BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Adam O’Brien, Matt Hill, Danny Baer ep 410

Episode Date: April 27, 2024

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Yo, what's going on, everybody? Welcome to the show, another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish. Got an awesome stacked panel today, very excited to have all these gentlemen. We're going to bring them in and give some intros in a moment. I hope you're all having, I was going to say a good week, but I hope you're all coping with the week well enough and learning the tools to navigate the current environment. I'm certain we're going to be discussing the finer details of what? that's alluding to in a moment. But yes, we're going to be diving in in just a sec.

Of course, this is live. Anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. The thing sucks. If you have not already, please do like, subscribe, share, all those things super important.

Helps get this content in front of more eyeballs. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your deal. session. Before we dive in, let's take a quick look at where we are in the market right now. I'm currently pulling up Timechain Calendar.com and simultaneously I'm going to pull up the live chat along the side. Everything you say into the live chat will be there for the world to see for better or worse from here on in. Looking at Time Chain Calendar, we're sitting at

$64,0.31 per coin. A single US dollar will snaggy 1,562 sats. Fees down significantly from last week when we were doing the show and the having was imminent double digits instead of quadruble digits. 51 sats next bite anytime 21 sats. In terms of Bitcoin mine, 19.69 million of 93.77 percent of the total supply. And before we bring in our guests, we'll give a quick shout out to our sponsors and we'll be right there. A mission to enable independence by being one of the easiest and quickest ways to purchase Bitcoin in Canada and the U.S. And the best part about it, every buy goes directly into your own self-custody. They never hold your coins.

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Bitcoin. The cold card queue is an absolute powerhouse and is my daily driver. And on top of this they have plenty of other goodies including the Mark 4, the tap signer, open dimes, the block clock, and much more. If you head over to their website, make sure you use code BTC sessions at checkout to get a nice disc count links are in the show notes down below when it comes to assisted multi-sig and inheritance planning it's hard to beat nunchuk.io and their honey badger program on your mobile device they allow you to set up a full multi-signature vault and once it's done you have baked in inheritance planning so that your bitcoin gets to your next of kin if anything should happen

to you on top of this the entire thing can be set up with devices like the tap signer the cold card and plenty more options and the whole thing can be done without kyc you don't need to give up your personal information to have it set up and working for you you can check them out today over at nunchuk i.o all right let's get this thing rolling we're going to get all of our guests into the room uh first i'm going to welcome up welcome up adam uh from bitcoin well good to see you buddy welcome back to the show we're also going to bring up danny uh from meanwhile and we're going to bring in matt hill from Start 9. Welcome, gentlemen. I'm going to be doing some shuffling here so that I can flip some people around here. But welcome, guys. Thank you so much for coming and being part of

the show today. Let's do a quick round of intros so everybody that may be unfamiliar gets familiar with you really quick. Adam, I'll toss it to you first. How you doing, man? Good, man. Wow, what a week. Yeah, I'm Adam. I'm sure we're going to type in. It's like we're chomping at the bit to discuss the current events. Yo, Opti, nice to see you, bro. Sorry, you're jealous that I'm here and you're not. But this is the way it is. Yeah, I'm Adam.

I'm with Bitcoin well. We are on a mission to enable independence and we are an automatic self-custody platform that sells Bitcoin. Awesome. Well, good to have you back, man. We'll dive down to Danny. First time guests on the show. Thanks for being here, man.

Can you let people know who we are and what you do. Yeah, you got it. Big fan. Love the content, love the show. Appreciate you guys having me on. My name is Danny Bear. I'm the director of wealth and asset management at a company called Meanwhile. Meanwhile is the first licensed and regulated life insurance company that operates completely on the Bitcoin standard. So all of our audited financials, balance sheet, regulatory filings, regulatory capital, solvency calculations, everything done in Bitcoin on the Bitcoin standard. Happy, to be here and excited to talk about the events this week and why we're bullish. Thanks, man. Awesome. Really cool. And Matt, um, returning, I don't know how many times you've been on

a few at least now, but, uh, good to see you again, man. Can you give yourself an intro for anybody unfamiliar? Yeah, thanks for having me back on. Um, I'm Matt Hill. I'm one of the co-founders of Start 9. We build StartOS, which is an open source Linux distro that enables people to run their own personal servers and circumvent big tech and cloud providers and remain private in their digital lives. Love it. Awesome. Well, gentlemen, we're going to dive in here again before we get going. If anybody's unfamiliar with the show, this, why are we bullish? Pretty simple premise. Each one of us comes with a reason for being bullish, even in weeks where that may be a tall order. But the flow of the show is, Number one, somebody's going to drop a reason for being bullish.

This can be anything, a news item, personal experience, a new app or device that they've tried. Whatever it may be, they get their chance to rant and get whatever they're currently interested in off their chest. Number two, altogether, we're going to riff on that reason, whatever comments, questions, and rabbit holes and wherever they lead us down. And then finally, number three, we're going to rotate to the next person until we've all had a turn. So reason, riff, rotate, that is it. And my only tip to you, gentlemen, is don't drop your reason early. I'll ask you why you're bullish when it's time. So I'm going to get us started really quick here.

It's been a bit of an insane week. Of course, we saw a few things going on. Most recently, we saw a Phoenix wallet just say, yep, we're not going to be serving the U.S. very shortly here. We're just pulling out out of the app stores everything. Pull your funds out now, move somewhere else. Just prior to that, a few days earlier, which I'm sure was the impetus for them doing that, Samurai Wallet founders were arrested, website seized, apps taken off the app store, and again, the DOJ basically saying that they're money transmitters and that they've engaged in illegal activity, so and so forth.

And so there's been that. Even prior to that, wallet of Satoshi, a custodial lightning wallet pulled out of the U.S. So we've seen a lot of this movement as of late. And yeah, so why am I bullish about that? I'm going to kind of focus on sentiment here and resolve. And I want to, I want to, I want to. quickly outline first off a couple things that people that are kind of caught up and wondering what the hell do i do in a couple of these instances what actions you can you can take um because there's a

lot of uh wallet of the samurai wallet users that are like i don't i even know how to access my funds all the servers are down what do i do uh and then people that are on phoenix where do i go uh where do i migrate to so um uh this is just on my nostril page here it's also on Twitter but I did a couple quick videos this week one was yesterday with Nico on Simply Sessions I did a demo on how to recover your samurai wallet using Phoenix or using Sparrow wallet on your desktop by importing the seed and passphrase and then simply adding the correct accounts so that you can see and recover your funds and then move them somewhere else and so there

are obviously still open source tools that you can use to access because with Samurai, you did have indeed self-custody. With Phoenix wallet, of course, there's some nuance here, but people are wondering, like, if this isn't in the app store, if that is in the app store, what am I even doing? Can I access lightning? Of course, you can run your own full lightning node. That might be, again, a difficult endeavor for some people.

But things like Mutiny Wallet that allow you to use a progressive web app may be a solution in the interim that you can use. And there's certain things about Mutiny Wallet that may make it a little bit more accessible depending on how draconian things get. But either way, you can take a look at that and start to dive in. I just wanted to outline, so this is a note by Mutiny and how they've tried to make themselves robust. Again, non-custodio, you control keys, node runs on your device,

critical data is saved on your device and encrypted remotely for backups. They're not an LSP. They don't run a node or a Lightning service provider. They just interface with others. You can open channels to any node. They never process any Lightning Channel payment or on-chain transactions, et cetera. And their Lightning Address server is built with Blinded Auth, and they can't link payments to your node.

They're open source. Web app is available in case app stores go down. Self-hostable bundled with, of course, Start 9. I'm sure we'll touch on some of that a bit later on. But yeah, they are, you know, strengthening their resolve. And one of my favorite notes is from Zeus. Again, Zeus has been killing it with all their updates and everything they're working on. Evan is an awesome dude.

But he said, we believe that Zeus is following the letter of the law right now. If the law changes or any judgments are made, we will make adjustments accordingly. If Zeus falls, all other lightning node operators are next. If lightning node operators fall, self-custody is next. This is the hill to die on self-custody. If you don't agree, you were never in Bitcoin for the right reasons. So get behind us or go home. Future generations are watching and depending on us, always forward from Evan.

So again, strong words. But I just, when shit hits the fan, I do love the resolve of some Bitcoiners that want to make this thing robust. And yeah, we're seeing a lot of it right now. So to all the builders out there that are putting up a fight and that are trying to build things around this. We'll give you a salute. So that's why I'm bullish this week. if you guys want to chime in on on any of that i'll let you have the floor yeah man i mean salute to the builders like it's it's definitely for the first time in this revolution getting

scary for the good guys and i think that we've seen for the last you know decade it's been scary for the bad guys scary for the scammers the the the illegal security pumpers the the bag dumpers. It's been scary for them, as it should be. But now we're starting to get scary for the good guys. And we're here for the right reasons. I think Evan said it best, right? If you're in Bitcoin for the good reasons,

then you care about self-custody and you care about privacy and you care about enabling future generations with sovereignty. And until I think it's going to get probably a little worse. But Bitcoiners are resilient, man. I mean, once again, Bitcoin is a perfect system and it's been testing us. If you've been in Bitcoin long enough, you've had to have your resolve tested. You've got to have your nuts checked a little bit. And that's what's been going on. And I think it's no different. I think though, it's amazing

to see how everyone is unilaterally on the same page without prior discussion. And it's just it's how you know we're on the right track, you know, fighting for a common cause to have maximum independence. And so yeah, man, I think that's a great thing. And we're going to keep on keeping on. Another thing, too, that's kind of interesting about this is, and I think NVK tweeted it, so not to steal his thing, but the U.S. is definitely moving backwards.

And we are going to watch Bitcoin put governments into competition with each other. And as soon as one jurisdiction is friendly, or friendlier, then I think we're going to see people pack up and go. And it's going to be pretty epic to watch more and more people just leave. The U.S. government is overplaying their hand right now. And they have absolutely no way to stop sovereign bitcoinsers from leaving the country with their stacks. There's literally short of like straight up capture and murder, there is no way to stop that. And that's an inspiring thing.

I don't think we're at the capture and murder stage yet. And so I think Bitcoiners are making plans. And we're going to watch the economic, the greatest economic collapse of the millennia is going to happen if the governments can't figure out how to work with this new money system. I did a, I'll finish up with. this. I did an interview because I love this quote. I did an interview with with Yahoo Canada because Canada budgets came out. I think, Danny, you were talking about that and like Canada

budget, same thing. You know, funny, go figure Canada and the US super aligned on timing and capital gains nonsense. And I was quoted saying it feels like our government is trying to shove a YouTube video into a VHS player. They're using absolute incompatible systems trying to apply this legacy financial model to a brand new money system. And it's not going to work. And so I think, you know, thank goodness we have Bitcoin. Thank goodness we have a protocol. Thank goodness. There are unstoppable software is in place that these companies can, you know, take their decisions and leave rightfully so in that scary environment for them. And customers, users are fine.

And I think that's a big win. And that's not true in legacy finance. It's not true in custody Bitcoin. It's only true in sovereign machines. And that's awesome. Danny, I'll let you follow up because Adam kind of gave you a show there too. No, appreciate it. I'll forego my opportunity to discuss why I'm bullshit on this topic.

I think we're in this, we're in store for an amazing cycling. here, where we have this combination of a government that has neglected to actually get their stuff together and figure out how to actually deal with this new money system, combined with the institutional adoption that's taking place. When Larry Fink and BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the United States, gives something a stamp of approval, that carries weight. But it's going to create this crazy tension, I believe, where the U.S. is just frankly so far behind having any sort of idea of what they're doing to regulate and facilitate growth and innovation here within our borders. That it'll be really interesting to see how this shakes out, how the inflow of institutional dollars impacts the price of Bitcoin and with it, kind of the wealth that's generated.

And to your point, Adam, you know, if there continues to be this uncertain to hear, people are going to leave and it'll be interesting to see how that shakes out. Yeah, Matt, I'll toss it over to you. I know you probably have plenty to say, but I think our topics will overlap a little bit when we get to yours. But if you want to dive into this as much as you can without spoiling your topic later, go ahead. Yeah, for now, I'll say that I echo your sentiment. that it's good to see, you know, people riled up, right? Like things happened and people are upset. And that energy is real and it is useful.

My concern is that that's easy to do, right? People get these things happen from time to time where everyone gets up in arms, like about some new bill that's going through the house about enhanced censorship or and it like makes the rounds on Twitter right and everyone gets all up in arms and then it there's like some small win that comes about that causes everyone to kind of be like okay you know that battles over and then it's like move on to the next thing right and this happens at sort of recursive scales from like macro macro stuff like COVID all the way down to like some you know bill that's going through some parliament of some nation um and uh, uh,

And if you zoom out, this is just one small battle in a much larger ongoing conflict. And so while I appreciate and, you know, welcome the energy and outrage and anger and readiness to like sort of jump in and fight, I also understand that that will fade in about three days time when Bitcoin price goes up 10K and, you know, and this sort of just goes to the background and everyone forgets that Phoenix existed in the U.S. and we just sort of go back to business. So, you know, it's good to have the energy. It's better to keep it. But those of us who are keeping that viewed out, zoomed out view are just, it's just

another week. It's just another day in the war. Yeah. I, you're totally right where everything gets, a huge spotlight on it for a few days and then everything kind of goes to the wayside. And that's happened again. Again, wallet of Satoshi seems to be a big deal when it disappeared. And then everybody's like, well, oh, well.

Yeah. But the interesting thing is I've noticed more and more friends of mine in the U.S. being like, what the hell do I use for a lightning wallet now? Like I can't like I was using this. I was using this. You know, or I heard this one was good and I looked it up and we can't have it here. And so there's a lot of that happening recently. And unfortunately, because it's just in and around Bitcoin, your average person, like there's a subset of Bitcoiners that are upset about it that stay upset about it for a little while.

but Bitcoiners already are such a niche sect of the population that your average person just has no idea and not a care about any of this. And so do we have, can we muster that critical mass or can we just build the tools that can just be there for when people eventually need them? Because they will, they will. I mean, if that's a question, I'll field it real quick.

I mean, the more support, the better, but I actually don't put an enormous amount of weight on numbers, right? It's more about the irate tireless minority, especially the most brilliant and most productive. Like, as long as there's a few people who never forgive, never forget, and always build, we're going to be okay. Because eventually everyone will just come around to the products that work and the things that survive. It's about survival, not support. Yeah. Support helps survival, but it's not the only necessity. Yeah, yeah.

Awesome. All right. Well, I'll put a little bow on my topic here and we'll do a rotation. And really, it's a tentative bow because I'm sure we're going to come back to this a lot during the episode. Either way, I'm going to rotate over. Adam, I'm going to toss it to you. I'm going to cue you up with the same question everybody will get. Why are you bullish?

Yeah, man. Nothing to do with the topic at hand of the week or the current events, but I was at Bipblock Boom last week, which that's like a subpoint, awesome hanging out with Bitcoiners in a Bitcoin-centric environment. You know, Matt was there and it was great to get to link up. But I found this game and I brought the game home and I've been playing the game with my kids, my my seven and six year old kids to be specific. And it's so good, man. It's this Bitcoin game. It teaches a little bit about mining and difficulty adjustment.

But then the key piece that I'm really enjoying within the game is moving your coins from hot to cold storage. That's like a key function in the game. And your coins can't get stolen out of cold storage. And it is so awesome. Yeah, this is the group. here called Free Market Kids. The game's called Hodel Up. It's so awesome watching my six-year-old daughter. So you can do one of three things on your turn. You can buy a miner. You can try to mine a

block or move your coins into cold storage. And my daughter gets so fired up when she moves her coins into cold storage. It brings a small tear to my eye and makes my heart leap for joy. Because We know that this is the next generation. We know that, you know, look at us. We're like a bunch of old dudes talking about Bitcoin. We've got like 60 years left, probably like less than that to be influential. We know what we're building up the next generation. And this year especially we're seeing more and more kids come into Bitcoin.

We're seeing more and more people excited about bringing their kids to conferences. I'm heading to a Freedom Festival next week in Boston, and they've got a full, like, kids. There's like a program for children. I know that Bitcoin Atlantis had a program for kids, and so I think it's fantastic that the next generation, we're training them up, teaching them what's right, teaching them how to, yeah, how to be Bitcoiners

and what's important. You know, it's my wish and my hope that the builders are building and that we were able to contribute something so that when my kids are my age, they're miles ahead. Just like, you know, the class of 2024 is going to have a way shallower learning curve than, like, you know, Matt and Danny, I'm not overly familiar with your story, but like, Ben and I have been in Bitcoin together for a long time. And we had to go through the ringer, man. we had to learn about like the importance of self-custody by like losing money in custodial platforms. We had to learn about the danger of the scam crypto scene by going through the the hard knocks of the scam that is the crypto scene. And the next generation is not going to have to do that.

And so, you know, if we spent or if I spent specifically how many years like on my Bitcoin journey, learning about the importance of sovereignty and learning about the importance of, Bitcoin maximalism, you know, what will the next generation that doesn't have to spend that time doing that? It's just going to compound and get better. And I think the builders are going to get stronger. The warriors are going to get stronger and tougher. And yeah, man, I'm so bullish on that. You mean, speaking to Matt's point, zoom out, look at the future. Like if we're looking at 2070 right now, I think it's a bright world. It's a bright world because we're raising and bringing up Bitcoiners who are true to the ethos of Bitcoin. I love that.

Again, I'll just echo your, you mentioned the Madeira conference. And yeah, they had like a, it was one of the first times at a big gathering of Bikorners like that where they had a family-friendly environment and people took full advantage of it, right? Like everybody was there. They had their full kid, their family, their kids, everything. And it was great. They had learning resources for the kids that are interested.

They had like little, they obviously had helpers and nannies and stuff like that to help take care. And so that was, it was, it was great to see because there's a lot of families in Bitcoin. And it's fantastic. So yeah, it's. Yeah. And even like even at Biplock Boom, I'm chatting to people during like the dinners and stuff. And it's, it's amazing. Like it's funny, man.

When you hang out with Bitcoiners and then you're talking about stuff that's not Bitcoin, you're all very aligned very quickly. and and the difference in mindset and the difference in uh in in ethos comes down to like very strange you know building nuance rather than like polar opposites of of what you know some conversations with normies are like so definitely you know bitcoiners raising bitcoins is uh is why i'm bullish nice i'm curious about the other gentleman's thoughts in and around um you know like Danny, do you have kids, by the way? No, no, no, engaged getting married this fall.

So, you know, I look forward to playing hoddle up, you know, in a few years' time, hopefully. With your your looming gaggle of children. Yeah, my looming gaggle of hodlers, I can't wait to play with. But, you know, it's funny. I was talking about kind of like everyone's journey and you go through the growing pains and there's such a steep learning curve, depending on when you got in. I was probably a little bit later than folks.

My background's traditional finance. I was like class of 2017. But still, it was just like hours of reading and then like hours of figuring out which platform or exchange or product to use and then losing Bitcoin. And then being like, wait, when is the bankruptcy filing going to go through and how much am I going to recover? Like there's just so much pain in learning that, you know,

playing board games and maybe video games eventually like that sounds a lot more fun than losing money or doing those things so uh i'm fired up about it adam i uh i look forward to i'm gonna i hadn't heard of the game until now so i'll have to give you dude it even i'm excited to play it with my friends like who are adults i think it's it's actually a good game that that breaks mining down so well yeah let's get some orange pills going around just through like game night you know I'll invite your friends over and this is the way I'm I'm massively bullish and actually we just finished up a Bitcoin jackpot contest and and part of that the proceeds went to a Geyser project and we let the like our Twitter community vote on which one and the one that was that was

chosen was another board game called block hunters on on Geyser so we were stoked to be able to give them some stats but I think it's man gameifying Bitcoin education by Bitcoin maximalists is got to be like just the sickest thing, right? You think about Bitcoin maximalists of even like two or three years ago. And it's like cypherpunks, you know, kind of on their soapbox talking about like, you know, crazy things. And now making it a bit more normie friendly as that orange pill, I think is super beneficial. Yeah. In the same vein, I've got to give a shout out to these guys because they're,

They're killing it and making not just Bitcoin-related content, but freedom-related content accessible to kids. Oh, I love the Tuttle Twins, man. Tuttle Twins. You got to love the Tuttle Twins. And I love their both. This is just from earlier today, but somebody had commented on one of their videos, crazy how this show goes from actually good lessons to shilling Bitcoin. And they replied, crazy idea, could understanding Bitcoin actually be a good lesson?

You know what? The number one thing that I, they actually have a whole episode on Bitcoin. Yeah. And my kids and I, we watched it. And there's this like, there's this old grandma.

And she's got the best one liner in the whole history of television, where they're talking about something about, like getting your money stolen. And, and one of the narrators said something about governments and thieves. And then the grandma, who's this like old lady with a cane goes, you said thieves twice. And my kids thought that was hilarious.

My wife thought it was hilarious. I loved it. I thought it was just brilliant. So yeah, man, Tuttle Twins for the win. How good is like sovereign kids content, man? It's just so important. Yeah, it's pretty solid. I enjoy it.

Man, I'm curious about you because you got a family and everything. Like, is this something that's kind of in the background? Is it like how do you think about the idea of, you know, not, you know, not not indoctrinating, but trying to best inform your kids to to form their own decisions? Like, how do you approach this and around them? Or do you approach it yet? Indctrinate such a funny word. It's sort of like manipulation.

I always viewed both of those words. Like just use influence and teach to replace those. They're basically the same thing. So indoctrination is fine as long as it's good stuff. So my kids are a little young. They're one in three. So we're not quite at like the understanding mining and Bitcoin phase yet. We're still trying to figure out, you know, like puzzles on the shelf.

But my wife and I are like really, really, you know, excited about raising children in our way. you know, we largely abide by the unschooling method, right, where it's like really trust human nature to like self-direct. You know, people will learn what they need to learn in any given era in order to be successful. And when you try to just like force them to learn stuff that you worked for you in your era or prior eras or what you think you're just going to get it wrong and it's best to kind of let them self-direct the education and just be there to help along the way. And we really love this. And, you know, my wife was a public school teacher for four years, a private school teacher for three years. And she's like so excited to just be able to be a teacher for our children. And, you know, that's her realm.

And I'm here to help. And I'm going to great father. I'm going to be there. But it's like, you know, that's, that's her endeavor and career. And, and, you know, I'm doing my thing over here. And we meet in the middle and it's wonderful. And, you know, I talked with Scott at Biplock Boom, the free market kids, one of the creators, him and his wife. And we were talking about some of this homeschooling, unschooling strategies.

And they're pretty much doing what we're doing, but they're like many years beyond where we are right now. So, you know, I was trying to pick up a few tips and tricks from him. And I have both the Tuttle Twins and Free Market Kids website's bookmarked right now because I absolutely plan on, you know, leveraging anything that they have to offer for my own children at the appropriate time and if the kids are interested. Yeah, 100%. Well, if anything is bullish, it's the fact that the people that aren't Bitcoiners or that are trying to enforce the legacy system, they're so nihilistic that they're not having children. And Bitcoiners are just popping them out, left, right, and center. So just to give us time and we'll be a largest large enough subset of the population that it'll just be inevitable. Yeah, we're hoping for about three more, maybe more.

We'll see. Five sounds nice. And yeah, we're going to, we're not going to put them in school or anything. I mean, that's stuff to do and we'll need help. But we'll make adjustments as needed. But that is the working plan. That's the way, man. We've got four.

And to our school age, our plan is to have them in school until grade three is kind of what we're like planning on right now with and then so that, which is in a year and a bit for our oldest. So we're excited to kind of be on that same journey and rip through the unschooling method. You know, yeah. You know something we were kind of joking about the other night? and I can't believe I'm going to share this publicly, but like, I love the idea of like arranged marriages, not like not forced, not forced. Yeah. But like parents doing matchmaking.

You know what I mean? Like I got two daughters. They're going to be beautiful. They're going to be smart. They're going to be independent. They're going to be like badass wives and parents for somebody, right? Or whatever they want to do. But like, I want to meet bit coinders who are raising badass sons and just be like,

yo, let's get your sons and my daughters together. let's join the families, join our power, join the wealth and grow. You know, like I like that sort of old school way of like joining families together. Because if I know that you're raising your kids in a particular way and I know you, it's like I can kind of predict what kind of people they're going to be and safely kind of matchmake for my own children. And so anyway, I'm planning to have a bunch of kids. So anybody else out there with kids, you know, like, hit me up and we'll talk.

This is like the super optimistic version of Game of Thrones where like it's like a much happier one. Just all the houses come together and build amazing citadels. And then the entirety of society is just happy and productive and builds amazing things for the future instead of constantly killing each other. Amazing. Awesome. All right. Well, we're going to put a bow on that topic as well. Hella bullish on, again, like the tools to raise families, the tools to educate and help people through, you know,

a solid foundation, not just in Bitcoin, but in freedom and liberty and all of that as well. And I think it's a fantastic topic. Again, that game hoddle up from free market kids, it was, I think. And then the show that we mentioned also was Tuttle Twins. And that's amazing. And Adam, what was the board game that won the Geyser Fund thing? It's called Block Hunters on Geyser. And then, you know what?

Since we're giving a shot, we can't not shout out Shamery, I think. And Scott and his wife, it's, yeah, there's both. Both Scots are like hardcore Bitcoin gamified. They got some wicked, probably actually Matt for. for your kids' age, like young stuff. They got some teething tools, some, like, cardboard books, and then some matchmaking stuff.

So that's dope. So Matt now has all those tools. Also, Matt, you're getting offers in the chat for sons to make. That's a little early, guys. Look what you've done. They're not yet of age. I was going to say for my first time on this show,

this took a weird weird card. I didn't expect Matt to be like talking about reinforcing the strength of his Bitcoin kingdom by arranging marriages and making allies that way. Hey man, but you know what though? It's funny because if you think about it, what are we trusting our current matchmaking up to is an algorithm governed by Tinder and equivalent like, you know, sites. I know, I just now I understand.

I understand what Ben Mem when you know, he said, eff it, we're doing it live. We're kicking this thing out. It's not, you know, in the car. It's also it's also just the culture around like marriage and it's all about like infatuation and lust and like who do you who's like are you interested in it. That's not what makes a great marriage. Like totally. Yes, that's important, you know, but like it's really about shared values, you know, shared goals, compatibility.

And nobody knows that better than your parents. It's like, I know my daughter is better than anyone ever will. And so while I'm not going to force them to do anything, I think I can make some great introductions. And hopefully I can raise them to be like, look, love and that grows over time, right? It's the shared values, the shared goals and the compatibility. Do you work well together that in time will create the most lasting marriages? Like the reason that marriages don't last is because everyone is just marrying for love, so to speak. It's not really love.

It's just you're just really into that person. You marry them and it's like, crap, I'm married for all the wrong reasons. So I'm just hoping to help guide my children a slightly differently. Yeah, yeah. It's you're either the average beginning of a relationship nowadays is either you're swiping or you're completely obliterated at a bar somewhere and then you just wake up next to a person. I think that's probably the average encounter nowadays. And it'd be good to get, again, parents with shared values just like, again, not like

put the forcing kids into a marriage, but as you said, like introductions of like-minded people that you think might be quality matches, not just like garbage people raised by fiat. He comes from a great family. He owns your own business. He's got plenty of money. He'll take care of you. like, you know, like these are things that matter. Yeah.

I mean, not the only thing that matter. A lot of other stuff matters too. Love it. You shouldn't negate that stuff. Well, I'm going to put a bow on this. We're going to do a rotation here. Before we do, I've got to give a just a very quick shout out to a couple of sponsors here. And then we're going to come back.

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Not confident, but we will see. Anyways, we're going to dive over to Danny. I will just say that, Adam, I know you're on a timeline. He is going to stick around as long as he can and then probably give the old salute whenever you need to drop out if that's cool with you, buddy. Awesome. Cool.

Danny, I'm going to toss it to you, key you up with the same question. Everybody gets. Why are you bullish? Yeah, very different. Abrupts change from the arranged marriages board games. Let's make the natural pivot to taxes and inflation. You know, I work in a world where it's all about kind of tax optimization. We work to allow people to access their Bitcoin for liquidity in a tax-advantaged way.

and then to pass more Bitcoin onto their kids. Speaking of marriage and kids, you know, pass it on to them in a tax-advantaged way. So this week, the big thing for me was the Biden's 2025 budget proposal with a recommendation of increasing the long-term capital gains rate to 46%, which is the longest in the history of the capital gains rate. And then also a potential proposal for,

taxes on unrealized capital games. So not only are they taxing the dollars, but then also, you know, in the last five years, 80% of every dollar ever printed or every dollar in circulation has been printed. So they're inflating them away as well. So why am I bullish? All the more reason to get your money out of the fiat money system and to convert and save long term in the world's hard as asset. So I'm fired up about it. It's just kind of gives me, uh, more sense of what we're building and what so many other people are building towards this future Bitcoin economy, whether you believe it will eat every economy or there will be a Bitcoin economy that's a sediment layer that exists across economies. Whatever your belief is, I think that

it just gives so much more momentum and kind of fire in the belly of those people that are working on it. Yeah. It's, it's wow. I see people in the chat right now talking about it, like taxing unrealized gains is insane. Like that is an insane thing. And it makes me, again, think back to the first income tax in the U.S. was a 3% flat tax that was touted as being aimed at just high net worth individuals as well, right? Like the upper echelons of the rich. And sure enough, that much like we talked about the great, um, the great.

gradual infringements and like in these sudden bursts of, oh, we're going to clamp down on this and this and then rumble Bitcoin. Well, I mean, that was, that was a look at where it started and where it went. Three percent flat tax for the richest of the rich. And now everybody's paying 20, 30, 40 percent of their entire income, like every person. And it's, well, and you know, it's from a scale perspective, you know, there are, and this gets back into the first topic and maybe to the next topic, but from a surveillance angle, you know, so on bank deposits of $10,000 or more, it has to be reported, right? Well, that legislation is passed in the 70s, $10,000 then is equal to like $84,000 now. But they haven't inflated that number with the inflation of the

underlying currency. So it's just more and more and more, an insubstantial amount of money will give, you know, the government credence to actually look through and surveil its constituents, which I think, again, just more reason to huddle. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I mean, they're definitely, well, unless that, that unrealized capital gains thing comes through, that's, that's, that would be the worst. I feel like with that one, that might be a, a tougher sell in that there's going to be

so many businesses that just. Yeah. That has to be, that's, that's political posturing. But, you know, when you get. to a point where your budget is so on whack, you have to do ridiculous things to make it balance or to make it look like you're making a dent in it. So, you know, I don't think that there's actually any chance of that. But, but yeah, so that got me fired up this week and maybe bullish on everything that we're building that other people in the space are building as well.

Yeah. Adam, do you want to give your thoughts? I know you got about five minutes here, but if you want to Yeah, I'll dive in and then and then I'll gracefully exit. I think the, it'll be so, so, difficult to tax sovereign Bitcoiners. Like, like, it's just, it's just designed in such a way, it's designed in such a way that when you hold Bitcoin in your self-custody and you are abiding by, you know, reasonable, even legal privacy policies, it's, it's just like you're able to leave. And this is kind of back to, you know, what I said about governments, Bitcoin, putting governments into competition with each other, the U.S. is without a doubt going to be the

most draconian in their policies towards Bitcoin. They've shown their hand now. We know what they want to do. We know they don't want privacy. And so Bitcoiners right now need to start investigating and searching for jurisdictions that are going to be better. And then you like, you pack up your books with your words highlighted and go. And it's like, it's not, it's just so simple. And once again, you know, the government thinks that and I suppose they, we are actively, we as a society, actively running towards fake Bitcoin, actively running towards Bitcoin in someone else's wallet, Bitcoin and some like tax sheltered, uh, ETF vehicle, which are

obviously very dangerous when we're talking about, you know, these things. But the fact that we can look at an asset, a single digital asset, and think, if I get on a plane, this asset has different taxes or that the next jurisdiction will take the same exact, fungible asset and treat it differently, just goes to show what a clown world we are living in. And I think putting governments into competition with each other is Bitcoin's number one superpower in that we can color. collectively look at and and I mean, frankly, it's not unlikely that Bitcoiners just buy countries one day. We're going to be able to actually have country founding wealth because as this level of draconian, you know, fiat nonsense trickles in and throughout the ecosystems, countries are going to fail. Dollars are going to fail. It's not even a matter of if. It's a matter of when at this point. And as that occurs, the Bitcoin in your self-custody wallet will be so valuable and have

so much purchasing power that like, you know, talking talking about like Bitcoin Citadel's, like that's what it is. It's like, okay, there's a hundred of us. You know, let's let's each pitch X number of Bitcoin and we own the country now. And and there's no, you know, consequences for owning Bitcoin. And watch what happens. Watch the prosperity. Watch the abundance that floods. into the country. There is a small project on an island outside of Honduras in the island called Roiton. The project is called Prospera. And they're like setting up, you know, a sovereign jurisdiction to have like this kind of of testing, I guess, this kind of abundance. They're like a magnet for people that provide value. And I think

that's a very bullish thing. So yeah, that's my take on. Adam, before you go, I got to ask, do you want to go halfseys on Greece? I heard it's nice. I'm in, man. I'm in. I kind of want to split it with Matt. Sounds like we could have a good thing going here. Awesome.

All right. Well, Adam, I'll let you duck as we let Matt give his thoughts in and around the current. reaches of the government to raid and pillage more wealth from individuals here. But thanks for joining, buddy. Thanks, guys. Stay sovereign, everyone. Awesome. So, Matt, again, in and around, I mean, it's, when you have a government that just

spends and spends and spends so much beyond its means, it's going to have to find ways to fund itself some way. Like, are you surprised to see more of this in any way? Well, okay, that's an interesting segue. Governments do not fund themselves through taxation, at least not the U.S. government. The U.S. government borrows what it will from its own private banker, and then that banker and also some of the larger bankers and the World Bank and the WF are absolutely funding. The IMF are funding international governments. So it's all based on debt.

the money exists as a result of that debt. The money is based on debt. And so taxation really has nothing to do with financing government activities. So the question becomes, why are they taxing? The obvious in the immediate answer is because fuck you. It's the obvious, it's the lowest hanging and most accurate answer, which is just like, hey, you know, like you got to know your place. I think it was a bug's life, the children's animated film where it's like, you let one of those grasshoppers talk back, or one of those ants talk back to us,

and like they all will. They outnumber us, you know, 10,000 to one. And if they all just got together, then we'd be ruined. So it's not about the food. It's about keeping them in their place. And I very firmly believe that taxation is a means of control, not a means of revenue collection. Further, it also is a way of mitigating inflation, right?

By pulling money back in from the people and paying off any amount of the debt, you are reducing the money supply and therefore dampening inflation a little bit. So when inflation starts a little bit out of control, they talk about raising taxes that brings some money back in, helps the inflation, and then people cheer, oddly enough. But anyway, so unrealized capital gains, higher levels of capital gains, it all kind of sounds like part of the end of stage empire formula for me. It sounds like, you know, last gasps at maintaining control and controlling inflation. I don't think that they could ever successfully implement any kind of unrealized capital gains program. It just practically speaking would be very, very difficult to track and enforce.

So if it ever did come to fruition, I think it would cause such a stir and such chaos that it would have to be rolled back. Not to say that it wouldn't cause a lot of damage in the meantime. But as Danny mentioned, I think it's more political posturing, more just trying to be rolled back. trying to set the price point, right? So somebody says, like, how much does your product cost? How much do you sell a server for, Matt? And I'm like, I sell servers for $10,000 a piece, but I'll sell it to you for 350.

It's just setting the negotiating bar so wildly out of control that when they do raise the capital gains to 28% from 20%, that everyone will view it as some sort of a victory, right? It's just this gradual erosion and rising of taxes, and loss of freedom, but you got to set the bar first. You got to come in crazy with your negotiating in order to make the counterparty feel like they're getting a deal at the end of the day. So I don't think unrealized capital gains are a realistic thing. I do think 44% capital gains for certain income earners could be a real thing. It's the highest in history, but it's not unprecedented

internationally. And I wouldn't put it beyond the IRS and the U.S. government to enact that level of taxation. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we get plenty of that here in Canada, too. They just raised the capital gains rate or it's going up inside of a couple months here. God, I'm trying to. Did they see something? It's like 67% for like the highest wage bracket? No. So let's see here. let's see I'm just quickly looking the capital gains tax yeah

so basically on the gain that you have so the way it would work is half of your gain would be taxed at whatever your income bracket is now they're changing that to two-thirds of your gain taxed at your yeah so 60

37% of whatever you've gained will be taxed. What's really interesting about cap gains taxes too is that so much of corporate America is built up around the idea that income taxes are higher than capital gains taxes. I'm talking about like options and equity awards here, right? Like there's a whole freaking paradigm built up around like incentive stock options versus non-qualified stock options and long-term capital gains versus short-term capital gains. That is all based on that fundamental fact that cap gains are lower than income taxes. And if that flips, you're talking about like people who planned their retirements,

long term planning and financial planning and thinking around the idea that they were going to be able to invest in these things, get long term capital gains benefits, and then suddenly realized that they would have been better off just, you know, not being an employee, getting non-qualified options. Like it would just shake up the entire corporate work. old, not only unrealized gains, but if capital gains rates ever exceed income rates, that that really changes the entire approach to compensate, equity-based compensation. Yeah. Yeah, it's, yeah, they're not, they're not very happy about the, the change here, obviously. And there's a

a lot of worry about, again, capital flight. And even within, um, They're worried right now in and around healthcare because there's not enough doctors for everybody here. We have a lot of population growth and not the specialized people in specialized positions to cope with that. Again, like doctors. And so a lot of doctors obviously have their family offices, and that's how they kind of store their wealth banking on those capital gains. and this completely disincentivizes new people from coming to Canada and opening practices and everything like that. Well, what I've heard, correct me if I'm wrong, is that tax enforcement in Canada is a lot more lax than in the U.S.

That you don't have the IRS with all their, you know, aggressive tactics and new agents, guns and that you can basically not pay taxes. That's what I've heard. I wouldn't go that far. I would just say that they are not as well equipped as the U.S. I think, you know, the U.S., because of the unique position that you guys are in or that your government is in, where they can kind of siphon a lot of wealth out of other corners of the globe and have that privileged position of being able to fund effectively anything because of the World Reserve Currency status.

Yeah, it's a lot easier to hire however many thousands of, 87,000 IRS agents to go shake down every grandmother in the entire country. Whereas here, you know, we did the, we did the Serb checks, which is basically like the, the version of the Stimmy checks that you guys did, except for it was like a monthly thing. And a lot of people just, you know, didn't, it didn't qualify for that, but applied for it anyways. And it's, they were saying, oh, well, we'll sort through it afterwards. We want to make sure that everybody is able to live no matter what. And if some people get through that aren't supposed to, we'll go after them afterwards. They're effectively kind of throwing in the

towel now. They're like, I don't know, like, we'll probably never get that back. Like, it's, they're, they're trying but um but yeah it's it's nowhere near the level uh of of uncle sam and i mean uncle sam he follows you around the globe it's i'm going to say the global the global reach right is that's the part well adam had mentioned something about you know like just leave and you know while this is why are we bullish i also had some issues with some of the things he was saying it was extremely optimistic and just like you know it's dead they're fall apart we're going to win would just leave i agree to an extent right it's jurisdictional arbitrage there's like Like, that's the long game for sure.

Like this doesn't work. And of course, you know, I'm optimistic in the long vision of things. But that doesn't mean there's going to be all sorts of harm and chaos caused in the meantime. And it's not just easy for someone to like just pack up and leave. And then there's the exit tax. And so if you're planning to leave legally, you know, and not have the IRS come chasing you around the globe, you're going to have to pay all the cap gains that you would have paid had you sold it anyway. And so it's like it's really just it's tough, right?

We're being we're being squeezed slowly, but surely the entire population is being squeezed. And people have a limit. I'm actually curious to see what that limit is. I've actually been quite surprised at the level of tolerance and resilience of humans, just as I've gotten older and witnessed what people are willing to put up with and able to put up with. It's one, impressive and two, just kind of disheartening because it's like at what point do people say no more? I don't know what that is.

It might be really far from where we currently are. Like, we might still be on the early stages of discontent before anyone really decides to put their foot down. Yeah. Just to tack on to your, how good is the CRA at enforcing things, Becca, in the comments. This is a true story. 600 employees of the Canada Revenue Agency said that,

or they got fired because they claimed the checks that they weren't supposed to. So they can't even keep their own house in order. Like they've got government agents stealing from our CRA. Yeah, so let's maybe let's get back to being bullish. Maybe just the bullish thing is that the government can't actually keep tracking itself anyway. So that could be a reason to be bullish too. I suppose so.

Yeah, no, it's it's we'll see. But I mean, you are seeing people. They are starting to get pretty fed up. I've started to see videos of people. You saw the previous videos of people like crying in their car, their nurses or have the, you know, the jobs that they thought were good opportunities. And they should be doing fine and they can't afford rent. They can't afford groceries. But now I've started to see videos of people like they got their tax return and they're just, they're tearing them up.

I've seen a few of those now. So maybe the answer to your question is it, I mean, it obviously depends person to person, but there's some people that are feeling that squeeze. They're being gaslit into, well, not successfully, but they're trying to gaslight people into saying you've never had it better. What are you talking about? Look at these jobs reports, right? Like that's kind of where we're at.

Well, look at the unemployment rate. If, you know, every single mom of four kids has three jobs to stay afloat, then, you know, there's a lot of jobs going around. they've got three of them. Exactly. Lucky moms, right? Three jobs, leave some for the rest of us. Yeah, it is lappable how it's being approached,

and I think people are seeing through it. It's just, are they angry enough? And we'll see, we'll see. But with that, we're going to do our final rotation here. Matt, I'm going to toss it to you. I'll cue you up with the same question. And why are you bullish? this week. It's a tough week, right? Or so it seems. So why am I bullish? So while this past week was a

slew of bad news, right? I have a list here. We have cap gains proposals, unrealized cap gains taxing, Samurai gets arrested and seized in Phoenix wallet deciding to up and leave the U.S. as a result of, we assume at least, what happened to Samurai. Seemingly bad for Bitcoin, seemingly bad for freedom. I'm bullish because none of that, while unpleasant, none of that surprised me. That all feels very much like part of the expected course of events here. We are inventing technology and changing culture and trying to rebuild society in a way that directly contradicts, confronts, and undermines the existing power

structures of this country and this world. And the idea that we were going to be able to do that and receive either buy-in or passive compliance from the existing, from the incumbents who have positions of power was very naive. And hopefully we don't have that mindset, but I certainly do not. And so, you know, witnessing a few attacks like this is just like, yeah, of course. Like I could have told you, and I actually did in more private circles, express shock, really, that the samurai guys had not already been arrested. I was like, you can't do what you're doing. Like, you're not going to get away with that. Like, you know, and we get, we get complacent, right? A few, we start doing something and even worse we start talking about the thing that we're doing start bragging about the thing

that we're doing start rubbing it in the nose of authorities and they don't do anything and what that does is it causes a degree of arrogance right overconfidence of just being like oh yeah we're like totally getting away with this we're like doing the thing that you know like i'm saying crazy shit and i'm doing crazy shit and they're not coming after me and so you sort of get complacent and then one day down goes the door and and they come and i'm like what did you explain? of course that was of course that was going to come you were doing something that well it may not have directly violated a law right like in other words the samurai guys and many people in the bitcoin space are actually relying on technicalities to protect them right like these clauses of

laws where it's like what does it mean to be a money transmitter well you take custody of the money samurai's like well we're not taking custody so we're not a money transmitter I'm like that's a fucking technicality. You guys were 100% running servers, centralized servers that people from all over the world were using to mix and launder money. Of course, you're not going to get away with that forever. They're going to change the law. Even if you are within the law, the law is subject to the whims of politicians and bureaucrats. And they're going to change it to stop you from doing what you are doing. And so should money laundering, quote unquote, right, whatever you want to call it, be illegal?

Of course not. That's a stupid law. But as long as the existing powers are saying that's something we don't like and you do it, you should expect to be attacked. Right. And you're not going to outforce them. These people have enormous amounts of force and power and access. And you're not going to win that fight, not on a battle by battle basis.

And the long term, of course, I think we're going to win the war. But you need to decide. People need to decide in the moment whether they are prepared to defend themselves effectively or whether they are prepared to comply in the event that they cannot defend themselves or whether they are prepared to become a martyr in the event that they refuse to comply. That is your hierarchy of choice that everyone is faced with at this moment. Anyone that is building anything that is countering. subversive or undermining of the existing power structures, you need to be prepared for one of those

three scenarios. At start nine, we take the first one, right? Our preparation model is effective defense, right? And we do that by not mattering at all, right? Our effective defense is that we are writing open source code, right? We are providing free documentation for how to use the program that results from that code. And we are providing customer support also for free to people who want to use that program once they're running it. We don't own the code. We don't own the docs. We don't own the support. We don't charge for any of those things, right? We are just speaking effectively, right? You can view code as speech. Code is a blueprint. For instance, it is legal for me to write a guide on how to make a knife. Okay? Let's imagine there's a country where knives are illegal,

It's not illegal for me to, as some member of this world, write a guide for how to make a knife. But that does not mean that it is legal for me to make the knife and give it to people or make the knife and sell it to people. So can I start doing that? I'm now in violation of the law. Should the law be that way? Of course not. But it is that way. And so you need to be prepared to deal with the consequences of violating that law. So what we do to protect ourselves is that we don't like, we don't matter everything that I'm building. here, everything that the Start 9 team is building here, is we'll continue to function almost without missing a beat if we went missing. If Start 9 were to be shut down, right? If we didn't, no longer existed, everything would just keep going as usual. That is our goal. We're not quite there yet.

At this point, if it were to happen tomorrow, say, there would be probably a few days of like, you know, people needing to figure out what to do and what button to click to make everything work again, particularly around the marketplace. That's really the only point of contact that we have with anything. But in the next release, that goes away as well. Okay, so I don't want to talk too much about starting out. Let me kind of back, zoom out a little bit here. I just kind of got going there.

So number one is make yourself not matter. If you don't want to be attacked, make attacking you a value. U-Less endeavor, right? So, for instance, if we get attacked and shut down, what did those incumbents get? The answer is nothing, because the technology will continue to be used. The technology will continue to spread. There was no real benefit, but they've created a martyr. And martyrs are very dangerous things to create, right? As somebody who's trying to maintain power, you don't want to create martyrs. You are willing to create martyrs. when the reward for doing so is sufficiently large as it was in the case of samurai. They must have viewed that. They must have weighed the cost benefit there and been like, okay, clearly everyone's going to get upset about this. Clearly, we're going to make a martyr out of these people, but we really don't want whirlpool running.

So let's shut it down. Okay? So yes, we've created these martyrs, but don't worry, the crowd is fickle. They'll forget about samurai in three weeks. We'll just come up, you know, some other thing will take the news cycle and they'll vanish. But whirlpool will be gone. So if you want to defend yourself, make it such that if attacking you results in no benefit. If attacking you results in some huge benefit to your opponent, then they may attack you.

You're setting yourself up. Number two is that if you are, if you matter, if attacking you would result in a benefit, you've really got to get serious about thinking about what your principles are and what your line is. Right. What are you willing to put? put up with when they say comply do this build a back door into the code give us your customer database uh give us control over funds whatever it happens to be you need to make a decision before it happens what you're going to uh put up with and what you're not going to put up with and if your

answer is i'm taking a hard principal stance i'm not going to give anything ever i'm not going to give any ground ever uh but you are doing things that they don't like you are setting yourself up to be a martyr. You should prepare for the fact that you, that is going to be your role in the broader war. And that's an important role, right? To be clear, like those people who stand on principle and refuse to kneel, so to speak, and go down fighting are the inspiration for those who remain, but you should know what you're getting yourself into because that's where this is going. Right. You either can defend yourself, comply, or be destroyed. And so why am I bullish about all this? Because this is normal, right? Like if you look at history and you look at war and you look at just how humans are, this is not unique. We are doing something very big and very important that is going to make the world a much better place for future generations.

And you don't get to do stuff like that free of charge, right? Everything has a tradeoff. We don't get to reinvent the world. We don't get to reinvent money. We don't get to, you know, reinvent governance to, you know, enable greater independence for individuals and families without getting a few cuts and bruises along the way. And so if you're on that path, be prepared to get hit. Be prepared for your friends to get hit.

And when it happens, don't get all up in arms and excited and emotional. It's just just go keep working, go back to work. Again, this past week was a thing. There was multiple attacks this past week. And everyone's really energized and excited. And as I said at the beginning of the show, that's good to see. But the reality is that this is just another week in Bitcoin. And these weeks are going to continue.

There's going to be more attacks. There's going to be bigger attacks. There's going to be things that we can't believe. they would do and they're going to do them, right? You shouldn't be surprised, prepare for that instead. So that's the perspective ultimately that I have and would like to share with people. Is this like broader, longer, bigger perspective of what is currently unfolding and to prepare yourself emotionally and psychologically for the idea that you will or may, depending on what you are doing be attacked and that you should figure out what you're comfortable with and what you're

willing to do or take now so that you're not doesn't take you by surprise when it happens and i suppose how how resilient the things that you're currently using and the way that you're currently going about data your your bitcoin but all of it i suppose is is that that you're that's something that will you know can just be snatched up from under you um really really easily uh you know how do you think about that kind of stuff in and around you know this you don't i it sounds like you you're not confident that the average bitcoinser is at all prepared for something like that no no i don't i think that there is a subset of not just bitcoins but people in this world who you know call them freedom fighters right like people who who want a more free future which i think has always

been the case throughout history and to be fair in a sense that has come true right like modern day like i wake up every day and i do whatever i want most people do right like sure maybe people have to work and but like the degree of wealth and freedom that is at least possible to the average person today not in every country, not at all times, but I'm speaking for myself in a privileged position in the USA today, there's a high degree of freedom and a high degree of opportunity, more so than existed throughout most of history. There's probably, there's been progress, right? But it's not like a linear chart. It's not just like more, more, more, more freedom. It goes in waves, and we are witnessing a resurgence of totalitarianism right now, not just in this country, but all over the world. And I'm confident

As is the case with the rest of history, that ultimately that resurgence of totalitarianism will be met with resistance and that the world will be more free and more prosperous as a result. But there is always damage done during the process. People will be hurt. People will be imprisoned. People will die along the way. And if that's not for you, then you need to opt out of that battle. It doesn't mean don't do anything. It just means you need to. to choose your level of engagement. I think we have a lot of posturing. There's a lot of people in the greater Bitcoin and space that are like really ready to like pop off at the mouth and like tout their, you know, like total fuck you to the state independence and blah, blah, blah. And they're like really ready to like, you know, they're talking, talking, talking because it has, it has not real. They don't recognize that this is like a real fucking thing that's going to come home at some point. And when it gets real,

you're going to find out very quickly who meant it and who didn't. And that's kind of what's happening right now. You have a lot of, you have a lot of posturing. And that's fine. I'm not saying that those people are bad. I'm saying what I'm saying right here to like, it's time to get serious. Like I put out a tweet the other day.

It's like it is time to get very serious about thinking about taking control of your information systems. If you are an individual, a family, or a business, and you are completely dependent on and relying on third parties to process all of your digital communications. If you're storing everything on third party clouds, if you're sending all your messages through third party servers, if you're storing all your money with third party banks in one form or another, you are setting yourself up to be severely damaged when the metaphorical bombs

start dropping. Let's hope they're not real ones, right? But when these attacks continue and these hacks continue, it's not just coming from one source. This is like a battle royale right now. I hate to use a term like World War III. I think that's kind of a stupid term in a sense. But like you have a sort of global conflagration right now sort of building up where there's tons of conflicting interests. You have this country and that country and this bank and those people and these individuals and that group. And like everyone is just kind of like trying to get theirs in whatever way that they can. And if we as Bitcoiners, as

lovers of freedom as people who want to build a better and more prosperous and more free place for our children and grandchildren are serious. And we want to come out on top of this thing. You've got to prepare. You've got to get your information systems, your financial resources, and in some cases your physical defense systems in order. And you should do that now, right? Not with any degree of panic. It's not like, I'm not talking about some sort of incredibly short timeline where it's like, oh, my God, like tomorrow, some crazy thing is going to happen. You better, like, be a doomsday prepper and get your bag.

I'm just talking about very reasonable and very, very gradual consideration that the world is not becoming an increasingly stable and prosperous and free place, that it is gradually slipping into totalitarianism and eventually conflict and that you should. you should start moving in that direction. And again, this is a why are we bullish segment. And again, I say that I'm bullish. I know it sounds like I'm like kind of being negative right now. I'm bullish because this is our reality. And how can you not be bullish about reality? It's like this is our time. This is the era that we were born into. This is our battle and our fight in the context of human history. You should be grateful that it's such an amazing battle,

Right? Like what a time to be living in. We're talking about this inflection point of human history where decentralized systems become more profitable and more efficient than centralized systems. That's never happened since the days of early tribalism. The nation state has always dominated because it could centralize and coordinate resources better than any small group of tribal leaders could. But we're now back to the point where decentralized systems are. more resilient like look at bitcoin right like bitcoin is the shining example of a successful resilient anti-fragile decentralized system we should be doing everything that we possibly can to learn from bitcoin and re-implement other information systems and physical systems in the model of bitcoin because those are what are going to survive the night survive the winter um And so if you're doing something incredibly centralized, right, it depends on how compliant you are, I guess, right? If you're doing something that's totally within the rule of law and letter of the law and there's no chance of that changing anytime soon, you're probably going to be okay. But if you're doing something even a little bit kind of edgy and, you know, unpleasant, there's a very good chance that the law is going to change and no longer well,

you and if you wake up that morning and go how could they just change the law and i'm suddenly like out of business is like you should have seen that coming because these people are not just going to let you take over their world yeah yeah um just to so for the people that are watching that maybe are like what the hell do i do is there is there a um perhaps like a a first step or or some low hanging fruit that some people might take advantage of to kind of start going down that road of being a bit more self-sovereign. Yeah, there's a few pillars, right? So there's family, you know, start a family to the best of your ability and within

your resource is, raise your own kids to the best as you can, right? Don't hand them over to the state if you can afford not to. to whatever extent that you can, you know, grow your own food. I mean, you know, it's homesteading. It's basically being independent. It's taking steps in every aspect of your life to not depend on others and especially a government for your essential needs. Exercise regularly.

Stay healthy. Do not get sick. Don't get caught up in the health system. It's broken. They're all broken. everywhere around the world. The only effective healthcare is don't get sick. And the only way that you cannot get sick is to eat healthy,

sleep regularly and exercise every day. So do that, right? Take care of your body. Take care of your mind. Take care of your soul. Have a family, people that are close to you and you can rely upon and can rely upon you. Have a community, right? Find like-minded individuals that you can trust and rely upon for information,

for assistance, whatever it is, take care of your digital life, right? And that's literally what I do. And if you're interested in taking greater control of your information systems, text messaging, data, financial transactions, everything like that, you've got to run your own server. There's a lot of people in this world that still talk about how you can create this sort of like totally private, censorship-resistant information systems by using central service providers.

And it's just a pipe dream. You're never going to do it. The only possible future where the internet and the global information systems are not dominated by central authorities is if you and your friends and family are running your own servers. Like get over the idea of peer to peer, get over the idea of end-to-end encryption as the sole solutions to the problem of surveillance, censorship, and, you know, digital attack. if you're not running your own server or using the server of somebody you trust, right, not everyone needs to run their own server. It's just that the number of people running servers needs to proliferate such that everyone is either using their own server to process their information and data or they're using the server of a very close friend or family member

who they trust utterly. That is the only architecture upon which humanity has, a free and open information, global information system. People have to run their own servers. There's no way around that. That's what we do. We make running your own server easy, or at least easier than ever before. I wouldn't call it easy just yet, but we're getting closer with each update. And then as far as Bitcoin, take self-custody, right? Do not put your coins with third parties, at least in large amounts, small amounts that you can afford to lose. Maybe there's a reason to do that, whether it's daily transactions or whether it's leveraging it to get a small loan or whatever it is. Just don't store the vast majority of your wealth with custodians.

And depending on your threat model, this might not apply to everybody, but you should be prepared to defend yourself physically. So that is combat training and weapons training. I hate the fact that I went all like fucking like I'm not I'm actually like a really easy going person And I just kind of like playing with my children. I sort of hate the fact that I just went off the rails there and got all crazy. Like it's not that dire. Like the world is still relatively okay right now. Like everything's fine.

Just start. Like I like the fact that we're called start nine. We're not called start nine because of this, but I've gradually come to like it. It's not called finish nine. Just start. You don't need to get it all done. You don't need to become some super prepper and like expert military combat guy.

Just start taking reasonable measures. to take control and ownership and responsibility over your own life and the life of your family. That's all I'm saying. That should be a very obvious thing to say to a human. That's really all I'm saying. Because most people don't do anything to take responsibility for themselves and their own lives for their own independence. They just don't. They completely are children and rely on others for everything. Yeah. The more self-sufficient you are, the more you build families and communities around

you of like-minded people, the more unshakable you'll be when when shit hits the fan. And, you know, take a couple notes from Matt and spend your weekend cleaning your guns, doing some common training and finding like-minded parents with a well-educated boys. But, no, that was epic. I thoroughly enjoyed that. Danny, are you taking some of this to heart again for your gaggle of children that you're going to have? you're going to I got to tell you I'm listening and I'm waiting for like the let's go around the horn I'm like okay what part do I jump in on here because you know there is so much but no Matt thank you for sharing I think that what really struck with me early on was talking about your

different choices as a founder or builder and you can you know the three choices that you outlined I think that there is importance in having people in the space that are willing to fall into those three buckets. Something that we talk about or our founders talk about is what's set them out to do what they're doing and build we're building here. Meanwhile is they have this like tolerance to deal with regulatory pain. And by that it means like they can they're willing to comply with like stupid old fiat system to build something that is painstakingly stupid and long and hard and whatever. But in our minds, we're helping to push the ecosystem forward. And the ultimate goal is to build something that allows people to leverage their Bitcoin,

to take it out of the traditional fiat system and plan for it in a tax-advantaged way so they can pass more onto their children. That's generally the goal here. And then during their lifetime, they can leverage it for liquidity if they need to re-enter the fiat system and spend. But to do that, we have to do a lot of things that we think are stupid. Yep. you know and and we have to we're willing to comply with them because we think we're building something that's bigger that in the long term if you go to one of the 57 countries in the world that had inflation of 100 percent or sorry inflation of 10 percent in the last year those people

should not be getting life insurance which is the world's oldest savings product in their fian currency they should be getting life insurance in bitcoin and we and we think that we can reach a lot of people and impact a lot of people's lives and help them support their family for multiple generations by doing so. But to do that, we do have to build within the rails of this legacy, the regulatory system, which is enough to make you want to put your head through some days. Well, yeah, let me chime in for two seconds. I mean, I hope that nothing I said led anyone to believe that I was undermining or degrading things. people who are not like on the extreme end of things, right? Like I grew up in a bakery and we made

bread for people, right? It's like it's like the most old school compliant, amazing thing you can do. You're just making a product that people want. Like every endeavor that is honest and good has my vote and I will cheer it to the end of my days, whether that's in Bitcoin or making a hamburger stand or it's my my point was more to to say like you need to understand what level you are participating at because i think there's a lot of disconnect in the bitcoin space where people are participating at a very dangerous level right they're participating at a very disruptive and dangerous level and they don't realize it and so they are ill-proping prepared for what is about to happen to them. And this week was kind of an example of that.

It was just like a like, of course, guys. Like what did you think was going to happen to you? Right. Like you, you were doing this thing and you didn't build it in such a way that you were resistant to attack. Yeah. I think a lot of people want to be martyrs. Maybe that's part of it. I think that there is a degree of that as well where it's like, yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to talk, talk, talk until I get taken down because that's my sort of shining moment. it, you know, maybe there's some of that. I don't want that. I don't want that for anyone, but, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, again, if people go forth and we can build, as you said, systems that, you know, coming down hard like this re yields zero results and things keep on running seamlessly, it becomes a, you know, it becomes a, you know, it becomes a,

whack-a-mole-type situation where it's just you can't when the crowd it's it's a it's a little bit like the torrent situation i suppose right they you know the napster easy um and then you know you go and try to shut down uh what was the first the pirate bay and everything like that but then like how how quickly do do other other ones pop up and it it it became becomes more difficult over time as I suppose as people offer not not intentionally but offer themselves up as as as martyrs and people figure out well here's why that happened or how how it was possible that happened and what do we do next it's all part of the hardening process right like we are entering a decentralized era hopefully is my is my vision that the future of the world will be far less

will contain far less centralized power than it currently does. And we're still figuring out how to do that, right? We're still figuring out where the line is. Like how decentralized does something have to be to be considered decentralized? It's always a scale, right? And so we're flirting with that line right now. And there's actually going to be court cases that evaluate that line, particularly with Samarai. It's like, were they a money transmitter?

Were they a like, and they were, they were very close to the line. And so they got sniped. And it's like there's things that are very obviously away from the line, like Bitcoin as a whole. And there's things that are very obviously in line, like a traditional bank. And then there are these hybrid things that are kind of in the middle. And we're still just trying to figure out how decentralized the world needs to be to resist attack. Clearly, Samurai was not decentralized enough, right? Not only because those guys got arrested, didn't end well for them, but also because if you wanted any proof that that was a centralized service,

being run by a few individuals, the fact that as soon as the DOJ sees the website, shut down the server and arrested the people, Whirlpool disappeared. It was not decentralized. It was 100% a centralized service run by a couple of people. And that's proof. There's proof that it was because the second they shut it down in a matter of minutes, right, like turn it off. It was gone. Could you do that to Bitcoin? Could you just turn off Bitcoin? Of course not. That means it's decentralized. That's the ultimate test. Can somebody with immense power and resources turn you off?

If the answer is yes, then you are vulnerable to attack. And you will be attacked if you're doing something distasteful or illegal. Well, just to round this out, you know, if somebody could send a message to my fiance, if she's looking for me this weekend, I'll be in the backyard digging out my bunker. Not a bad idea, my friend. I don't have a bunker. Anyone is wondering, I'm not that far. Yeah, he's still much more digging to go.

Awesome. Well, gentlemen, I am going to start to round it out here. I'm conscious of our time. We're a little bit over the hour and a half, but that was epic. And again, everybody that is watching and is curious about a lot of this stuff. and how to kind of navigate.

Again, I am regularly using, again, I've got my server behind me and it's pretty badass. And again, you can host a lot of stuff independently and just be a little bit more resilient to those services that you maybe are used to using just going offline. If you, you know, there is low hanging fruit. You can do things like, hosting your own password managers.

Again, of course, like running a Bitcoin node and everything is great. BTZ Pay server. And even like in the context of, you know, with Phoenix wallet and everything, while I'm looking at my mutiny wallet running from my Star 9 server right now, which is super cool. So yeah, anyways, it's worth looking into. I think we could all stand to. to be a living in a more decentralized world.

So with that, gentlemen, I'm gonna round it out. Danny, do you have any parting words, anything that you wanna say, and any recommendations or anything you wanna point people towards before we finish? No, you know, thanks so much for having me on. This has been a great first session. I hope that a clip of this is shown in the movie

that will inevitably be made on Matt Hill's life one day. I can just be sitting sitting and listening listening in awe. I was laughing at one of the comments. My face was like, quote, unquote, wow, during the, but it was great, great to be on. My Twitter's at DeBear 7, our company, Twitter is at MeanwhileLife. You can reach out to either of those and get in touch me one of those ways, but love to continue the conversation here and appreciate it. Awesome, awesome. Matt, again, any final words, anything you want to point people towards before we finish up here? No, not really. I think I talked enough. Danny was really nice meeting you.

Maybe sometime we could just hang out and not talk about that. And yeah, let's talk about life insurance. Yeah, exactly. I should have some. I don't. Nothing more riveting than talking about life insurance. I mean, you should have it, right? You should have inheritance. You're going to have it. You might as well have it in Bitcoin rather than dollars. Hey, are you guys available in Canada? Okay, so because we did just get some life insurance and my wife was like, was balancing things. And she's like orange pilled now. She knows what's up. And so I was like, you know, there was the initial discussion of like, do we just, do we just like gradually put away the Bitcoin or do we sink it into this fiat thing that, you know, the purchasing power of which the payout will be far lower. over time, but the main concern was over what if something happens immediately. Her reasoning though, her reasoning was, yeah, you know, we'd be, you know, the kids would be okay. They could use the Bitcoin to, you know, pay off some things and whatever.

But she's like, but I don't want them to have to use the Bitcoin. So if we just put some Fiat, then then, but yeah, some Bitcoin life insurance would be Anyways, we're going to round out here. Gentlemen, thank you so much for being here. Have a great weekend, and I'll see you both soon. Have a good one. Cheers. Thanks, Ben.

Bye. Sure, guys. All right. And everybody, thank you guys so much for joining in for the show. What an epic rip that was. Of course, please do like, subscribe, share, all those things help a ton getting this content in front of more eyeballs. Of course, all the previous to mention sponsors are in these show notes down below. can hit them up. And again, as of last Friday, I announced a new company that I just

launched here called Bitcoin Mentor. You know, I've been teaching people and making tutorials for people for eight years now. And I have been doing one-on-one consultations with people when the free tutorials are not enough and they need a little bit of extra help with stuff. Well, I'm kind of at the point where I can't take any additional sessions. I just don't have, there's only so many hours in the day. So myself and my co-founder might. here have put together an incredible team of mentors that can help you through pretty much anything you need in Bitcoin. We had 350 people apply to be a part of Bitcoin mentor and we whittled it down to like 16. So they are just awesome, awesome, awesome people, awesome, awesome, awesome

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and you can also find it via my website, BTC Sessions.com. Anything that says booking now, we'll head directly to Bitcoin Mentor.io. So with that, thank you guys again so much for joining in with the show. Like, sub, share all that stuff. Everybody in the chat,

awesome to see you. Glad you guys were all part of it. And with that, I am out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening, wherever you may be. See you guys next time for your daily session. Bitcoin.