BTC Sessions - Charlie Kirk Assassinated: Society Has Broken — Understand Why w/ Brandon Quittem

Episode Date: September 11, 2025

Charlie Kirk has been assassinated. Join Ben Perrin, Nathan Fitzsimmons & Brandon Quittem to reflect on what this means for the state of society, where we go from here and what we can do to fix it.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 AQUA WALLEThttps://qrco.de/bfiD8gNUNCHUK HONEYBADGER INHERITANCEhttps://qrco.de/bfiDARHODLHODL NO KYC P2P EXCHANGEhttps://hodlhodl.com/join/BTCSESSIONDEBIFI LOANShttps://qrco.de/bfiDCpCRYPTOCLOAKShttps://qrco.de/bg5Dvo#btc #bitcoin #crypto

Charlie Kirk was assassinated, and a lot of people right now are reeling. Things feel a little different. The error is heavier, and many people right now are wondering if society itself is broken. But today's show is not about digging into the details of this tragedy or trying to point fingers. It's about stepping back and asking why we are where we are. Why does it feel? like the very fabric of our culture is fraying, why do moments like this seem to hit so hard right now? To help us unpack these questions, myself and Nathan, today are going to be joined by a special guest. His name is Brandon Quidam. He's an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, passionate bitcoiner, and his articles have been read by millions around the globe.

And together, we're going to explore what many believe lies at the heart of our current societal decay. It's a generational cycle known as the fourth turning. There's a book written on it in the 90s. We'll talk about where we are in that cycle, if it were to be true, how different generations process events like this. And most importantly, what you as an individual can do to navigate it and to get us to a better place on the other side of it. And of course, after we finished speaking with Brandon, stick around with myself and Nathan. There's a number of other Bitcoin-related stories. Myself and him are going to cover.

I just felt like this was the best thing to lead with today. So without further ado, I'm Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your weekly session. So I want to welcome to the stage. Of course, my co-host with the most, Mr. Nathan Fitzsimmons, a Bitcoin mentor. How you doing, buddy? Doing well, sir. Doing well, all things considered.

Yes. And I also want to welcome to the stage. Brandon Quidim, how you doing, man? All things considered, as we said, doing well over here. Awesome, man. Well, thank you for joining us. And, yeah, this is going to be a little bit of a departure from what we normally do on our Thursday show. But, you know, it's just one of those times that I think it calls for a break from the norm.

And we're here. I've invited you here to chat about this just in the context. of I've had you on many times before. You've been on many other, you know, shows chatting about kind of your dive into and understanding of this thing called the fourth turning. Before we get into that, I don't know if you have any general thoughts on just like how crazy the past day has been. I don't know if there's anything that you want to say or not.

It's up to you. Yeah, I think just generally saddened as a father myself. thinking about a mother with young kids, not having their father, that's just devastating. The kids being there on site when the assassination happened, I just can't imagine that. That's the worst thing ever. And yeah, I think Charlie, people can disagree with his opinions, but I think he engaged in good faith in a way that's rare. And I think his bravery and his courage to do what he thought was right and doing that for so long. is something that we should admire and something we should remember yeah at the at the end of the

day it's okay to disagree sometimes vehemently with people that's an important part of a functioning society to be able to not resort to violence but to actually discuss these things and and as an individual actually try to come to understand the people that you're speaking with and why they think the way that they do, rather than creating a caricature as everyone that doesn't agree with you is some evil force meant to be reckoned with. Everybody comes to what they believe through their external stimuli. And if there's one thing that's clear, a number of the individuals that I've seen kind of celebrating or saying he got what was coming, I think.

think from what I've seen, they've actually not really listened to a lot of his interactions with other people and rather just kind of seen, as we see with social media and with regular media nowadays, you get the sound bites. You get the things that spark the most outrage. You get the things that are going to get the most clicks. And unfortunately, that's kind of the reality of the internet. and not a lot of people like to dive a little bit deeper and actually say, well, what was the context of this conversation? What was the interaction back and forth and actually take in a discussion rather than just here's a sound bite written on a meme? And that's my reality. So I hope we can get back to a place of that and agreeing to disagree and still being able to sit down at dinner with each other.

that would that's that's that's my hope for the future and and for anybody that's watching this wondering brandon just before the show you said you know this is this is not about dumerism it's it's actually quite the opposite it's um you know i'm looking uh in the context of the fourth turning i'm looking to uh this cycle and um and a turning of a new leaf eventually and how we can best shape that to get to a place where stuff like this is few and far between. But with that, Brennan, maybe what I'll do first is from a bird's eye view, what is what is the concept of the fourth turning? Where does this come from? And what does it mean? Yeah, absolutely. So first off, here's the book. Neil Howe is the author. This is a revised edition. It came out a year or two ago.

the original book was written in 1997. And for the Bitcoiners Among Us, that was the same year as a sovereign individual. I consider both of these foundational texts to understand the context in which humanity is going through right now. And the book was written by a historian and a demographer. And they wrote previous books, their big one before that was called Generations. And they're just essentially studying American history, finding patterns, what can we learn about looking backwards. And the fourth turning was essentially their a little bit more narrow focus book focused on these 80 to 90 years cycles that they for some reason discovered in their research. And to be clear, this isn't this doesn't predict the future. A common critique would be like horoscopes for

intellectuals. And I would say if you just glance at the material, you see a chart or whatever, it can definitely feel that way. And I was skeptical at first, but the deeper I went in into the material. I think the thesis that they have, which I'll present in a second, is actually fundamental to human civilization. It feels like there's cycles everywhere you look were governed by them,

but modern man believes in this linear path of history. We went from a primitive man, then we discovered agriculture, and then we had laws and religion, and here we go. And I think reality is much more complicated than that. I don't wanna get into ancient history, but I think cycles are everywhere, I don't think our history is as linear as we were told. So getting to the thesis, what is this thing?

And so the punchline, the fourth turning, is the end of the 80 to 90 year cycle. And so what that cycle feels like is our institutions are starting to crumble and society is starting to get more volatile, populism increases. Essentially, we look around and nothing's working and the instinct as a society is to collectivize and to work together to solve the big problem in front of us. Historically, they've been war. All fourth turnings have ended in war, total war, and all total wars have been in a fourth turning. And that's going back four or five hundred years.

Now, and we're in a fourth turning now, and I'll explain more. Does that mean we for sure are going into a total war in the next five years? The answer is no, it's not a for sure. It's not predictive. but we do need a catalyst large enough to sufficiently mobilize the population to essentially march in the same direction. If we go back to the previous fourth turning, that was the period between 1929 and 1945.

So you have the Great Depression, stock market collapse, obviously World War II on the back of that. And not only was that a crazy time in America, but we essentially created all these new institutions and policies to respond to the chaos around us. So that's when Social Security came into play. That's when, let's see, deficit spending, World Bank, NATO, IMF, all these social pro-F-DIC insurance, all these programs. Oh, the banks collapse. So let's make a new insurance. So if the banks have a bank run, you're all fine. Oh, a bunch of people lost their job, can't support themselves. okay, let's make Social Security. So all those things came out in a response to the chaos.

And on the back of World War II, that enters the second turning, which is of the four quadrants, that's a relative peace time. And that stage is marked by exhaustion from the conflict. We're so sick of the chaos. We just want a white picket fence, raise a family, go to work, watch TV, whatever. It's also a period of sterility and boring. Like think, leave it to Beaver, if you guys remember that show. And what happens then?

What you'll notice in the pattern here is it's very reactionary. So we went from chaos in the fourth turning. Then we went to stability and general economic equality. That's the highest economic equality in a first turning after the shakeup. And the kids who are born during that period of stability, they come of age. They look around. they go what the hell mom and dad are boring the sex drugs and rock and roll and they kind of push back on their upbringing right and that's where you get the civil rights movement the psychedelic

60s vietnam all that kind of stuff and rock at the early 70s too exactly all the same stuff and that's the midway point of the cycle and what's important to highlight there is the midway point is when all the religious revolutions occur going back to like the quakers and the Calvinists And I don't even remember all those, but oddly enough, that's when that happens. Then you go to the third turning. So after that cultural revolution period, the third turning is a period of deregulation. And it's like, hey, the economics are solid. Let's start deregulating.

Crime goes up. Essentially economic tailwinds propel society forward, but we start pulling apart the parts of society that actually hold us together. So we essentially create a house of car. Okay. Then the fourth turning comes, which would be 2008 it started. Nice parallel with 1929 and a lot of change since then. And so in 2008, all of a sudden we pull out one of those cards at the bottom of the castle and the whole thing starts to come undone. And so that's where we are now. It probably felt like different stages from 08 to now. I would call this like a general upward ramp in chaos, unpredictability, and I think leading towards crescendo.

And I think if you ask people today, they feel like something's off. And they're not exactly sure why. You can't trust what you read. You can't trust the government. You can't trust the news. You can't trust the schools. You can't trust healthcare. All the things that hold society together aren't being trusted by the populace and for good

reason. So if you pull up a Gallup poll or any of the major polls, they'll go back, I think, like 80 plus years on how much do you trust your institutions? And it's at a historic low right now. It has since they've been collecting data, it's never been lower. That's another hallmark of the fourth turning. And I think skipping to the actually, let me give you a little bit of the why. How is this even possible? Okay. So the authors identified four archetypes, hero profit nomad artist and they come out in those, there it is, nice, that's my graphic, beauty. We figured it was.

They come out in a very particular order. So, for example, a prophet raises an artist, an artist, rate is a hero, a hero, raises a nomad, something like that. And so the reason why it comes in a consistent pattern is going back to that leave it to beaver example, right? The kids rebel against the boring parents. That is a natural instinct that humans have. I think it's a good thing, by the way.

It makes us more adaptable to change if we have different, if parents push back on their parents, what if society changes and parents are more adapted to the future or the kids are more adapted to the future, right? Essentially spreads out our bets from a biology standpoint. Anyways, so people predictably push back and it creates these different archetypes. They go back 500 years or so.

And what the fourth turning allows us to use, like why is this useful to us, is because the constellation of those archetypes dictates the mood. Okay, is the profit archetype in middle age and running everything while the hero's a child? Or is the artists in charge and the nomads this, right? So four stages of life. You're a kid, then you're an early adult, then you're in charge, and then you're giving wisdom at the end of life.

And so that consolation dictates the mood. Right now, the boomers are the prophet. archetype and they're the ones in charge more or less and so the boomers are idealistic do as i say not as i do and i'll skip the millennials because i know we're all millennials and probably most of the listeners millennials are the hero archetype which sounds pretty badass but what that actually means is during the total war we're the we're the cannon fodder we're the primary soldiers going out there and the artists which are the gen z's they're born and they're essentially raised during the chaos period. So they become inward, they become artistic, they become

antisocial, really creative. They're kind of taught from a young age that the world is scary. You can't trust anything. So they more or less turn inward. Whereas millennials are more social, team-oriented, etc., because that's the context in which we grew up. And one more on millennials versus the nomads to round it out. The nomads are the Gen Xers. They're the bad boys. They're the latchkey kids. They're the libertarians. Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, those would be good examples. They were raised in a period post-Hippie era where, and that's when they created the term yuppie. So I think post-Hippies finally had kids and from the boomers, the prophets, and they didn't want to really parent. They're all individual. They want to do

their own thing. So they didn't really raise their kids. And so that's why those nomads grew up under-parented and that creates like the movie Terminator or the Goonies, stuff like that. That's media of that era. And then in the 90s, 80s and 90s, when the millennials have started being born, there was some sentiment that it said, hey, the kids are effed. Why are the kids so crazy? We need to do something about this. And so then we had the millennials being born and they were seventh place ribbons,

baby on board stickers, mothers against drunk driving, right? And we all of a sudden over-parented the millennials. So we all turned out like entitled Snowflake Brats. And then when we got in the workplace, the profits and the nomads, boomers and ex-ers, they couldn't stand us because we were oil and water with their general ethos. And one more point here as I'm piling on the underpinnings here, and then we can debate or discuss this. Why does a cohort of people born in a certain era lead to an archetype? like, oh, I'm an individual. I'm not a hero. I'm not, whatever. So here's how it works.

We're all born in the exact same context. 20-year period, roughly millennial. So we're born, the conditions in which we're born are relatively similar. Our influences are relatively similar. So before we leave our parents' nest, the external world is relatively the same. Okay, then we go out and we leave the nest and what do we do? We go hang out with our peers. We go to college or university or whatever it is. And as soon as we leave the nest, we forge that identity with our peers and we essentially stamp all of our like subconscious processing our bias the way we approach to the world is forged at that early age and then we more or less maintain that perspective throughout our life obviously stage of life influences our us

as individuals but a nomad versus a hero or a gen x versus millennial at any stage of life like yeah they'll change individually, but they're still very, very different. And so that leads us to the whole point of this thesis, which is that the generate, sorry, history creates the generation. So the context forges the generation. Then the generation goes out and enforces its will on history. So it's a symbiotic relationship, history generations, generations history. And that cycle, that process is what keeps this thing flowing and flowing and flowing.

And so it's would this be the I think this is your other image that I'm going to pull up here, but it's it's basically saying that, you know, we say we're in a fourth turning right now. And what what I'm hearing here and what I've heard you discuss before is it's not necessarily that more bad things happen at certain periods of time. It's that generations. react differently to their environments based on their upbringing and their interactions with the world, which translates into, if I'm not mistaken, this. Would that be correct?

Exactly right. You want to outline this? Yeah, so I don't know the genesis of this meme. I made the image, and I like the Aurora Borealis. I think that's what it's called, the snaky tail in the middle. But I think this is the fastest way to understand the generational theory from Neil Howe. You can just see, okay, hard times create strong men. We're in the hard times period.

The world's chaos. We need people to step off. We need to rebuild the world. We essentially wipe the slate clean and rebuild all our institutions. And after you do that, you create strong men. And what do the strong men do in the first turning? They create good times. So we have a strong culture, a strong institution.

that creates a flourishing society. But, okay, if you're born into this amazing life, you're the third generation of a billionaire, all you know is luxury and you don't have to work, you're insulated from the world. And that good time creates weak men. You can look at all the celebrities, the celebrity kids, etc. Okay, weak men, what do weak men do?

They create hard times. They are not making hard decisions. They're not being strong leaders. They're not, you know, raising families and building businesses. and building. So the weak men create the hard times and then we come back to hard times and that demand strong men. And so I think that's a very useful way to look at it. Another one I really like is the supply and demand of order. I don't know if you have that graph up, but this one's amazing. If you go to Bitcoin in the Rhythms of History, you'll find that also on Twitter.

I think that one's an amazing chart. And then I'm going to send you one more link since we're live streaming. I think I can hit you in the private chat. Yep. It can. Okay. Check this one from a coworker Lane at Swan. This chart's amazing. Okay. Highly recommend pulling this one up. And I think this would be a good transition into where we are now and populism and why there's such divergent responses to Charlie's assassination. Okay. Is that what you're looking at?

Oh, wait, was that Nathan? Hold on. Nope. That's a good one too. Let's do that one. So, okay, check it out. U.S. net share of wealth. So what you're looking at here is when those two lines, the red and the green are close together, that's populism. That's when the most economic disparity is around. Okay. And in that period, what happens? Populism. People are looking around. Young people are like, the American Dream is gone. I can't buy a house. The boomers raided everything and they gave us the empty bag, right? And so no wonder why we end up in a situation with populism. Now, if you look at it in the middle of that period, it's the widest. That means that, which is counterintuitive, but that means that economic inequality is at the lowest point. And so I think that's just a beautiful way to look at it.

And I bet if we go back to another cycle, we'll find the exact same thing. There we go. Supply and demand of order. Okay. So supply of order would be like strong institutions. strong, civilizational things that kind of keep us going in the right direction, demand of order would be like how much do we care about rule of law, strong institutions, right? So if you start in the first turning, that's right after war, right?

So the supply of order is high because we're just like quickly building things to restore order. And the demand for order is high. We're sick of fighting. We just want life to go back to quote normal. Then you catch the second turning. What happens? The young people grow up and they don't care about order. They want some excitement.

So the demand for order plummets, but the supply is high. So that delta between supply and demand, which creates the awakening or the religious movement, civil rights, etc. Third turning, all of a sudden we have a reaction to the second turning. And what happens is supply of order plummets and the demand stays low. And that's the deregulation. that's just like PE corporate raiders, that's penny stocks, that's like cocaine. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Then then the fourth turning, what happens? We look around and we go, shit, all our institutions are messed up. Society's coming off the rails. So demand for order sky rockets. And that mismatch of demand, high, supply low is what creates the conditions for crisis. And just to to your, our.

institutions are garbage kind of sentiment. This is a chart Nathan threw to me. It only goes to 2016, but you can kind of see the gradual decrease in confidence for all institutions, only going to 2015. And I feel like stuff really kicked off in 2016. These past eight years have been, what eight, nine years have been wild. And, uh, and, and, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's cratered since then. And, uh, every day you see, uh, I think also because of the political whipsaws of back-to-back administrations that nobody is trusted, um, for half, half of the country has always deeply distrusted, uh, the other side that is currently in office for, you know, every, you know, like the current admin, the Biden admin, and the previous trumpet admin, it's just been like, you know, everything is in the other side's eyes always it's rigged against them.

And we're seeing, funny enough, even Kernadmin themselves actually adding to the distrust of institutions that actually in the long run have helped. the U.S. So like we see Trump and his administration calling out the Fed and and trying to bend it to their way, which then, you know, breeds distrust from their own party, but, you know, subsequently down the line, a lot of people are beginning to question just everything. And it's, it's, I've not seen this before. It's, it's wild to watch. I do just want to add to. I pulled it up here quickly, just as they kind of signpost, trust in newspapers as an institution, trust in news, is, down to 17% from 28% in 2011. Yeah.

And what's this one? Percent who trusts the government in Washington always or most of the time. You go back to the after the 60s and the 70s, it was, it was, looks like it was close to 80% in an around almost. And now it's sub 20. And Kennedy would have been the mark for the change in the cycle there as well, too. So that makes perfect sense that that would be the end of. that in the decline because that was going into it's going into crisis or awakening crisis now that's an awakening that's a good yes yeah it would even be higher most likely before that

right if you think of 50s 60s 40s 50s 60 70s it was a whole different world like people were fit people were they knew their neighbors they liked each other they had american pride NASA was awesome people, the best among us wanted to go into politics. Now the worst among us want to go into politics. Actually, on that note, too, I'm curious if you have any thoughts on, it seems like the profit generation, the boomers did not hand over the reins to the Gen Xers in terms of going into the next phase of cycle, staying particularly, I'm thinking like Trump and Biden, like key example of like, guys, this was not supposed to be your demographic in charge at this point in time. If you have any thoughts on if that may be lengthens and cycles or if it's changed the layout or all, if there's any kind of downstream effects

that you're aware of? That's a really good question. I actually haven't thought about that. Let me go. We'll do it live. Okay. Let's do it live. I think you're right. I think it's unique that the boomers clung to power. But what I don't know is that that's also of their archetype. The boomers want to hold power and they're the ideologues. The Gen Xers are pragmatic. So usually in the fourth turning, they're like the military generals that actually get stuff done and they do the hard stuff where the profits just sit in their ivory tower and talk platitudes. But what our government feels like is ideologues talking platitudes and pandering, where you'll have like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk to pull them back in.

Elon Musk was like, let's just go reduce some spending. Let's go create the doge, right? And that did not go well. And so I think what happens, if I'm going to guess, I don't know this to be true. Previous four turning is a Gen Xers like the Elon Musk, they'll try to take control and they'll get their hands swatted and go back to being pragmatists. That's my thought. I'd like to throw something in here too.

And this is, you know, obviously all of us, Bitcoiners, this is where the money side of things and the economic reality side of things may also lean into Nathan's idea of extending cycles a little bit because what has the millennial generation been known for? Staying at home way longer, starting families way later. And that's not just, that's not laziness. It's a lack of financial ability to do so. What's the number one thing you hear from people? I can barely afford to put food on the table, let alone.

buy a home, get married, have children, retire. None of those things are on the table for a lot of people. And so it's really kind of not only prevented millennials and Gen Z from kind of rising up into what would normally be somebody in their early 20s married with kids and a white picket fence, but it's also allowed, you know, boomer generation to kind of remain where they are because they have the financial means. They were able to kind of follow the growth in real estate, which was monetized specifically because the money was so broken. Do you think how much of the money plays into this particular cycle, in your opinion? Obviously, there's other, you know, this cycle

was happening before the ebb and flow of the fiat dollar and going off the gold standard. But like, you know, where does this play in? Yeah, it's a very good question. And so this is something where economics and the social trends, so we can call the fourth turning like an emergent, bottom up social approach to the world, like sets the mood. But economics is a very strong variable. And what we find is extremely high correlation to the same 80-year cycle.

Ray Dalio calls it the long-term debt cycle. There's many names for this going back thousands of years where they would say when a new king takes over or like a new dynasty ends, they just reset all the debts and start over. And so this is a common thing. And what we see is that soft money comes back every fourth turning. Unsurprisingly, you have populism. Like you just mentioned, young people priced out of the future. So they start rioting. They stop having kids.

They turn to some form of nihilism. They also turn towards collectivism, by the way. In the 1930s, the intelligentsia class, like the people that many people would strive to be a part of, the educated, the well-to-do, go to the cool cocktail party people, they're all communists. And what do we see now? Like, unironically hammer and sickles all over the young people. And, you know, I mean, so what we do here is we say, look, economic conditions for me and my generation is bad. So the problem must be capitalism. So let's try something else.

And we're on a knife edge there now. You have Malmdani in New York. I'm sure there will be more. And young people have a very good reason to be upset about the economics. Unfortunately, they made a hasty conclusion that capitalism was the problem instead of some deeper things like fiat money creating issues or whatever crony corporatism we have going on now. Right? It's not functioning in a way that's very useful.

And so I think we need to take the arguments of the young people serious. Let me rephrase. Their arguments are bad. They're objectively bad. But we need to take that energy seriously because it's real. It matters and it's gigantic. It's a huge force in our culture today. I don't know how to solve that problem.

I think it's a really hard thing to educate people on. I think getting people some Bitcoin watching number go up so they can afford their life helps. You see Bitcoiners who often benefit from NGU raising more families and being more stable and more optimistic about the future thinking long term. So I think that's a force here. But I think it would be wrong for us to outright dismiss that communism, socialism, energy because it's a real force today. And we need to be delicate with how we approach it. If I may, I kind of had an observation when Ben and I were talking beforehand that really struck me as like, oh, that's a a little too on the nose, like based on the 1997 book to feel comfortable, is I was listening

to Neil Howe, and he was discussing how during this phase, it will be the Gen Xers, it will be the, I believe, the nomad generation prior that actually builds out the new institutions, but it is the millennials that then assume control them and then move forward. And again, it spoke to that collectivist kind of nature. And perhaps it's just because, you know, the space that I'm in, but I couldn't help but see parallels directly within Bitcoin, quite strong ones as well, too, in the sense that we had Britain Woods as part of the last turning. And the idea being that like Bitcoin might actually be one of those major institutions. It might actually be the institution. That Bitcoin in 2009, if you look at people like Adam Back, Dr. Adam Back, Bitcoin was built by cyberpunks.

I often think of it as millennial, but it wasn't millennials who actually set it up. It was like the Gen Xers and cryptographers who built Bitcoin. But millennials are then the ones assuming Bitcoin and are the largest probably voice in the space, both from advocating. and using and that bitcoiners are around the ideas of individualism are both becoming much more conservative in terms of order families return to religion as well too additionally bitcoiners they're not going to like to hear this but we very much so are a collective it's based around individual values but we act as a collective which was on full display during the last election that bitcoiners as a group were actually the ones being catered to

along with libertarians as well too, but we were actually being selected there. So I'm just, that one really struck me, particularly when I realized that Gen X built Bitcoin, because I always thought of it as millennial, but Gen X built Bitcoin, especially if we look at like the prior instantiations or attempts of e-cash and money as well, that I think that may be very centered on what's happening here. It might actually be the new monetary order that we have to stand up. First off, I think you're spot on. Second, I really appreciate bringing new stuff to discussion.

You're clearly interested yourself, Nathan. So I appreciate your questions making me think here. No offense to other podcasters, but I've gone through a lot of forth-turning discussions where the person on the other side of the mic has a cursory understanding, but not that interested. And so I love what you're bringing up. That's that. I think you're right.

It's built by Gen X for sure. That's the pragmatic group. They're like, hey, guys, either we vote harder. we build some new stuff. Let's do our homework. Let's build something cool here. And they did. And I think you're also right that the Gen Xers will, by necessity, they're the individuals against all. And so they don't care about their peers at all, as long as they get what they want. However, the millennials are extremely collective. And so we're going to care about onboarding the less fortunate among us. We're going to care about the perception of Bitcoin,

against for the progressives that maybe on face don't like it yet. And so I think there's also a weird paradox with Bitcoin like you alluded to there, which is that it's the most individualistic capitalist system ever. But at the same time, the only way that we can achieve that sort of like individually preserve the fruits of your labor is if we collectivize and we defend the network and we agree on what version of the software we run. And that is a very social thing. Bitcoin is a weird, it's not just code.

It's code in our human incentives and how we interact with this thing. Like 21 million is only a thing because it's against our interest to change it. Right. And so there is a weird paradox there. And Bitcoin's full of paradox. On your next point, go ahead. I'll just say, hold the point. I just wanted to jump in there super quick as well too.

It's interesting to me that you brought up progressives because I just recorded an interview with Jason Mayer speaking about onboarding progressives to Bitcoin. But related to this is I think that we're actually going to see a wave of progressives coming in here very shortly. And the reason being is that Bitcoin is the money of the rebel. It tends to be the person who feels that they need to defend themselves, that then takes it. And so if the culture has swung to the right and we're going into a reestablishing order, I would expect if the last couple of years were kind of a progressive authoritarian, the pseudo-progressive authoritarianism, you think with the everything kind of going on regarding the culture wars, that I think we're going to see the right now in positions of power with pop,

popularist movement behind it, they're going to try and reestablish order, which will put progressives on their heels and be the reason that they come and explore Bitcoin is because they're actually hurting and need something to defend themselves. I think that's well said. And I think that's also true that people, like everyone on this phone call and probably many in the audience, we've tried orange filling in our damnedists. And we realize that it's not very effective to bash people over the head with the Bitcoin standard until they get it.

And so people find Bitcoin when they're ready, when the teacher's ready, when the students ready the teacher appears, whatever, can't lead a horse to water, right? However, what we know for sure is that when people need Bitcoin, they find it very quickly. And so I think that's the right way to look at it. From personal experience, a little behind the scenes at Swan, we launched in 2020, essentially. And in the early, let's say, first year or so, it was primarily young people, think Bitcoin, Twitter, DCA plans. Then during the COVID money printer era, we saw a dramatic shift. in the customer cohorts.

We saw a huge flood of boomers. I started asking my dad, what's going on? And he said, well, my peers and I look around and we say, our retirement's coming up and we're scared. Why did they print 30, 40% of the outstanding supply in the last three years? Something doesn't feel right. And so the boomers start looking, right? You see BitChat today.

That was very optimistic. Dorsey's privacy-focused chat app. You've got Indonesia. You've got Nepal. young people pushing back on government policy, rightly so, and you see explosion and downloads over the last couple days. So necessity is the mother of invention, more planet dudes. I got to jump in.

I got to jump in, Ben, if you can find it as well too, because it's, it's sorry, it's just two on the nose, because you're absolutely right. So we saw the millennials using BitChat, who was made by a Gen Xer, who was made by Jack, and he even just tweeted out today that it's now doing everything over Tor. that it's using Tor to protect visible too. So again, we have a Gen Xer building something that is then protecting the millennials who are changing and actually assuming the new roles. Beautiful.

There it is. Yeah. So BitChat. Interesting. Actually, the last two conferences that I went to, Bitcoin conferences, they had everybody roll up BitChat and just start kind of, if anybody hasn't played with this, again, in the context of freedom technology and things being built, you know, that I think are a positive for society and for the future. Effectively, this is you don't need internet at all.

You download, you get the app. Once you have it, you no longer need an internet connection. As soon as you fire it up, it'll pull up your your Bluetooth. It'll create a mesh connection between you and anybody within, I can't remember, recall exactly the distance. 100 feet. It should be about, I've seen 100 feet and 100 meters. 100 meters for Bluetooth seems long to me, so 100 feet is what I'm thinking. Yeah, but that mesh network daisy chains through multiple people,

and so that network can extend further. And so you're then linked to everyone near you and everyone near them and so on and so forth. And you can have a large, like anybody, public forum, or you can reach out to any individual. And yeah, so the latest here, BitChat, iOS, and Android now sends all internet connection over tour, full IP address, privacy for all. And then this is the interesting thing here in the context of, in the context of like global protests and things like that. Last week, we observed a sudden spike in BitChat downloads in Indonesia during nationwide protests. Today, we're seeing even bigger spike in Nepal during youth protests over the government's corruption and social media ban.

And yeah, I mean, tools like this being built in times of crisis, where, you know, tyrannical regimes cut off people's access to communication rails are very important. And it mirrors the values of Bitcoin, financial censorship. Again, I do a lot of work alongside the Human Rights Foundation. We see this time and time again, the first things that are attacked to stop movements. What are they? You know, you cut off communication, you cut off finances. And that can completely neuter a movement, an anti-government.

an anti-government or anti-dictator movement can be just like completely chopped off. And I've seen in attending events for the Human Rights Foundation over the past four to five years, I've seen what was met, you know, Bitcoin itself and other technologies like it, what was initially met with extreme skepticism has now become a generally accepted and applauded and understood as needed technology for a lot of these people, not as a silver bullet, but as a tool in their tool belts when facing both financial and communication level oppression. Just incredible stuff.

Yeah. It's, Brandon, for anyone that's listening to, I was trying to think what we're going over that example too. What are the examples or signposts that you've seen that would indicate we're in a fourth turning and that trying maybe give us an idea of where we may be in in that crisis phase. Great question. So key things to look out for. One, everything is political. Yeah. Okay. You look around, there's not a single thing that goes across Twitter or X, whatever we call it, that doesn't get politicized. And you might say, why is that? Not everything's

politics. And under the first, second and third turnings, you would be correct. However, in the fourth turning economic inequality is at the highest point. Our institutions are failing us. We look around, everything's messed up. So that's a time when politics actually matters, right? I think there's another thing that amplifies the everything's political, which is that we're all online now and we all know each other's political views. I think that's probably slightly unique with the technology bent,

but it was still happening in the 30s and all the previous ones. So that's one. The next one would be cancel culture and ganging up on each other. That's an impulse to if you're not with us, you're against us. We got to be rowing together if we're going to get through the crisis. And so that's the left eating itself. That's the right eating itself. That's getting people fired for jobs for saying the wrong flavor of the day, politics

de jour. That's one. Another one would be division amongst the population. And the stipulation here is that in the 30s and 40s, we're going to be a lot of the 30s and 40s, we were extremely divided until Pearl Harbor. What happened in Pearl Harbor? Go to war the next day. Everyone's on board.

All the women making like sewing stuff for clothes and flags and working in machine shops. That's when we create all the machine shops to create ammunition instead of cars, right? And so what we're, what we'd be looking for is something that would unify us in a certain way. Now, we'll save the climax next. So that's, that's the juicy stuff. But divided country, let's talk about that. We have two groups, two populations in the U.S. We do not have one America.

We have two Americas, separate language, separate places to hang out, separate facts, separate media, separate everything. And if you want to look at a stat, actually I'll ask you guys, what percentage of marriages in 2024 were between a Democrat and a Republican? I'm going to go with no more than 11%. I think it's like one in ten tops. I'm going to say single digits, man. You would be correct. In America, it was 4%. Oh, my God.

Wow. Wow. I mean, in the context of today, though, how people think, how people interact with each other, it's everybody has a, in their mind, they have a caricature of who anybody with opposing views is. And it's all the most extreme that it can be. And just this evil, the evil incarnate is what they believe. Even if a lot of people's views actually are somewhere in the middle, everybody's just got this imaginary person in their mind that as soon as you say, I lean on this side of the aisle, you are that.

100%. And let me bring in one more point here to illustrate. So in the third turning, we have things. starting to go bad, but we have enough economic tailwind, enough like built up positivity in society that it doesn't, we don't really feel it right away. And so the political slogans in the 90s, let's say, are all about minimizing problems. We're the best country ever, you know, small little problems, we'll take care of it, don't worry about it. I'm the right guy. What happens in the beginning of the fourth turning? We get Obama's hope and change. We get make America, make America,

grade again, right? That's all, those are all capturing the ethos at the time, which is that everything's effed and I'm the one to save it. Right? So you either avoid the pain or you lean into the pain as your primary psychology and what you're trying to use as a slogan. And so that's just where we are now. I think the media reinforces this problem because their economic model is for clicks or the New York Time. It's for subscriptions. And what do you do if you're in New York times, you pander to the left, you stop being anything remotely resembling journalism, and you're just a rag for your side of the country, which is how you get paid. And I think my dad would say, like, don't talk politics with your neighbors, right? That's like conventional wisdom.

And I think that that is very good advice for a good reason, because what do we do? We do caricaturize the other. We can't help it. It's built into our biology going back from Hunter-Gatherer days. right we're fearful of others we're fearful of other groups and that was a very useful skill to have especially in hunter-gather times if two separate populations come together they either kill each other through war or through disease and so that's built into us and yeah we'd like to say in modern society we sort of use culture as a lever to try to reduce that impulse so we don't just like kill the other people obviously that's bad but we do have that inside of us and right now it gets animated through politics, through media, through the climate.

And I also think hiding your bias on social media is much trickier. And so we kind of know everyone's politics. And we use different language. If you're in a mixed group, which is crazy to say, like people I went to college with with different political views in our late 30s, if you're in a mixed group, people tiptoe around the issues. They like fish to see what your opinion is on a certain topic. and if you're in a like-minded company,

the filter comes off and you have honest discussion. If you're in mixed company, it's this weird fake dance of try not to ruin your friendships because you don't agree, right? And so group chats are truth. Public posting is a lie. I just got to touch on that super quick because you hit something on the nail on the head for me there

in terms of in my previous job, I had to hide my thoughts in opinions actively, very actively, could not share, I actually believed was not in good company, you'll say. And when I first started going to Bitcoin meetups, I thought it was the most energizing thing ever. But what I realized was it was a spot that I could go in and stop using energy to filter and think about everything that I was going to say.

I was in my group and I could just drop the mask completely and be me. So that just really resonated. I did also want to tease out a little bit. So I do want to know what your thoughts are in terms of what the coming climax might look like. And then additionally, with recent events, I would hope that we're getting to the peak of that polarization and derision between tribes. But you've got a better view of this than I do.

I'm curious, your thoughts. I'm going to also tag into as the follow-up to the climax. On the other side of the climax, when you look at the cycle and we have a first turning, we have something anew, it can be positive and it can be positive. it can be not positive, it can be negative, right? What through this period, what do you think that people can do to try to contribute to a positive outcome on the other side of climax? Go ahead.

Awesome. So we got a three part of here. I'll try and keep it together. First one is go through the climaxes as I see them. I'll rank them. Then it's, is there an optimistic picture to paint here? Can we be optimistic that we'll get through this and it'll be better? And then what can people do individually?

Cool. All right. So potential climaxes. I'm pulling this straight out of an essay I wrote in 2020. Bitcoin in the rhythms of history made its rounds on Twitter. Look it up if you want. It's a condensed version of the book. First, third is the book in condensed format.

Second third is my analysis. Generally updated, you know, 20 years after the book or whatever. And then the third part is like through a Bitcoin lens. How does it intersect? So shill's over. I think when I wrote in 2020, four climax potentials, COVID, civil war, total war, call it war with China, or a black swan that I can't really think of. That could be financial collapse, terrorism, cyber attacks.

It's kind of a mishmash of the other ones. But during 2020, I very wrongly assumed that COVID might be the thing. This is like summer 2020. Maybe we all rally against the virus. We put our differences aside. and we go conquer this big challenge together. Turns out it did the opposite. Destroyed families, made everything worse.

It was a disgusting moment in our history. And to be honest, we haven't healed from that moment. I think that's what cemented the divide. And on the tail end of COVID, okay, it's not a big deal anymore. What happens? There was no apologies. There was no make amends. We just go about our day pretending like it didn't happen

and pretending like one side didn't hate the other and the other side didn't hate the other. And so in my honest opinion, this is going to sound crazy, we should have done something drastic to move forward. And what we should have done is publicly executed the people responsible. Crazy. It would have helped. Crazy.

But what I honestly think it would have helped. And the reason is, hey, I'm the government. We screwed up. We got way out of bounds here. This is not okay. We admit it's not okay. And we're going to hold the people responsible for it. We're going to move forward now.

a group. Yeah, it's the, the problem was never the virus. The problem was the response to the virus, and we never got a resolution or conclusion to that, right? Nobody was held accountable. There was no amends. There was no coming back together. We just left that hanging, like, let's just pretend it never happened. It's like having, it's like having a major, like someone, cheated into marriage and you guys just go on pretending that it never happened. It's going to blow up at some point. Exactly right. And I use public execution to be flagrant and illustrate my point. It doesn't literally have to be that, but we needed a resolution that we didn't get. It could be private execution. That would be fine. That's true. That's true. I would be okay with that.

So that's COVID. Next one, civil war. In 2020, I thought that was beginning to become possible in my mind, but the lowest percentage. Total war. So, okay, we've got Taiwan, we've got rising China, declining Europe, declining U.S., we've got Russia, we've got resource wars in the Middle East, we've got a frame petro dollar system. There's a lot vacuums being created there. And when there's a vacuum, major powers conflict, Black Swan we touched on that. So if I had to rank them then, it would have been COVID-1, total war two, civil war, maybe Black Swan three, Civil War four. Now I think it's probably still total war or like proxy war with China. I don't think it'll be like World War II at all. It'd be

like resource war, economic war, plausible deniability. We backed your grid and shut down your grid. We infiltrate your social system in the U.S. and try to cause problems here. It would be stuff like that, deniable stuff. And sadly, I think with the events over the last week here and just the general ramp up since COVID,

I think a civil war in the U.S. is more likely than it's ever been in our lifetimes. It's the one I fear the most. And when people think civil war, they go back to the first civil war, which was like clear battle lines over some ideology, it would be nothing like that it would feel more like at least as i see it i could be totally wrong if it would feel more like uh rogue splinter groups like honestly domestic terrorist groups

um i'm going to just use antifa i don't really know that much about antifa but let's just say antifa has a militant arm on the left and then you have like ex-military militia guys on the right who are like constitutional uh we got to spill some blood to preserve liberty type ideologies So think lots of those splinter groups around the country operating covert missions, and it just becomes scary. In that world, you'd have political violence, like the two politicians assassinated 10 miles from my house, by the way. You'd have Charlie Kirk. You'd have a bunch more stuff like this. And so that one sucks.

That one's horrible. That would mean cities decay even worse. I'm from Minneapolis. I'm very passionate about Minneapolis. and I'm very sad at how the city is crumbled. And I would expect that to continue whether we have civil war or not. So rural land go up, urban land go down. That'd be my bet if you want to bring it in market terms.

If I can just jump in quick, too, the other parallel that you just reminded me of as well is that perhaps even a civil war wouldn't look like the previous one, but maybe secession is back on the table. And maybe that's part of the crisis as well, too, that it's a less violent civil war. But again, we're looking at the answer to the divide in the country. is to divide the country. I think that that is a plausible scenario. I think over the long arc, now let's bring in sovereign individual.

We have technology. We can work remote. Our monies on the internet. We don't need a lot of people anymore because economic value comes from knowledge, more than bodies. Knowledge would include robots building things, by the way. And so in that world, the incentive to have the largest country possible is gone. That is an industrial revolution construct.

more people, more might, more magnitude means you run the world. Now it's about knowledge and information technology. So a world where we go from 300 countries to 3,000 countries, I think the mega trends are pushing us that way. We might be too early in the U.S. It's hard for me to imagine that happening without major problems. But that could be a res. If we do have a proper splinter civil war thing in the U.S.,

that is a way to move forward. Like pick your new country. You can go with your people and stay away from the others. All right, let's go more optimistic here. I'm coming to time. I got to go play dad here in a minute. Perfect. That's bullish in and of itself.

Sorry, say that again? That's bullish and positive in and of itself. Absolutely. I'll go hug my three-year-old real tight tonight after the recent events. Okay, to talk about the resolution here a little bit, let's bring up a quote from 1787, Benjamin. Benjamin Franklin walks out of the Constitutional Convention and he's asked something like, what did you guys create?

You know, what's the deal? What's up with America? And Ben Franklin said, we created a republic if you can keep it. Okay. That's a very, very powerful statement. We created a republic. That is what America is. But the if you can keep it part, that's what we're going through now.

And drawing on Neil Howe, he looks at each fourth turn. as a new American Republic. We essentially stress test the American values. We go through this narrow filter point and we become something new on the other side. Hopefully we preserve as much of the OG American values as possible. We're pretty far from that today. But if we want to be optimistic, this crisis period could send us back to a more traditional or OG American values world, which is separation of powers, transparency, and

of government, individual rights, meritocracy, right? Those are the type of values that made America what it is today. And this like acceptance of mediocrity, collectivism stuff, that is not in our DNA and it's not a successful path for us or anywhere. And so hopefully going back to you got to touch the stove or feel the pain before you change, hopefully that is the lesson that we learn here and hopefully we move towards something like strong family values and separation of powers. I think Bitcoiners are probably the cultural cohort that's the furthest along in that path. I personally went through major transformations with Bitcoin on that way. And I think the closer you are to Bitcoin, it's almost always happening to people.

Everyone in my life, that would be true in Bitcoin land, that is. And so I think through this crisis, we will be done with. it at some point, by the way, this will not last forever. But I think Ben brought up an important point. If we have a next American Civil War here, it will end at some point, and then we will stop the fighting, but America would be very different on the other side of that. We would still feel exhausted and go back to, quote, normal, but the new normal might be something we can't recognize. On the other hand, if the adversary in the climax is external, that typically bonds us all together in a way where we would move forward loving our neighbor as ourself, rather than just like separating

and pretending like it didn't happen. And so it's weird to say I hope the climax is a war, but I hope the climax is external, let's say, because the alternative would be significantly me worse. Let's see. If I'm an individual, what do you do during a fourth term? You want to make yourself anti-fragile. If I only had one sentence, that's what it would be. We're going through a period of rapid change. During rapid change, being anti-fragile is the way to overcome that. I made a list in that 2020 article. I'll highlight a few of these. So the first one, we're on a Bitcoin show, and even if we weren't, I would say this. You need to have your finances in order. Money is optionality. Money allows you to get out of problems.

Money allows you to move your family away if you need to. Money allows you to paper over your problems. So get your money in order and specifically protect your wealth with Bitcoin and self-custody. That is the most optionality you can have as an individual. Not only is number going up, but is a get out of jail free card if the state starts trying to steal assets. I wouldn't be surprised if Social Security gets rated or age extended. I wouldn't be surprised if they nationalized 401ks and IRAs in the U.S. I wouldn't be surprised if they raised property taxes 50% every year for five years.

I wouldn't be surprised of income taxes went through the roof. All those things are on the table. When the state gets desperate, they raid assets. That's what happened in 1933, stealing the gold. Income taxes exploded. So that's what we should expect. The next one is watch your debt. Inflation's going up.

Cost of living is going up. If you're not careful, your salary. all of a sudden doesn't pay for what you need, and you end up in credit card debt. It's over $2 trillion now and probably still rising. So don't get wiped out in volatility. Now, a home mortgage at a reasonable rate within your budget is a good form of debt, but in general, manage your debt. Live below your means.

If we go through economic issues and you or your spouse lose your job or I'm the only breadwinner if I lose my job, that'd be a problem here. So plan for the worst. Live below your means, save for a rainy day. day, that kind of stuff. Multiple source of income is nice. Diversify your geographic capacity. So get a second passport. If you can, start exploring ways there.

That's just reducing attack vector. Don't be cancelable. So if your job requires you to like have a certain political view, make sure you're not at risk there. Either like shut up online or make an income in Bitcoin where the political views are a little bit less relevant. You're not going to get canceled at a Bitcoin company. That's exactly what I did.

Smart. Same. I would say don't invest in the politics to juror. Like don't get riled up on the internet. Go outside, touch grass, hug your kids, like go to the park, throw football around. Like, truly don't invest in the politics as your. It's going to mess you up individually. It's not useful. Culture is not your friend.

Opt out. Be self-reliant. Whatever skills that might mean for you or not to grow food, defend yourself energy fundamentals really and that's all just preparing for the worst hopefully you don't need it be more technical become super literate find community i think those are all very bitcoin things so it's just becoming more uh self-reliant and more skillful in a world where you might need it and i think bitcoiners may tend to be more individualistic myself included however if shit hits the fan being on your own is not the way the metaphorical citadel is the way so you need

community not only do they enrich your life like we're actually starve for community our body our biology needs it and we don't get it so we become horrible so stay close to friends and family call your friends text them when you think about them like maintain that's super important and the last one just stay vigilant pay attention be proactive make a plan. It matters now, right? If society is good, we're all on the gravy train, you can kind of not be as vigilant. But when consequences are serious, it's on your, it's your responsibility to take action, protect yourself, protect your family. And so that's how I think about it. I love that. This has been fantastic. It's tough sometimes to step back and kind of try and take a

a bird's eye view of, you know, where we're at. And, um, I mean, Nathan, we're talking the other day. And, uh, you know, what I, I, I ascribe to, to the fourth turning. I think it is, um, and I, you know, I, I think the idea rings true. Um, you know, I don't think that it's going to turn out specifically one way or the other, but I think directionally, it's, uh, it's very correct just in, in terms of, um, you know, that generational kind of, uh, response to stimuli. And, you know, when you've read it and you kind of understand the concept, it's very different understanding the concept versus watching it play out. It can be very jarring and unnerving. And I know both myself and Nathan have been talking and it's, you know,

days like this or like yesterday are pretty shocking to see. And, you know, the end of it can't come soon enough and I hope that that good people can come together and make a better world on the other side. So Brandon, thank you so much for joining us. Your website, brandonquitam.com, specifically Bitcoin, Rhythms of History. Bitcoin and the Rhythms of History, if you guys want to look that up, that will cover a lot of what has what we've talked about here with some. some graphics and everything. So please do. I'll link it in the show notes after we wrap up as well.

But Brandon, thank you so much. Go be an awesome dad and have a great evening. Yeah, thanks, guys. Really appreciate the chat. And I think two quick points. One, it is very different intellectualizing these things, reading books, looking at charts, thinking versus like experience them in real time. I'll tell you why.

It's a lot better thinking about it than it is. experiencing it. And I don't look forward to this next period, but I do maintain a strong sense of optimism because, number one, we have a long-term debt problem. Bitcoin fixes that. And we have a lack of institutional trust. And Bitcoin properly understood is a new type of digital institution that holds society together in a way that is more anti-fragile than a 12 dudes in a room setting monetary policy approach. And so those are two things that be optimistic about. Again, stay off the internet, go touch grass, hug your loved ones, like care about what

really matters because that is what really matters. And then finally, if you want to buy some Bitcoin and you live in the United States, either as an individual, a business or in your retirement account, check out swan.com or the Swan app. It's a great place to buy Bitcoin. Obviously, I'm biased. I work there. But I'm proud of what we built.

And I recommend checking it out. And if you don't have any Bitcoin, no better time than now. Yeah, 100%. Brandon, thank you so much. Have a wonderful evening. And yeah, enjoy some quality dadding. I'm looking forward to it. Thank you both, gentlemen.

Have a good rest of your night. Cheers, Brandon. Later, sir. Awesome. And Nathan, we are going to continue on. We'll try and keep it relatively tight because I do have dinner here coming up. But there's some other news to cover. So we're going to take just a brief break one minute.

But on the other side of the jump, just a few quick stories. They do lend themselves back to the topic at hand and the great discussion we had here with Brandon in around the fourth turning. But one of the major ones out of the U.S., despite the seemingly friendly, you know, Trump admin and in and around the world of Bitcoin, are we going to see some flavor of the Patriot Act? brought to the Bitcoin and we'll call it Crypto Space. We've got a new article that we're going to take a look at from The Rage and has also been shared by a head of Bull Bitcoin, Francis Pouliot. So we'll be chatting about that and a few other things on the other side of the jump. Give a quick shout out to our sponsors.

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Very, very interesting. This is Francis Pooleyot tweeting founder of Bull Bitcoin. He said, U.S. bureaucrats attack on Bitcoin user's privacy. I strongly recommend Americans read this article. the Orwellian scenario may not come to pass entirely, but it's a signal. If we let them, they will establish that any use of Bitcoin except tracked custodial wallets is, quote, suspicious. And this is an excerpt from an article. The article is one from The Rage, and it's entitled U.S. Government to bring Patriot Act to digital assets. FinCEN director reveals that the Treasury

is finalizing a ban on privacy tools, representatives revive special measures to fight modern threats act. I'm not going to go through the whole article, but I do want to zoom in on what Francis took a screenshot of here and what they view as suspicious. Pooling or aggregating cryptocurrency from multiple persons, wallets, addresses, or accounts. using programmatic or algorithmic code to coordinate, manage, or manipulate the structure of a transaction. It's crazy. Splitting cryptocurrency for transmitting and transmitting the cryptocurrency and transmitting the cryptocurrency through a series of independent transactions. Creating and using single-use wallets, addresses, or accounts, and sending cryptocurrency through such wallets, addresses or accounts through a series of independent transactions.

transactions, exchanging between types of cryptocurrency or other digital assets, or facilitating user-initiated delays in transaction activity. Basically, what is outlined here would be something as simple as having a wallet that generates a new address every single time using any type of coin join. Like if you want forward and backwards facing privacy, and you don't want people to be able to determine your net worth through a simple transaction. Using any sort of swap. So, you know, if you're going from, you know, Bitcoin to lightning, lightning to liquid,

liquid to a stable coin, anything like that, anything that kind of offuscates where you were to where you are now, even intentional or not, that would be out the window. even things that because there is something called timing analysis where people can look at timing of transactions and try to link transactions that are yours based on when you do them and amounts and things like that. And that can be used by, you know, governments, on-chain surveillance, but also criminals that are trying to determine your net worth and if you're a worthy target of them to spend some more time on. It would basically make wanting any semblance of privacy from anyone illegal.

It's crazy. Nathan, I don't know. What do you think about this? Well, it's, I guess speaking of the fourth turning, it feels like this would probably be inevitable. Because if the crumbling institution is the existing monetary system and Bitcoin is the new institution taking over, I don't think they go down necessarily without a fight. Now, again, I think they still have greed motivating them, that people will, politicians have a better incentive to fill their bags and let things pass through than to necessarily try and stop it, depending on how much they're being bribed in the back end.

But one of the things that really stood out to me was the dividing it into smaller transactions. That seems directly in line with the, I figure what the reporting requirements are, but like anything over $10,000 has to be reported, which would hint to me that they're planning on having some like any Bitcoin transaction over $10,000 must be reported to the IRA or the CRA or the CRA or sorry, IRS or CRA. and that they don't want you splitting them up to try and obfuscate that, which I believe in the U.S. carries like a jail sentence penalty for doing so by trying to skirt their limit amount. So that tells me that they're going to put some sort of limit on transaction in terms of what is legal. Now, luckily, it doesn't actually stop them from sending anything. It's a reminder that you want to get a hold of these privacy tools beforehand.

You want to familiarize yourselves with them now. Have as much knowledge in terms of self-custodies as you can at the moment. Things like the individual address thing is just ridiculous. Again, when I can spin up a wallet, when I can generate a new key with pen and paper, good luck actually enforcing these things. You can't keep drugs out of prison. And then we've got now, Bitcoin is a global money. So you just hopefully go to a better jurisdiction if any of these things sort of pop up. But get up to date on the tools. Definitely an indication of the time. Very disappointing from the administration. And it looks like it's trying their attempts to try and get their hands around it probably for tax purposes under the guise of K. K. Y, C&ML. Yeah, yeah, 100%. You know, everything is always, you know, to go after the criminals. But realistically, it's to come after the fruits of your labor. That's how it always ends up being.

The income tax started for the upper echelons, the top 1% of the 1% that would be paying, you know, a single digit percentage on their money. And flash forward to today, if you are, for instance, in Canada and you're living the equivalent of a middle class lifestyle. And so what I mean by lifestyle is not what's considered middle class income nowadays because that is the lifestyle is completely cratered. But I'm talking about the typical, we'll call it the North American dream, owning a home, having a family, being able to take vacations, having a car. Like the stereotypical white picket fence family and the occasional vacation, if you're able to afford that, you're paying probably 40% in taxes.

That's just on your income, let alone you then pay tax when you purchase something, when you keep cash through a phantom tax of inflation. or if you purchase something that goes up in values that you can escape the phantom tax, they charge you a tax on escaping the phantom tax, right? Your capital. You die. You also pay tax. So just at every turn. And so, yeah, it's unfortunate, but this is kind of where we're at.

Now, I do want to kind of rattle off a few quick things that would lend itself to the current era that we're in these, you know, what Brandon was talking about, about the fourth turning and some of the quality. of it, a dissolution of trust in our institutions and how people are reacting to it. So, you know, good morning from James Lavish. The Bureau of Labor Statistics now believes that they overestimated the number of jobs created over the last year by 911,000. Have a great day. So basically, they faked almost a million jobs that didn't exist.

and this is supposed to be the Bureau of Labor Statistics that tells us the state of the economy. To fuck it up that bad. What do you think about that, Nathan? That's a good way putting it, Ben.

The ridiculousness of it, because you often hear, I'll hear sometimes people talk about, like, the efficiency of the market, right? But think about how much misallocation of capital, even just ignoring the monetary problems, misallocation of capital traded on those BLS statistics, and they were out by 911,000 jobs, right?

Faith in institutions, I think this one, it's not, but I think it kind of gets grouped in with academia, rightfully so, and that the knowledge coming from the ivory tower, whether it be our statisticians here at the BLS or at the universities, you can just tell it's hot garbage, right? Why red meat is killing you. Okay, thank you very much. I think I'll move on from there.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. I also did want to touch on, again, dissolving trust in institutions. And actually, people pointing it out, this is very interesting. But this is Russia kind of pointing out what they believe the U.S. intends to do with, well, they say crypto, but I think like what they're talking about in terms of like stable coins and stuff like that as well. I'll kind of, it is in Russian, but there's a subtitle. So I'll enlarge it and I'll mute it. America right now trying to but it's going to by that. Okay, here we go.

The US is now trying to rewrite the rules of gold and cryptocurrency markets. Now, some of his terminology here, I think is kind of bad. Remember the size of their debt, 35 trillion. Okay, makes sense. These two sectors,

crypto and gold, are essentially alternatives to the traditional global currency system. Makes sense. Washington's actions in this area clearly highlight one of its main goals. To urgently address the declining trust in the dollar, I think that is a very real thing. In the 1930s and 70s, U.S. plans to solve its financial problems at the world's expense. True. They exported the inflation and took the gold.

This time by pushing everyone into the crypto cloud. He keeps on saying this term. I think it's horrible. Anyways, over time, once part of the U.S. national debt is placed into stable coins, Washington will devalue that debt. Absolutely. Printer go burr. Put simply, they have $35 trillion in currency debt.

They'll move it into the crypto cloud again, devalue it and start from scratch. They're saying that they're going to print away all the dollars. They're going to drum up demand with their stable coins. That's the reality for those who are so enthusiastic about crypto, he says. Okay, a couple things here. I think he's rightly pointing out kind of what's trying to be done here. I think that U.S. is kind of seeing the writing on the wall. The petro dollar is less and less a thing as time goes on.

Nobody wants government debt. What do we do about it? Their bonds are shit right now. Well, stable coins are a thing. There's a lot of people in other countries around the globe. if I'm living in any other country and my currency is weaker than the U.S. dollar, I'd probably prefer to be holding the U.S. dollar. That can be hard to do. People don't have access to bank accounts, but a lot of people have access to the Internet. And so a U.S. dollar stable coin becomes a lot more compelling, especially if you're living under high inflation, let alone hyperinflation.

And so maybe they drum up additional demand for the U.S. dollar there. Furthermore, though, the people that are actually creating these stable coins, they get U.S. dollar deposits into a bank account. They create one for one the stable coins. What do they do with the actual U.S. dollars? Well, they could hold on to them or they can hold U.S. dollar equivalents. What's the least risky thing nominally to do, especially somebody else's money? you're not taking much of a risk. You buy government debt.

You buy government bonds that nobody else wants. Even if the percentage that you're making is not as compelling, it's zero risk to you. It's somebody else's money that you would have parked in a bank account. Just buy U.S. bonds. You get your whatever, four or five percent for free on, I don't know what the market cap of some of these, like billions, billions, trillions, depending. it could be trillions easily. And you're making 4 or 5% coupon on that.

It's for the U.S. It's an absolute win. And then they can print more. If there's accessibility, demand will be there until people realize that fiat in general is garbage. Nathan, your thoughts. All of that. Plus, you could, they could, don't forget,

they could push out stable coins to the rest of the world because they probably won't be used domestically because there's no need. You've got a U.S. denominated bank account. You've got your visa card. You're being paid in U.S. dollars. You don't have a need for U.S. dollars, but the rest of the world does. So not only did would stable coins allow you to push out inflation to the rest of the world,

especially because of the retail and the rest of the world even more than you already are, by encouraging them to get on U.S.D. But I'm not saying they would, but they also could rug them. They could turn around and say, oh, we kind of got this wrong. We're not going to honor your stable coin. They could have it be, you could have like a Terraluna, basically, where it's redeeming at subpoly. if there was some sort of other condition or requirement that people didn't want them as much,

you could see it actually depeg from the dollar, which would strengthen the dollar and screw those dollar holders around the world. Yeah, 100%. I fully agree. Now, I'm kind of rolling through a few of these things quickly here, but just to kind of lean in, the last couple things into this fourth turning and just like chaos around the globe. Here we have a frat, Fennig's. The world is in chaos.

It characterizes the fourth turning, and this is France erupting in protest. The government proposed $44 billion in cuts, including freezing pensions, slashing health spending, basically promises that were made to the people with the people's money being reneged upon. Again, people to, I mean, France is no stranger protesting. So this is pretty par for the course. This next one, I'm not going to even have the videos on screen, but Dale from Bitcoin Mentor, five years ago, I read the fourth turning and was totally convinced. Here we are. And there's massive upheaval everywhere. East to West, too long political elite have exploited their citizens and the

pushback is happening hard and fast and real time. He's sharing videos of Nepal in revolt. The finance minister was dragged through the streets as protesters torched leaders home. I believe they shoved somebody into the river. Finance minister, pretty sure, yep. Yeah. Did they, I heard something about them killing his family. Is that? I, I, I did hear some things along those lines. I was not able or did not confirm before the show whether or not it actually took place. But they were burning down basically parliament.

So kind of good, yeah, Gaddafi in the streets, I wouldn't be surprised if there was some actual violence there as well. Yeah, yeah. And again, the theme of the show has been the people that are getting tired of this. We're seeing these hints of returning to safety and tradition and community. So safety historically monetarily has meant gold. And we're seeing gold hitting record highs. This was a couple days ago, but gold 3660, just in this image here.

But, I mean, massive spikes in gold. Historically, Bitcoin tends to follow. And Bitcoin I'm looking right now is well over 115 now. So it's beginning to move in the right direction again. So it's 15, 115, 3, almost 115, 4. But we've definitely seen some inklings that Bitcoin may be beginning to follow suit with gold once again. Beyond that, just to the community and a return to a place of moral value counterintuitively. So I just want to jump back to when I first read the fourth turning, the part that I read that I was like, oh, man, that's a shame.

They're way off base here. It was a part where they were talking about how millennials and potentially Gen Z, like kind of that realm, like the subsequent generation, there would be a return to morals, to like a moral fabric of society, a more conservative kind of outlook on things. And when I read it at the time, you know, it was like Cardi B. Wap like on the on the billboard charts and like, and that wasn't that long ago. But like you get the sentiment. Like everything about the culture was saying degeneracy. And what I've seen over the past few years is is a whipsaw of that. Not everybody. There's still a lot of degeneracy going on. But I'm starting to see people return to that. And this is interesting. Church attendance is on the rise and young people are leading the charge. Secular ideology is told young people they could construct their own identities and find freedom apart from God's design. But that experiment has left many confused, lonely and hurting this from the article.

So there is a resurgence in religion. Also, Gen Z. I'm a millennial. So like I grew up and it's just what did people do for fun? They just got wasted on the weekends. Just everybody is just, you know, you have a bender and you're going to bars and everybody's drinking. You're pre-gaming.

You're drinking more at the bar. You get back. You have more drinks. I was not like a huge bar person, but I still would go to friends parties. And I would have big nights. And Gen Z. a lot of them are had don't touch alcohol it's a complete reversal and so what I thought was a complete misfire from the fourth turning when I initially read it I'm I'm now kind of thinking that

they were right I think I see it and I'm curious people that are watching this if you're seeing it too if you're seeing similar things or or it trending that direction I know there's still a lot What degenerate stuff going on. But there's a different sentiment. Do you think that's true, Nathan? No, 100%. Like one of the things I found most interesting is even in Bitcoiners, I find that there's a lot of religious undertones in Bitcoin, particularly Christianity, which from the

personality types that we have in Bitcoin is actually counterintuitive. It shouldn't actually align. We have the architect and logician personality types, which are generally like some of the lowest or the lowest reported strongly religious views. I think it really goes back again to what we're talking about here, that it's in dealing with the chaos of the world. There is some truth in the fact that, like, so for example, I'm not, I'm not religious. I can't necessarily get there, but I'm well aware that Christians have been the best allies that I've had, the ones defending my own individualism. They're the best ones I think on COVID necessarily.

And I, given the choice, it's like atheist or Christian neighbor, I want the Christian neighbor. Like, that's definitely where I see my sort of ally, tribe. I feel much more at home and akin with them. And I think that there's an element even there that it's undeniable that it's a good way of being and particularly to deal with chaos and help you get through hard times. I think we'll see even though it's not necessarily personality aligned with Bitcoiners, I think you'll see it continue to grow as we move into this more ordered first turning of the next cycle. Yeah, yeah.

And I'll echo a little bit of what you said there. I grew up going to Catholic school and somewhere along the line, I kind of, you know, you grew up kind of hating what you're doing and you just, you rebel. And I kind of fell out of that. And again, I'm in a similar vein where I don't know that I can get myself to a place where I'm, I'm necessarily a religious person again. But I also had this deep-seated belief and reaction back then to religious. religion and I viewed it as like in intolerance. And coming into Bitcoin and meeting a lot of the Christian bitcorners and Catholic bitconers and people like that, I've actually found a lot of them to be some of the sweetest people that I've met and some of the most tolerant and some of the people that are very likely while having strong beliefs themselves to be accommodative and to be welcoming and and warm and kind and and to grieve when something sad happens regardless of who it happens to and and yeah

and that's that's kind of shifted my perspective on a lot of things and I I now I value those people I value people that can be warm and and want others to succeed and be happy and so I think that's a good thing so I mean to end to begin rounding this out on a positive note I'm I'm happy with some of the trajectory in terms of the people that I know in and around Bitcoin and their hopes and and dreams for the future. I'm excited about what's being built, the freedom technologies. We're talking about BitChat earlier in the show and and enabling people to communicate with, with, you know, nothing in between with no way to censor. You know, some of the some of the some of the technologies that we've seen, you know, monetary as well, just Bitcoin in general,

a lot of the privacy techniques, despite people's best efforts to stop them, we see them pop up again forked anonymously for all to use, self-sovereign computing, all of this. I think these tools and people with, you know, a strong moral backbone, I hope that, that through kind of the fourth turning and that climax of the fourth turning, that on the other side of it, we can come out with something that takes us back to a place where we can agree to disagree on a number of things, but at the end of the day,

still sit across from each other at a dinner table and not view each other as the enemy and just kind of sort through things with conversation one more time. So that's my hope for the future and the hope that I have for my kids, I'm sure you have for your kids. Do you have anything else to tag in before we say goodbye? No, I guess I would just add that this two shall pass. Things will get better. But I think particularly if you're listening to this, it's on us to actually do it.

And I think if Bitcoiners do take those positions of leadership going into the next phase, that while we'll still have cultural changes between generations, I think it is possible to stop that pendulum from violently swinging back and forth. And I think it is possible to get to a point where we don't necessarily have as cataclysmic of a crisis that we can actually break the cycles at one point. Yeah. Yeah. You know, despite a bit of a rough week here, I'm still hopeful and I'm still glad to be

surrounded by the people I'm surrounded by. You know what? I will just add one thing there, too, just on a personal note. I'm online all the time. Things don't normally get to me. This week really got to me. And I did appreciate other people sharing that as well, too, to know that was not alone that I think, guys, this one is really hitting all of us. There's been a lot of, I'll just say, darkness currently.

And again, it will get better. And if it's bothering you, it seems like it's bothering everyone for a good reason. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I appreciate everybody that joined in. Again, a bit of a departure from our typical show. But I loved having Brandon on and revisiting the concept of the fourth turning. If you haven't read it, you can find it easily on Amazon, pick up a copy at any bookstore for the most part.

And it's a very interesting read and very prescient, given that it was written in the mid to late 90s. So do check it out. At the tail end of the show here, I am going to play our last little sponsor shout out. But actually after that, again, you guys all, you watch the news, you watch the interviews, things like that. but self-custy and using the tools is also important, trying to be as digitally self-sovereign as possible. So at the very end of the show, I also play a little clip pointing you to our learn page. There will be a QR code up there.

Give it a scan and just use the free tutorials and begin your learning journey. Learn how to self-custy and use Bitcoin privately. And if you do need additional help at the bottom of the page, you can find myself, Nathan, and Gary and the rest of the team over a Bitcoin mentor. if you need some kind of premium one-on-one help to make sure that your setup is absolutely solid. But with that, I'm Ben. This is Nathan, and this has been your weekly session. Cheers, guys. Have a good one.

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