and precious metals along with the rest of the market, took an absolute dump.

I don't know, what was it? Was it like a 10%? 11% drop. 11% drop there on silver, which silver had basically a 50% haircut. From their all-time high down to about 75. Yeah. Again, a couple of what, like two weeks or hit two weeks at this point? So two things here. Number one, you know, I feel for the silver bugs, like they're, you know, they waited quite some time to have their heyday. And they did have a heyday, but like, damn, that's, this is the one year.

And that's the peak to, well, not trough, but who knows. but I did find this very, very simple. I looked at it. I was like, this chart looks very familiar. And to me, it looks almost identical to Bitcoin in 2017. It is, to me, it's basically the same chart. And Bitcoin had a spectacular parabolic run in 2017. It was a wild year.

But it feels like silver just got one of those. But 2018 sucked ass. So for the silver bug, unfortunately, the silver bugs had to wait quite a bit longer to get this. So anyways, Joe, I'll give it to you. But was there any indication what the deal was to cause this at close? what's going on? Yeah, really good question. Ultimately, like what you're seeing is a combination of hedge fund rebalancing.

So like institutional asset managers at the end of the day, rebalancing. Chances are they needed liquidity because of the immense selloff that we saw in software. I'm not seeing any gold-specific headlines or silver-specific headlines, but the one reality is like it's market psychology, it's hedging. You have to sell other positions in order to position your books correctly. and with this huge sell-off across the equity market and in software, particularly, chances are a lot of players needed dollars. I have a couple of really crazy charts that kind of puts this in a perspective. So speaking specifically about market psychology, gold and silver going on the parabolic run that they did over the last 18 months, particularly silver over the last eight, nine months, the crazier, the ascent, the larger the ascent, the bigger the drop, and then the longer the consolidation that you have after that, silver in particular, has had three really noteworthy bubbles throughout the 20th and 21st century. And it seems like we are

now experiencing the popping of the fourth. This chart right here is gold and silver's combined market cap. They lost to $10 trillion in roughly four days. So from the end of January to the beginning of February, this is one of the most insane moves that I've seen. I think if you look back to 2008, this mirrors the size of the equity market drawdown when the great financial crisis this first happened. And so seeing this move in precious metals is something that's totally unprecedented. And you can see relative to what we saw last month, the move in silver is just a small blip on that radar. We move from about $36 trillion, 39 and a half trillion dollars, excuse me, the 38.3. So losing about $1.2 trillion in value there. And then I've got a couple of other things.

So this is the one day change in silver's price. You can see all the way back to 1960. later earlier the, or excuse me, later last month, January 30th, we saw the worst one day decline in silver ever. And you can see the impact of that on this chart here in Silver's history. So the silver bubble has been popped in a very real way. Chances are it's going to deflate back down to Earth. And over the last couple of days, even though we've seen a couple of minor pullbacks, we've had multiple days that are over 10%. So on February 5th, we had 19.5% decline. and now we have an 11%

almost 11% decline today. Gold has been, it's been faring poorly, but not nearly as bad as silver has. You could see in historical context, the sell-off that we saw at the end of January wasn't nearly as bad for gold. It shed 9% on the day, making it only the second worst drawdown

in the 21st century. But either way, both of these markets, both of these assets are losing an immense amount of value. And it's solely a function of the fact that we had what behavior that we always thought was relegated to Bitcoin or small cap equities or meme coins, which is this euphoric blowoff top where, you know, your grandma is calling you and asking how she can go to the bullion dealer and buy physical gold. That's when you know you need to

sell. When you have that type of behavior, what usually follows is what appears to be a bubble popping, and that's expressly what we're viewing in silver and gold, but specifically silver right now. So even though there isn't a clear headline for it, this is just a function of a much broader market-wide sell-off. Gold and silver were due for a huge correction, and that's what we're experiencing now, and I don't think we've seen the end of it. Damn, all right. Nathan, do you have anything else that you wanted to grab from Joe before we wrap here and move into our next segment? The only thing I want to pull apart is whether or not you think this is going to be short term or long term for gold. And so again, like I have no ability to look at charts of these

things. What just stood out to me again, because our natural human bias for just numbers is that it seems like gold is now having a hard time maintaining 5,000. If it's not able to say like break that trend, would you expect both to continue to decline over time? Or what kind of behavior are you watching or looking for from the chart side to kind of get an understanding of where they might be heading? So I very much feel like gold and silver are not behaving the same. They definitely aren't. Yeah, silver is much more bubble bursty. For instance, we topped out on silver at around $121. And now we've gone all the way down to a low of, I think, $63. Currently we're trading at $75. So I would wager that we're probably going to get that back down

into the 50s for silver. For gold, I tend to think that it's going to fare a little bit better. If I take a look at the levels here, you'll note that we spent a very short amount of time in the $4,000 area. We blew almost directly past it. We only spent a couple of months in there in silver terms. basically we entered in the $4,000 range in October, and we broke out of it in January. And for an asset that is $30 trillion in size, that's unprecedented. And so we spent a lot of time in the zone between $3,000 and $3,500. I think there's a decent amount of support there, a decent amount of volume there. So I would say like downside target on gold is within that $4,000 to $5,000 range because we haven't

spent a lot of time there. Similarly, that's why Bitcoin is ranging around. and we're probably going to be range bound for a little while longer before we go lower, because we spent basically no time in the zone in November of 2024 when Trump won and we blasted through 70K, blasted through 60K and 70K. So the same principle that leads me to believe we're going to spend more time here before going lower is what I would apply to gold in that context. But silver is just going to go down much faster.

It's a much smaller asset. It tends to be more bubbly in behavior. So there you go. That's definitely my take. My last question would be, does this blow off top, does this little crash in the market, have anything to do with Pam Bondi's recent comments on the market? Honestly, it's good. She topped the market perfectly.

She said the Dow is 50,000 points today, and then the very next day it's down massively. So well done, Pam Bondi. Generally speaking, you shouldn't counter trade people who are in Washington, D.C., but I suppose tomorrow was the, or yesterday, was the first instance in history where you should, in fact, counter trade folks in Washington, D.C. Is Pam Bondi the, what's his name? Kramer. Is she the Jim Kramer of people in front of the Senate? I suppose so.

We'll probably need more data to validate that. But at the very least, her one instance of saying the market is doing extremely well was instantly faded. So short Pam Bondi, short Jim Kramer, short and long Nancy Pelosi. Always, always. Beautiful advice. Joe, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for coming.

always a pleasure. Absolutely. Thanks, Ben. Thanks, Nathan. All right, cheers. Beautiful, sir. And everybody else, stick around because we have plenty more to discuss. We're going to, we are going to play that clip of Pam Bondi later on in the episode. I think it's worth a look. It is just insane to watch her reaction to very legitimate questions about the Epstein files and just go off the rails. Unbelievable. But on the other side of this, I want to discuss something very, very serious. We've discussed on the show before, but the influx of people being abducted, kidnapped, wrench attacked for their Bitcoin.

There's been a ton of different cases around this. And I just wanted to kind of draw attention to a few of the latest. And then give you guys some practical advice on how to deal, how do you even begin and thinking about stuff like that and making sure you're safe. We got plenty more, tons of new releases, some stuff that I've been working on as well. So we will be back in just a moment. If you're enjoying the conversation, please do drive a like on the video. You're brand new here.

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And so she, the woman went missing from her home in Tucson, Arizona on January 31st. So just under two weeks ago, there's now been a small transaction for a few hundred dollars that went to a wallet address that was referenced in some of the notes demanding funds. There's no confirmation on if this was like a test transaction or whatever. But they are also, there's a letter demanding one Bitcoin, so around, you know, 65, 66,000 bucks or something like that, which. I'm honestly kind of surprised. It's kind of low. I would have assumed with a very visible personality like that, they'd be asking for even more,

but maybe they just wanted to keep it accessible and then ask for more. They've got some footage of a suspect, a massed suspect, appearing to tamper with the front door on some of their nest cameras and everything like that. The director of the FBI, Cash Patel said, working with our partners as of this morning, law enforcement has uncovered these previously inaccessible new images showing an armed individual appearing to have tampered with the camera on Nancy Guthrie's

front door the morning of her disappearance. Yeah. So, I mean, this is just one recent example. Like, this lady's still missing. Well, yeah, Cash Patel's on it. Yeah, yeah, don't worry. He has got it handled unless anybody is implicated that maybe is in a position of power of government, in which case, we'll never solve it.

But besides that, this, France, again, another kidnapping, actually a mother and daughter, they were rescued by a passerby. This again, from two days ago. So 35-year-old magistrate in France checked his phone last week. So a picture of his partner accompanied by a stark warning pay ransom and cryptocurrency, or we will mutilate her. Like, how horrible can you even imagine? So they did end up escaping. But this all links back to a case where a tax authority, somebody working for the French tax authority, leaked over 100 individuals who paid taxes on gains. So by complying with government and paying capital gains, this person working within the government then sold that information being able to formulate how much Bitcoin the people.

had and then gave names and addresses and emails and all their information at like 800 euros a pop to some criminal organizations, which have now resulted in multiple people being attacked, kidnapped, so on and so forth. And these people are just simply by complying with the law are now targets, which then it's a direct incentive to not imply, to not comply. It's really wild. And then even beyond this, Bitcoin News, this was, again, two days ago, juveniles invade a home in Arizona with a toy gun to steal Bitcoin. The teens posed as delivery drivers restrained two adults with duct tape and fled and he stole in plate Subaru before a wrong way chase ended their escape. like this is I've not seen this much this many examples of wrench attacks in such a short period of time in ages and I'm very surprised to see it happening that we would just discuss the drawdown in Bitcoin but I'm very surprised to see that happening as much as we are right now at this point in the market usually it's you know Bitcoin takes a parabolic ride up. and you hear a bit about this kind of stuff, people gloating and running around and, you know, showing off wealth and everything and they become targets, which makes me even more scared

for when the market does turn around. If people are targets right now, can you imagine in the future? I'm aware of another individual as well that was targeted and they weren't particularly public. Luckily, everything worked out in the end, but like, holy hell. So, I mean, Nathan, what are your initial reactions? to seeing some of this stuff. This is the less sophisticated form of the same thing in the first story with that

unrealized capital gains tax. As things get worse, Bitcoiners have been and will continue to be identified as a possible target. It's just it's the downfall in the economy, the Fiat system. It's everything. People are going to get desperate. Commies are going to try and steal your shit one way or another. And it's something to be aware.

You have to take this sort of threat assessment into consideration, where you live, how you live, do you have guns? Do you have nachos? All that fun stuff. It needs to be incorporated into what we're basically doing, which was a shout to the chat. You guys are awesome. The big dogs is always a good way to go.

Big guns is a good way to go. Keeping your information as private as possible, but you need to be aware, particularly if I have growing concern that we're going to enter a secular bear market. I'm not necessarily convinced of it, but I'm even wondering if the Fed's going to respond and if they even can at that point in time. If we do really kind of go off a cliff,

like things already suck. You talk to the average person. They're completely pinched by inflation. They feel like they can't get ahead. I saw a chart that you might have later on, talk about basically hours worked as going up, but we all feel poorer and desperate. And that's exactly it, right?

I mean, when you're in the peak prosperity, if everyone's doing well, then you have less worries with crime. But it's going to be increasingly more of a threat. It's going to be something to be aware of. Get the fuck out of France. Get the fuck out of the cities, right? You have to take this stuff seriously.

You have to start to make these considerations. Make sure also, like the other one I saw the other day, was basically someone claiming to be, I believe, in a medical situation as well, too. very similar. You can think of this even as like a hostage threat situation. It wasn't. It was an AI voice. Someone trying to get them to send money, but that wasn't actually really them. So having things like a passphrase that you share with your family and loved ones on hand and available so you can discern whether or not it's real or not real. And kind of you've got to have that situational awareness.

It's every good reason to get a dog, get a gun. Make sure you stay in shape. You can think you're aware of your surroundings. And for the love of God, don't be in France. There's no reason for you to be in France. UK is no better. Maybe Texas. Try Texas. or Mexico, Costa Rica. I hear these are better. Get out of you. Screw Europe and Denmark and Sweden and all that stuff. Sorry to our friends over there in Helsinki, but no, get out. Yeah, it's scary. I mean, hopefully we're in the Republic of Alberta in due time, and we can easily arm ourselves to the teeth.

And we have a rule of law here. And, yeah, I mean, I'm looking forward to that. but just to add on to some of the practical things you guys can do, I'd recommend go and check out there is a, there's a video I did that this was a few months back, but just general kind of like ways to try and be private and secure as well. So what can you do to make sure that people can't get a good picture of what you own, but also so that if somebody does try to,

coerce you into giving up your Bitcoin, you can do so where it's plausible that you've given them everything, but in reality, you actually have the real stuff hiding elsewhere. In decoy, you maybe have decoy wallets, maybe you have a jurisdictional multi-sig, but you have like, you know, wallets that have enough in them so somebody's happy and they smash and grab. And then you actually keep your life savings. So go check. that out you just search this is the perfect bitcoin security and privacy setup and uh and it should come right up and there's been some other videos that i've done to the tune of that but uh yeah be sure to go and uh take a peek at some of those because there's there's a lot of tools out there that can really

help so the other one i'd add to that too the other really important one is not only just like guns and toyotos and drones and dogs and all this fun stuff as well too is that community right If you don't have an existing relationship with your neighbors, if you're not in a spot where you necessarily can't, get to one where you can, get to know them. Like really in an emergency, the first responders are not going to be the fire or the police. It's kind of your neighbors in your community. So make sure you start to develop those bonds.

Get to know those people, identify the good ones, the bad ones, and have that kind of self-awareness. That's really one of the best things you can do. Yeah, yeah. Now, I'm going to do a little bit of pivot here. We were talking in the last section about, you know, the Bitcoin market and people gloating about it. And there's been some dumb takes lately.

So I just wanted to highlight one that I was having fun with. Also, Walker, Walker America, fantastic, the Bitcoin podcast, great show, friend of the show. Here's one of the fastest growing podcasts. I also hear that. I also hear he's got a potential new project he's going to be visible in next week. So that can be pretty cool, too. So keep your eyes open for that. I think Walker's got something cook in there.

But nonetheless, I wanted to highlight this dipshit. The reason I brought up Walker is because he created a bookmark list called retards. So I had to tag him and said, quick, Walker, I found another one for your bookmark collection. Anyways, this guy, at some point, our society will fully wake up to how dumb it was to burn electricity for Bitcoin. You are burning a productive asset to get some casino chips. That last sentence, very, very telling of this guy's level of education, number one, casino chips, I mean, that's what dollars are, right? It's just, it's worthless, and it will always go down in value.

And, yeah, pretty wild. But burning a productive asset, so he's assuming that all electricity going to Bitcoin mining has another use case when in, reality, especially right now with the price down, yeah, if you use grid power in a city, you're not profitable. So what are, how are people mining Bitcoin? I don't understand. It's because there is waste energy all of the fucking time.

If you want to have, if you don't want to have brownouts and blackouts in a city, you need to operate at 100% capacity all the time. The other energy, the excess energy that you have when you're not using 100%, gets wasted. We don't have the battery technology to store all that shit and use it later. So it's just wasted unless you can find a use for it. And in this case, you can find a use for it with somebody or something that always has demand whenever you need it and you can get paid for wasted energy. And that is what Bitcoin does. It does the same thing for stranded energy in the middle of nowhere. You have an oil and gas well. You've got natural gas. You've got methane.

whatever and you can't get it efficiently to market, what do you normally have to do? Flare it or worse, vented into the atmosphere, which is not good. Or you can capture it. You can utilize it. You can convert it into CO2, which is 80 times less bad than methane. And in the process, get paid to do so by mining Bitcoin. So this guy's a dipshit. And there you go.

And again, also apparently unaware of the difficulty. adjustment. Bitcoin did just have the biggest difficulty adjustment since China's mining ban. We had a difficulty drop of 11%. What that means is if Bitcoin, basically, when you have everybody mining Bitcoin, it's kind of like a lottery in a way. And the Bitcoin network makes it so that on average, somebody can get. guess the correct, we'll just say the correct number, in a period of around 10 minutes. And it can kind of eyeball that based on how much computing power is currently mining. However, it begins to take longer than 10 minutes for a Bitcoin block to come through or the inverse shorter than the network automatically adjust.

So what has happened is Bitcoin is not as profitable to mine. Miners leave or turn off. so then Bitcoin blocks begin to come in slower. And what happens after roughly two weeks is the Bitcoin network goes, oh, geez, blocks are taking 11% longer than they should. We're going to drop the difficulty of mining Bitcoin by 11%. And so now it is cheaper to mine Bitcoin than it was just a few short days ago. So that is how the network functions.

The more you know, da-da-da-da. I did want to chat a little bit about the market, though, Nathan. Let's do it. Are you a Mayor Multiple disciple? Are you a person that describes to this? I'm more of a Peter Schiff trader. I wait for him to really take a victory lap. And then I take the $5 I hadn't already put in Bitcoin and DCA it in.

Yeah, yeah, that's fair. That's fair. Mayor Multiple is a long time indicator that people have been using. it is now dropped to May 22 lows. And that's pretty interesting. So, yeah, again, the multiple can, the lows can persist. 2022 did see further downside after similar readings. But again, the 200, we just talked to Joe about the potential downsides.

He cited 58K. He also cited the long-term holder average around 40. So it's not that it can't get worse, but we are looking at, you know, we're in the realm of in the coming months. It's going to be probably the worst of the worst. I also did want to point out the fear and greed index. Oh, my God. This is, if you look back, so it's at five right now. Again, if we're at 100, it's everybody's greedy, everybody's celebrating.

if you're at five, everybody is panicking, which would make sense because I see, I think I see a dipshit in the chat right now saying that Bitcoin is dead and all that. So anyways, I mean, these are good indications to me. But nonetheless, yeah, it's at five right now. I went back and I was trying to find when it was in and around. It was at six in, yeah, in around June of 2022. So it's been some time since it was here. Now, the price did dip from there.

So, like, this was coming down from the all-time high from the 2021 high of, like, 69K. And we were at around just under 19K when this hit. And this was, you know, post-FTX blow up or in and around FTX, all that kind of crap came later in the year. But, you know, later in the year when FTCS did come, the Fear and Greed Index wasn't down this low even, which is pretty wild. Like, there was less fear and greed then than earlier in the year. I guess maybe because there was just no reason for it to be that low. But anyways, just to give an indication of where we are, fear and greed, super low, worse than 2022. How do you feel about that, Nathan?

Oh, it's beautiful. It's wonderful. See, I disagree, Joe. I don't think we're going to go test those lower bounds. I don't think we're really in a bare market like the previous cycles. I don't think, I know it's falling the same rough pattern. I don't look at peaked in October and then we're coming down, but I never saw euphoria. I never saw things get crazy. It wasn't a blow off top. And my trading scheme, feel free to use it.

You can bar it if you like is whatever the most interesting thing is that will happen. That's what will happen. And so for me, you know, taken from Sky Adams on that one, I think the most interesting things we hang out here for a bit and we are going to test those lows that we're just at one more time at 59k we're going to get really close 59-0-1 even made right i love steli oh yeah we are not even going to touch 58k and then we're going to start grinding back upwards and no one's going to believe it no one's going to believe it that we're going to start raising up there'll be waiting for the floor to drop out something else is coming it's dead it's over everyone's out and we just start

stair stepping our way up slowly but surely over the rest of the year i think the bottom is in famous last words. I'm sure I'll regret that in just a week the way these markets fucking move these days. Amazing. Amazing. I have a handful of other things here, but I want to bring them in

on the other side of the jump. But one thing I will play before we go to break. We said we're going to play that Pam Bondi clip. We've got to set it up as well too. I just want, guys, for context, this is a probe about Epstein.

And this is her response. This is like, you know, this is like my wife coming to me like, I think you cheated on me. I found out that you cheated on me. Like, look, babe, look, the meat in the refrigerator is not expired. It is the best meat that we've ever had, like, just look, what the fuck are you talking about? Complete, like, left hook. I think she's trying to like. I picked up so much groceries today.

You have no idea. I don't understand. I made eggs. Don't you like eggs? This is. Let's just lay this issue to rest because clearly you like eggs. Amazing. Amazing.

Okay. Let's watch. effectively what we just said in front of Congress. The Dow is over $50,000. I don't know why you're laughing. You're a great stock trader, as I hear Raskin. The Dow is over $50,000 right now. The S&P at almost $7,000.

And the NASDAQ smashing records, Americans 401Ks and retirement savings are booming. That's what we should be talking about. We should be talking about making Americans safe. We should be talking about what does a Dow have to do with anything? That's what they just asked. Are you kidding? Mr. Jordan.

Mr. Jordan. Committee will be in order. Mr. Jordan, am I going to get an extra 45 seconds added to my time? The committee will be in order. The time belongs to the gentleman from Texas. Ms. Bondi, the Attorney General can respond. Thank you. The Dow has shattered 50,000.

for the first time. This is crazy. They said it couldn't be done in four years, yet President Trump has done it in one year. It is crazy. It is crazy. Yeah, because one, I believe the question was asking about satanic child sacrifice, so I feel like we went a little bit off script.

But the more like, the more interesting thing is you can take it like kind of two ways. One is that we're going to be like, hey, look over here, you've got money, don't worry about it bread and circuses. That's one way to look at it. The other fun way of looking at this is like, are you using, saying that if we dive into the Epstein files the market's going to crash? Are those two fucking things related?

Is this whole thing propped up by your weird cult? It is I don't I don't even Are we in a simulation right now? This is wild to watch. I can't

I know because simulation would require that somebody imagined this scenario and then created it and this is way too far-fished for anyone to imagine We're literally going through, and I had a wonderful conversation today about it. Like the wildest conspiracy theories, like Alex Jones was so goddamn right. And it's so just like you're looking back on and going like, this is crazy. This is absolutely crazy.

Pizza game, totally real. Child sacrifice, totally real. Pedophile satanic network, totally real. Jeffrey Epstein, it seems like he wasn't necessarily blackmailing everybody, which is wild to think about because they were all really happy to talk to him. It wasn't a blackmail network. I had to Dave Collin point this out to me today. It wasn't a blackmail network.

It was a power broker in dealing. network. He wasn't giving them children and these things so that he could hold it against them later because then nobody would want to party with this guy. You guys saw the emails. Everybody wanted to party with him. No, he was feeding them exactly what they wanted so they would do what he wanted. That's the weird, sick, twisted, extra gross part about it. It wasn't blackmail. It was basically like, what's your vice? I'll get it for you, Blondeer Burnett. Wild. Wild. All right. On the other side of the break, I've got a whole bunch of awesome updates of things that have just kind of come out this week.

If you are using your Bitcoin day to day, if you're looking for wallets, if you're looking for things to try, a bunch of awesome stuff. Awesome. On top of that, we have the opposite of awesome with the Canada sucks section.

And holy hell, plenty of, I'll tell you, right before the show, I said to Nathan, like, oh, yeah, you got anything for Canada sucks this week? I'm a little shy here.

I didn't have anything ready. He's like, hold on. In like a minute, we had five tabs ready. So here we go. But we will be back in just a minute. If you enjoy the conversation, make sure you slap that like button. Chat.

Thank you guys so much for being here. And if you're new here, welcome. Make sure you hit that subscribe button. We'll be back in just a second. Looking for a simple and secure way to manage your Bitcoin on mobile, aqua wallet has you come. It's user-friendly and puts you in full control of your Bitcoin with secure self-custody. Aqua also supports Lightning and Liquid Network, making fast, cheap Bitcoin payments and asset

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You can head over to debify.com to check them out or simply scan the QR code on the screen. All right, we're back in and Nathan, I have to show you. I pulled the trigger on something. It actually just arrived. today. So I got to plug it in, but I got a MAPE here.

I had to tweet it out earlier that, yeah, I'm diving into these quasi-self-hosted AI thing, open claw. Mm-hmm. Honestly, I'm like so in the dark on a lot of this stuff, and it's just time for me to actually learn it. But at the same time, it's like, it's like I want to try and do things in as self-sovereign a way as possible. So like, yeah, I've used chat, GBT and GROC and all that kind of stuff. But at the same time, I'm like, how can I put a bit of a wall between myself and that? And yeah, so Open Claw seems interesting to me.

If you guys don't know, I don't even know really how to describe it. But I also did find that you could get it on your umbrella. So I installed it on that as well. So yeah, it's like a sandbox to do all of your AI-related stuff. And you can link it to an external AI model. And then you can get it to, you can pretty much link it to anything. But I'm going to caveat this by saying you've got to be super cautious because it can also really screw your shit up. So like if you give it access to like your email and you say, okay, start emailing for me.

and start doing this, that, and the other thing, at times it may be like, oh, it's more efficient to just delete everything and then start, like, it might, you might screw your shit up. Skynet, but on a personal small level. I think someone lost like all their family photos and stuff. Yeah, yeah.

And then I've also heard stories of somebody just giving it full control to like it's, the text messages and messenger apps, and it started just like talking to his wife. I'm the man of the house now. Yeah. Although maybe if you're a forgetful husband, it could be helpful to have a bot saying, Honey, happy anniversary.

I love you so much. So I don't know, but also, yeah, just be cautious. The way that you should approach stuff like this is if you're tinkering with it, create segregated accounts for everything, maybe run it on a segregated machine. I don't really have funds sitting on my umbrella. I use Start 9 for anything lightning-related. And I do limit what I have on Lightning Nodes. So anyways, with that, I am playing around with OpenClaw now.

And it's pretty neat. I'm going to install it on that Mac Mini and start playing around with AI. I'm really getting interested in kind of like all the sovereign tech stuff, too, that are complementary to Bitcoin because your finances are a huge part of being self-sovereign. But also there's this draconian tech oligarchy penopticon that we're subject to. And we just kind of live in willingly. So like how can you actually start to pull yourself out of that with, you know, one piece at a time? And so I'm thinking of starting to explore some of that alongside the Bitcoin stuff,

probably like on separate channel or something like that. But I can see myself diving into that to give armed people. with the tool. So this came up to me and in the same kind of AI realm, I just saw this today, but this just dropped today. So Jan 3, these are our friends that create Aqua Wallet. They just launched Echoes. It's a free offline AI transcription app. So free open source voice to text transcription app from its new AI division. I didn't even know they had it. an AI division. It's called A1 Lab. Ecos runs fully offline, offering private local transcription with no accounts,

subscriptions, or data sharing. Kind of neat. Very cool. Have you heard of this? I actually heard whispers of it. I can't remember if it's in the podcast or it was after the podcast from talking to the Prince Philip of Serbia. He gave me a little bit of lowdown on what was coming down, coming down the pipe there for Jan 3.

Yeah. That's pretty interesting. Yeah. I quite like that. Now, I do want to mention a few other things that have dropped. Aqua actually just updated their stuff. So staying on the Jan 3 train, they just released 0.4.0. So the interface is completely kind of re- it's not even like re-skinned.

It's like they've changed where everything is to kind of make the flows a little bit better and everything. I did encounter one funky thing. There was some previous. like liquid transactions that were showing as pending, but they had already gone through. So anyways, that will be up in the next one. I see that Nathan is here. He just needed to step out. I don't know.

Restream's been weird. We're ditching this anyway. Yep. We're going to move on for that one. I will say, though, as much as I love it now, Ben has gone a little too. As much as I absolutely love Aqua, and I do love Aqua. It's tons of fun. The one thing that I'm still waiting on.

guys, you haven't said anything. I totally get it because the Fiat overlords aren't going to let us, but I want the dolphin card that I was never using because I'm in Canada. I want the dolphin card back. Yeah. It's, I mean, anytime somebody tries to do a way of using

Fiat without giving up every bit of information, it gets rug pulled. And unfortunately, the Fiat overlords are not fans of it. You can find ways. The best way, is to create your own local circular economy. Very, very good way to say.

And even on the earlier point for claw bot, I do want to explore these things. I'll probably be a little bit more late to the train. I'm trying to save up as much as I can right now, because first I need my army of drones, my little armed mounted drones, and then I want my claw bot to direct said drones and protect the perimeter.

Yeah, exactly. Now I did want to say also, I did drop a new tutorial on the bull Bitcoin wallet. New, I say I actually condensed the other one was like an hour and a half and it went very in depth. This one, we were able to cut out about 60% of it and just get the basics done. So if you're, if you just kind of want to get onboarded and learn the basics of how to use the bull Bitcoin wallet, which is like chef's kiss, an amazing job that they've done. It's got on chain. It's got lightning. It's got liquid. And it's

got hardware support as well. And the exchange has actually built into it. So if you're in Canada, Europe, Mexico, Argentina, I think Brazil, maybe a couple of... France, Europe. Yeah, yeah. So all over Europe. Actually, they're publicly in France, but they are actually accessible to all of Europe. So you can, if you're watching this from Europe, you can use bold Bitcoin. So, yeah, go watch the wallet video first.

But, yeah, the exchange portion of it is in the wallet as well for those that have access. Aside of that, a few other things. I can't say I'm surprised by this, but Proton Mail. So they have something like an extension called Simple Login. But anyways, this guy went to go pay with Bitcoin and they've got Coinbase Commerce plugged in, which is just like the worst big. I don't even think you can easily pay with Coinbase with Bitcoin through Coinbase commerce. It's just such a mess.

Anyways, way, a horrible option for Proton Mail. So Proton, if you guys, I've met the dude who made Proton mail. Dude, if you're watching, please, I'm more than happy to help you get set up with BTC Pay server. In fact, I've got a video dropping on using bold Bitcoin wallet with BTC Pay server so you don't even have to set up the lightning infrastructure. So it is incredibly easy now to do this and just have it on your website. So please consider. You know, it's things like you combine this with all the Epstein Fudd and AI FUD and quantum fund and all that shit coming out there.

And someone says like, oh, we're so early. No, we're not BlackRock's there and it's $125,000. Well, one, BlackRock is always going to come in and try and make some money off of shit. So don't worry about that. We're not at $125,000 anymore. We're a little bit further down. When I see some of the products coming out in the Bitcoin space from the larger

companies and how the design really like any Bick, or any of you guys watching the stream right now could have better advised on the setup that lets me know we're still super early. We actually are still super early. Yeah, exactly. I've got a, there's a question in the chat. Will the Republic of Alberta accept immigrants embedded into the BTC universe? Honestly, I'm pretty sure the Republic of Alberta would accept anybody that is a contributing member of society that comes here through legal means.

Yeah, yeah, we have basically, it's going to be a very standard sort of set up. We're going to take a look at your capital account. So you have to show us an on chain, do a little bit of a signature. Make sure you've got some Bitcoin. You've got to stay on the bull for eight seconds. You've got to eight a 64-ounce stake. And then you're as long as you can shoot a bullseye, at least three out of four shots with a revolver. You're good to go.

Or the Winchester. It's up to you. Yeah, exactly. And upon a successful application to live in Alberta, you'll be given your first honorary cowboy hat. That's just how it works. That's our passport. Yeah. Yeah, it's just tip of the hat.

Right this way, sir. We're going to, speaking of Alberta, still being in Canada, let's pivot to Canada sucks. We have to. We have to. The government will shut us down. We have to have Canadian content. So let's go through it and make them meet their words. Exactly.

You were very efficient at finding a lot of this stuff. But I did come across this one. And this guy, Bill, tweeted out, I think something is wrong. Canada has a population of 41 million people. but only 17 million of them are working full-time. And of those, 4.4 million are government workers. So they may as well be doing nothing at all. That means there's only 13 million full-time private workers in the economy.

Only one in three Canadians have a full-time private job. Youth unemployment rates are soaring. Canada's top economic advisor said that 45% of the workforce would be wiped out by AI. Side note, the government creates jobs just to create jobs. So think of how much more efficient the private sector is going to become in comparison to the government. The government just saying, well, we're creating more jobs. And that's their goal without the jobs having a purpose.

So they just become this behemoth of inefficiency. Meanwhile, companies are looking for ways to be as efficient as, possible. And, you know, that's tricky to navigate because, you know, industrial revolution, a lot of people had jobs that became, you know, not jobs anymore. We're going to see that through a lot of sectors right now. But on the other side of it, society became better and more efficient. And we're able to catapult ourselves into the next thing. Governments are going to, it's going to be rough. Anyways, I mean, he says, I just want to point out super quick on that one, too, talking about like terrible the government jobs over government jobs.

So I just pulled it up. So we were talking about like how software is becoming demonetized. Let's not forget that the Canadian government spent 59.5 million on a broken can-en-arrived app. That was great. They still try to push it, hey? Are you serious? It's still a thing? It's still a thing.

It still exists. It's still there's like ads up in the airport being like make your arrival more efficient. Dude, have you used the app? It's the least efficient thing on the planet. And also, I'm pretty sure if you were like, here's my arrive can. Everybody at the airport even would be like, what do you? What do you do that for? Yeah.

So it is so stupid. Anyways, he goes on to say, I'm quite shocked that Canada is not being rocked by massive civil unrest. Well, yeah. Kind of in the middle of it. Does a province separating from the country count as civil unrest? Maybe. Okay, this is interesting. You found this one.

Maybe I'll let you. What is this? Canada, you can read it. Canada spends enough on immigration to pay every Canadian family a 157,000 per child, which is well above the median income as well, too. But chooses immigration anyways. I wonder why. No wonder our birth rate is absolutely plummeting. And that's true in the sense that realistically, if we were in a closed system, if we had a good currency, if we were on a Bitcoin currency,

you would see population growth from birth change with basically the availability of assets and supplies and homes. So even for a quick example, if homes are too expensive, people have less kids, there's less kids coming up, there's no one to buy the homes. Home prices come down. Home prices come down. People have more kids. They get this nice little equivalent to them back and forth.

But no, no, they'd rather steal from you, call you a racist, tell you're stupid, tell you that you have to identify the shooter, worst mass shooting since the 1989 Polytechnic. You have to call them a lady and use them. proper pronouns, but don't worry, we're completely pillaging it and giving it to people who do not share your culture and they're just coming for free ship. So things are going well, in other words. Things are going well. Things are going well.

Here's our friend of the show, Marty up north. Canadians are working 15% more hours at their main job than they were 10 years ago. Is this a necessity to make ends meet? And it shows national economic indicators actual hours worked at main job. obviously the destruction during the lockdowns, but now we're far past that. And it's funny because efficiency and technology, if we had a money that worked, what the reality is, is that you would suddenly, you would have a set of tasks at work and you would have a, you know, you would have an hourly wage or you would have ideally you would work for completed tasks

and all of a sudden it would just be quicker and quicker to complete the tasks so you'd be working less for the same money or in other words if you worked the same amount of hours you would be paid much much more and have a better quality of life and higher purchasing power we're witnessing the exact opposite and the government is not helping with things even outside of money printing. Do you think they have to work as many more hours that they got $157,000 each year instead of paying it to immigration? I mean, that'd be pretty neat. The better way of handling it would just be to not give any money to the government anymore at all. So they didn't even have to turn around that money and put it somewhere. This, okay, this is very, very sad, but the cartoon above it will at least lighten the mood a little bit.

Dark humor. Oh, God. This is actually horrible. Canada may start euthanizing babies. Nathan, what in the sweet hell is this? It's made, Ben. We're just extending made to children who might be disabled in some way or be suffering in some way that were like,

the more I keep diving into it, it's like, holy cat, crap, child sacrifice has been with us for our entire human history, and it's still here today in more explicit ways than others. But we're just going to, because it's not, they're not murdering. No, no, no. I'm not even having an abortion debate at this point in time.

This is out of the womb. This is, we're going to go with the euthanizing. We're going to start euthanizing babies maybe because that's, I don't even know. Better than the hell. I said, I got nothing. I got nothing. At least we've got maple syrup. Oh, God, damn.

At least we're not racist or sexist or whatever the fucking thing they're talking about today. Oh, Lord. I will say that this is a great account instead of the far side, which was a great comic. the far right side. And it's just some dude in bed and the doctor's pointing a revolver at him. You're lucky we're in Canada, Mr. Smith. Your treatment is free. I mean, there you go.

There you go. Yeah. And I was going to play the clip of the police, RCP, correcting the pronouns with I can't be bothered to give. it airtime. It's just, it's horrendous and there's plenty that I would like to say on it, but I just, I'm tired, man. I'm so tired. And I think, and also, I just, I feel horrible for the victims. There was a, anybody in familiar, if you haven't looked at the news, I'm pretty sure this is international. But in a place in northern B.C., there was, again, school shooting,

I think 10 people dead, including the shooter, including the gun person, if you will. But yeah, it's super tragic. And you guys, I'm certain, you know, maybe myself and Nathan's thoughts on it. But I'm not going to dwell on it here. I'll just say super sad, super unfortunate. and let's hope that things get much better, and I think things can get much better, if Alberta

begins to separate itself from Canada and come up with some of its own policies that provide private options, better options, more efficient options to deal with not just regular health care, but deal with mental health issues, things like that. Yeah, holy hell, man. Super unfortunate. But outside of that, Nathan, if there's one exciting thing in the, let's just lean to the Bitcoin space that you see coming down the pipe, whether it be technological, something else. What are you looking forward to over the next little bit?

Well, let's see. Super things that I'd be bullish looking forward to. I'll give you one not outside, not inside the Bitcoin space very quickly, which is I keep noticing this trend with Alberta independence where we see people taking shots at us, calling us treasonous, all that fun stuff as well too. But I noticed that they always say, um, Albertans are being treasonous most Canadians believe. It's like, oh, that's interesting. Because in your mind, we're already two separate groups. You've already kind of accepted the outcome, haven't you? Because not Canadians in Alberta, right? We're all Canadians. Aren't we? I thought, no, no, no, we're two. very, very different groups. I think that's always a wonderful thing. I'm super excited about in the Bitcoin space coming up. Well, we got a lot of good events, right? I got friends to look forward to. We've got wonderful chats coming up. We have, you know, Bitcoin Las Vegas. I'll hopefully be hanging up there with some people. We've got also the Bitcoin rodeo in the workshop. And I love being in those environments where someone's really excited to learn. Additionally, let's see, what else am I super stoked on? Those are the big ones. Like, even if we are in a bare market, we get the chance to build in a, what, is there a funny comment in the chat?

No, I want to tell you something and the audience something that I've loved today. I've got Lisa working some of the emails and stuff that come through to the channel. And I got this great email from somebody today from Australia. And Nathan, I think you in particular will love this. Awesome bitcoiner. Had some general questions and everything. But mostly was very interested in what's going on in Alberta and was saying, can you tell me more about what's happening?

Are you guys actually going to secede? What's the interest like? Where can I keep updated on this? And in Australia, like, there's nothing like that really going on yet, but I'm looking at my options. And if Alberta seceded and it was kind of the things that are being mentioned, I feel like that would be a great mecca for a big. corner to go to. So I'm getting emails from people on the other side of the planet that are looking at Alberta as as their citadel if this were to go through. And I've heard that from

more than a number of people in the Bitcoin space that are like, maybe that's, maybe that's where we head. That'd be awesome. I would love. It's absolutely beautiful. Can you imagine? Like just, it just so happened. that the place that we live becomes the Bitcoin Mecca of the world, that would be incredible. It's not by accident. It's definitely not by accident. And to that point, it's the, going back to the opening story talking about unrealized capital gains. Yes, that will cause capital to flee. The opposite is also true. If we become a financial and entrepreneurial hub and a productivity hub of the world, rich in resources, we will attract the best of the best. And I think Francis on last night's dream summed up my own views on it extensively well. that it's like, oh, holy shit, we might actually get to build a country with our friends. Well, that's pretty fucking cool. And that might be a lot of fun.

That's definitely a lot of fun. Well, let's get to it. Let's do it. With that, we're out of here. Thank you guys. Drop a like on the video. Stay tuned. We got lots more stuff coming in the coming days.

As always, I'm Ben. This is Nathan. This was your weekly session. See you guys soon. When I first got into Bitcoin, I was overwhelmed. The jargon, the security risks, the fear that one mistake could cost everything. I remember staring at my screen and wondering, are my keys safe? Did I do this right?

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