BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Alex Brammer, Jesse Berger, Brian De Mint ep295

Episode Date: October 8, 2022

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What is going on, everybody. Welcome to the show. Another Friday, another episode of why are we bullish. Very excited for this panel. It's going to be a lot of fun. A couple new guests and somebody who's been on the show a number of times. Very happy to have them back. But we'll do some intros momentarily.

Of course, this is live. Anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. Do it live. I can write it and we'll do it live. I'm a thing sucks.

Yeah. If you have not already, please do like, subscribe, share. All those things really help get this content in front of more eyeballs. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. All right, before we dive in and bring in our guests, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. This is the Bitbo.io dashboard. We're looking at $19,577 per coin.

A single U.S. dollar will pick you up 5,107 sats. 91.3% of all Bitcoin have been mined. Side notes, there was a big upwards difficulty adjustment in mining, meaning more hash rate coming on the network. Very interesting. In terms of fees, it looks like next block, seven stats per byte, but anything beyond that, if you're willing to wait just a little bit,

low single digits should do you just fine. Shout out to sponsors of the show, coincite.com. These guys just have the best damn hardware in the Bitcoin space. I love them. I love my cold card mark four, which by the way, I just put out a new tutorial on that on Monday, which covers using NFC with Nunchuk wallet.

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And with that, enough of my rambling. Let's get our guests in here. Let's start chatting. So we've got Brian, we've got Jesse, we've got Alex. Gentlemen, welcome to the show. I think a quick round of intros is in order. So I'm just going to go down the line and two simple questions. Who are you?

And what do you do? So I'll start with Brian. Can you give yourself a little intro? Yeah. My name is Brian DeMette. I've been in the Bitcoin space in some capacity since 2013. This year in June, I wrote my book, Bitcoin Evangelism. It's hit as high as number seven on the Amazon bestsellers charts in the inflation category.

So that's been pretty cool to be part of the kind of national conversation around inflation. Either that or I just picked a category to put my book in. It's not very competitive. I don't know. Either way, hey, it's up there. But anyways, yeah, it's so cool to be on the show. today because when I set up my lightning node, I was searching YouTube and BTC sessions, BTC sessions was where I came to set up my lightning notes. So thank you. Your content has

contributed to the network in a pretty cool way. So thank you. That's awesome. I'm always stoked to hear somebody use one of those videos to get going on a node or on lightning or something like that. So yeah, that's great. And I'm excited to read the book. I don't have a copy yet, but it's going to go on my my my list and so I'll be I'll be grabbing one it's in the mail dude I already I already sent it out it's on its way so don't worry yeah there's a little present in it too so you got you're now now you're in the in the presence of another author and maybe that's what we'll go with our next our next intro here but Jesse you also wrote a book give yourself a little intro I did my name is Jesse Berger I wrote I got a copy here magic

internet money, a book about Bitcoin. It had sold 10 million cup, no, 10 million stats worth worldwide. Yeah, I'm Bitcoin, advocate, educator, and overall, just proud Canadian too. Awesome, man. Well, I'm glad to have you back on the show. I think this is your, what, third, fourth maybe? Third or fourth maybe. Yeah, I'm grateful to be back every time. It's always a blast, but looking forward to today's show. too. Awesome. Well, thanks for being here, man. And Alex, let's give you a little intro. Who are you? What do you do? Sessions, thanks, man. I want to reiterate what Brian said. You've been helpful in my journey as well in terms of technical education. So I've been in Bitcoin since kind of mid-2016, spent a first career in the military, and then got out about two years ago and dove into mining headfirst.

was the VP of business development for Luxor and Hachshard Index for about a year and some change. And then I head up more or less mining strategy, do some data center stuff as well now, at a big power producer called Talon. And we'll talk about this a little bit later, but currently kind of finalizing a 200-migwop build at a behind-the-meter new plant. So we can talk about mining, nuclear power, et cetera. I have not written any books, unfortunately. PhD, but only two people have read it, which are my two supervisors. I don't even think my fiance's read it. But I'm honored to be on the panel with these distinguished literary

gentlemen as well. Well, awesome. I'm stoked to have you all. This is going to be a lot of fun. Everybody that is watching, if you're unfamiliar, this is why are we bullish? Really simple premise to the show. Each one of us is going to come with a reason for being bullish, and then we're going to discuss our ideas. And so we go by the three R's here, really simple. We're going to start, number one, somebody's going to drop a reason why they're bullish. It can be really anything, anything that they're currently buzzing about in and around the Bitcoin space.

Number two, we're all going to riff together on that reason, discuss, ask questions, whatever may come of it. Number three, we're going to rotate to the next person until we all have had a turn. It's a really simple. Reason, riff, rotate, and that's it. So I'm going to get us started today. And my reason for being bullish is in and around kind of the questioning of our institutions, the questioning of kind of the way we built our society and our money.

There was a period of less questioning and just a blanket trust. I feel like that is coming to an end in a variety of ways, but it's becoming more pronounced in and around kind of our monetary system, partly maybe energy as well, majorly energy as well, but there's a lot going on here. So I wanted to kind of just present a few things that I've noticed as of late. And I'm not going to dive too deep into these. I know that actually some of the topics that we're going to be talking about, there's some overlap here, which is great because we're going to be able to like dive deeper into things if we see fit. So a couple of things I wanted to bring up.

So here's, this was this week. The UN basically called on the Federal Reserve to stop tightening, to stop raising rates because they're screwing everybody. everybody with U.S. denominated debt is getting royally screwed. They're worried of a global recession. So the title of the article here on Yahoo News, UN agency warns a recession linked to imprudent monetary policy. They said excessive monetary tightening could usher in a period of stagnation and economic instability. Any belief that they, in Braggas, central banks,

will be able to bring down prices by relying on higher interest rates, goes without generating a recession, is the report suggests an imprudent gamble. It says the current course of action is hurting vulnerable people everywhere, especially in developing countries. We must change course. Now, the especially in developing countries is, you know, a lot of these developing countries are more or less given predatory loans

in order to prop up later like extracting resources from from these developing nations, in my opinion. But yeah, they're getting royally screwed because a lot of their debt denomited in US dollars compared to their own currency and the resources that they have in hand, they're having to create more and sell more and be left with less just to service the debt that they have. So it's a big problem. beyond that you see

expect more rate hikes from central bank despite a growing chorus of criticism and this is more local to Canada here our Bank of Canada Governor Tith Macklam there's just been so many things like in early 2020

the governor of the Bank of Canada literally told everybody hey if you're looking to make a major purchase like a home you should probably you can you don't need to worry. You should go do it now because interest rates are going to be low, like record lows for an extended period of time.

Fast forward to this year, the same governor of the Bank of Canada basically warned, hey, if you got a mortgage in 2020 or 2021, exactly what they said to do it, you're screwed, especially if it was if it was not fixed rate but even if it was fixed rate you're looking at mortgage rates raising somewhere between or not mortgage rates but you're looking at your mortgage payment raising somewhere between 30 and 45% by 2025 2026 it's it's insanity and so rightfully so he's

getting a ton of criticism and there's a new blog out from tiff macklem saying uh hey we're we're working on, we're working to ensure the return of price stability for Canadians. Wasn't that your mandate in the first place? Aren't you stability? Where did it go? What happened? It seems to me that your policies directly resulted in price instability. And so if there's a problem there, it's likely that a lot of those policies contributed to it.

Why weren't you able to get a handle on it? It's because anybody can, because there is control of the monetary policy, there's bound to be mistakes. Again, in and around the rate hikes and everything, you have basically the UK pension fund. And this kind of falls into the same category of the UN calling on the Fed. But UK pension fund near collapse. And again, this is kind of like a systemic. problem where a lot of these funds are invested in things that get screwed with these tightening policies. And now it's at a point, there's a rock and a hard place. It's inflation is

it multi-decade highs everywhere. And so everybody's saying, oh, well, we need to, we need to rein that in. Well, how did what's the, what's the lever they have to rein it in? You need to bump up interest rates. Well, they're doing that and we're still near record high inflation. And you, and pension funds are near collapse. And the UN is saying you're going to cause a global recession. And it's a little wild to see like that you're getting tweets here's from watch or Google just in over $930 billion wiped out from the U.S. stock market today. And we're again, we're like single digit, low single digit interest rates right now,

which is unbelievable. And so again, my general theme is questioning of our institutions. Yes, on a monetary level. But again, you're seeing, you know, gas prices are back on the rise. Conveniently, you have. And this would be the same on either side of the aisle, right? No matter who's in charge. So don't take this as me, you know, specifically blaming the left.

Because I think it would be a similar story regardless of who was in office. But nonetheless, Biden is blaming Russia and Saudi Arabia for the rising gas prices. But he was super stoked to take credit for it when it dropped a little bit. You've got, again, I enjoyed this tweet from Zero Hedge. The Fed finally did it. They broke the market. The Dow Jones, 30 largest industrial stocks on the planet, is officially more volatile than Bitcoin for the first time ever, the volatility versus Bitcoin.

Mission accomplished, baby. Yeah. Isn't that something to look at? And again, in terms of the questioning of our institutions, now you're starting to see the cracks form, right? You've got the UN and the Fed in direct opposition. But then, and, you know, they typically would at least maybe be on the same wavelength. But then you've got, you know, nations that are not friendly to each other and you get things like Russia to allow international trade with Bitcoin and crypto for any industry without restrictions.

And then the response, EU issues crypto ban on Russia with new sanctions, basically trying to ban any Bitcoin wallet out of Russia, which I mean, best of luck there. But once again, the clapback, chairman of Russian Congress finance committee, EU's ban on our Bitcoin and crypto transactions were only stimulate the development of the market in Russia. The reason I brought that up is because right now Russia has the most or the least to lose. So they're going to go down this road first. But others will follow eventually, right? And same story with El Salvador. They had the least to lose in terms of monetary policy.

They were already one of the poorest nations on earth. It wasn't that much of a gamble for them to go down the road of Bitcoin. And it's actually turned out relatively well for them. Their tourism is up. There's a lot of positives that came of it for them. And I think that you're seeing that on a nation state level. And you're seeing that on an individual level too, because individuals are, again, are questioning the opinions and and assertations of our deepest rooted institutions, right?

They're questioning the central bank. They're saying, I'm screwed right now. I can't afford groceries. I can't afford this. My central bank is telling me everything is roses and that, you know, blaming it on one thing or the other. and those stories don't seem to add up to a lot of people. It doesn't make a lot of sense. They're starting to see through kind of the facade of we understand what we're doing and we have control because that's gone.

And again, just another example in the investors ditch the euro and the pound for Bitcoin in record numbers as their value plummetz, value referring to those two currencies. And the interesting quote here is, as these individuals from the UK and EU see the value of their currency collapsing, they effectively sell the pound and the euro for Bitcoin. If this were just a trade to capture the volatility, we would have seen similar spikes in May 2021 and March 2020, but they did not. So there's something interesting happening. There's a lot of questioning, again, of our major institutions. And I think this is a double-edged sword. I think long-term, it's great because people will move towards things that are, in my opinion, they'll move towards things that are transparent and easy to anticipate,

given that, again, the transparency and the immutability. of them, that's what people will gravitate towards over time because everything else that can be pulled and pushed and levers and all that kind of stuff is is screwed. But in the midterm, I think it's going to be difficult, particularly for those that are like where we are, you know, Western nations where there's going to be a lot of scrutiny on that because the narrative right now is going to be Russia's bad and Russia's using it or X is bad and they're using it. And we've seen this before, but not on a level of there's a war happening and the opposition of that war is utilizing this tool. And I imagine when I look at the panel here, we're mostly here because we believe that in an open,

uncensurable money that cannot be debased and people should be able to choose the currency that they use and we just want the best currency. I think there's going to be a lot of trying to paint Bitcoiners in a certain way, given the geopolitical kind of demeanor at the moment. So I think midterm, it'll be a little rough, but I think long term, it results in a better world for all of us. But I am, I am bullish to see people finally very publicly questioning a lot of these institutions. So I'm happy about that. So I'm going to open it up to the floor.

I'm actually going to maybe, I'm going to get Jesse's thoughts here first because I know that there's going to be some overlap. but don't like fully dive into your topic yet, but pick apart what you wanted to from what I covered. Yeah, covered a lot of ground there, so there's definitely a lot to go through. One of the interesting things you mentioned in the, I think it was the Yahoo article, it said something about the developing nations being hit the hardest.

One of the asterisks you could put on that article as well, except El Salvador, which is remarkably paying back their loans sooner than other countries, right? They're making an effort, I think, to pay their 2023 and 2025 bonds in the next, whether it's a few months or whatever it may be. So kudos to Buckele and El Salvador for pulling off that one. With regards to, you know, sort of everything else in terms of the Fed raising rates and other central banks raising rates, pushing the world to the brink when geopolitically, they're already on

the brink of war, of energy destitution. It seems like madness. There's no sanity. There's no, like, where are these institutions in terms of, hey, we need to really reassess, pull back, maybe we've overstepped, we've made too many mistakes, whatever it may be, certainly there's growing backlash from the public, but they're sort of very, like, in a sloppy manner, stammering around, trying to figure out what to do next. It's very myopic. They can only sort of see and deal with the inch in front of their face. There's none of that long-term, you know, low-time preference vision that we would hope and expect from, although I guess not in the field, but hope and expect from leaders, push,

you know, pushing the UK pensions to the brink. I mean, you know, every Bitcoin is sitting on the sideline going like, yeah, what'd you expect? You know, like, what did you think was going to happen? So it's kind of laughable when you have, you know, that Bitcoiner lens, that more of a sound-focused, long-term lens. And you see these things happen. And you're just like, you know, this is all so patently avoidable. and same with energy markets. I think Germany closed down in the last couple of years

a whole bunch of nuclear plants. Like, what were you thinking? What was the thought process there? So yeah, it's just, it's pure clown world energy is what it is. It's just, it's a clown world. It's a cult of clown thinking. I don't know what they call it, but yes, it will certainly result in some pain.

And then hopefully, you know, Bitcoin will be a part of cushioning the blow that's destined to come and we can come out the other side better off for it. And I'll happen from there. I hope so. I hope you're right. But yeah, there is a lot of, I mean, you're conditioned to be a short-term thinker in Fiat world, right? That's how you've grown up.

It's a necessity, especially for current generation. You can't plan for your future when you can't ever hope to, you know, own a whole. home or, you know, like even support or family. Like, it's, it's, it's a hell of a challenge that a lot of people have ahead of them. So, um, I, I'm curious to hear, maybe I'll, I'll jump to Alex here and get your thoughts on on the topic at hand. And then we'll get Brian afterwards. Yeah, absolutely.

And I, um, I want to touch on, uh, what Jesse just referenced in terms of the European energy crisis. And it's, it gets to a little bit of. I don't want to like spoil the why I'm bullish. I do have to, I have to drop here in about 30 minutes. But it's tragic what's happening. We're seeing a lot of our kind of post-World War II institutions eroding in legitimacy around the world.

They're just, they're not functioning as they were designed to function. A lot of that is manifesting itself right now in an energy crisis that is that is very significant. And to your point, Jesse, about the German government and primarily the energy minister and the German Greens Party, which is the political party in power, they have actually been on a basically a zero nuclear policy since Fukushima back in 2011. And they had a world-class fleet of nuclear power plants that were generating a significant amount of reliable base load, zero carbon.

And when I say zero carbon, I mean six grams of carbon per kilowatt. watt hour, which is, you know, a single-digit percentage of the next most efficient energy production technology. And we can talk about the, you know, the restarting of the coal plants to provide baseload and all that stuff. But this is a serious problem, right? And so they have been shutting down these nuclear plants. They are in an energy crisis now with the blowing up of Nord Stream 1 and 2, which are the gas pipelines connecting Russia. to the European continent. Like the European continent is in a full-blown,

like they're going to be rationing energy this winter. You know, people, you know, sessions, I apologize, man. I know it's supposed to be an upbeat and I'm bullish, and this will get to why I'm bullish, but like this is existential in some ways for the European Union. So to get to your point about people kind of raising questions, you know, this is raising questions in the public's mind around fundamental issues of energy provision.

of public goods, of the role that government institutions play in people's private lives. And frankly, I want to say this in a way that is apolitical as much as I can, but policies around decarbonization, certain ESG policies that have prioritized certain methods of energy generation and certain decisions around energy infrastructure that are now having real world physical and political consequences that are being called into question. And so when I think about, you know, the positive outcomes of this, I agree with the consensus it feels like here on the panel that we've got we've got some some volatility to go through here in the short term. But in the long term, we're going to learn a lot of lessons as a

global body politic around our relationship with physics and reality. And the role that physics and reality plays in human outcomes when it comes to the ability to heat our homes and to feed ourselves and to keep our folks alive. And so in that regard, I do think that it is bullish, to your point, sessions around people are waking up and questioning, you know, institutional orthodoxy that is now being called into and has since, frankly, I mean, if you want to pick a point on the calendar, since 9-11 and really since the 2003 invasion of, you know, of Iraq by the United States military, these institutions have been,

the legitimacy of them have been called into question increasingly as we've been waking up to the fact that everything is not as it seems and we've been misled pretty significantly by the folks that have been charged with, with, I don't want to say caretaking, but really guiding our kind of national and geopolitical policy structures. So I'm also bullish, because we're going to wake up and we're going to realize, like, we have to renegotiate these social contracts.

We've got to really look hard at the data and ask questions around, like, do I want power production that is, you know, a 95% guaranteed uptime and six grams of carbon per kilowatt hour produced? Or do I want something that is, you know, 20% available, completely unreliable? and the supply chain is rife with environmental violations. And so I generally agree. I'm pumped that we're starting to question some of these power structures. It feels a little bit like, you know when you're a kid and you're like, God, I don't know how it would be an adult. Like how does everybody know what they're doing and like go about their business?

And like they go and they do all these things. And like I would have no clue. And then you get to being an adult. and you're like, oh, nobody has to. That's the secret. This is what people are realizing with people in government. They're like, wow, how do they manage entire countries? I would have no idea. It's because they don't have any fucking idea either.

Just wing it. That's exactly what's happening. It's crazy. Brian, I'm going to go to you. Thoughts on kind of like this. Do you see it? Do you see like a beginning of questioning? Absolutely.

I mean, I'll make it quick because I want to get to Alex's topic. But I think, and as much damage as COVID caused, as many broken lives and just the suicide rate and the actual contagion from the disease or whatever happened, all the destruction that happened from it, I think COVID might in the light of like the arc of human history might be one of the greatest gifts to humanity ever because I think it caused people to wake up on a level unlike ever before. because there's there's people that that started not just questioning what narratives were around medical and things like that but what okay now once you once you peel back the the curtain on one thing it causes you to to peel back the curtain on other things and so i uh one of my favorite and you referenced pulling the levers how the how the fed pulls levers um it reminded me of uh mike maloney has a really good um series on on youtube yeah you've seen it it's called the hidden secrets of money so it's only it's 10 part series episode seven like you just go to episodes oh You've got it right there. I had to, the image from the book, and I'm literally pulling levers. Sorry. Beautiful. Yeah.

And so, so Maloney has a like a, like that, like a graphic in the, in the video of the Fed pulling levers. And so I remember seeing that video in 2016 or something like that, 2017, pretty close to when it had come out. And so I think that helped prep my mind for, okay, the Fed will be balancing every one of those lever pulls of the Fed is a narrative shift, right? Like, it's not just them. up or downing the interest rate. There has to be a narrative behind it as well. So when you start to think in terms of that, you're kind of starting to think more,

instead of looking at the economy as like a random series of events, look at the economy and the world is a chessboard and chess pieces being moved around. So people are making strategic moves along the way. In order to move a chess piece, they have to combine that with the narrative. And so it needs to be questioned. By the way, I just looked up the Mike Maloney video.

I remember before COVID checking the views. I think it had 50,000 views. before COVID, and it's at one point. So, and it's been out for six years. So the first four years it got 50,000 views since COVID, it's got 1.7 million views. It has nothing to do with COVID. It has nothing to do to do with disease. It has everything to do with money in the Federal Reserve. And so just as far as people questioning narratives, I think you can kind of quantify it that way. And then let me read this one quote about the volatility. It's Alex Zvetsky. I don't know if you're familiar with him. He's founder of Amber App. I quote him in the book. He says,

In the madness of crowds, Bitcoin is volatile in its perception of what it's worth. But Bitcoin itself is actually anti-volatile. Volatility is inherent to things like central banks. First, inflation is transit transitory. Then it's not. Now inflation is because people are being vaccinated. Now inflation is because of global climate change. Now inflation is because of toxic masculinity.

That's volatility. Volatility in opinion. Volatility in policy. Volatility and everything. Whereas Bitcoin is just not. It's fundamentally not volatile. It's the only heartbeat in the world that hasn't changed. It's still what it is.

It's backwards compatible for 13 years. That's perfection. It's the relationship between a volatile world and a perfectly pristine manifestation of a heartbeat. That connection is volatile. The connection between the heartbeat in the world. The alpha we get out of that is because we understand what Bitcoin is that it's not volatile. By the time the rest of the world understands it, then you won't notice the volatility. anymore. So he has this beautifully poetic way of saying that. And I think it goes so in line with

the volatility is because of the narrative. The volatility is because of everything around it. And then the last thing I'll say is one of my, you know, before I go train, I like to do competitive jihitsu. Before I'm like when I'm in training camp, I'm watching like movies like Rocky, things that inspire me. When I want to get inspired in the financial sector and the Bitcoin sector, when I want to get bullish, and by the way, I actually watched this show for that reason, But, but when I want to get inspired, the movie I like to watch is the big short. And the reason being is because it has nothing to do with Bitcoin. It has to do with corruption and questioning narratives.

And those guys throughout it, at the very end, when the guy's getting the big paycheck, it's the Ryan Gosling character, he said, I had to take a rashy dump for two and a half years. But at the end of it, because I knew what I was doing, I knew I was going to get paid off. And I feel like that's the boat we're in. Like in the Bitcoin community, we know this is happening. You, Jesse, you referenced El Salvador. Like, they're taking that rashy, that rashy bowel movement right now. It's uncomfortable, but they know on the other side they're getting out of it, right?

They know on the other side that there's light at the end of the tunnel. So it's just kind of like what's your perspective. And having set principles, it doesn't matter how many times they pull the lever. And that's what's so powerful about the Bitcoin community. We have this kind of principled stance. And so, yes, the narratives volatile. But Bitcoin and the Bitcoin community, because it's centered on principle, it's anti-volatile. And so that's why it's growing so much is because people are attracted to this anti-volatility of principle.

Damn. That's beautiful. I love that quote from Stetsky. He's he's awesome. Yeah. So, I mean, I'm going to try and segue here well into Alex.

And I guess like the again, in the realm of volatility, there hasn't been something more blatantly volatile than energy this year. And in and around that sector is, is where you find your home. So I'm wondering if that plays into your reason for being bullish at all, or maybe you want to elaborate on what got you at Stoke. I mean, Brian, that was like, that was poetic, man, honestly.

And I will talk about energy here in a second, and I do think it's apropos, but I also just want to kind of like what you just kind of reminded me of and tapped me on the shoulders. Like, I'm bullish because of the people that are in our, space and in our industry and the and the way that um the way that there's like a movement happening of people that are that are aligned philosophically they're aligned uh with with their interpretation of of the reality of the world and they're optimistic about it which is a really

rare thing these days like the fin-tuit kind of classic uh you know if you want to get a bunch of engagement on fin to it you just start calling for for the end of the world and there are some you add folks there, you know, Doomberg is, but by and large, the macro commentators right now are just all kind of like, oh my God, the world is ending. If I am ever, if I am ever feeling down, I read Bitcoins, you know, pure Bitcoiners, you know, stuff on substack, stuff on Twitter, because a lot of the most innovative things, a lot of the most optimistic ideas and views of the world come from our from our space and and um i think that's a beautiful thing and i think that what you just kind of highlighted brian is kind of an example there so i i want to applaud you for

for picking that quote out and really just like in solidarity man like this is why this is why we're all building and fighting um on the energy stuff which is going to get darker uh yeah the we have We have grossly underinvested in our global energy infrastructure for the last over a decade, and that's primarily around fossil fuel infrastructure that's required to facilitate an energy transition that we have envisioned to decarbonize the grid. And we have misallocated a significant amount of capital. We can talk about the impacts of certain types of subsidy regimes, but the push to a renewable, a high percentage renewing,

grid has created a significant amount of volatility. When I say volatility, I say that in terms of intraday volatility, so when you have a grid system, let's take ERCOT, everyone I think in the Bitcoin space is probably familiar with the Texas grid ERCOT. They have a significant percentage of variable renewable energy, so solar and wind, things that you cannot control. That creates a lot of volatility in balancing the grid at the same time that they've been decommissioning, what we call baseload, which are kind of the classic coal, nuclear, some of the

other types of thermal. And this has been done without, this has been done primarily at the hands of policymakers and capital allocators that do not have a very fine-grained understanding of how grids work as a system to provide reliable electricity to folks that are relying on these, the source of power. And the unintended consequence is that we've gotten a lot of renewables on, but we don't really know how to control our grids and keep the lights on. So Cal ISO has had a significant amount of grid scarcity events, which basically means not enough power being generated for the load expected because a lot of renewable assets didn't show up. MISO had a bunch of, MISO is the Mid-Atlantic independent system operator that controls a bunch of around the Great Lakes,

significant amount of volatility over the summer. Urquat has been in the news significantly, starting in February of 21 and going forward around grid scarcity events, and a lot of these are caused by the fact that we can't provide enough baseload. We're learning the value of energy as a global body politic,

and we're seeing the cost of not... Europe, unfortunately, the European Union is going to be an object lesson in failed industrial and energy policy this winter. And it's going to be really sad. It's going to be really bad. And it's going to be worse next year because these things are so long term in terms of building reserve, building strategic reserves of natural gas and the ability to produce baseload. They are in the midst simultaneously of decommissioning, still decommissioning nuclear power plants that are running today and they are not choosing to turn them back on.

The implications here are nothing short of the dissolution of the European Union as an integrated political entity. So when you start to look at sovereign debt levels in conjunction with current account balances, in conjunction with the ability to produce energy at a sovereign level versus what you're forced to outsource, this is a crisis. why am I bullish? So why am I bullish? And this does go there, right?

So why am I bullish? I am deeply bearish, frankly, for the European Union. I have a lot of sympathy. I spent my 20s fighting in wars in the Middle East, and I've seen what failed states look like. I've seen what energy scarcity looks like. And I'm, and I'm, my heart literally pours out to the folks in the European Union right now, just given what they're about to face, not to mention

the specter of Russian aggression on their eastern flank. You know, everything that's going on in Ukraine, the recent headline is notwithstanding. That is not a closed question. For Europe, I'm sad. For the flourishing of a outside money, as as Zoltem Posner puts it, for the flourishing of a global public censorship resistant, you know, non-centrally controlled, decentralized currency that allows us to allocate capital in a better way and that reconnects us to the value of energy, I'm very bullish because we are experiencing a renaissance in energy technology right now. And it's being driven by Bitcoin. Bitcoin is creating economic incentives to monetize types of energy that have never been able to be monetized.

right and so we're talking uh i can i can hook up bitcoin mines to the top of flare stacks on top of uh of landfills and monetize the methane that's coming off of landfills i can hook these up to uh non-economic wellheads where associated gas is coming up and provide you know and belching methane into the atmosphere we would never get those molecules to market we burn them off i can put them there i can monetize nuclear power plants in the in the in the uh you know the case of the company that i work for that are located in places where the grid in these deregulator markets is just not paying the right amount of money to monetize these assets to keep them on. Bitcoin can monetize them and keep this reliable base load on and provide for that stability that is starting to lack. I mean,

you name it. We're monetizing the energy differential in the thermocline in the Pacific Ocean. If you have not, any of your viewers should listen to a recent podcast. Peter McCormick did a good one. with some folks that are literally, so Nate Hawaii is his Twitter handle, is doing amazing things in the Pacific Ocean. The upshot of this is that we are simultaneously learning through blood, sweat, and tears the value of energy while we are also developing a technology to maximize the value of energy that is the most stranded and the most inaccessible, which will allow for a level of abundance and environmental sustainability combined

that we could have never imagined. This is all happening because of, because of the unique technical and physical characteristics of Bitcoin mining specifically and the amount of energy that it consumes and the way that it consumes it, people are realizing the value of this and it is giving an additional extrinsic value proposition to Bitcoin beyond everything that we talk about in terms of censorship resistance, decentralization, sound money policy, disinflationary, all of the monetary properties that make it incredibly valuable. We are also developing external, kind of positive externalities. They're going

to reinforce this narrative that Bitcoin is a net positive good socially. And I think that it, that it is going to lend a very strong case, not only to counter the energy flood, but also to kind of boost the baseline value proposition of Bitcoin, not just as a monetary technology, but as an energy technology. And I know I've been going on for a while and I appreciate it, but that's why I'm bullish. that wow i don't even know where to start there um i mean that yeah the european situation is is a difficult one and and i worry about like you're saying that it it you're anticipating it being worse next year than this year do you think do you think it could

be bad this year and there's such a pushback that like you're saying that being that Basically, the trajectory is already sunk and set to the point where it more or less locks in how bad it's going to be next year. Like there's no, there's no, like, back and off. If the politics radically change primarily in the German Bundestir, which is really just their energy ministry, which is primarily in control of all of their power generating. specifically their nuclear policy. That's kind of the core of the European aversion to nuclear energy and just kind of driving all of this.

If they make a radical shift, technically speaking, they could keep six nuclear plants open next year, which would be roughly, I want to say it's almost, I want to say it's like 5 to 8% of their national production, potentially more. There's some questions around how they can apply it. I don't think that we are in the darkest times inevitably at this point. Darkest had no pun intended when we're talking about power.

But what it's going to require is there's going to be, there's going to have to be a lot of pain this winter. My concern, and that pain will induce policy shifts that are demanded by the people in Europe. And also, frankly, just not to mention, ISO New England, which is our independent system operator in New England, It controls the power generation and distribution for most of the northeastern United States. Very similar position, ironically, for some energy policy decisions as Europe. They are facing similar international natural gas prices, which is setting electricity prices.

They've got a similar kind of ESG, you know, decarbonization push. If enough people suffer that have enough money that have enough political influence, we could change this and we could potentially roll this back to where next winter is not catastrophic. my concern is the political damage that will be done through this winter will set in motion the example here, the election of a far-right prime minister in Italy, the election of a far-right government in Austria, you know, the political wheels are turning in the European Union. And I'm telling you, if you were paying 10 to 40x what you were paying last year for energy right now and you were on the poverty threshold, you would also be pissed off. and you'd be voting differently.

And these political shifts happen, it's like an aircraft carrier being steered. It's slow and it's largely irrevocable in the short term. And my concern is we will have profound enough political shifts that the political damage will be done. Maybe we can back it off on the energy side of things. But when you unleash a populist movement in any type of a political, you know, in a political arena,

it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle. So I don't want to say that it's undoubtedly going to be catastrophic next winter, but I do think that a lot of this is already baked in, unfortunately. Interesting. I'm going to open it up to Brian. I know you've got to drop in a couple of minutes here, Alex. Maybe I'll open it up to maybe Jesse if you had anything that you wanted to say regarding this before Alex drops. Sure.

I'll chime in real quick. Obviously, energy is not my area of expertise. And Alex did an incredible job, sort of painting a picture of what we're seeing right now. But it just reminds me, I guess, of one of the reasons why we like to be bullish about Bitcoin is that it is this incentive to generate energy, this incentive to generate cheap, efficient energy. And we're experiencing a deficiency of that right now.

we are i mean we've cut off you know europe is cutting off their nose um or a limb i guess um in the energy sense and they are going to need um a mechanism i mean voting and and and swinging policy is one thing but you know this bitcoin as an incentive mechanism we know about um i mean i shouldn't say we know about, but I guess there are many ways to generate energy. I am not familiar enough with them to comment on it again. But just it being there as this backstop, as this extra push to the populist movement you're talking about is key. It just, it highlights again, sort of a key role that Bitcoin can and will and should play in all this. So I'll turn it over to Brian maybe with that. Well, if I could just get a question in for you, Alex, while you're still here. And this is going to

off to a lot of people like this is the dumbest question in the world because I'm not really versed with politics and the narratives around nuclear power. But why is that just not an option at any point? I remember hearing a podcast on Rogan where there was a guy talking about the kind of the narratives and the false narratives maybe around, you know, death tolls around nuclear catastrophes where there's really not any direct, you know, maybe like down the road cancer deaths and stuff like that. But like I imagined as a kid that nuclear power plants were blowing up and killing, you know, doing like a Fukushima type of thing. Or like a Nagasaki type of thing. And so, yeah, anyways, why is that so just it's a third rail if you can't touch it?

Yeah, no. I mean, and that, like, if I can leave, if I can leave everyone here and your viewer's sessions with this one thing, it's an incredible question. It's really important. And it's not just about nuclear power. It's just about sensible energy policy in general. But nuclear power is this beautiful example. And it's also an example of a cautionary tale for Bitcoin, right? And so I'll touch on that in a second and then I will have to drop.

Nuclear power has been stigmatized. And it started off. It started in the Cold War as what we call information operations in the military, which is essentially kind of information operations or sciops. You might want to call it from the USSR trying to disincentivize the West from developing this type of very reliable energy. This then coupled, and that was marginally successful, because frankly, in the West, like, we were running a bunch.

The 70s was like the golden age for the development of light water reactors and different types of Gen 2 power plants, you know, nuclear power plants in the United States. We were putting them up, I mean, rapidly, two, three year development timelines. We're getting them authorized. We're getting them up and running, and they were safe. They were safe. We have not had a major nuclear accident outside of Three Mile Island, which is a special case.

in the history of the American nuclear reactor projects. And so Chernobyl happened. Chernobyl was this horribly globally traumatic event. You know, it's been serialized. And what I think is actually a pretty good Netflix documentary, if anyone wants to kind of learn about RBMK reactors and kind of the dysfunctional nature of centralized kind of command economies and socialist governments.

But this kind of had this. And then Greenpeace and a bunch of different environmental groups took it up, took up the mantle. There has been solid evidence that has suggested that, you know, Russian, what was KGB is now FSB agents have penetrated into a lot of these different organizations. Through various means have tried to propagate this anti-nuclear idea. And then Fukushima happened and it was basically the straw that broke the camel's back. No one could disaggregate the fission reaction required to create. a nuclear explosion, which is high enriched geranium versus the fission reaction required to generate power, which is low enriched uranium. And we're talking 5% to 95% enrichment levels. It's a bunch of,

it's impossible for a nuclear power plant and the, the, the fissile material in a nuclear power plant to go super critical and actually create an explosion, right? And so there could be some radiation leakage that we saw in Chernobyl. But really, the global death toll, of nuclear power plant, you know, accidents is like many orders of magnitude smaller than even hydroelectric dams. And there's a, there's, you know, Max Gigliardi on, on Twitter relates to thread yesterday that kind of goes through that. All that is to say, it is largely a campaign, a smear campaign against nuclear power. Thankfully, right now, people, and this again is to the point of why we're bullish, people right now are waking up to the fact that, wait a minute,

this is a this is a mostly zero carbon method of producing electricity the energy density of one pellet of low enriched uranium is equivalent to like 500 barrels of oil and so when we're talking about or like multiple square miles of solar panels i mean the the comparisons are just ludicrous the ability to take care of the nuclear waste is something that we've been doing on site for over 50 years at all of our light water reactors throughout the United States with no accidents, people are waking up to this. And they're going, you know what? And everything that happened in the 90s with the fast reactor technology, everything that's happening right now is small modular reactors. I encourage everyone to go and look up, you know, Oklo, which actually partnered

with a Bitcoin mining company about a year ago to do nuclear offtake. Now, whether that, you know, whether that actually comes to fruition as an open question, but it's indicative of the potential. And so people are waking up to it, but it's largely been a technological misunderstanding and a political smear campaign that's been occurring as a function of geopolitical games that have been played.

And my warning, and this is where I'll sign off, and I really do appreciate the time, gentlemen, I'll give you guys the rest of the two hours to kind of riff, my warning is that if we don't approach Bitcoin mining with the knowledge in mind that we can lose the narrative, and really lose, and this is just, you know, to Bitcoin, right? Like, not just mining.

I keep, it's my industry, so I keep talking about it, but Bitcoin broadly, if we don't, if we see the narrative ground and we don't frame this thing correctly, and we don't fight back in respectful and inclusive ways, where we are correcting narrative issues, but we're not alienating people. We may actually lose the narrative framing war with Bitcoin, and that will be detrimental. Will Bitcoin succeed in the long run? Yes, it will, because I think it's pretty much unstoppable. It's almost like a physical reality that it's going to continue to eat the world of value,

you know, storage and transaction. But will it slow things down and make things more difficult for people in the midterm? I think so. I think the world benefits from a transition to the Bitcoin standard and to a hard money standard and to a sensible monetary policy standard. And I think the extent to which we can fight for that, we're doing good for the world. and the extent to which we can shape our narrative to prevent external, you know, malign actors from mischaracterizing the value of Bitcoin, we will be doing ourselves in our community and the people that are going to come to rely on Bitcoin a big favor. And so with that, sessions, I appreciate the opportunity.

This was awesome. Brian and Jesse, thank you guys. I really do apologize. I owe my fiancee our evening here. And so thank you guys so much. Thank you for being here. It was awesome. And yeah,

we'll finish up the riff here. But thanks, buddy. Have a great night. Dude, great listening to you speak. It's always amazing. Like listening to just,

there's so many brilliant bitcoinsers out there with all their different niches. And I'm just, you know, I've been on a couple times. It's always, you know, a learning event for me being here. So thank you, man.

Thank you. Yeah. Cheers, man. Thanks, guys. Bye-bye. Awesome. So gentlemen, let's continue on.

Just to kind of wrap up, to kind of wrap up what Alex was touching on with the energy. I think we're seeing kind of this dichotomy where, again, we had our money become disassociated with reality. right it became imaginary and now we've got a return to a money that is it is inseparable from reality right it the money itself is reality because it's directly linked to energy and you cannot remove it from that and so i i think because of that it's it's allowed our understanding of energy to kind of run amok and become just as imaginary as the money itself.

So to kind of sum it up, do you guys think that what do you see this transition being? Like, let's assume that things go well in the long term. And we move to a system where we have sound money that can't be screwed with that is directly tied to energy and reality. and we gain a better understanding of how energy itself works. Do you think people are going to struggle with changing their views on that? Or do you think it's just going to be an absolute imperative for them to do it?

Neither one of you can dive in here. Yeah, thank you. Well, yeah, I just think it's funny because you know, you're talking about this, how money was, it's kind of background noise to people. They don't really think about it. It's this abstract form. And then, you know, Jesse's book is literally magic internet money.

Like people, it's funny that that's the accusation that's thrown at Bitcoin is that that's, you know, it's this woo-woo. It's like the most hard thing ever. I think it's just one of those, the process is going to be, it's going to be this, I think this, I think this strange transition to people just using it and it just working and then people seeing the fruits of it. I always say my mom was not, she would not define herself as an internet. adopter. You know, she's 65 years old. And, you know, she adopted the internet 20 years ago or whatever. She would never say she was an internet adopter, but she was. Like at some point, she adopted the internet, but she doesn't realize she did that because she just type some words out and hit send and all of a sudden she's using email, right? And, you know, she pops up

Netflix and her shows on Netflix. She thinks of it just like cable, but it's actually the base layer is the internet. So I think it's going to be that exact same thing. It's going to be presented with us. I think that the narrative battle is happening right now. But I'm just a firm believer that when you have truth on your side, just the truth will win, especially when there's people fighting for it. Like, truth can die in silence. Like, it is possible for the truth to be eradicated if nobody speaks up for it. It's, we're too broad. We're too noisy. We're too decentralized for that narrative to be lost. And I mean, it's guys like us. I mean, I'm learning a ton from Alex right there. Like, I love talking to the energy guys in the Bitcoin space.

because they're just, their brains work on a different level and they're talking about carbon emissions per cubic whatever. I don't know what any of that means. But I just think that some of the smartest minds in that space are going to equip us, those of us that are ready to share the message about why Bitcoin and fight that narrative battle. I think, you know, we're writing literature on debunking the narrative. I mean, that's probably a lot of what Jesse's books about. I don't know yet, but I just bought it. I just bought it on Amazon right now as we're sitting there. So I'm like, because because it is important.

I mean, this is where the battle is happening. So I think it's going to be, we're feeling it. There's going to be a whole generation of people, like not even the next generation. People that are living right now, like our friends, our peers and stuff that are going to say, oh, wow, like we're using Bitcoin. And that was weird. It's just like there was no fight. We're like, what are you? We're going to say this in like three years from now, four years from now.

What are you talking about? Like, don't you remember all those days that I was, we were talking about? went on this podcast and we were like that's when the fight was happening people will not even recognize that a fight happened um i mean that people there was a fight for the automobile right like there was a fight for every emergent technology but here we are in the generations that have just adopted it we think that like the automobile is just presupposed electricity is just presupposed i sit in a room that's completely electrified but there was a time where there was people out there that had to fight anti-electricity propaganda from the kerosene industry because there was there's

interested people that didn't want people to have electrified homes right and and it just it seems like electricity's just common sense it's just the status quo now but there was a time when people fought tooth and nail for it that's what we're in right now and because we have the truth we're going to win it's just it's an inevitability um the the power narrative i think is is going bitcoin's going to win out because it's showing to be the it's going to be the solution for the green energy crisis. Like, it's going to fix the very problem that the narrative is saying that Bitcoin is, you know, that the counter narrative to Bitcoin is what's being accused of Bitcoin. So anyways, Jesse, sorry. Yeah, no, to what you're saying about the three to four years of,

of not realizing, you know, in three or four or five years, you know, we won't realize the fight happened. I was having a conversation with someone the other day. And he's like, oh, yeah, you know, has that Bitcoin thing going. And it's like, you know, you spend 98% of the time, being ignored and just derided. And then suddenly, you know, for these brief moments of time, you know, it steps into the spotlight and everyone wants to hear about it and learn about it and understand it. But at some point, that 2%, you know, will become just the whole time will just become 100% as Bitcoin inevitably takes over. And then in terms of, you know, the disassociation of money from reality, there's, I'm going to get the quote slightly wrong. but, you know, it goes something like, you know, you can ignore reality, but you can't ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.

And so as it pertains to the energy market, as it pertains to, let's call it Bitcoin's competition, whether we're talking about fiat or, and I realize this is a stretch to compare it to Bitcoin, but something like Eath, where there is that video circulating of a guy going, oh, you know, we're going to have the Metaverse where we can just create our own laws of physics. It's like, you're, this is theod, it's fantasy land. Like, what on earth are you talking about? You're not going to fix the world by creating a fantasy land while you're like physical body lives in the real world. Yeah, you turn to mush in real life. Yeah. Like, you know, you want to go and daydream. Like, great, have fun.

That's okay. But, like, you know, there's real world issues to fix. And this that is the solution to it. I love it. It is hilarious how, how again, like there's so many people in around Bitcoin working directly to figure out, okay, how, how, you know, and there's different views on like what's going to be useful and like what energy looks like down the line. But in general, the consensus in and around Bitcoin is it, there's a purpose for it being tied to energy. That's our anchor to reality. otherwise what are we even doing here and the narrative on on the other side of things in

and around proof of stake and everything is literally that like you said it's a it's a fantasy land it's it's it's the land of make believe where the laws of physics uh no longer apply and i thought the reason we're here is because there were no rules within the current monetary regime other than what the people are at top set and and and Spoiler alert, if you're not one of the top stakers in Ethereum, you're not setting those rules, those imaginary rules that can be set by anybody. And you can do all the work you want, but you can't, you're not competing on a level playing field. You're playing from behind. But that's, yeah, we don't need to give any more airtime.

I don't think. Let's dive into yours, man. Let's start down your rabbit hole. Let's go. Why are you bored? Well, I'm a bullish. So, yeah, so my topic, I titled it, Fracturing Faith in Fiat. If you step back for a moment and look at the recent history of central banks and, you know, beginning with them suddenly realizing that, oh, inflation arrived. We didn't see this coming. And so they call it transitory. When they said that, they sort of, of admitted a mistake, which if you've been following central banks for a while, they almost never or seldom do. And so in a sense, they sort of led a little bit of a genie out of

a bottle of this accountability genie because, you know, they put themselves in this precarious position where now they have to somehow fix it. And so I was going to talk about, I mean, at the top of the show you mentioned the UN and IMF, pardon me, the UN and IMF, and asking the Federal Reserve to stop raising rates. And we know about the near miss with the UK pension plans and the BOE effectively bailing it out. But there are some other interesting tidbits in and around sort of this fracturing faith that I was going to bring up. And I'll start somewhat locally with the Bank of Canada, which, you know, we know Paulyev in Canada, the new leader of the Conservative Party has sort of been on the Bank of Canada's case on his campaign. And it seems to have somewhat worked and the Bank of Canada is now on the defensive.

So much so that they started putting out a series of tweets to explain how things are happening. You know, they had this one where they explained how they use reserves, which don't call it money supply, but they use special reserves to sort of backstop the financial markets during the, the crisis. And even though those special reserves perform the exact same function as money when they're deposited at banks, don't you dare call it new money supply? So they just created this weird explanation that made absolutely no sense. They had this whole thread about it. And I basically quote threaded their thread to just make a mockery of what a stupid. why I was thinking it was.

And then they had another one where they went on to say, they basically blamed inflation on just average people expecting inflation. Because obviously, A, they can't fully take credit for inflation. I mean, there was the attempt to blame Putin. But basically they came out with this threat where they're saying, well, because you think inflation's coming, inflation ends up coming. And again, it's just like, my goodness, like is this, this is you trying to sort of manage a

PR crisis. You're on a defensive and you're just, you know, you're stumbling backwards. You're falling over. It's, you're making a mockery of it. And then the last one I'll point out about the Bank of Canada that they did. They put out this educational curriculum where they wanted, I guess, for teachers to teach children about sort of the basics of money. And one of the, you know, they actually listed sort of those classic five characteristics

of money. And then they called the money supply. Oh, money supply should be rare is what they said. And they didn't say fixed. They said rare and it should be, you know, manageable. But, you know, if you put the sort of money supply of Canada side by side with that line of thing, it's like, well, you're not practicing what you're preaching or teaching. So just, you know, the cracks in their approach are sort of showing.

And I mean, we're seeing that in other places, too. We talked about, if you guys are familiar with Neil Oliver of GV News in the UK, he released this video where he basically said everything except Bitcoin saying how, you know, people need to take back control of money. Yes, Neil, they do. And they do that with Bitcoin. There's no other alternative. So just come out and say it whenever you're ready.

and we could even extend that into the wider world of, quote, crypto, where I think just this week, you know, Solana paused their chain, like Binance yesterday paused their chain because 70 million was stolen, and then they somehow froze $7 million. Like, this is what the current banking system does. And then obviously Celsius docs in their entire client roster, like, come on, that's a joke. NFTs are done, right? all the hype, all the fast money for that, it all dried up. So all this illusory money, all this fake money that people maybe thought was real is just evaporating before their eyes. And so now

it's causing them to question. And so, yeah, that's the sort of fracturing of faith, I think, that I'm referring to. And I guess part of that is just like they can't keep their story straight, right? Like they're, they're raising rates to stop inflation, but raising rates destroys the economy. And wait, so you're going to raise rates to stop inflation, but you also didn't cause inflation, and yet you think you have the power to stop inflation. Like, do you control it or don't you control it? Which one is it? You talk about, you know, we get back to the roots of money and you want a low supply, but on the other hand, you're just printing money like crazy. So all the cracks are starting to show someone, I saw this quote that I saw this quote that

I think kind of summarizes it well. It's not that central bankers aren't doing their job right. It's that the job shouldn't exist and can't be done in any way but wrong. I love that. That is fantastic. And keep doing our questioning, yeah. Yeah, I love the gas lighting that the Bank of Canada is doing on the citizens. Like somebody in the comments here, archiving clown world,

app name inflation is your fault citizen yeah like it's it's hilarious to see and Brian I want to mention something that you were referring to earlier like in regards to and like Jesse you have it in your book

but like the levers and pulling and pushing and you were saying every lever is a narrative shift and like with a policy shift has to come an accompanying narrative shift and you can you can pull that off slowly over time.

But the problem is they needed to do it so quickly because it was so hard in one direction. And they've had to pull it back the opposite direction and overcorrect. And so, you know, when you print 40% of like our base money in effectively a calendar year, and then all of a sudden you go on a rip of the fastest rate increases in history, and you're just cranking that lever back and forth, all of a sudden, it's no longer like a generational shift where it's like, well,

this is the situation when I was growing up and then everything changed over. And there's a new generation of people growing up in a different environment. It's like, hold on. It was the opposite a year and a half ago. And now you're trying to explain why you're way the hell over on the opposite side here. You literally told me to go out and rack up debt and buy a home because interest rates would be low for an extended period of time.

And two years later, you're telling me I'm fucked because my monthly payment on my mortgage is going to be 45% higher within the next few years. And so like that that narrative shift, I think that this all ties in with my initial topic as well is people are questioning their institutions. People are going, well, you said this. And I couldn't remember when you said it. everybody you know can remember when you said it. And now the opposite is suddenly true.

And there's so many things that can be pointed to. Well, you said this, but I can clearly see this. You said this here. And now you've changed your mind over here. And it's ping pong back and forth so quickly that people can't help but realize like, nobody has any idea what's going on. So Brian, I don't know. What are your thoughts here on Jesse's additional topics here in regards to, again,

and questioning institutions. Yeah, Jesse, you're so spot on. I mean, I love the detail you went in there too. I mean, we've had in the U.S., we've had multiple central banks. People think that the Fed was the first central bank the U.S. has ever had. It's like, why did multiple central banks exist before? It's because this is a generational thing. Like, I know the Fed has existed over several generations now,

but there's always, central banks always come to a breaking point. Then it breaks because it finally breaks because people, at the end, it's the sputtering of the narrative, the back and forth, the leverpools and all that kind of stuff. And exactly what Jesse's pointing to. They're starting to redefine. It's not new money supply. It's reserves. And, you know, all the nuance that they try to get into there, people start to see it for what it is. And then the system breaks. And then they go away from in the in the U.S. we had gaps of a generation or two of the people that remembered what the central bank was and they wouldn't let it come back. And if you read, I'm sure you guys fall read it,

Creature from Jekyll Island. He goes into, he documents why, how the Federal Reserve was created in the U.S. They had to do it. They had to trick the American public in order to get it because some people still remembered. They still remembered or at least their parents' generation that told them about the narratives that the central bank had pressed and why they didn't want a central bank anymore. But over the last, you know, since 1913, we've grown up, we've had multiple generations

of people not understand why a central bank doesn't work. and this is the first generation in a long time. It used to be like the crazy voice in the wilderness, like the Ron Pauls of the world saying audit the Fed, you know, those types of guys running around and people were like, why? Why would you audit the Fed? I mean, I remember as a high school kid hearing him say that in an interview

and thinking like, is it that important? Like, you know, they're probably doing what's right. You know, that's the thinking and that's the default line of thinking for people. But it takes once it's the, it's the fool me once, shame on what you, fool me, right? You can't be fooled again. Yeah. The problem is I say it just like he said it, but I actually mean it that way. But anyways, it's that same thing. People feel stupid. And then once you're, once you're hurting people, right, the Fed is specifically saying,

we're trying to get some of you people out of your job. We're trying to increase unemployment. The fact that they're having to be so frank about it, people are going to recognize as soon. And we haven't seen that big shift in layoffs. And one of the things I don't think a lot of people are accounting for. is we're still seeing the effects of some of that easy money flow. I don't know if you guys are familiar with the employee in the U.S. We had a thing called the ERC or the employee retention tax credit. I run a business in Southern California, a little chain of stores. And one of the stimulus things that they did, this was from 2020 that's just now

people are starting to get the checks from it, the businesses. I mean, people, you know, inflation people think was caused by the $1,500 or $1,200 or $1,200 stimulus checks that people got. The stimulus checks that are coming to businesses right now, are 50% or 70% of your payroll for an entire year. I mean, there's companies getting hundreds of thousands of dollars back right now. And it sounds crazy,

but literally we filed for it. We got some of this money. Like it's, and until the check came and it took, I think from the time we filed to the time we got it, it was like 11 or 12 months. So it's this role. And we were one of the first companies of people that I knew of business owners

around me that actually knew about this thing. So we filed for it pretty early on. So it's just, I mean, it's just starting to roll out. So we're starting it's even if the Fed's tightening policy, they're still dealing with all of this loose money that was promised to businesses and stuff like that. And I mean, it makes those $1,200 stimulus checks that that happened in 2020 or early 2021 look like nothing here in the U.S. But people aren't recognizing that it's happening. But what's inevitably going to happen is the Fed knows that that money is still being pumped into the economy.

That capital is still being pumped into the economy. and so they have to crush business. Like they know it's going to be hard for businesses to get to get employment. It's insane to think about it. They're actually intending to crush business. Like they want to crush business. Yeah. And it's because that's the problem when you have a mandate that that those things.

Right. And employment is part of their mandate and inflation. So they have the, they have to tip the scales accordingly. Like if you're going to get inflation down, you have to do something to employment. and your goal is to keep those things in balance. But when you do that, you're always going to be sacrificing one to do the other. And it just goes back to it shows the problem. I wrote down the timestamp of that quote that you just shared about how the job done correctly.

Is it stucking? I don't know what the quote was. But yeah, it shows the inherent flaws with a centrally planned economy. We like to say that, man, the U.S. We're a free market. We're not centrally planned. We're not socialist here or anything like that. Our money and banking system is hyper.

centralized. I mean, my business is beholden to the policy of a group of 12 people in a room that I don't even know where they're at, right? And it's just, it's frustrating as a business owner to have that happen to you. You know, we have customers that are canceling with us because of the fact that, you know, their jobs are going away because somebody made a decision that that is implementing that. It has nothing to do with how well we ran our business that month or that year or anything like that has nothing to do with the performance of business. And that's in a free market, people should sink or swim based on the merit, based on how efficiently they're selling products and services, how happy they're making customers. That's not how our economy is

functioning right now. Our economy is functioning based off of monetary policy and the destructive effects of that over a long time. People are going to feel it. And as soon as people feel that, they're going to want to opt out of that system. The cool thing is, this is the first time in history that we've had a life raft on that. I mean, that's bringing it back to why we're bullish. It is so exciting. I mean, I think it's no small coincidence that at this time in history, Bitcoin was created. We've had fiat currencies implode before, right?

We've all studied the history of fiat currencies. They all implode. We've never had a worldwide currency before. The U.S. dollars, the first ever real worldwide currency. We've got currencies that were accepted places. But in terms of large-scale macroeconomic implications, U.S. dollar is the first one that's ever going to fail on a worldwide level. That's the first time we've ever had a decentralized non-governmental currency that people can gravitate towards.

So there's a huge upside. And for just like the salvation of humanity in terms of economics, I mean, the implications are huge for Bitcoin. Absolutely. Yeah, you talk about sort of that life raft. And, you know, I think if you were to look back through the history of failed currencies, not once was there this just plan B sitting here waiting to go. Everything's up and running. You know, you want a wallet.

Get you a wallet on your phone in five minutes. No problem. Like we are ready for launch. We're sitting on the tarmac here. It's just okay, as soon as you fall. Okay, we'll come up and hopefully pick up the pieces and, again, prevent as much damage as possible. And that's, again, I realized I didn't actually end my little rant there with

why I'm bullish about the fracturing of Fiaf face. But that is exactly the reason is that it's highlighting, you know, okay, two things. I guess one, the deficiencies of the current system, but B, the benefits of Bitcoin. It just highlights, oh, no one's bailing up Bitcoin. It doesn't need a bailout. It's self-sufficient. It's running 24-7. It's never going to freeze you out.

It's never going to blame you, you know, for causing inflation. Yeah. It's just highlighting, you know, everything gone wrong and the ways in which this can make things better. Yeah. And it's, and it's kind of a unique spot right now in that when, because, I mean, clearly Bitcoin's going to continue ticking, pumping out blocks every 10 minutes. And, you know, I don't think any one of us doubts that the purchasing power of Bitcoin in the long term. will never return to previous heist that it was at, either as measured in U.S. dollars,

but that's becoming an increasingly bad measure. But it'll become pretty obvious because everybody's had, you know, pretty much I'd say this cycle, the entire globe has had a touchpoint with Bitcoin. Like you wouldn't find somebody or you would very seldom find somebody that would be like, I've never heard of that. at this point. And the people that have heard of it are probably that, you know, the ones that

aren't Bitcoiners are probably, oh, it's dead or it's dying, or I was told that it was a scam and now it's gone or it's like barely there anymore. And those people are going to have another touch point in the future here when, you know, the value and the purchasing power of their currency has been obliterated, right? In a lot of of places and massively decreased in Western nations. Everything will be more expensive as denominated in, you know, whether it be U.S. dollars or Canadian moose nickels or whatever it may be. It's going to hurt. And then all of a sudden there's going to be Bitcoin. Oh, you know, I could have bought a house had I just taken my paycheck in in Bitcoin instead and saved.

and like saved more than I more than I spent. I think that's going to be pretty stark. And like you said, it highlights everything wrong with the existing system. Just a good example of like how broken even like banking and just trying to transact is. Me and my wife, she's starting to do the occasional shift back to work after Matlead now. And she, we went and we got a just like a cheap used second.

vehicle. And so we went and I hate banks. Like I get paid in Bitcoin. I keep most of my money in Bitcoin. But everyone's in a while, I got to use a bank in some way, shape, or form because that's just the reality of the world we live in still. There's plenty of great tools to live on Bitcoin. But, you know, sometimes I need like I'm buying a used car and I need cash. And so I had gotten some money into my account. And I was going to transfer it over to my, wife's account so she could take out cash. And first off, the vehicle is, you know, it's cheap for a, for a vehicle and it was like a few thousand bucks or something. And so I go to send over like an e-transfer to an account that I've been e-transfering like for years and years. And I go to send like $3,000.

And they're like, oh, no, that's over the limit. You can't be doing that. You can't just go send $3,000 will we need let's just not allowed so I had to send $2,000 the wait 24 hours and then send $1,000 then when it got there and my wife went to the bank but you could you could have gone and wired it for 50 bucks I bet you could have done that yeah I could have and then waited a week for it to land and all that yeah so I could have done that and then she goes to the bank to take her the cash to go buy the car and then she has to they're like how much are you taking out and she's taking out like 3,500 or 4,000 or something. And they're like, ooh, that's over whatever X threshold is. You're going to need to like give a detailed explanation of what you're doing and like fill out these forms for taking

out like four grand from the bank. I was like the pain of like sending a few grand to my wife and then her just getting her hands on the cash so that we could purchase a used vehicle was like the difficulty and the hoops you have to jump through just for that. And and I'm complaining from the perspective of somebody in like a first world nation with like the the utmost in access to banking and but i've still blown away when i'm like like bitcoin i could just i want you to have this money there you go nothing in between it's just gone there in your possession done irreversible That's so radical. You're such a radical guy.

I am. I'm some might say I'm a fringe minority with unacceptable abuse. But nonetheless, like it's, it is, again, it's just, it presents a solution to so many of the things that we've seen these past. I have a similar story to that. It was this was probably three weeks ago. I went to the bank taking out cash. I was going to buy. I got invited to, I don't know if you guys saw the viral video going around of the

beef initiative. This is cool, like farm to table, you know, type of thing. Farmers building a parallel system to what's going on. And these, you know, guys that are 60 years old, these farmers are like, all these kids want to buy beef from me and Bitcoin. So, so I got to go to this event. There were some great people at the event. It was out in Georgia. I live in California. And so my, I love to take my kids with me, my wife with me whenever we can do this, like the book tour things. I'm like, you know, let's go buy an RV. By a used RV. We'll, we'll do, you know, I'm going to start doing some more book tour stuff and, you know, the RV will be a good investment. It takes some, it was, you know, over $10,000 in cash, obviously, for an RV.

And the bank, you know, not only do you have to get the banker, you have to get the manager comes over. It's like the end degree or whatever. The awesome part about this. And why this is also, I feel like the bullish fun part is they ask me, oh, what are you buying with this? Buying an RV. Oh, what are you doing with the RV?

I'm actually traveling to Georgia to talk about Bitcoin. And so, you know, I got to sit there and they had to because I'm their customer. had to listen to me orange filling them. And here's the cool part. I like, I even reference, hey, by the way, I talk about this process in my book, what you guys are putting me through right here. And they kind of laughed and there's two really nice ladies. Both of them said, oh, I'm going to go out and buy a copy of the book, which I think's funny. But here's the cool part. They were both ultra receptive to it. And here, these are like the gatekeepers of the old system. And both of them 100% got what I was saying and were totally on board with.

everything I just said. I mean, these are the gatekeepers. And they're like, yeah, you're right. Like, that's a better system, you know? And so there's more people today that know about Bitcoin than knew about it yesterday, right? Tomorrow there's going to be even more people. Like, how many more people are going to know about USD tomorrow versus today? It's the same exact amount.

There's no growth. Like, that's a dwind. It only has one way to go, right? But with Bitcoin, tomorrow, a percentage more is going to know more about this. And it's these people, again, that are just. gatekeepers of the old system. The only people that really want to uphold the old system, it's like this 1% of the 1% everybody else is fine with change. And so again, that's why, in terms of this lane, I'm just ultra-b bullish. I mean, it's so exciting to be in the lane

that we're in and get to be on the right side of history. And it's a sticky thing too in terms of like when that light bulb goes off and you kind of understand it. Like once you see that idea for what it is and, you know, putting it in the context of the pain points that you're experiencing in your current, under the current dynamic, it highlights it. But once you see, oh, the benefits, you know, sessions, I just want to give this person cash for his car and I have to jump through all these hoops. But no, instead I can just, hey, you want Bitcoin, yeah, I'll take Bitcoin, click, click, okay, boom, done. You can't unsee that. You can't unsee the benefits in the end of it. So yeah, it's just, you know, the more people you said, more people will know about

tomorrow than do today. That means more people every day. And no one's going out the back door, right? We're not, we're not losing people out the back door, which I think is critical to. Absolutely. Well, that's awesome. Okay. Let's let's round out this topic. And Brian, I want to give you your piece here and let you have the, the floor. So I'll defer to you for, our final topic. Why are you bullish, man? Well, okay. So I think that, like, a lot of what I do is this Bitcoin evangelism type thing. And it's, it's, you know, talking, you're talking to different people, right? If we're winning over people in the community, there's a huge percentage of people are going to be no-coiners, but then you'll inevitably meet a lot of people that are in the

crypto space and their first exposure was Dogecoin or some, you know, 19,000, you know, coin on on coin market cap because they look at it through the lens of i heard that bitcoin went from two cents to 20 000 i want to find the coin that does that right and so why am i why are they not interested in in bitcoin it's because they think that some threshold you know it basically it has a glass ceiling like it just can't go any higher than where it's at right now glass i don't know if you're laughing at the glass ceiling reference oh i'm sorry My fiance, they're making faces at me. Bring her on.

Can you like, say hi. All right, glass ceiling. All right, glass ceiling. Anyways, so they think there's this cap to Bitcoin, right? Like, why would, I'm going to invest in Doge because I can, I can become a millionaire if I do that. And so I think it's really important for people to understand. So I write about it in length in the book is, is this thing called,

capital flow inertia. And it's, I came up with this term to try and embody what, what happens in terms of market capitalization. It's not, it's more difficult than just describing supply and demand. And what I mean by this is, you know, think of what is inertia. So if you take a, say you have a six pound bowling ball and you set it on top of a glass plate, the glass plate is probably going to be okay. It's not going to break. But if you take that bowling ball and you take it up to 10 feet and then you drop it, the six pound bowling ball will shatter the glass plate. Well, what's the difference between those two encounters? There's velocity.

So mass times velocity creates inertia. So the inertia is what it has a dramatically different effect than, you know, than if it was just static if it was in place. And so I use that to try and help encapsulate this idea of how new capital affects market cap. So there was a study done by FundStrat. and they weren't the only one. So some people think that Fund Stratt, you know, they were maybe inaccurate in this. There was a few other studies done in different bull markets. But what they found was that there was in 2017 and that big bull market run up from $900

at the beginning of the year to 20K at the end of the year in the four month period from August to December through the end of the year where the bull market really ramped up. In that period, there was only $6 billion of new capital that came into the market, but it accounted for $159 billion in. market capitalization. And so one of the fundamental misunderstandings of people that are new to crypto or that are new to investing in general is they think that $1 billion equals one billion. So $1 billion of new capital equals $1 billion of increased market cap. And because of supply and demand, that's not accurate. And so I think that capital flow inertia, it encapsulates this

idea that a certain amount of capital that slowly trickles into the market doesn't have. have much effect on market price. You could have $6 billion of capital flow into Bitcoin, and it doesn't really affect the price all that much if you did it over 10 years. But if you have $6 billion of capital flowing into Bitcoin in a four-month period, it makes the market cap go up orders of magnitude from where it was before. And so why is this important? And so why, why does Bitcoin have, we haven't even touched the tip of the, the sphere in terms of what Bitcoin can get to in terms of buying power. So whether you want to talk about it, Bitcoin in terms of dollars or what Bitcoin can be in terms of buying power.

Many of the listeners are probably familiar with something called the dollar milkshake theory. I think we talked about this a little bit earlier offline. The dollar milkshake theory is essentially this idea that the Fiat currencies around the world are going to collapse because the U.S. dollar is the most robust and strongest. It's strategically placed because of the petrol dollar, that sort of thing. It's going to, as Fiat currencies around the world, collapse, they're going to restrincten the dollar. because countries are going to go off of their old standard and then they're going to collapse their value into the U.S. dollar. That actually probably is true to some degree.

We've seen that some in the past. But like we talked about earlier, we've never had a parallel non-governmental currency that provides another option for those countries to fall into. So while I think the dollar milkshake theory is a good theory and it's actually, it's accurate. I think that there's also a Bitcoin milkshake theory where Bitcoin sucks up the value of those those currencies. And even if the U.S. dollar does suck up the value of all those failing currencies and it's the last Fiat currency to stand, inevitably it has to fail as well. So whether it's in the short term that Bitcoin sucks up all that value or whether it's over

a 15 year period, Bitcoin is going to have to suck up that value because 100% of currencies fail 100% of the time. There's no, there's no historic precedent of Fiat currencies lasting forever. It was just obviously they can't. And so I want to pair that one with one last point. Many of the listeners are probably somewhat familiar with the Weimar Germany hyperinflation. As Bitcoiners, we love to go to that. It's because it's very fascinating. It's a very, very interesting case study.

What do we got? Dying of money? No, when money dies. There you go. Yes. Who wrote that one? That one's Adam Ferguson. And it's Weimar, Germany, like a detailing of Western.

happened. Beautiful. And so until I study that in depth, I think we all heard about why more Germany in like our high school economics class or high school history class or something like that. We've heard about that before. We all heard the stories about it would take a wheelbarrow full of money to go get bread at the store. Right. We've all heard that part. But until you study, until you read when money dies or dying of money by Jen's Parsons or some of these landmark detailing of the German hyperinflation, we don't understand the magnitude. Because we call like high inflation, hyperinflation all the time. Hyperinflation is actually 50% month over month deterioration of the value. That's completely different than 10% inflation. And so hyperinflation,

and it's the inevitable, you know, the inevitable march that every, every fiat is on towards hyperinflation. So the German hyperinflation after the end of World War II, or excuse me, at the end of World War I to, I think it was 19, when did, was it 1917 that World War I ended? I forget the year, 1919, maybe 1919. Correct me if I'm wrong. There was a four-year period from the end of the war until the end of the hyperinflation. And so at the end of World War I, Germany, Ymar, Germany had a 60 billion mark national debt. In their denominated currency, it was kind of equivalent to like our $30 trillion debt that we have here in the United States. It was this unpaid debt that was way too big for its gross domestic product. The country was never going to pay it back. So what they did, what every country does is they print the currency

that hyperinflate to not only service their debt, but they do it to intentionally devalue the currency so that it's easier to pay off that 60 billion marks. Okay, yes, that's what everybody did. But here's the kicker. The 60 billion mark debt over the course of that four years, most people don't realize how little they turned that into relatively their currency. After four years of the hyperinflation, Their smallest note in circulation was a one trillion mark note. And so they literally turned their entire national debt into the equivalent of 60 cents. I had no idea. I had to corroborate that from like three or four different sources because it sounds ludicrous that you could turn an unpayable debt that is that is higher than all of the wealth in the country.

And then you could turn it into 60 cents, but just by, you know, some magic Fiat money to give you a little rub there. But now here's the exciting thing that what was the fix? I never knew what the fix was. How did Germany come out of that hyperinflation? What they did was, and this is one of the times in history, then the government kept to their promise for a few years. What they did was they said, okay, we have the Reichmark, which is the currency that's hyperinflating,

and we're going to come out with a new currency that we're only going to print, and I'm not, I forget what the exact number was, but I think it was something like $100 million. We're only going to print $100 million of the rent and mark. So these are sister currencies. You can use either one, one's hyperinflating, one's scarce, and you're free to use whichever one you want. Well, there's an economic principle called Gresham's law.

People will naturally leave the very, you know, the one that's either volatile or the one that's common. And people will leave that and then they will save in these scarce asset. So naturally, people, the market, without any pressure, without any coercion or anything, market forces took people over to the new currency, the rents, mark because it was stable and it was it was a lifeboat eventually the german government you know continues the loose money policy you get it off hitler you know no big deal whatever right um but that's that was the fix to the german hyperinflation again that's why it's so exciting is that

as we have the world's first ever worldwide currency and we have all these currencies collapsing around the world we've never all we've also never had that in history a simultaneous collapsing of currencies around the world the only logical place for that to go is into Bitcoin. And people will say, well, what about other cryptocurrencies? No other cryptocurrency is aiming to be sound money. So even if you like Ethereum, even if you like what name X, Y, and Z token, that's fine. You might think of them as interesting tech.

They're not trying to accomplish sound money. And so the world only has one place to go. And so when you pair all of the value of the world's fiat currencies, only have one place to go. And then you combine that with capital flow inertia, this idea. that $6 billion of Fiat can turn into $159 billion of market capitalization, where does that put the value and the potential market capitalization of Bitcoin? It puts it at an absurd number. Like if we make a price prediction in this video based on that,

we're going to sound stupid. Like people are going to laugh us off. They're going to turn off the show. But you're talking about an increase in buying power that the world's probably never seen before. So it's probably a good time to buy a few stats. I love that. Yeah, it's because I mean, everything happens at the fringes, right?

Like it's not until there's an actual pinch of, oh, you know, there's not a whole lot of people willing to part with their Bitcoin at this moment in time. Well, then then that's where you get those explosions in the purchasing power of said Bitcoin. Because if you're not willing to part with it, then the only way to go is bidding up the price. we're currently in a situation where people are are pinched in fiat land and you know the only you sell whatever you can and for some people unfortunately that's bitcoin you know like it's it's and i mean people are treated you know also there's there's an element of people treat it like a tech stock they don't understand what they own right so there's going to be some of that but that more and more people are kind of realizing what this is and

And they're treating it appropriately. And even though I live on Bitcoin, that means that obviously I use it and I spend it. But that's, again, a whole other set of reasons because I no longer have faith and trust in any sort of banking infrastructure that it won't on the whim of a politician be shut down. And I'm no longer have access to my money because that has happened. So I think that getting onto a standard where you no longer, and I'm still here, sorry, my camera is just the battery doesn't like me. But again, getting on a Bitcoin standard, it forces you to kind of reconsider your financial decisions and kind of retool the way that you're interacting with the world in a financial sense. And so in that aspect, it gives you better habits, allows you to save more. And you're, again, Gresham's law.

When I was using dollars and Bitcoin, obviously I'm saving in Bitcoin. When I'm using exclusively Bitcoin, I'm still saving in Bitcoin. And whenever I have to touch dollars, it's briefly and I get rid of them right away. So I've kind of gone to the extreme of Gresham's law now where I don't want to. the dollars and I really don't like being paid in dollars as much as possible. So it's, yeah, it's, it's an interesting trajectory we're on. I'm excited to see it play out. I don't know, Jesse, do you want to chime in anything else in and around Brian's points? Yeah, sure. I can give you a couple quick thoughts. You know, Ben, you mentioned lots of different sort of participants

in the Bitcoin market, but then going back to what Brian's, said about both Gresham's law and economic reality, right? Like when that kicks in and if you, or if you have this capital flow inertia kicking in, all of a sudden the people who might be traders, who might sort of hold Bitcoin as you know, you call it like a tech play to some degree, their outlook can change, right?

Whereas now it's not this quick buck investable asset. Now it's a lifelong. and it can take more Bitcoin off the market. It's just like the dynamics of play are very fascinating. I was listening to Brian talk and in my head I'm going, you know, I just hear the quote, why so bearish? You know, oh, you're 50,000, 100,000, half a million a million. Like, it doesn't even matter because if a 60 trillion dollar German market

or 60 Deutsche Mark trillion, pardon me, whatever the number is or the nomination is, market can be worth the equivalent of 60 cents when it's all set and done. Like that value didn't disappear entirely and it did go somewhere. And it may not have all been worth what the inflated value was noted on paper. But certainly the collective value of the German economy is worth a lot more than 60 cents, even if everything is decimated, even in 1939, or in 1990, pardon me. And so yeah, whatever we're thinking about in terms of Bitcoin, there is so much out there. And like you said, it's all, it's global.

It's not one country as well. So there are so many monetary forces, I guess, at play and so much value out there that will inevitably because of the, you know, the guarantee, the assured failure that is coming. And whether it's coming in a year or a decade or whatever it may be, or more. It all has to find that that landing spot. And what is that landing spot going to be? Well, what are my alternatives?

Like, give me my list of choices. What are the pros and cons and all them? What are the characteristics of all of them? Bitcoin stands out like a sore thumb as the only best viable, credible option. And just one last thing I'll say. When you mentioned capital flow inertia, I was thinking, oh, maybe we could a nickname for it. we could call it the sailor effect from 2020.

When he was started, he sort of in a sense in the summer 2020 or fall 2020 started the ball rolling by buying a couple billion dollars worth of Bitcoin. And that pushed or helped push Bitcoin's price from. You know, I think his first buy was $9,000 or $10,000. I don't know what the market cap topped out at when we were at 60 or 65. But he didn't do all that on his own. And I'm sure all the value that came into it didn't nearly equate the market cap that came out of that. So I thought the Sailor Effect might be a fun nickname for that too. But I love that you came up with your own, like coming up with a new term for money in markets in general.

I mean, that's an innovation in and of itself, which is what we're doing with Bitcoin. It's a little bit of analogy for what we're all doing here. So I like that. I appreciate that. Yeah. No, I think if we tag it, the Sailor Effect. and then he says it, then it's,

I mean, it's golden. So it's off the race at that point. Absolutely. All right. Well, gentlemen, I'm going to start rounding this out.

We're just about at the top of the hour here. So I am, I always finish out the show with just a round of any final thoughts that you wanted to sum up. And then a challenge to you guys, which is a recommendation of something that has helped you, along your Bitcoin journey. And it can be really anything.

What I'm going to say is you can mention your book, but it can't be your, for each of you. You can obviously, I'll link both of your Twitter profiles are down below so everybody can get info there. But I'm looking for some sort of a recommendation that has been helpful for you in and around your learning journey here. So this could be anything. It could be a video, a podcast, a podcast,

a book, an article, an app, a device, something that you found useful in and around Bitcoin that has helped you along. So I'm going to start off here to give you guys a moment to consider what that might be. But I'll start off because Alex isn't here to give his final thoughts. I will give his suggestion for him because he gave it earlier. So he was talking about this episode of what Bitcoin did. Bitcoin unleashing an ocean of energy with Nathaniel Harmon. I believe that's the interview he was referencing.

I haven't heard it myself. So give it a listen. Let me know what you think in the comments. Or if you have already listened to it, I'll have to give this one a look. Now, in terms of my final thoughts, again, I think we're seeing major shifts. and we're not just, we're kind of seeing them all over. Like, and again, all of these topics have kind of played in together in that the ties are shifting and people are questioning and changing their habits and wondering if everything

that they're hearing is in fact true, right? There's this genuine questioning of institutions. And that is a theme, and I'll tie it into my recommendation, but that's a major theme in a book that I really quite enjoyed. And it's a book called The Fourth Turning. And so in a, basically the main idea of the book is kind of like the shifting generations. And depending on when you're born in a certain cycle will depend on kind of your response to stimuli.

And so the general idea is good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, hard times, create strong men, strong men create good times or people, I guess. But nonetheless, there's a shift of like, oh, if you had it really easy, then you're not going to be really hardened and you're going to probably be a little bit degenerate. and that's going to create a more volatile world. You're going to be ill-equipped to deal with it. A new generation growing up in that time is going to be hardened and they're going to have to deal with it and correct for it

and create a better world for everybody. And thus the cycle continues. And there's kind of these four different archetypes that result from this. But one of the major things that happens in a fourth turning, which is kind of like when shit really hits the fan, is a major questioning and eventually dissolution of a lot of institutions that were seen as really trusted prior. And man,

am I ever seeing a lot of that nowadays? Am I ever seeing a ton of, I don't trust this institution. I don't trust the money. I don't trust the central banks. I don't trust the news. I don't trust, you know,

what we've been taught about health and, and diet and all this kind of stuff. You know, like the, the, a lot of narratives are being questioned, a lot of institutions that, again, were trusted are, are no longer so much. And I think we're seeing that play out and we'll see replacements for that. And I hope,

I hope that those replacements are not as prone to human influence that they are, as in Bitcoin tied to some sort of a reality that is irrefutable and so then people can just look at those institutions

that are basically just hard-baked in and then make decisions based on a set of rules for all that is easy to decipher. So I would recommend check out the fourth turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe. It's a pretty damn interesting read. With that, maybe let's go to Brian first. Any final thoughts, anything that you wanted to add in

and a recommendation from you, Matt. That's cool. Well, I'm such a like a book junkie and I'm actually pretty good about reading, but the amount of books I buy compared to how much I actually read is is still disproportionate. So thanks a lot. My wife's going to be pissed at me because I just bought two more during the show. The fourth third of it and magic internet money. So Amazon's way too easy. but um okay so yeah as far as a recommendation i i mentioned earlier i'll go back to that um mike maloney's um the hidden secrets of money it's a 10 part episode that he actually does talk about bitcoin later on he talks about hedger cash graph but whatever like he you know he what he talks about in terms of like monetary like foundational uh you know tenants core tenants of money um he that was

the first time that I watched his videos was the first time that I ever separated the terms money and currency, right? Like, I still use money interchangeable with currency because of the fact that it's just, that's our vernacular. And when you're talking to regular people, sometimes it sounds awkward to say currency. But yeah, I mean, it's just the fact that there's a separation between money and currency. Gold, the only, you know, is the only kind of tried and true or one of the very few, you know, precious metals and, or one of the tried and true sound money elements that have,

have existed through history, that's great. Like, if we're basing our next bet off a historical precedent, then why aren't we going with sound money? Like, without even getting into the gold versus Bitcoin debate, like sound money will 100% win. Like, you need, people need to understand what sound money is. Have a foundational understanding of that because 100% of the time, fiat currency loses 100% 100% of the time throughout history, at least, you know, historical. historic times that we can keep track of an account for, sound money has preserved, right?

We still have the same gold. Like, Farrow's gold is somewhere in the world today in its same form because it's sound money. I'm not here to pitch gold, but what I'm here to say is that like Bitcoin, you can understand the case for Bitcoin as sound money. It's a better version of gold because it's the only type of sound money we can really use in the digital age. And you can even, you can look back at analog versus digital industries and you get

again, really bullish on it. Look at paper maps, for example. The paper map industry in its biggest year ever was like 40 million dollars of gross revenue that the paper map industry ever did. When did you use paper map? You used it like once a year when you're going on a trip. Now digital maps has created trillions of dollars of value in terms of new industry, right? Entire new companies or types of businesses exist. The way we drive in our cars is completely different. Like we used to use a paper map once per year. Now you're you. you use it once or twice or five times per day as you're driving around? Most people have it on, you know, as they're driving, whether they know where they're going or not. Amazon's logistics

wouldn't exist without digital maps. Uber, DoorDash, any of the gig economy wouldn't exist without digital map. So it's like in history, technology, it unlocks value that humanity wanted, but they never knew they needed. Paper maps, like $40 million a year wasn't the total desire for humanities needs for navigation. When we got better technology, we realized, oh, it's actually hundreds of billions of dollars of navigation that the market values. But the old technology just couldn't unlock that value. So if gold is, you know, history's only sound money that is, that has worked and it's $11 trillion in value, the case for Bitcoin being some order of magnitude more valuable than gold is really, really high. And so, yeah, when you, going back to the

Mike Maloney thing, it starts with understanding sound money. It's like the battle between sound money and fiat money and just putting that before people and in front of people and like, hey, this is the dichotomy that we need to know about. And then the second thing I'll say is like the best way to orange pill somebody aside from getting into the nuance of, you know, if you're talking to somebody that just doesn't want the academic sound money versus hard money or sound money versus fiat currency, sit down with them, have them download a lightning wallet, wallet of Satoshi or something, send them 100 sats and tell them, say, here you go. This is the first time you've ever had self-sovereign money.

You can send this anytime, anyway, anywhere. By the way, it didn't cost me anything to send that to you. I usually do it when I'm right there with them to show them like, hey, you could have been in China right now. I could have sent this to you. But look how fast it goes through from the time that I hit send to the time it shows up on your phone. And did we ask permission from anybody? No. Like, so I think when we're, as we're talking through and we're trying to share with people like why Bitcoin matters so much, there's people

that we need to explain things to. And there's some people that we just need to show things to. And so always keeping that in mind. So as far as a resource, like pragmatic resource for like sharing the gospel of Bitcoin, sometimes sitting down with somebody and just opening a lightning wall and sending value is like the number one way to do it. Yeah, absolutely. Like experience. Sorry, Ben. Experience is the best teacher. That's been the case in my world, too. If you can actually get someone to send and receive a transaction,

that teaches them more than, like you said, that sort of academic, let me list off all the reasons that this is superior, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, that's great for the interested mind that wants, that is open and ready to learn about it. But for someone who isn't necessarily at that point, the act of, you know, getting your hands dirty can do wonders. Yeah.

Let's keep it with you, Alex. Let's do your, let's, any final thoughts? And if that, if that segues into anything you wanted to say, and a recommendation. I assume you meant me. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. You said Alex there.

It threw me off. So I read an article this week. It was very brief that I thought was, was just well written. It was called The Can Has Reached the End of the Road by Omit Malikin. I think it was reprinted on Zero Hedge as well. So again, it's called The Can Has Reached the End of the Road. And it just sort of highlights a little bit of kind of along the winds of what Ben and I had as our themes today, that, you know, we're running up to this place where we're now kind of caught between a rock and a hard place. There's no good step to take that doesn't result in pain.

the central banks have pushed themselves to their limits and now it's you know like what do they do next I don't know there's no good way out of this there's no soft landing for them and so yeah the can has reached the end of the road I thought that was just an interesting little piece just well written in terms of some other media I know Knut Spanholm and Guy and Guy Swannholm and Guy and Yoni Applebaum release, Bitcoin is element zero, which was a very cool and well-done video and very thought-provoking video. There was another one which, I don't know if you would be able to run it on the show now here, but it's called Get It. And it's just Get It, Exclamation Point, Question Mark. I don't know if you can find it in time because it's a two-minute video.

So it's very short. Yeah, maybe if you search Twitter, you might. I've better live with it. I've got it here. I'm going to rip it. I'll try and I'll try and put it up there. But just give a little description of what it was. Yeah, it was just very, very, very concise.

It's very well done. It sort of is highlighting how there are, you know, there's stores of energy, there's stores of food, there's stores of sound and use tools to unlock it. And they provide benefits. But it has to be operated the correct way. to have certain properties for it to be, you know, the most beneficial to you. I mean, it's sort of self-explanatory if you have it ready to go here. But it was just, it was very neat, very concise.

Yeah. It may not. No pressure. Yeah, it may not in time. If I'm able to get it by the end of the end of the show, then I will. Okay. So there was that as just a couple of sort of media pieces that were out there that I enjoyed recently. I also have been reading a new book, so Brian, maybe we'll get you to order

one more before the show's out. But per byland, an economist at the Mises Institute put out how to think about the economy, just like a primer on economic thinking. And, you know, in the sort of traditional economic world of economics, everything is numbers, right? It's, oh, GDP, you know, spending, just metrics that are incomplete and don't paint a proper picture. It's always snapshots of just this moment and it's an incomplete picture of what's happening in the full snapshot. And that's just like not a very useful way of thinking about economics. So in that book, he's trying to write to the layman explaining that economics, I mean, economics in society, you can't, like you can't separate them also. They are one and the same. But that is a process.

It's an ongoing process. Everything is interconnected. And we need to think about just what are the incentives that make everything flow most efficiently, most effectively. So again, just a good resource for anyone who's wanting to learn about economics. I've got that clip. We'll end with this clip and then I'll bid you guys to do. So let's pull it up here. This is food.

It stores food energy or calories. You cannot save food for long because it's perishable. This is canned food. It stores food energy. You can save canned food for a very long time. You need the right tools to access the calories inside. This is wood. It stores heat energy or fire.

If saved correctly, it decays very, very slowly and will maintain the potential heat energy. You need the right tools to ignite the potential heat energy. This is a record. It stores sonic energy or music. If stored well, it will maintain the sonic energy for a very long time. You need the right tools to be able to hear the recorded music. This is an MP3. It's a digital store of sonic energy or music.

It can be duplicated instantly and sent electronically. It can save sonic energy for a very long time with no decay. You need the right tools to decode and play the digital music. This is Fiat. It's a store of trade energy or work. You can exchange Fiat money for the goods and services of other people's labor. It's controlled by central banks and governments. It does not save well, leaking its trade energy over time.

This is called inflation, an ever-increasing total supply of Fiat money. You need the right tools to access and transact with Fiat money. This is Bitcoin. It's a store of trade energy or work. You can exchange Bitcoin for the goods and services of other people's labor. Bitcoin is a digital record-keeping system with no central controller and a hard limit of 21 million Bitcoins. Its rules are enforced by a combination of electricity, mathematics and time. Bitcoin increases its trade energy over time.

Limited supply saves incredibly well. You need the right tools to save and transact with Bitcoin money. Bitcoin. Get it? I love that. That's great. Wow. Nice concise. Is that Max Hillebrand? Yes. Yeah. He's been a narrator.

Okay. Awesome. Yeah, I thought that was fantastic. Well, yeah, you can find that on YouTube, just called Get It. And it's Get It dash energy stores and it's special affection was where I found it uploaded. So yeah, solid. That was great. Well, gentlemen, this has been a good rip. I thoroughly appreciate all your time.

Again, everybody watching links for their Twitter handles are down below, and then you can find everything that they're doing. You can find their books. Pick up both of them. Brian's already been picking up books during the stream. Hopefully everybody watching has been doing the same. And yeah, guys, thank you so much. much. You're welcome back anytime.

Thank you, man. It was an honor. Really. Yeah, great being with you. Great to be back. It was awesome. Yeah, I appreciate it. And yeah, guys, have a great weekend and I'll see you soon. All right. And everybody watching, thank you so much for being here. Of course, I hope you enjoyed it.

Please do follow those guys on Twitter. Again, links for them are down below. Grab both their books and actually follow Alex as well. Obviously, he couldn't stay the whole show, but we're glad to have him here and his insights on energy as well. Of course, like, subscribe, share. All those things just really, really help a ton

getting this content in front of more eyeballs. You can also help out the show by hitting the previously mentioned sponsors in the links down below. Coin kite, shake, pay lead, and bit refilled billfottle. They're all down there. And if you really liked what you saw, you can always hit me up with a Bitcoin tip

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And there's an events section there. But yeah, if you really liked what you saw, you can always drop me a Bitcoin tip. Strike.me slash BTC sessions. Get there to type in any amount you want. Hit the tip button. You'll see a lightning invoice or tap to the right. You'll see a regular Bitcoin QR code. With that, I'm out.

Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening wherever you may be. See you guys next time for your daily session. Toggle the Bitcoin.