BTC Sessions - Currency COLLAPSE Happening NOW – MAJOR Nation About To Go All-IN Bitcoin?

Episode Date: December 30, 2025

🚨 A major currency collapse is happening right now — and Iran, ahuge nation, may be about to go ALL-IN on Bitcoin to escape the fallout. This could be one of the most critical turning points for global finance.Join BTC Sessions as we break down the warning signs, insider moves, and what this could mean for Bitcoin’s next massive leg up.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:http://abundantmines.com/boomersAQUA WALLEThttps://qrco.de/bfiD8gNUNCHUK HONEYBADGER INHERITANCEhttps://qrco.de/bfiDARHODLHODL NO KYC P2P EXCHANGEhttps://hodlhodl.com/join/BTCSESSIONDEBIFI LOANShttps://qrco.de/bfiDCp#btc #bitcoin #crypto

A national currency is collapsing in real time and it's happening in Iran. As trust breaks down, people are scrambling for ways to protect their purchasing power. And the response on the ground is telling. Now, the CEO of Bitwise weighed in on this moment and what he pointed to raises plenty of questions about where people decide to turn when money stops working. Today we're going to connect what's happening in Iran to similar stress we've seen in other countries. why this pattern keeps repeating and why it may be accelerating. We're also going to look at what gold and silver are doing right now and why they could be signaling what Bitcoin does next

as we head into the new year. Stick around. You're not going to want to miss this one. I am Ben with the BTC sessions, and this is your weekly session. All right. I want to welcome to this stage. Co-host with the most Nathan Fitzsimmons of Bitcoin Mentor.

Buddy, how you doing? I'm doing wonderful, sir. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. But I have some bad news. It turns out we're in the wrong business. So I'm now proposing Sessions Daycare. I think that's what we got to move into. That's what we're starting up next. I heard that's lucrative. Very lucrative business. There's a lot of subsidies available if you're running a daycare. I'm sure we'll have a chance to talk about that as well. I heard that's an easy line of work. Yeah. So let's get into Iran first. I'm sure we'll talk more about daycares in a bit. So yeah, what is going on there? Let's take a peek and get us up beside it. Tweet from Alex Gladstein, mass protests in Iran against the collapsing currency. And the original tweet here from Massey, actually who I had the pleasure of meeting at multiple HRF events. Today in Tehran, shopkeepers poured into the streets because their money is becoming worthless. They are protesting the collapse of Iran's currency, but this is how dictatorships crack when daily survival becomes impossible fear changes sides in 2019 economic collapse turned into open rebellion because people realized the problem wasn't poverty it was the regime itself the

regime haven't forgotten that's why they're terrified now and you can see people in the streets uh just lining yeah it's it's not great and so um i did want to bring up this article from uh bitbo here here. Iran Rial collapse sparks Bitcoin calls from Bitwise CEO. Let's see what he had to say here. So this is protests erupted in Toronto on Monday after Iran's real fell to a record low against the U.S. dollar. Locals blame the central bank of Iran's fiscal policies as the currency slide eroded household savings. The Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley said Bitcoin offers a way to protect against collapsing currency. He wrote on X, economic mismanagement, the story of the past, present, and future. Bitcoin is a new way for people to protect themselves.

Pretty on point, I would say. The Financial Times reported the Rial has lost more than 40% of its purchasing power since the two-week war with Israel in June. It is now at around $1.4 million per dollar. Keeping in mind that when the head of the central bank there entered in 20, 2022. It was at around 400,000, I think I was looking up, which is so, yeah, like 60-something, 67%, something like that, two-thirds. Alex Gladstein, again, chief strategy officer of the Human Rights Foundation noted the official rate in the early 1980s was 70 per dollar. That is crazy. That is

insane. So the Central Bank of Iran governor, Mohamed Reza Farzan, resigned amid the protest. And we do have a tweet about that here. There we go. The head of Iran's central bank, Mohamed Riza Fersen, resigned Monday as protests broke up and broken Tehran following the sharp collapse of the national currency. Again, hit a record low of $1.42 million per U.S. dollar.

But yeah, you can see the streets just flooded with people. You know, and what do you do in that situation? I don't know how either of us would. I mean, we would be okay. But can you even fathom seeing the fallout of something like that in a Western nation? I can't fathom. I think it's coming at some point in time here. There's really no escaping. We're dealing with a fiat currency.

What's crazy is that, like, I hope that they can have their kind of Bitcoin light bulb moment, that there's enough people on the ground there that can share that information. This is an alternative way to get away to protect yourselves in these sort of situations. I was also like, I would say, like dark humor. I was like, oh, I see they had their sat sent parody moment a long time ago. that's at least interesting that that happened for other countries, and I'm sure it will come to both Canada and the U.S. all in good time. But what I think people miss,

there's going to be unbelievably amounts of chaos in these sort of circumstances because most people don't really have a good understanding of economics and realizing that our prices and our money is a means of communicating and coordination. So you can almost take the analogy, just imagine me at a country where all of a sudden they couldn't speak to each other anymore. Like all of a sudden, you're saying words, but I can't understand you anymore. It's unbelievably disruptive when something that's so critical for organization, for being able to coordinate between different businesses and people, everything when that's taken out from underneath you. Yeah, it's pure chaos.

And it sucks that it always has to get to the point where that mazo hierarchy of needs where your food and your shelter threatened. Because particularly I imagine somewhere like Tehran, too, it has to get bad enough where you don't fear the government anymore. You fear being able to feed yourself. Like that becomes your primary threat and then you're going to change your position and start to realize. Yeah. So I hope that, you know, we're going to see more of these things across the globe, but I hope at some point in time that this is the last one. Like you get, we don't repeat like, oh, we just need a new central banker. That'll fix it. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's super unfortunate. And again, this isn't, this isn't the only time in recent memory that stuff like this has happened,

right? Like it's, and so it begs the question like, what does have to break to make people actually change? And is it a lack of information? Is it a lack of knowing like what Bitcoin offers? Obviously, we'll talk about gold and silver in a moment. But, you know, what do people use as an escape valve? And so, again, just to kind of harken to some other more recent ones that have happened. So Lebanon, you know, they've had massive currency collapse in the past few years. And, And so again, like Lebanon over, there's, there's, in early 2020, it defaulted on its foreign debt. The value of the Lebanese pound plummeted. And so you had businesses that or basically destroyed overnight, you know, successful entrepreneurs that basically had like, you know, a few dozen dollars left to their name.

I couldn't pay any of their bills or anything. So hyperinflation, like, take a listen to this. Hyperinflation took hold with shocking speed, a loaf of bread that once costs 1,500 LBP, whatever their local currency. I can't quite. Lebanese pound? Yeah, it might be a Lebanese pound. Zero. Yeah.

So 1500 LBP for a loaf of bread. It shot up to over 30,000 within months. Which is crazy. So like, was that 20 times the price? Yeah, 20 times the price within a few months. Fuel prices were even worse. 2023, a gallon of gas was 25,000. It shot up to over 500,000 in just a few weeks. It was impossible to keep up with prices. Now, the interesting thing about this, so my barber is from Lebanon, also a bitcoiner, asks me to pay him in Bitcoin every time I go in, which is great. He's been out to the sat market before. but I asked him about this.

And the response that he gave me was actually kind of shocking. So I tried to bring it up delicately, but I was like, you, man, it's crazy what's happening in Lebanon with the currency there. And he's like, yeah, I don't know, man. It is what it is. I was like, I was taking aback at like how nonchalant he was about it. But he explained like, listen, when it happens. initially, yeah, it's horrible. You lose everything. But when it keeps happening, you can't, if you've already lost everything, you can't lose everything again. If the currency collapses 99%,

if it collapses another 99%, you know, if you had a dollar, you had one cent, now you've got a fraction of a cent. Like that, it doesn't, you're already wrecked. And so people just, they adjust how they operate and they realize, I, I can't keep this money anymore. And this is what we talk about a lot in Bitcoin is people utilize other things to store the fruits of their labor. And so they just adjust and this switch goes off in their hand. They go, don't hold the money, hold other things.

Or as we always talk about in Bitcoin, be a consumer, consume everything. As soon as you get paid, consume, get the things that you want, live your life. And they just don't, there's not really saving. or if they do have saving, yeah, they might have like jewelry or something like that or they invest in their home or whatever. But we see this play out in the West too at a different pace and with a different mindset. Oh, we're investing. Well, no, it's just a different form of the same thing. Your money is horrible.

It's stealing from you. So you stop holding the thing that's stealing from you and you buy other things. but we like do you know what I'm saying here the mentally there's a different disposition to it like there they're like yeah the currency's crap let's not use it here it's like oh we're being good investors why do you think why do you think we approach it that way it's just timeline in the sense that we're doing you're right it's the exact same thing you both identified that your currency is shit and so you're getting away from it it's just the speed at which that it's happening right so in like the the Canadian or the US sort of

of area, they're still even, they haven't, it hasn't accelerated to the point where they're no longer thinking in dollars at the end. They're still thinking like, I'm going to invest and have more dollars when I need them later. They know they can't hold it over a generation, over a decade, even over five years, even though it necessarily one, but they're totally fine still holding it for six months, three months, two months when they go to use it. And so that urgency has not been built in yet. They still aren't necessarily seeing the problem that's there. And even talking to the idea about like, I was thinking, what's the change? What's the moment that, like, we see this?

Because I think we're going to see these happen again. When does a nation actually shift their viewpoint that they're going to adopt something like Bitcoin and get away for this to end this cycle instead of just repeating it over and over and over again? And I still think we're a little bit of a ways out. Because I think the biggest adopters of something like, who are the biggest adopters of a new technology? Well, it's going to be the youth.

And it's going to be probably the black market as well, too. Right? It's good to think about pagers back in the day. How are you getting a whole of your drug deal in the 80s? You're sending him a page. This is what we're going to go ahead and use. I know in the 80s I always page my drug dealer. And so even what's going on right now in Tehran, they'll probably redo the dollar. They'll probably do like another run at the Fiat system.

It's going to have to be because the older generation still has a distrust for things that are digital. They're not a digitally native generation. They haven't been playing video games in game currency their whole life. That sort of value aspect isn't quite, it doesn't sense. sit with their current mental models. But give it a couple more years, millennials are the dominant ones and controls or seats of power. Give that black market, maybe a little more time to develop as well too. And you'll see that shift because you already had it primed to move to such an idea.

Some of you've already interacted with it. If you've got a bunch of people right now that are buying drugs using Bitcoin, you can damn well sure. And in 10 years that the currency collapse ago, I know the solution. Just like we have a whole bunch of OG bitquiners who may have come from the Silk Road. That may have been the first time they ever sought out or bought Bitcoin. Yeah, 100%. 100%.

And it's unfortunate that, again, that people, I think you're honing in on something important. It's if you haven't used it, you don't know. And so it's foreign. And even though there's dire circumstances here, it's still like, well, this is what I know. And I know having a house or I know having jewelry or I know being a consumer, right, which is the most insidious because that's that's the goal right that's the goal of inflation is be a good little consumer own nothing and be happy kind of thing um but i mean again it's it's happened plenty of times before again we've got turkey uh 2019 to 2022 and it's ongoing too like the

inflation is reared back up um but uh we've also had you know Argentina Argentina has just been a mess albeit that it did kind of get reined in a little bit under Javier Millet, but still like look at this timeline, 24.8% in 2018, 53.8% in the year after, and then year to year 36.1, 50.9, 94.8, 14.8, 114.5. And then it's like there's the inflation chart. And just think of that compounding over time, too. just absolutely decimated. But again, like, same thing. We got Venezuela. At first, it was of their own doing.

Now, you know, now with impending conflict with the U.S. and all of that. There's a whole other reason for hyperinflation. Yeah. And so it's just, it's just this, it's this thing that it is perpetually happening. And unless you're in it, it's really easy to dismiss around the globe. And just to point out the, if you're curious about in Iran,

the exchange rate of Bitcoin to you said they reached their sat set parity long ago. Yeah, one Bitcoin is 3.6 billion Iranian real. That is unbelievable, right? That is just unbelievable. But you're right. It's the same thing that we see. with issues with even like foreign conflicts it's always happening to somebody else it's somewhere else

in the world that can never possibly come here we have that that normalcy bias which is so ingrained even though you don't have to go back that far in our history to start to see monetary issues or even like um well let's just go back to 1971 or prior to that or 1913 like it's it's amazing how fast the particularly nowadays the cultural consciousness can shift away from these things again it's somewhere else it affects someone else like how many people are even still like remote we think about what happened during COVID. Like, that's just a distant memory to them. It's like, really, you don't remember that totalitarian lockdown and all the evils that went on

then? Nope, it's gone. We're just back to normal. And I worry that even somewhere like Tehran, we'll have this moment here. But it'll be like, oh, okay, we just need a new central bank and back to normal. And that's always the tactic. Oh, we made a new currency. Yeah, but you're still in control.

Yeah. That's the problem. Whoever's in control, even if it's new people, they get a new guy in charge of the central bank. Who cares? What are the incentives? The incentives are to print more and steal or siphon off the fruits of everybody else's labor in favor of yourself and your buddies. And that's what happens every time. And people are cluing into this in different ways. We said people are, you know, becoming more ardent consumers in the example of my barber Lebanese. And so people like, they get rid of the money quicker. And some people do go to safe haven. Some of them that have been familiar for generations.

So, you know, gold. How has gold been reacting this year with all this uncertainty, you know, even just state side with, oh, we're going to, we're going to lower rates and we're going to print and all that. People see it on the horizon. Well, gold's had a hell of a year. It is, it is finally acting as, as it should, in this type of condition, right? Like it is up, what, 65% on the year? You know, so they've had a great year. They've had over five years, it's up 128%. For a shiny rock, that is admirable.

You know, it's a massive, it is a massive, massive market cap for gold. Do you recall what the entire market cap is like $22, $2.25 trillion, something off the top of my head? Yeah, yeah. It's absolutely a massive. So it is harder to have larger moves. So a 65% change in a year is significant. But again, that goes back to the Western perspective as well, too. Gold has not had a good year.

That is just Fiat currencies doing absolutely horrible. But it's that mental model that like, oh, I have to put my investments in a 401k. I have to buy gold as well too. You're measuring the wrong thing. This isn't gold succeeding. This is the structural planned evaluation of the dollar. That's what you're looking at. Yeah, yeah.

And you see it in other metals too, right? Silver has been all over the news lately. And yeah, silver, it's not giving me the year to date here, but like it's had a hell of a spike, you know, since November, right? It's been, you know, like the $50 range up to the, it hit 80 the other day for the first time in history. Yeah. So there's, there's, the interesting thing here is that golden silver, I'd say right, So the price is reflecting the monetary BS that has been happening.

And right now, what a lot of Bitcoiners and, you know, we'll say naysayers on the precious metal side are saying is, well, look at Bitcoin's year. And yes, we had movements. We absolutely did. We started the year at what, like 90, 90 something, mid to low 90s. we got up as high as as you know 124 125 you know something 26 126 yeah at one point we have a little spike there um but you know where are we right now or sitting at 88 where on the year on the year we're down about 5% on what people typically anticipate to be

a bull run year the year the calendar year following the having if we end below 94K or whatever it is. This will be the first ever red year a calendar year post-having. So that would, in turn, end the four-year cycle

for the first time to the downside. But we want to talk about this after the jump here. We're going to take a quick break. Say a quick shout-out to our sponsors. But we're going to talk about

how people are perceiving this as, well, there are naysayers, but there are some people that are incredibly bullish on this. So we're going to investigate why after the jump. If you are enjoying the show, please do drop a like. It helps a ton. If you're brand new to the channel, welcome in the door. And be sure to subscribe if you haven't already. And we will be back in one short moment. Bitcoin Well is the best place to be buying and selling Bitcoin in Canada and the U.S. And now with Bitcoin Well Infinite, it's also the best place to be making large buys at their OTC desk of over $50,000. Their white glove service gives you fast transactions, no slippage, and the lowest fees.

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Back in and let's talk Bitcoin. Again, we said we're down on the year 5% or so where gold and silver have been taken historic runs. And we were chatting last week on the show, and we pulled up a lengthy tweet from somebody, David, his handle on Twitter, David, E&G, MBA. And he outlined why he designated December 26th as a very important day for Bitcoin price. There was a bunch of options that we're about to expire.

to the tune of billions, hundreds of million? I can't remember. Oh, yeah, no, I'm pretty sure. It was a lot. Much expiry. Much expiry on contracts. Yeah. And so that day has lapsed.

We didn't see significant movement. We seem to still be pinned between the 85 to 90K range. It's just like I saw it pop up. I'm looking at my little brain's deck here in the background. I saw it pop up. I'm like, oh, we're going. getting close to 90, smack right back down, like clockwork, back and forth, back and forth. So let's take a look at what he says post December 26th.

No meaningful changes. What the hell is going on? So reading here, David, tactical delay, why the failed breakout is actually a more compressed and bullish spring and a path to a year-end, 219-K. He's obviously referring to year-end 2026. No, it's tomorrow. It's tomorrow, damn it, Ben. Not tomorrow.

Yeah. Okay, so on December 26th, the market expected a massive volatility release as 60%, 327 million of gamma expired. Instead, price remained flat. This was not a failure of the bull market. It was a mechanical repressurization event. Here is the mathematical reason why the market didn't break, why it is currently coiling, and why it leads to your end,

219K, 2026, everybody. One, why the release valve jammed, the Great December Roll. The volatility explosion failed to materialize for one specific reason. Traders didn't leave the table. They just bought more time. Instead of letting positions expire, which unpins the price, the market executed a massive coordinated role. The action, institutional players sold the expiring December contracts and aggressively bought

January contracts. The result, the dealer, short gamma, exposure didn't vanish. It was simply transferred 35 days into the future. The numbers. The old trap, December 27th, gamma has withered to 17 million, only 6% sorry, 6.8% of the total. The pin is gone here. The new trap, January 30th,

gamma has swelled to 93 million, which is 37%. The diagnosis, the can was kicked down the road. The suppression wall that held Bitcoin at 87K in December has been rebuilt at the exact same level for January. Why is this bullish? Paying rent to wait.

If the market were bearish or exhausted, traders would have taken the liquidity event on December 25th, to cash out. They didn't. Paying the premium. The term structure is that contango 28% for December and 39% for January, rolling these positions is expensive. So to continue moving forward, it's very expensive to do so. So the signal, smart money is effectively paying rent to keep their bullish exposure alive. You do not pay a premium to roll a position unless you mathematically expect the eventual breakout to exceed the cost of the role. The conclusion is that this wasn't a failed breakout.

It was a kinetic loading phase. The market is compressing the spring tighter rather than letting it release prematurely. Now, as I was reading this, I was like, why can't they just keep doing this? He addresses that. So why this cannot happen forever? The physics of the pin. What will keep this from happening every month? The market cannot perpetually rule this position.

containing a price span against fundamental inflows requires energy or capital and willing counterparties. The physics of the options market guarantees this suppression mechanism will eventually break. The cost of carry. So the dashboard shows charm exposure at negative 18 million, meaning this is the daily cost of time decay. The holders of these calls are bleeding millions in value every day the price stays flat. Eventually, they are mathematically forced to either exercise by the spot or capitulate. Close. Both actions shatter the pin.

So the gamma steepening, the wall gets harder to hold. That's the wall of cell pressure, keeping it below a certain level. So as we get closer to January 30th, the gamma curve becomes vertical. The consequence is that today, a $500 move requires moderate dealer hedging. By mid-January, that save $500. move will force dealers to buy or sell massive amounts of Bitcoin to stay neutral. The pin becomes unstable and eventually unmanageable. And so he outlines his path to 226. He says the beach ball effect. I like the analogy. The market feels dead because implied volatility of 28% is crushed while

open interest, 276 billion is at record highs. This is the definition of a mechanical coil. This is the internal feeling we've been having all year the like why the F is Bitcoin crab walking when every day all day we hear it there's so much buying everybody's so greatest Bitcoin you know greatest ETF rollout of all time all of this stuff sailors smashing by all the time why are we crab walking so I bought like a hundred bucks it should have gone up yeah come on my my $20 DCA didn't make a debt What? So think of Bitcoin right now as a beach ball being held underwater by a mechanical arm. This is the dealer pin.

So the current state. The force down is the call wall at 90,000 caps to the upside. The force up is the ETF inflows. Ibit FBTC. They're buying the underlying asset. The result is potential energy accumulates. The longer price stays flat while inflows continue, the more of the more of the violent, the eventual snapback. The failure point, January 30th or sooner, when the charm bleed

forces the longs to act or the gamma steepening makes the pin impossible to hold, the mechanical arm breaks. He's saying the release, 90 to 226K, stage one would be the squeeze breaking 90K forces dealers who are short to panic by Bitcoin to hedge. This drives price to in and around 100 to 110k within days. So a quick sudden movement. Stage two, the vacuum, he says, above 110K, there's almost no sell side right now. There's no liquidity. It's a big air pocket. Stage three would be price discovery. With the suppression removed, Bitcoin repraces to match the accumulated ETF inflows. The target of 20K and 219K aligns with the power law projections for late 2026, accelerated by the catch-up from this suppression period.

So the final verdict he says, the December roll brought bears 35 days of survival, but it guaranteed that the eventual move will be vertical. The spring is now more compressed. What I'm going to say is I would not be surprised to see another role, but I do agree that it can't go on forever. You can't just say this price will stay down forever. It is expensive.

So, Nathan, I'm curious, your take here. Well, one, funny enough, because I've been talking about this guy, like, I haven't been at all emotionally bullish, like, all year long. It's like, I think it's going to go up near the end, but like, I never felt any sort of like, no drive. I don't think I've been as bullish as I am. And it's not for me, just reading that. I don't think I've been as bullish as I am currently in probably all the year. I don't know why. There's some heuristic.

There's something in the back of my mind that's saying, everyone's bearish. everyone thinks this is done. This is great. I have seen this movie before. Let's go lower. Let's go harder. Let's go back to 58K. I know exactly what we're rocketing to afterwards.

So I agree that there does seem to be some, this channel forming basically between the call to put options, that they're really trying to maintain that ban and keep those contracts out of the money. I also thought it was very interesting that it was 219K. Like, we're never giving Kaiser 220. It's not happening. We're not doing 220K by end of year for Max Kaiser. It could be 219 just to absolutely bother him and piss them off.

This makes sense to me. I cannot give you a bearish case for next year. I can give you a bear's case in the short term in terms of like economic decline, monetary problems like we're seeing in Tehran, we're seeing dollar. So for me, the gold and silver run is reflective of what's coming, that are monetary metals are a flight to safety. They're, they're an insurance for impending chaos. But like it looks like things with even like the US and Russia are getting a little bit better.

I'm not hearing about Venezuela right now. We've got the new Fed chair coming in. They're talking about like tax paybacks and, you know, two grand to every new person born in America. 50 year mortgages and we've got the doves taking over like there's japan is seeing problems you know they're trying on the liquidity taps again i cannot give you a bearish case for next year i can give you like a neutral at worst that like nothing happens and we kind of crab walk around the same but i completely agree that this the price action does not feel like bitcoin price action and i don't think it's i i do

think that we do have some short term funny business between the biggest players going on at the moment i i'd see i i'll just again i'll just put it to 219 end of year, like, yeah, that, yeah, totally would buy that. I think the best part is, is that if it's 219 end of year, but it's just that grind upwards with no spike up, I think that would just like bore people to death still. We still might not even see retail show up if there isn't any quote unquote excitement at some point in time. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think I wouldn't be surprised to my rational mind keeps on. on saying like whatever you believe is going to happen, me personally, whatever I believe is going to happen,

the opposite is going to happen. So like this is just, I'm trying to think what would be the most Bitcoin thing to happen? And you know, right now a bull year ending bearish is very Bitcoin. Yep. Hitting a new going below previous all-time high on the bear market last time, very Bitcoin. new all-time high before having very bitcoin um and so like this is just a continuation of that crab walk through a bull a supposed bull year and then ending negative very bitcoin also a supposed barrier being up significantly would be very bitcoin but in saying that am i ruining it i don't know

it's funny because i feel like the most bitcoin thing that could possibly happen here is all of that Plus, this coiled spring theory from the kicking the can down the room for the contracts, is that you do see a moment where Bitcoin just rockets enough to actually get retail to, like, FOMO back in, and that's the top for the year. Like retail shows up right at the top of a little bit euphoria, and then, okay, let's go reset to maybe where it would have been, had they not been this compression. Yeah, yeah.

You look for OTC desks with lineups down the street, much like we saw with gold. And then call that the top. 100%. Again, we're talking bullish scenarios here, but we'd be remiss if we didn't take some examples of devil's advocate here. I don't think they're right, but let's just chat about it here. Luke Groman, previous Bitcoin bull, not bullish. Bullish no longer.

Luke Groman trims Bitcoin risk, still backs debasement. So what did he have to say? He says that the debasement backdrop remains intact, but he is dialing down Bitcoin risk as market signals deteriorate. He told the Risk Reversal podcast a move towards $40,000, the $40,000 range in 2026 is possible. Nathan, how do you feel about this? I feel like the word possible is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there. It's like, yes, it's possible. It's not in my likely scenario.

And there was a few other things. I forget, it was a TFTC, I forget who Luke was speaking to. And I like Luke, friend of the show, want to have him back on. He's a wonderful man. I get it. He's got his newsletter. He's got tons of things. He can't dive in anything.

I remember seeing like a clip of him making, I think it was a bit of an offhand remark about like concerns around quantum. And as soon as I heard that, I was like, ah, okay, you're listening to noise. You're not getting any signal here. I'm not surprised. Yeah. Yeah. It's unfortunate. Yeah.

So he said that Gromans view is process driven rather than, you know, he said that Gromans view is process-driven, rather than a call that Bitcoin is dead, he said gold and some equities are currently expressing the debasement theme more clearly than Bitcoin. He also flagged three issues. Bitcoin lagging gold, technical trend damage and renewed quantum computing headlines, exactly as you're saying. So the thing that stands out for me is there's a stat where it's like, especially for Bitcoin, this is true.

Time in the market beats trying to time the market. If you miss the top 10 days of Bitcoin's upside in a given year, you are down for the year. Even if it's the most spectacular bull run around historically that we've ever had, if you miss those days, you are down for the year. You're screwed. And so him saying, I'm trimming this because I think it could go down, communicates that he either hasn't heard that stat or thinks that he can outsmart that stat. And I don't think that's a winning tactic.

I completely agree. I just want to add to that as well because it's a wonderful point that you're making. It's a really smart point is that Bitcoin is not an asset for smart people, smart as smart traders, right? It's not something that you play around with that you get an edge by going into the research and looking at, Oh, okay, I can see the mortgage-backed securities we're having issues here. Bitcoin is the savings technology. You're right. The winning strategy is buy it and do nothing.

And that can be really hard for some people to just sit on their hands and wait. It's not something that's meant to be traded. It's not something that you're going to get ahead of it or it's just going to burn you every single time. It's the don't think about it asset. It's the you don't have to do research asset. It's the you understand how to hold themselves custody. You research that aspect. But in terms of markets, you just keep stacking.

You got more this month than last month. You're winning. Yeah, yeah. Now, again, I like Luke. I think he has some great takes on stuff. I disagree with him on this take. I don't think it will be a tactic that pays off in the end. Now, somebody that I think is way off base in the bear territory is Mike McClone. Senior commodity strategist over at Bloomberg Intelligence. He said, sometimes being wrong is part of the pain for the game. I was wrong about goal. breaching two grand resistance in 2021 to 23. The seed for $40 crude oil was planted by the surge above $100 in 2022, and Bitcoin's rally above $100,000 may have sparked a cycle back towards $10,000 potentially in 2026. He goes on to say wealth creation, reversion will likely drive the next recession

led by collapse and highly speculative, speculative unlimited supply digital assets most of which track nothing firstborn bitcoin is down only 5% 2025 though December 14th through December 14th i've been wrong about a sustainable declining u.s treasurer yields and the stock market it may be time in 2026 again a couple things here 10K, that is a ballsy call. Like that is one for the record. Isn't it funny how it's always round numbers too?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he probably wasn't didn't think Bitcoin would ever hit 10K in the first place. Furthermore, he, the indicator that he

doesn't understand is this. He's grouping Bitcoin in with highly speculative, unlimited, supplied digital assets, unable to discern between Bitcoin and crypto. That's what stands out to me. It's like if you don't understand that Bitcoin was the creation or, you know, somewhat would dub it the discovery of digital scarcity and that every replication thereafter is a perversion

of that that can be manipulated and changed, then you are going to be. to make this mistake every time, I think. 100%. It's the quick heuristic to know if you're dealing with somebody who's taking the time to understand the technicals and the subject matter enough that you can consider their opinion, right? We don't have time to think about everything today. We've got to move through stuff a little bit faster.

It reminds me a lot of the like, what is a woman question? Because I can ask you that. And based on how you reply, I can dismiss or I might be curious what we have to say afterwards, but I can probably pretty quickly dismiss you. And so if you say Bitcoin and crypto or Bitcoin and digital assets or cryptocurrency in general, then whatever your opinion is on Bitcoin, I'm sorry, I've got time for it. I don't give a shit. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I mean, it's fair, right? Like, you can tell very quickly through somebody's vernacular where they sit at their education in Bitcoin. Somebody says, I'm ready to invest. You're like, it's saving. You have work to do. When somebody says they want to buy some crypto, you're like, oh, you got, you got.

a bunch of work to do. Again, same with like the quantum, the like you can tell certain things the way people phrase things where they're at and you can, it's very nuanced for people outside of the realm, but if you're in Bitcoin long enough, there's certain words and phrasing where you just kind of get, yeah, I see where you're at and and yeah, it can be a definite negative, but it at least informs you as a listener. It blows my mind quickly on that, too, is just how, like, again, really like Luke, how much money you could have invested in Bitcoin, but you don't understand how the signature scheme works, what a transaction input outputs. You could have so much on the line, but you never want to, like, get under hood and see how the engine actually works, because that would alleviate probably a lot of your concerns. Yeah, that's the other part of it.

Like, it's very different for something where it's like, okay, gold. I get somebody, somebody understands, you know, 5,000 your history. You can't, you know, alchemy failed like you're not going to create gold out of nothing kind of thing. Like it's, it's there's a historical precedent where you can, you can without having to go through the, the chemistry of it, understand. Whereas with Bitcoin, it's, it's, it changes the course of human history in my life. opinion, but it's also new. And so there's more legwork to do and understanding why it changes the course of human history. And if you're, yeah, if you've got a lot riding on that, on this very new thing and you don't understand that, then yeah, shit like this is going to

spook you. Oh, gold's going up faster in it than it in this subset of time. Which quick shout out, promote myself, dropped a podcast episode with TC just this morning. And we did just that. We went through the technical understanding and break down some of the components of Bitcoin so that you can feel relaxed about like quantum threats and AI and hack and what's going to happen and have a better sense of the whole ecosystem and how everything works together. So if you're a little bit shy on the technicals, you don't quite get how things like the difficulty adjustment works, what miners are actually doing, 100% worth of time, throw it on, cook dinner, you'll be golden.

100%. Yeah, T.C. is so well spoken. I love chatting with him and him on his spaces every day. He's just a wealth of knowledge. and creator of time chain calendar. So go check that out for sure. Now, I did, there is a, so both these gentlemen, McLaughlin and Gromman, obviously precious metals people as well, right?

Like they're big into gold and silver and they're definitely heavily allocated there. And, you know, that's their position. And, you know, gold bugs had their victory lap earlier this year. Silver bugs are pretty loud right now. But Simon Dixon, who you also had on with Dr. Jack Cruz recently, killer interview. Go check it out if you haven't seen it. But he had a pretty solid clapback to everything here. And so I'll show his tweet here.

Simon Dixon, I'm bullish on silver and gold because the financial industrial complex are strategically weakening the dollar. That makes sense to me. For everyone DMing me about silver outperforming Bitcoin this year, here's the silver chart from when I first started advocating for Bitcoin. Enjoy your moment. Zoom out. But remember, you don't own silver unless you can hold it in your hand. And the chart speaks volumes. This is Bitcoin priced in silver over time. And I'm just going to scroll down so that you can really experience what you would have experienced holding

silver instead of Bitcoin over this period of time. Again, there's probably some celebration here. There might have been some celebration here and maybe here and maybe here and now people are losing their minds and celebrating here. But to see the full effect of what you experienced in that time, that is crazy. This is this is Bitcoin over time. And it's for a new monetary asset that is literally the most scarce money that humanity has ever known, this is the reality for that over time. And silver is more scarce than a lot of things. Think of other run-of-the-mill stuff priced in Bitcoin over this period of time. Same thing happens with gold.

Same thing happens with housing. Same thing happens with other valuable things as well. those valuable things, you know, they can be valuable versus the dollar. But over a longer timeframes, look at what Bitcoin does to everything else. It makes it cheaper. Don't. Don't be like the idiots in Toronto who think they're investing to get out of Canadian dollars. Be a little bit more like people who might have woken up in Tehran right now. Switch your denominator. This is happening everywhere. This is happening to everything. If you're not measuring it in terms of Bitcoin, you're looking at an illusion. Yeah, exactly.

I want to round out this section with a couple more bullish calls for the coming year. And so this is the KKM Financials founder. So they're a research-based investment firm out of, I'm trying to recall. Chicago, I believe. I got very concerned that when you started reading the name, I didn't know what it was. And we got two letters in. It was, oh, boy. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

They really dodged that bullet there. But let's take a listen to this clip, super short of their founder, what he says about Bitcoin moving in. How about Bitcoin and the pullback we've seen here? Well, Bitcoin has really been interesting this year in 2025 because it was so lock and step. It was the risk on asset. If you put a NASDAQ 100, the QQs next to Bitcoin, they were lock and step until April. We saw those trade tariffs really decouple that risk on correlation. So as you've seen profit taking, I haven't seen a back and fill all the down to 76.

which I would like to see in the Bitcoin futures before we resume. But there's so many new organic buyers, meaning the platform, the ability for investors with their advisors or through their advisors, they can now allocate. So I think you will see Bitcoin go back over 100,000. But right now, people are a little shook. When you see a 30% drop, you have to be considered. This isn't equities. This is Bitcoin.

It's very common and usual to have these type of pullbacks, but you have to have the stomach for it, Morgan. You said something interesting about this guy when you were listening before the show. You said it didn't sound like you're typical. It didn't sound like the typical like an investment or like a head of a hedge fund or investment firm or whatever it is. I found it really interesting because that whole idea that like 30% drawbacks are typical in Bitcoin is usually a point that we're throwing out there.

It's the thing that we've gotten used to it. I found it very, very, I don't know. It's almost like our memes are penetrating actually into Tradify that he would reference that point as well too. Pull back to 76K, I wouldn't be surprised with that. I think that's roughly where like the cost of production is for mining right I know that's a bullshit stat for largely, but it gives you kind of a sense. So I would be totally fine.

I'd have to pullback to 76A. Also, quick side show request, audience, please help me out here. I don't know how you get on one of these shows, but I want to put Ben in a suit on one of these shows. So if anyone has a connection to like CNBC or something, hit us up. I want Ben to be there and giving one of these bases. It's almost like an after game speech. Like, you really don't say a whole lot, but it looks cool. I love to raise a whole bunch of worry over relying on ETFs.

Oh, that'd be a few. fun one. I would love to get on and talk about that and say how self-custy is the way and there's so many better options than sitting your money with an ETF. That would be good. I think I'm not going to comment on like what the market as a whole is doing. They have their pundits for that. But yeah, I would enjoy chatting about the virtues of self-custy. However, another Bitcoiner did hit up one of these shows. Corey Clipson was on and he was talking about what is likely for the room to come. Brian, let's bring up Corey here and take a list of what he had to say.

Make the bull case for Bitcoin and other cryptos right now. Brian, you're the lucky charm for Bitcoin and we're here to usher in a nice new rally in 2026. So yeah, it has been, it has been a rough fall right after a nice rise. Remember, we actually touched 73K before that rise up to 126 and now we're settling into kind of the high 80s. It's been bouncing between 85 and 90, maybe 91 for a couple of weeks now. You know, I think the bigger story, if I zoom out, is these four-year cycles that we got so used to in the Bitcoin space where there was a bull market peak in 2013, 2017, 2021, followed by the price never. actually reaching that level the following year. So there was never a time in 2014 where the price surpassed that high of 2013. Same thing for 18 versus 17, same thing for 22 versus 21 with

the FTX collapse and all that. And I think because we didn't see this astronomical price rise in 2025 that you might have expected if you still believed in those having driven cycles or liquidity driven cycles or whatever it was that was causing that for your cycle, because there wasn't an astronomical rise, it's hard to imagine some precipitous fall from here. It seems like there's plenty of institutional money and government money on the bid and lots of people buying and more and more people coming in. Adoption in Bitcoin is kind of a one-way motion. People don't tend to get into Bitcoin and then get out of it.

They generally stick. It's just a matter of how much they buy. And so I think we have more than a 50% chance is how I handicap it of a new all-time high in 2026. So I actually do expect that we'll see a. of 125k next year. Ooh, I like how he laid that out there. Cautious, but optimistic.

I think that's a solid play. And I mean, seeing that beyond, instead of absolute certainty, actually makes me more bullish when there's caution. 100%. It's when everybody gets, like, it's just human psychology. We get those euphoria moments and everybody's pumped. That's when we got to want. watch out that someone's going to try maybe take our legs out from under us.

This, like, even from the head of the U.S. exchange is only being like 50% plus one, cautiously optimistic about next year. Now, every, every spidey sense is going off right now and be like, next year is, I think it's going to be an up year. I really, really do. I'll bet anyone in the chat, a pint of beer at the, like, the Vegas conference or something. I think we're going to be up.

I think next year is going to be a, I think it potentially could be a banger. Like, if we felt like we never even got that retail moment, right? If we get, if Navidia and tech stocks get boring and Bitcoin gets exciting again, everyone's got like their wealth simple, their Robin Hood, even Square, right? You got cash app and stuff. Watch people rotate in. And I'm not saying that retail can necessarily move it at the price of the size that we're at, but they can still have an impact.

And it's definitely a sentiment indicator. Yep, 100%. And we'll see. I would love even a moderately higher price above previous all-time high in 2026, even just like, you know, getting to 1.30, to me, the breaking of the cycle, but then seeing an up year and an expected down year would be bullish as hell. It changes everything. All the dynamics about expectation of when things should happen or out the window, which means

that any one time things could happen to the upside. And it's more a game of how many people get it and how many people are acting on it and how many people are going to play stupid games, like betting it will stay down, will get wrecked. So we're going to, on the other side of the hop, we're going to say a quick shout out to our sponsors, but don't go away because me and Nathan are going into business. I think we want to really expand the channel. And Nathan, you had an idea for what was the line of business you wanted to get into? Sessions Daycare, right?

We'll have session snacks, sessions daycare. We can have 99 kids in one building and collect like $1.15 million would be wonderful. I feel like Minnesota might be a good place for that. I think that's where we're setting up shop. Awesome, awesome. Well, we're going to talk about that. We're also going to talk about a little bit of why Canada sucks. And a special Christmas present from the European Central Bank that they dropped Christmas Eve.

Thank you, Chrissy Lagarde. We'll talk about that all in a moment. If you're enjoying this show, make sure you drop a like on it. If you're brand new here, welcome. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss an episode, and we'll be back in one minute. Looking for a simple and secure way to manage your Bitcoin on mobile, Aqua Wallet has you covered. 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 transfers easier than ever.

Plus, it even supports stable coins giving you ultimate flexibility. Build on open source code, Aqua is transparent, trustworthy, and perfect for beginner and pros alike. Ready to upgrade your Bitcoin experience? Click the link in the show notes or scan the QR code on the screen now to download Aqua Wallet today. Securing your Bitcoin doesn't have to be complicated or invasive. With Nunchuk's Honey Badger plan, you get state-of-the-art multisig with built-in inheritance planning and no KYC required. Nunchuk is trusted by users to secure billions of dollars in Bitcoin. Badger Plan offers 204 assisted multi-sig guiding you step-by-step on mobile or desktop.

It works seamlessly with hardware wallets like TapSiner, Cold Card, Jade, and plenty of others. So you're always in control. Plus, with non-KYC inheritance planning, you can ensure your Bitcoin goes to your loved ones. No private info needed. Take control of your Bitcoin today. Click the link in the show notes or scan the QR code on the screen to check out the Honey Badger Plan. DeBify is the best and easiest way to borrow against your Bitcoin in a non-custodial way.

Funds are held in a multi-sig escrow where you hold a key, and the platform allows for excellent hardware like the cold card Mark 4 and the Q. You have access to flexible conditions, the best rates, and institutional grade liquidity. If you're looking to make use of your capital, don't sell your Bitcoin, borrow against it. You can head over to debify.com to check them out or simply scan the QR code on the screen. All right, Nathan, are you ready to launch Sessions Daycare? I am. I think it'll be a wonderful, wonderful business. We had a ton of capacity, but this just in.

There's no more space, so don't bother calling us. Shucks. And I just got the sign fixed. Yeah, stupid. Of course, we are referring to the absolute. mess that's going on in Minnesota recently. And how does this relate to Bitcoin? We'll talk in a second about things that enable this. But first, can we just appreciate what's going on?

So let's watch this clip, first of all. This guy is named Nick Shirley. He independently went to all of these daycare centers around Minnesota, trying to find what was going on. There's so many of them. And he can't seem to get a hold of anybody. Let's watch. Here in Minnesota, massive fraud is taking place within the government and the Somali population.

Here, this building alone, quality learning center, is a daycare, yet they spelled learning wrong. And they said, leering. This daycare alone in 2025 has received $1.9 million from the government. And the strange things about these child care centers is, There's no one here right now. It's midday on a weekday. And if you were to try to go inside, it's completely closed and the windows are all blacked out.

No one's working midday. Children should be in here. And this place is licensed for 99 children. And this is the outside. There's no windows, no nothing. And like I said, they literally spelt the word wrong on their sign. This is open and blatant fraud taking place here inside of Minnesota. The government is complicit with this.

And this is just one of the hundreds of child daycare centers here inside of Minneapolis being ran by the Somali population. It's sad that it's happening here in Minnesota and it stinks that it's happening and it's being labeled on the small population. However, that's just the facts of what's happening here inside of Minnesota. $1.9 million for this daycare center that can't even spell learning right. Okay. I watched the entire 45 minute walkthrough of him.

this other guy who's been investigating this for a number of years. And they went from location to location and knocked on doors. They went to buildings, not just for daycares, but also for healthcare centers. And they walked around like these giant kind of warehouse type buildings with multiple offices in them. There was one that was all designated for healthcare. And every business inside of it was a healthcare provider. some of them had three health care providers listed for single offices and they walked around.

Most of them closed and locked and nobody in there. And then they would walk into some and he'd say, hey, can I get health care here? What are your rates? And they'd be like, no. It's like, what? Can I have your rates? And they'd say, no, it's okay. What do you mean?

It's okay. Like I want, can you refer me to one of the other health care providers in this building? And then it'd be like, I don't know. I don't know about that. You're like, oh my God. And so what is happening is that the government is effectively funding and offering these huge grants for these programs for these daycare centers for health care. There's another one where you give rides to people to and from non-mergency medical appointments.

And there's just vans that are just sitting out empty, haven't been moved in months, or they'll see them driving, but never with a passenger. And so it's just, it's fraud to the tune of billions of dollars as they were kind of working through the math. And so how does this relate? And maybe Nathan, I'll get your take on this too. But in general, if I want a service and I take my own money and I go and I purchase that service, I will know that my money purchased the service that I got. When the government extracts money from the populace,

further exacerbated by being able to extract value from the populace, not only from taxes, but also by printing money at will and running massive deficits. And then has basically the ability to write blank checks. to people and say, provide this service to the populace, there's no direct check on the authenticity of those things. So by having the government involved in this stuff allows for this type of massive, massive fraud. Nathan, would you like to chime in here? This is basically the entirety of government spending.

Like those giant omnibus bills, what do you think is getting shoved in there? It could be a little bit more sexy than Minnesota daycare centers, but it's all the same idea. Why do you think lobbying is so unbelievably profitable? It's because they're going to lobby to get favorable conditions or subsidies or grants or whatever they need for their organization. Remember, like the green craft that seems to have died down recently, but in Canada, we have tons of this green fraud. Look, there was like Nancy Pelosi and everyone that was involved in approving all these green spending bills just happened to own the companies that directly benefited from them. Weird, so strange, right? And even now, right now, we're seeing what you see it with war as well, too.

We see it with basically going directly to the military industrial complex or just laundering money out. The whole point of like the government apparatus basically is to extract wealth from you. And then they have a whole bunch of stupid Fiat games in order to get it out. So this is like tip of the iceberg, man. In Canada, they were doing the Denver COVID. They gave away, what they called them? Basically the stimmy checks in Canada that were going out. Yeah, the Serb.

That's right, right. The serve checks going out. There was no check on them. You said to go online and fill it out. Like you were supposed to be unemployed or not have income coming in. But there was massive fraud in there because it was the same sort of thing. It was like, hey, did you do what we told you to? Totally did.

Check box, get checked. And people will absolutely do that, right? It's always that we had the app, the arrive app, same sort of thing. The amount of government projects that are just funneling money to similar sort of daycare centers. And to your point, like I'll try to illustrate it quickly, the main problem that you have there is you can basically think of it like a four by four grid, right? You have money that's yours and money that's not yours and money that you're spending on yourself and money that you're spending on other people. The best sort of situation is it's money that's yours and you're spending it on you. You will be careful with it.

It will go to things of value for you. You're more direct with it, right? If it's somebody else's money, but you're still spending it on you, you still be a little bit more cautious about it. The worst possible scenario is it's not your money and you're not even spending it on yourself, which is exactly what you see these government programs. So there is no accountability. It's all just basically going out the window. And of course, it's being defrauded. This is tip of the spear.

Yeah, 100%. And again, what I will say is that, you know, I think this is legitimate fraud. It's super bad. I will also say, don't let this distract you from Epstein. That's still a thing to be angry about. All the redacted or like not very well redacted stuff that's out there is. still bad. This can be a problem on both sides. Both sides are corrupt. The issue is not red or blue. The issue is between the state and you. And I think people can forget that and say, well, this is

just a distraction from the other corrupt thing that the other government did. No, it's both. It's both. It's bullshit exacerbated by both sides of the aisle at all times. People that are in positions of power have extreme amounts, extreme incentives to do the wrong thing. And not all do the wrong thing, but those incentives eventually over time do their thing to people. And they will be tempted to do other things or coerced into doing things that are against the best interest of the populace. That is the problem.

Quick side tangent. Do you ever hear about the cobras in India? Yes, this is the best. Dave Bradley often brings up this. Nathan, do you want to give the gist of the quick one-two of what happened there? Basically in India, we had a problem with a cobra population. So they said it started saying, hey, we'll pay you if you bring in like a cobra body. Like you kill a cobra, you bring it in, we'll give you a reward for that.

It's like, okay, all of a sudden, they started getting a lot of people bringing in cobras. And the cobra population actually exploded. Why? Because incentives. They were paying for dead cobras so people started breeding them. so they could exchange them for money with the government. And then the best part was post that when the government was like, all right, we get what you guys are doing.

No more cobra money for you. So everybody released the cobras that they farmed and the cobra population exploded worse than before the government program happened. So the lesson is the government ruins everything. Everything. Speaking of which, let's chat about Canada. Oh, here we go. There we go.

So just hot off the presses here last few days. Canada's GDP fell 0.3%. The largest drop in nearly three years from Statistics Canada, a nonpartisan organization. and hear from table salt, everybody's favorite Canada sucks meter, major breaking Canadian GDP per capita falls below Alabama, basically one of the poorest U.S. states. Canada's GDP per capita, the light green line, resumed its downtrend. After a dismal October, GDP numbers break under $49,000 USD per person, lower than Alabama, which is at 50,383. that is wild. I'm pretty sure we're more than every state at this point per capita.

Not only that, not only that, the GDP per capita also, this is not even in accounting for the fact that our homes are twice as much, our groceries are way more expensive, every part of cost of living is way worse. And like how can this be? well, once again, an instance of taking other people's money and deciding what to do with it. Mark Carney just announced another $2.5 billion to Ukraine. Total Canadian aid now is $24.5 billion, and this puts Canada in the highest per capita contributors in the world.

Nathan, you had an interesting stat. That is equivalent to what? That's basically the entire, because don't forget we have socialized medicine, guys. It's great. It's totally great. It's not falling apart and awful. The entire province of Alberta, our entire healthcare budget for 24 to 25 was about $28 billion. So basically they took our failing health care system.

They took the entirety of the money that we could have used to like double its capacity, at least in some respects, and just gave that, just burn that in Ukraine. Again, it goes back to the same thing as a daycare. It's just money laundering. Yeah. Yeah. And when you talk about the Alberta health care system, the amount of waste that is happening there is staggering. Like there is a stat.

I need to go back and find it again, but I watched a video of somebody going through the stats. And the amount of people from the 90s till now within Alberta basically doubled. The amount of people working for Alberta health services over the same period of time, I think it was like it was double digit multiples. It might have been 10 to 20x number of people working for Alberta health services. And so we're spending that much more. We have so much more people involved. But the quality of care is going down.

My wife is a nurse. And when she started her career 15 years ago, she would have two, maybe three patients max. Now, regular, it's like four or five. And she works in a unit where it's not, it's babies and their mothers, newborn babies and their mothers. So double basically the patients. And so the quality of care, what that means for her is she can do the bare minimum. She can chart, find out what they need,

all that kind of stuff, and then run to the next room and run to the next room. If there's an emergency, she comes back. There's no personalization of care. There's no kind of one-on-one, like additional help. It is far worse for the patient and for the healthcare professional than it was 10, 15 years ago with so, much more money and so many more staff it is just nothing but government bloat it's waste of money and so even with all of that wasted money wherever it's going to that that is basically they're they're pissing away that on on on sending it elsewhere rather than kind of fixing things here um but hey at least it's free how bad how bad could it even be well pretty fucking bad because

Here is an article. American talk show host Glenn Beck wants to prevent Saskatchewan woman, which is the province next to ours, from turning to maid. What is made, you ask? Medically assisted dying. So here's what's going on. A woman from, yes, there's a real town called Regina. Stop laughing.

A Regina woman whose fruitless attempts to secure a surgeon for parathicized. thyroid disease have led her to schedule a made assisted death for January, may end up having her health issues resolved thanks to an unexpected source. American conservative talk show host Glenn Beck said he will pick up the tab so Jolene Van Alstein can receive treatment in the USA for a rare parathyroid disease. Quote, if there's any surgeon an American who can do this, I'll pay for this patient to come down here for treatment. Beck posted him. next December 9th. He also had harsh words about Canada's medical assistance in dying regime in place.

This is the reality of compassionate progressive health care. Canada must end this insanity, and Americans can never let it spread there. Beck later posted an update saying that they received emails from surgeons and said they are in contact with Jolene and her husband. Please continue to pray for her health. In a later episode, Beck posted, Jolene does not have a passport to gain legal entry into the U.S. But my team has been in touch with President Donald Trump's State Department. All I can say for now is they are aware of the urgent life-saving need. And we had a very positive call. This is crazy. And again, just makes me think, like, the existing system with all

its waste said, yeah, there is a surgery that would help you. We can't do that, but we can kill you. And this poor woman said, yeah, I guess, I guess so I'll let you kill me then. Instead of being like, can I like, maybe I can pay like personally, if the option for me was being killed by the state or choosing to go into some debt and getting that life saving surgery. I pick the debt. I don't know about you, Nathan. Oh, yeah, I'll definitely run up Fiat debt for sure. I have no problem with that.

I'll have the fault on that fucker, too. What's amazing, there's so much. One, everything is a Minnesota daycare. That's all I'm seeing, right? Everything is a daycare. All these government programs, they're all in Minnesota daycare. When you're talking to Normies, just let them know. It's all an illusion.

It's all a game. It's all the leering center, okay? What's astonishing, I would love to see the numbers, too, because Canadians forget this. We think that the health care is free. because you never see the tab, but it's not. It still costs a fuck ton of money in terms of administration, in terms of the surgeons, the rooms that works, right?

How much more expensive, like, if you look at the cost of what the surgery would, because you couldn't book somebody because no one's fucking available, because why would doctors want to stay here? It's a socialist hellhole. So if they could book a surgeon and get all that stuff, what would that cost? Let's tack on, what is the cost of, like, medically assisted in death, right? Okay, we already got that there as well. I bet you the cost to then pay her, like, just, why didn't they just fly her to the states?

But didn't somebody from like the provincial health care going to be like, we don't have a surgeon here. What's going to cost to get her to the states and make this happen? I bet you it's not like it's like a million times more. It's like maybe double. Maybe it's actually close to the same. Like it's our health care is not that cheap. It's just they think it is because they never see the bill.

Like fuck, man. I just fired at Chicago. I don't know. The thing is they can't possibly do that because it would be an outright admission that the system has failed. Yep. It would be, hey, our system can't even keep you alive. We literally had to use taxpayer money and fly somebody to a different country

with a private health care system to get this dealt with. And a cronyist health care system. And it was still better and actually kept them alive. Like, it's wild. And yeah, go ahead. I was going to say they have 2.5 billion for fucking Ukraine to just piss away. But you what, you couldn't spend, what, you couldn't spend 100 grand? A million?

I don't give a shit. Give a million to hurt. That's a fraction of that. Take it from your stupid foreign spending on wars. And why don't we fly some of these people to actually get it? But you're right, it's all perception. The perception of the Canadian government, which is so ridiculous. If they were to actually send somebody to get the treatment that they needed, it wouldn't be like, hey, they took care of one of their own.

They'd be like, wait, what the fuck are we paying you for? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And not to mention like the money, and I'm not saying that extracting money from other people to pay for these programs is the answer. But we are certainly pissing away a lot of money on a lot of stuff. And Alberta itself, though our healthcare system is obviously not great because it's all socialized. You can't have private options to release the pressure on the public system. And just even just having a competition between the two, in my eyes, would be.

fantastic because you have the option. I don't know why people are so afraid of that, but we also send billions of dollars to the other side of the country. That money could be, you know, that would bolster it. And again, I don't think that giving the government more money is the answer. But I, you know, in the choice of the two, you know, hey, you guys actually have a surplus, send it all over to Quebec versus like, well, maybe you could do something with a surplus in your province and make it better and entice people to come there and live there and so on and so forth.

And this, my friend, is the reason why elections Alberta has approved the separation referendum question. The question being, do you agree that the province of Alberta should cease to be a part of Canada to become an independent state. The Alberta Prosperity Project will move on signature collection. Yeah, so this is going to take place next year. People are actually going to be able to vote in a referendum and decide if Alberta continues to be a part of Canada. That's cool.

What do you think? I think it's incredible. There's a chance that I can finally leave Canada without leaving my home. which is amazing. If you start looking at our resources, our entrepreneurial sector, everything that we have here, we would be in competition with Dubai.

We should be wealthier and more prosperous, have a nice, clean, wonderful place than Dubai. You want those, like, shitty socialists, you have free university, free healthcare? Fuck it, fine. We'd have more money than like the Scandinavian countries. We could pay for all of it. We just got the fuck out of our way

and let us keep our money. So this is amazing. We're going to do everything we can to make this happen. we're going to need the like every bitcoiner out there internationally to help push this forward we're going to need basically the world getting behind Alberta and maybe just maybe we might have the opportunity to really build a Bitcoin Citadel here and I think we can do it I think we can do it I want us to do it um I think you're more optimistic than me because I feel like I've been let down at every single turn anytime there's like there might be some free a fuck

So, yeah, I don't know. I don't know, but I'm hopeful. And at the very least, what I would love this to result in is that Alberta as a whole and maybe Canada as a whole becomes more like the U.S. in the sense that individual provinces have far more control over local governance and the federal government can F off. I think that would be a positive outcome. but to me the best outcome is independent Alberta. It's going to happen. We're going to make it happen.

We're going to be the ones that we're going to get in there in the trenches. We're going to push this whole thing forward. We're going to make it happen. Everyone watching this show, they're going to make it happen too. And just so you know, I know you're pessimistic, but it's just a fact of life that I have a horseshoe so far up my ass that for whatever reason, the things that I really want in life, this job, my wife, my family, I fucking get them. And I want Alberta independence.

And we're going after it. Yeah. I have a feeling that when I celebrate that, there's going to be some tension amongst existing friendships. Yeah. Anyways, I want to change gear. We mentioned this before. But I think, Nathan, there's, it was a very Merry Christmas. It was.

We got the greatest gift of all, or rather, I guess not us, but the European people got us. It's just a lovely gift from the European Central Bank and the lovely Christine Lagarde came on. Chrissy Lagarde, as we like to refer to her as. She came on. She wished everybody a very happy holiday. She had some exciting news to share. And I think we should let the people know just how festive things got or about to get in Europe. So let's take a quick listen to what Chrissy Lagarde.

had to say. We're getting to the close of the year and for many of us it's a celebration moment. So to all of you who are celebrating, Merry Christmas, to those who are not celebrating, I hope you are having a lovely time. It's also a time to look back and see how much has been done. And frankly, it's been a lot of work. One thing that the European Central Bank is proud of is to have achieved our target of 2% medium term. Inflation is down to where we wanted it to be. We've also looked at our strategy going forward and we took stock of the work done by all the teams to see from a strategy point of view how we're going to go forward and whether our strategy is fit for purpose and whether the ECB is fit for the times we're going through. Difficult times

they are. The two are the big projects that we have worked on and will continue to work on in 26 are number one the digital euro. We have completed the cycle of the preparation. The governing Council has given its go-head to move to the next cycle and now waiting for the European Parliament to come up with final legislation that will the go-ahead for the pilot phase and then the launch. The other project, which is not unrelated, more traditional, but still very efficient and needed, is the banknote. We are revamping our banknotes, process is well underway and we will have new design, new faces possibly, and we look forward to that as well. So to all of you should know you should know that the European Central Bank is standing strong,

pleased that it has reached its price stability target, and determined to make sure that this remains the case and that we are useful for our European compatriots. I have so much to say. I have so much to say. Okay, okay, first of all, like self-congratulations of how much incredible work has been done. And then like 10 seconds later,

we're it is very troubling and difficult times who was in charge during that time uh secondly i love that first she laid out the totalitarian hellhole that they're crafting and then was like also as we're rolling that out you guys are going to have the prettiest pictures on your bank notes it's like we got new faces maybe look out thanks it's me it's me Nathan thoughts Oh my God

The internet That was a great idea It's like that video Almost feels like a hostage situation But it's not It's the terrorist telling me They got the bodies Like we're dead set

The tree almost looks like it's dying You ever see one of those like parrots That is young and molting And their eyes are super wide open Like we're the fuck was the makeup team On that one She looks like she's death right now You gotta love how it's like the creation

Of the Federal Reserve right We're always sneaking this shit in You just slip it in the deck Little little thing the message there on Christmas Eve, right? That's where we're going to push this out. To our friends in Europe, I'm fucked in Canada. You guys are screwed.

Yeah. Yep. Yeah. It's, yeah, they basically said like, yeah, we put it through. And all of these governing bodies that you have no say in have given the go ahead. We've got to wait for one other bureaucratic mess to also give the approval, which you also have no say on. And then we will get rolling it out. Like that was pretty much it.

Like, just so you know, we're doing this. And you can't say we didn't tell you because we put this in a tweet on New Year's Eve. Are she a criminal as well, too? Yes. Yeah, I was just trying to pull that up right now. Let's get a lecture from a criminal on New Year's, on Christmas Eve, about how they're basically taking over money. But don't worry about it. It'll be great.

There'll be new phases, too. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Now, Nathan, I normally would wrap up here. but one of our members of the team wanted us to share something. Right. So art on the team wanted us to let everybody know. If you're looking to start your career in Bitcoin open source,

there's something called the Boss Challenge. So Boss Challenge, it's Chainco Labs initiative for coders, serious about beginning a career in Bitcoin open source. You can apply. And so basically, at the heart of this challenge is a set of programming exercises and hands-on activities spanning the course of a month. Once that month is complete, participants are ready to continue the adventure that are ready to continue the adventure, had the opportunity to extend the program for two additional months. So month one, you've got foundation and core learning, months two and three, you've got advanced programs and partnerships and beyond the program, the journey to becoming a full-time boss.

contributor is long winding and different for everybody. It's not a straight path. This challenge is not only designed to give you some supports along the way, but to foster the proactive self-starter spirit that is required in open source. Join the challenge, see how far you can go. So yeah, if you want to check out this, head over to bosschallenge.xy. Some of the people previously involved are here, the alumni down below. But yeah, if you're looking, if you're keen on getting,

getting into Bitcoin Open Source, then this may be a pathway for you. Again, bosschallenge. Dot XYZ. Be sure to check it out. And hats off to Art for letting us know and helping with the project. And, yeah, hope to see some of you guys

create some success in the new year, which is super awesome. With that, Ethan, This is last show, 2025. Plenty coming up in the new year. We're going to take a little hiatus tomorrow because it's, of course, New Year's Eve and, you know, have a bit of celebrating. Do you have anything planned?

Are you family stuff? Are you in the missus doing anything? Oh, yeah, family stuff. It'll all be around the community, around the house. They got massive, like, kid events set up, big, big massive fireworks display out here. and my wife is already working on doing a balloon drop inside the house. So I'll have fun cleaning that up later. Yes, we will be doing that inside of my parents' house.

So they can have fun. And then the kids are having a little sleep over there. And myself and the wifie are going to have a night out with some friends and do some games, live music, some champagne, all that kind of stuff. I will say going to be a little difficult to surpass last. year because i was in sailors backyard on his yacht right i forgot you didn't bring me for that that's right yeah so um i could have pretty much done anything this year and it still would have seemed like a bang of shit compared to you you almost just like stayed home like just purposely like i'm

going to throw this match so i can restart next year yeah yeah exactly start fresh and then i can always say like well at least it'll be better than last year than when i did nothing uh But yeah, either way, it'll be a good time. And looking forward to tons of exciting stuff in 2026. So, yeah, with that, everybody that's here, thanks for joining us on day before the new year. And yeah, if you enjoyed the show, drop a like on it. If you're not subscribed, but you're new here, welcome and hit that subscribe button so you don't miss a thing. And we will be back in the new year for all.

all time, tons of shenanigans, tons of education, all kinds of stuff. We'll be seeing you guys at events and everything. And again, as we always say, great to talk about the news, great to talk about price and all that. It's super fun. But if you don't take hold and learn the tools and become self-sovereign, it's all for not. So this clip that I always play at the end is super important. Please do check out the learn page. Please do check out the tutorials. And if you need additional help. Please do check out Bitcoin mentor. My team would be DC mentors, including Nathan, to level up in a one-on-one scenario. And with that, we're out of here. I'm Ben. This was Nathan, and this was your last weekly session of the year. See you guys soon. Hey, you. Yes, you watching the

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