BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? David Bailey, Jason Maier, Nico Moran ep342

Episode Date: May 6, 2023

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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 our excellent panel. All returning guests, actually. They know the run. They know what's going on. So very excited to have them all back.

And never in this combination, obviously. We always mix and match here. So, yeah, very excited. We're going to get this thing rolling. 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'll write it and we'll do it live. The fucking thing sucks. If you have not already, like, subscribe, share all those things, help a ton getting this content in front of more eyeballs. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session.

Before we bring in our guests, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. is timechain calendar.com. We're sitting at $29,536 per coin. A single U.S. dollar will pick you up 3,386 sats in terms of fees. Holy bejesus. Next block, 165 sats per bite, even if you're willing to wait a tad, 145 sats, much more reasonable. Nonetheless, use RBF, be smart, jump on lightning, do all those things.

It's purging anything below just shy of six sats per byte. So just keep that in mind. And we've got a transaction backlog of 777 megabytes. So thanks, BRC 20. Anyways, outside of that, 92.21% of all Bitcoin have been mined. That is 19.37 million of them. Shout out to sponsors of the show, hoddlehottle.com if you're stacking sats. And you've got a few priorities in mind like peer-to-peer trading.

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One ticket left. But nonetheless, Coin Kite puts out incredible stuff. The cold card mark four, the tap signer, the Sats card, the block clock, the open dime. All of it is absolutely insane. And coming down the pike soon, the cold card Q1 looks incredible. So anyways, if you want to pick any of it up, coinkite.com, use CodePTC sessions for 5% off everything. the store. If you're looking to go beyond single-sig in terms of your security setup, Nunchuk has an incredible solution with their Honey Badger assisted multi-sig setup. It's all done

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Embassy 1 or the Embassy Pro, you can build your Bitcoin stack. Core, Lightning, Memhole, Da Space, join market. You can host your data, passwords, photos, files. You can also host Noster Relays and Noster Clients, all kinds of crazy stuff. Yeah, Embassy 1 is your entry level. Embassy Pro, if you're looking to get serious and host everything on it, start9.com. And with that, enough my rambling. I need to get in my guess here.

So we're going to welcome back. somebody that we never see on the show, Nico, good to see you, buddy. That's up, dude. Let's see you back. You couldn't say no. We've also got Jason here. Dude, good to see you, man. Welcome.

Great to be here. And David, thank you for making the time. Yeah, thank you for having me on. Yeah, this is going to be blast. I'm excited. Let's do a quick round of who are you and what do you do before we dive in just for anybody in unfamiliar in the chat. Matt. Nico, I'm so unfamiliar. Who are you? What do you do? What's up, guys? I'm Nico and the creator and

host of Simply Bitcoin, and I am the director of content strategy at Swan Bitcoin. Awesome. Well, dude, glad to have you on a non-new show for a change. I know, right? It's definitely a change up, definitely a change up, but happy to be here, either way. You let loose. I'm having a little bevy here, so there you go. David, I'm glad to have you back. Can you give yourself a little intro for those that are unfamiliar? Yeah, man. David Bailey, long-time Bitcoinser, CEO, I guess, I don't really call the shots, but owner of Bitcoin Magazine and the Bitcoin Conference. And yeah, as of two weeks ago, ordinal, Ordinal extraordinaire, you know, number one shit coiner of all Bitcoin.

So spicy. Well, dude, glad to have you and looking forward to Miami, of course. And Jason, glad to have you back, man. A lot has happened in your life since you were last on, but I'll let you introduce yourself. Yeah, so my name is Jason Mayer. And by day, I'm a high school math teacher. So I spend all of my days teaching teenagers trigonometry against their will. And I also wrote a book about So newly released a Progressive case for Bitcoin that I woke up early in the mornings to write so I can go teach math during the day. So that's out there and happy to be here. Awesome. Well, gentlemen, again, thank you all for your time.

Thank you for joining for everybody in the chat. Thank you for being here. Keep those messages coming. We'll be pulling them up as the episode goes on. And for those unfamiliar with the show, this is why are we bullish? Very simple premise to it. Each one of us comes with a reason for being bullish, something that's on our mind, something we're excited about in and around Bitcoin.

And the flow of the show is very simple. Somebody's going to drop a reason why they're bullish. Then altogether, we're going to riff on that reason. And then finally, we're going to rotate to the next person until we've all had to turn. So the three hours, reason, riff, rotate. Simple. I'm going to get us started today. And my reason for being bullish, this is.

week. It's a relatively simple one, but one that I'm always happy to see. And I'm bullish for the new round of the new class of Bitcoin educators. I'm very excited for the newcomers to come into the space, use the foundation that has been built by those, but before them and then improve upon it. And so something that I see in my area and something that has been lacking for some time, but I'm starting to see more of it. I'm so happy is practical walk-through tutorials in video form. And I'm seeing more of it.

And I want to use this opportunity right now to funnel more people into these guys that are kind of, I'd say, in their early stages of building their channels. And I want more people to go in there, subscribe to them, support them, because like, you can't just have, you know, a couple of people doing this. You've got to have lots of sources of information. And so I'm going to bring up my screen here, but there's been a few guys that just recently I've caught my attention and I just appreciate people building, you know, educational content out there.

Honeyset has been doing lots of different stuff. I think he actually took a little bit of a hiatus prior and then I started commenting on his own, his old stuff. And then he, you know, I kind of had it back and forth. I'm going to have them on the show soon. But he does these, you know, great step-by-step tutorials on how to use various things. He just did bull Bitcoin here in Canada, where to spend Bitcoin, talks about the white paper, cold card. like a whole bunch of different stuff just walking people through how to how to do all of these different things and so i appreciate that so if you can uh anybody watching hop over to darren honeyset uh h-o-n-e-y-y-s-tete-t on uh youtube and give him a sub like some of the videos share them around um he's also on twitter and everything so anyways check him out uh there's another dude the btc course

and yeah, he's been covering lots of great stuff. He's covered River, Tabsigner, Trezor versus Ledger versus Keystone versus Cold Car. So a lot of like hardware tutorials or comparisons. He's done BISC. He dives into a lot of great stuff. And also just basics explainers like UTXOs and just getting started and how to use Mempool.Bot space and all of these great tools out there. So anyways, check out the BTC.

course over on YouTube, give him a sub, like his video, share them around. And then another one of my Canadian brethren, Ian Major. I've had him on the show before too. And again, he's covering all kinds of great stuff. He just did a new video on Zeus, which is a mobile interface for your own lightning node. And so you have easy access. I'm using it myself. I'm glad to see it get more attention. And this is another important part of educators of being able to break down all of this great software and all these incredible tools that are being built by the actual developers and then showcase it in an accessible way. And so again, Ian does a great job of this. Go follow Ian Major on YouTube, subscribe, all that. And I'm going to give a shout out across the pond. He's been around

for a while actually, or they've been around for a while actually, but Decove Bitcoin in out of France. I met these guys at at surfing Bitcoin in Beirits last summer. And I mean, they've got their their rubicon of Bitcoin knowledge that they have is impressive. It's not just video stuff, but they've been. got like full free courses that you can go through and actually like zero in on specific aspects of Bitcoin. And there's like a 101, a 201 and you can like really level up well.

So if you're French speaking, their stuff is unparalleled. And they're working. They've, they've begun to do things in English and kind of reach out into a lot of different languages. So check out them as well. D-E-C-O-U-V-R-E-B-C-R-E Bitcoin on YouTube. And yeah, anyways, the long and the short of it is more people are coming into Bitcoin. Again, they're using the stuff, like the trajectory of learning that I've seen from a lot of people coming in has been expedited by, you know, great people writing, books, great people creating various types of content around news, around practical knowledge,

all that stuff. And the new guys that are coming in are taking all that, mastering it in no time, and then building on top of that. And that's exactly what we want to see and think of what the next generation after them will do. So I love it. I'm going to open it up to you guys. maybe actually I might even throw it specifically to Jason because you are an educator yourself. And so I'm curious to get your thoughts on the state of education in Bitcoin right now and where you think it could go and what you think is it's doing well versus where it could be. Yeah. I mean, I think that it's a great topic, right? Because you have new people coming to the space all the time. And I think that there's just a lot of uncertainty from people on a very

practical level, like, what do I do next and how do I do it? And so just generally speaking, right, like, first of all, if Ben, if you're the only person teaching people how to use a hardware wallet, right, we don't want a single point of failure. If you get hit by a bus, then everybody doesn't know what the hell to do with their Bitcoin. So I think it's good to have other people out there because, first of all, you learn differently from different people. So other people are going to have a way to explain stuff and it might resonate with some people versus others. And not to mention, like, there's just so many innovations happening right now, like new products, new companies, new people, new groups working on stuff. Like, it's hard to keep up,

or I would imagine it's hard to keep up. So I think that my, like, I'm a pretty risk-averse person. And I remember the first time that I was about ready to like take my Bitcoin off of an exchange and put it on a hardware wallet. I must have watched a dozen videos. Like, I know. I know, I knew how to do it with my eyes closed because I wasn't going to touch a thing until I watched multiple videos about it from different sources. So, you know, and obviously, like, some of the best ones were from you, but there's lots of other ones too, right? And I can sort of triangulate based on different explanations and say to some people will skip a step. And like, you don't, like, you don't want to be surprised when you're going through that process for the

very first time. Like, oh, I didn't know they were going to ask for a pin, you know, or something like that, as simple as it might be. So I think that having different resources and having the ability to triangulate explanations and pick somebody that you like, like, hey, this is a person who explains things well for me. Or, as you mentioned, like, in the language that I speak, like in my birth language is super important. So I have been, like, really grateful for the fact that there are so many resources out there. So I didn't have to start from scratch and learn how to set up a node by myself or how to, you know, set up a hardware wallet or the difference between a hot wallet and a cold wallet. All of that stuff, there's great resources out there.

And so, as you say, like, the more people, the better. And as long as there's good quality content, like, that's going to, like, filter to the top. And there's resources that people can trust. I think it's great. So I feel good about it. I feel like the number of things I can like suggest the people is growing and I can suggest different things to different people now. So it's amazing and it's impressive to see.

So yeah. Yeah. I like what you mentioned about overlap too because God knows there's been many videos that I've done where I'm like, oh, God, I've left out something and now people are going to go to this. but when somebody also covers it and somebody watches a video that I've done and they're like, you missed something or this is different now and then somebody else's covers it, like putting those two pieces of knowledge together, it just complements each other.

So David, I wanted to toss it to you because the thing that spurred on my reason for being bullish today was I was in toxic happy hour spaces this afternoon and D++ was there. And she's speaking at the conference and we're just talking about different ways to explain things. And, you know, the open source stage, there's a lot of great educators and there's a lot of great people speaking there to help people level up. There's lots of workshops, hands-on stuff happening. Like, you obviously view that as an important part of this. I mean, it's the most important part. I mean, Jason's being humble.

But I mean, the beauty of Bitcoin is that each generation of Bitcoiners is better and replaces the last generation. So Ben, when did you get started in Bitcoin? I stumbled my way through 2014 and 15 before starting making content in 2016. Got it. So yeah, and that makes you an old man. So you're going to be replaced by these young guns that have no respect. there are so many I mean two two young guys that I've gotten to work with over at BPI David Zell and Grant McCarty 22 and 23 years old I mean and it's like like you know not just

way smarter than me at the time I was their age way smarter than me at my current age so it's just like okay Bitcoin just keeps upgrading and thank God we all get to benefit from everyone's success. But yeah, so I'm, you know, I'm also impressed with the each wave of bit, Bitcoiners, it brings a new flavor and a new, a new, new narrative, new story to Bitcoin. And I have been very interested in seeing this like the growth of this, let's say, progressive part of Bitcoin, which I'm like, I die hard libertarian. I, you know, like my, my politics would be very different. But, You know, to see like people that are 100% pro environment, like make the case for why Bitcoin is like green technology.

You know, people that are pro the military make the case where how like Bitcoin is, you know, a soft war, safer war. You know, you can go down the list of just like the number of narratives where just about we can tell the story of Bitcoin to anybody and find the things that they care about. and make the case for Bitcoin in a condensing way. So it's dope to see that. And it's just like the hive mind just keeps getting, you know, stronger and better and more legit. So yeah. I love that.

Nigo, we were talking about this yesterday on the show, how like that everybody can benefit from Bitcoin in some way. I mean, unless you're like Christine Lagarde. But like everybody can benefit from Bitcoin in some way. And so it makes sense that if, if enough people look deep enough, that they'll find a reason for them. And it's going to be different for everybody. Like, do you have thoughts in and around that? Yeah.

I mean, dude, look, you see this, right? Like, everyone comes to Bitcoin. They come at it from a different angle from a different perspective, right? You know, in the case of Greg Foss, it was 35 years in a wrist chair, right? But, you know, all roads lead to the same place, right? And the beauty of it is that everyone kind of contributes to what their strengths are, right? So like, obviously, you know, uh, you and me, Ben, like we're content creators, right? This is just what we do. You know, Jason was writing amazing books. And then, of course, David Bailey, you know, uh, basically the, you know, the CEO behind Bitcoin magazine and, and the Bitcoin

conference, right? So it's all very unique contributions. And I think that we're just, playing on our strengths like this is you know how we got into the space but what's awesome of a bitcoin and i can't emphasize this enough and i don't hear a lot of people talking about it enough which is the idea that the incentives are aligned right so like me just working creating content ben you creating content uh jason david like it we're all kind of contributing to each other we're just making it stronger and um to kind of go back to the educational videos for a sec uh i think that's crucial, right? I say this all the time. I think we're in this like narrative trench warfare on the battlegrounds of the internet. There's part it's not left versus right. It's not red

versus blue. It's it's orange versus green. Right. And we need as many people on our side really trying to get breakthrough the Bitcoin echo chamber and really get the message out there. It's like, look, guys, it's not the opposing political party that is causing your economic woes. It's literally that the money is broken, you know, and I think that we're finally starting to see that. I was incredibly bullish when, you know, the Bitcoin Conference made the announcement that Robert Kennedy Jr. was going to be speaking there. That's absolutely massive. That is the second person behind trailing Joe Biden for the Democratic primary. And there's a non-zero chance that we might have someone who's pro Bitcoin in the White House in 2024, you know, so this is what it's all

about. I think we're all fighting. We're all on the same, we're all on the same side. We're just fighting in different trenches, but we're all trying to, you know, to reach the end goal, which is hyper-bitonization and freeing the world from the tyranny of central banking in the process. You know, I heard somebody put it this way. It was pretty interesting the other day. in the Middle East, they said that the fiat is all about assimilation and Bitcoin is all about integration. And you can maintain your culture, your beliefs, and you can integrate them with Bitcoin. But the Fiat standard, it requires you to think the same. Like the people who touch the money are the people who dress like Westerners, work in Western offices, abide by Western standards.

But Bitcoin, it doesn't ask you to abandon any of your preexisting beliefs. It's there to be used however is compatible with what your views. Bitcoin is halal. So it's like, I thought that was a pretty beautiful metaphor because it really applies to, I think, all the cultures that touch Bitcoin, not just, you know, the Islamic one. Yeah. At the end of the day, I think the question to be asked is, Do you believe that Bitcoin will improve the world, which obviously everybody here would agree in some sense and at some level? And two, do you think there's any way that somebody you disagree with using it could corrupt Bitcoin, which, I mean, if that was possible, then I wouldn't be very confident in Bitcoin anyways.

So for me, the logical outcome from that line of thought is you should learn, even with people that you politically oppose, you should learn why it appeals to them and then learn who you're talking to when you're introducing Bitcoin to them. because if you know all of the arguments for why that person or that that ideology would find Bitcoin appealing, then you can just simply present those. You don't have to go, like, you know, you don't have to go down a rabbit hole that somebody does not care about. You don't need to go, you know, you don't need to become political with it in terms of, oh, this is where I'm coming from and that's why it should be important to you. That doesn't matter. Your end goal is I would love more people using Bitcoin because I think Bitcoin helps the world if more people are using it. And I love, I heard a term the other day. I can't remember who said it.

But the idea of a, what was the term? A compassionate maximalist. that was the term. And I think that's useful. Because again, the end goal, I think Bitcoin improves the planet. I think Bitcoin improves things for all of us. I want more people using Bitcoin. If I happen to disagree with somebody who's also using Bitcoin on other topics,

that's like a second tier issue to me. So, yeah. I'm going to say any final thoughts on this, on this topic. I know we kind of went down a rabbit hole away from education, but like it all pertains, right? You're trying to reach out of people and meet them where they are. Any final thoughts before we do a rotation here? Yeah, I mean, I'll just add a bit what, you know, to what you're saying, Ben, which is Bitcoin is the great unifier. It's really, and then Fiat is just a great divider. That's, you know, very simplistic way of seeing it, but, you know, I really, I really do believe that in my heart.

Yeah, yeah, I'd echo that. All right, awesome. Okay, so we are going to do a rotation. Now, there was something that there's a little thing that came up earlier, a question for Jason, and I wouldn't mind just tossing it to him really quick. It was just somebody asking about if, where is it here? Jason, wondering if your students ever ask about ever ask about Bitcoin and all that. Oh, there we go. Dig. Dig Doug says, awesome to see Jason on here.

Would love to know if you ever get students asking or interested in Bitcoin. Like, do they know your interest or is it a secret? Yeah. Great question. First of all, it's on the back of the laptop I'm using. So there's a big fix the money, fix the world sticker on it. And I teach with my laptop every day. So that's popped up facing them and they get to see it. They know I'm writing the book. through the first, the end of last year and the first part of this year when they knew that I was writing the book, they would ask me a lot because I think that they're very correctly figured out that if they asked me about Bitcoin, they can waste a 45 minute period, you know, at waste. You know, meanwhile, I'm teaching them what they need to know.

I'm doing them the real truth. So they're, oh, if we get him talking about Bitcoin, then we're going to, we don't need to learn, you know, the law of cosines today. So that was their goal. But it's actually kind of interesting because a lot of people say, oh, teenagers, they must know so much. They really don't. They ask me questions immediately, like how they don't say this, but the questions are really, how can I get rich with Bitcoin?

And I have to just sort of like back it up a little bit. Like this is why it's important. This is how it works. So my students, by and large, are very curious. They ask really good questions. They are sort of engaged in that conversation. like gradually more and more throughout the year once they sort of saw me pushing away like, well, this is not a get rich quick thing, right? This is actually a real thing that we need to learn

about. So they're asking really interesting questions. The day the book came out. So my book dropped last Monday and that day was a whirlwind for everybody. And they kind of believe that like the book was actually real. I wasn't just making it up this whole time, that people out in the world wanted to read it. They were, really? Like, what did you think we've been talking about for the last several months? So, yeah, it's like a real thing. So anyway, yes, the students ask about it. I have very interested colleagues that I teach with that want to learn more about it. I held a faculty colloquium at my school a couple of weeks ago, had, you know, a pretty good attendance from just people asking me, like, really thoughtful questions. And, you know,

really understanding the importance of it. It was all about sort of the geopolitical sense of Bitcoin and how it changes the world in potentially positive ways. And I think that it just really opened the eyes for a lot of people that we all know the current system is broken, but here are some real examples and here are some real solutions that are possible. So yeah, curious students, curious colleagues,

and a lot of attention sort of in my small, here where I work about the book and about Bitcoin and all of that. That's fantastic. My favorite thing about this is like Bitcoin's tendrils get everywhere. And like having a progressive school teacher, all of a sudden having other staff members gathering and asking questions and they all go. And from your unique perspective of kind of where you're at, and they go, oh, geez, and then they all take their own perspectives

and that grows and reaches out to other places. And I think it's inescapable because people in all positions and all walks of life are going, oh, this makes sense for me. And that knowledge grows out. I'll just add one small anecdote, which is that I was driving my team to a tournament last week and a kid specifically asked to sit in the front with me

while I drove. It was like a three-hour drive that we had to go to another state because he wanted to ask me questions about Bitcoin. He's like, I didn't want to be rude. I said, no, you can ask me anything you want. And this kid was coming up with really, like, very thoughtful questions, like about monetary policy and how do we know it's actually better than what the humans are doing. And like, we got to the end of that conversation, and he just got quiet for a second. And this is a 17-year-old kid, right? Like, this is somebody who has learned economics through a high school, right? And has, and has thought about things. But he goes, if what you're saying is true,

this has some really serious implications about like how the world works. And I was just like, and I was just driving. It was like, what I'm saying is true. This does have important implications about how the world works. And he was able to sort of like, it clicked. He was like, wow, if like this is real, like this is a big deal.

So yeah, that was a really great moment for me. And I'm just driving down the road. And like a light bulb moment came on for a 17 year old kid who thought that he was just going to, invest and just cash it out for more U.S. dollars. And I disabused him of that notion very quickly. I love the dynamic of him being like, I don't want to be rude, but I just had a few questions. And you're like, oh, please God ask me the question. The irony of somebody saying, you know, I don't mean to bother you, but I have some

questions about Bitcoin. And Bitcoin is being like, oh, I guess. Jason, you have to take advantage of the situation and give them extra credit for the class if they set up a full node, like, really lean into, I mean, think about how many kids you educate every year and then do the math on like how many Bitcoiners you can create over. It's true. Every day I get people saying, you know, you should just teach a class about, like, every, like, teach a whole class for a whole semester, make it available for students and adults. And it's not out of the question. And next year I'm on sabbatical, I'm going to be promoting the book and traveling around doing Bitcoin stuff. But when I come back, it's better if you pick like biology though or something that like they're required education because then you can just hijack the topic.

Yeah. Right, right. Well, that's and I do it through math all the time, right? Like I like I'll throw and they'll ask me a math question. There's a great moment where they said, well, how would we change the notation if we wanted to make a math symbol different? I was like, well, math is decentralized and you need to get a lot of. of people to agree to change the symbol. I just didn't mention Bitcoin or all.

I hear it in the back of them. I mean, like, it sounds like Bitcoin. It's like they're making this connection. Yeah. Nice. Good job. I, uh, I, shit. I just lost my train of thought because, uh, because yellow just came in the chat.

Yeah. Yellow's a little sad, David, uh, that you unfollowed him. But he, he would, he would love if he would, he would love. I think he said some salty things about ordinals. Bro, you don't understand how many salty things people have said to me about ordinals the past two weeks. I don't unfollow anyone. Okay.

All right, yellow, I got you. Yeah, yellow is reaching out with an olive branch to request. Anyways, gentlemen, it's time for a rotation. And again, shout out to everybody in the chat. Thank you for being here. is just coming. I'll start pulling up some more. But nonetheless, I'm going to rotate. I'm going to toss it to Nico next. And I'm going to cue you up very simply. Why are you bullish? I'll take it away, Matt. Yeah, man, why am bullish? Dude, I mean, look, whether it's Argentina,

whether it's Nigeria, what's fascinating about these two countries is that, you know, in the case of Nigeria, right? They tried to roll out their central bank digital currency program. Argentina, you know, one of the conditions when they took the IMF bailout was that they had to, quote, de-incentivize the adoption of Bitcoin. And it looks like Nigerians and Argentinians don't care, you know, and I think the reason for that is really simple. I think, you know, when it comes to having two options, putting food on the table or listening to the guy, the talking head on TV in the suit, telling you it's your patriotic duty to use money that is just like literally vaporizing in front of your eyes. You know, people are just going to follow their incentives. They're going to care about their family.

And if Bitcoin is that tool where it enables them to provide for their family, they're going to do just that. So the adoption rate in these countries is absolutely crazy. You know, the figures are anywhere between 25 to 35%. And you could be sure that a lot of those people, you know, they're not just using Bitcoin. I mean, of course, we're all hardcore Bitcoiners in this. But the vast majority of people, let's say in the developed world that are using Bitcoin or, you know, they see Bitcoin or they see, quote, crypto, right? They see it as a speculative asset where a lot of these. people in these countries, it's the only alternative, right? So, you know, the Bitcoin virus is

spreading Bhutan. The news that was coming out of Bhutan is absolutely bonkers. They've been secretly mining Bitcoin since 2020. That was before El Salvador, I might add. We would have never found out if it wasn't for the Celsius bankruptcy. And then they just came out and said, you know what? $500 million invested. And yeah, Bitcoin's incentives stay winning. And And I think anyone who fights that is going to have fun staying poor. They're just going to, you know, Jack Mahler said it at the BPI summit. He, there was a veiled threat, like right in the beginning. He's like, you know, guys, if, if you don't like, like, go along with this, I'm just going to move.

And then he threatened, he threatened them again later on. He said, he said, you want Bitcoiners paying taxes in Texas and not Dubai, right? So it's like two very strong statements to politicians. Like, look, you know, you either go with the flow or we're going to leave, you know. And that's the power of Bitcoin. And I think people are just going to wake up to that reality all around the world. Maybe I'm an absolute crazy person, but I really do believe in the theory from the sovereign individual that information technologies are going to free mankind, you know.

And I think the internet started the fire. and then Bitcoin came along and poured a drum of gasoline on that fire of freedom. And I think that's what we're living through. And boy, oh boy, is it a great ride, man. This is a, you know, they don't call the Bitcoin roller coaster for no reason. But what a time to be alive. What a privilege to be alive during these crazy, crazy times. This is the separation of money in state.

And we're going to win this thing. I feel the heat from that fireman. I feel it. Yeah, I love the. Also, Shout out, speaking of sovereign individual, I don't know if he's still in here,

but, but C.K. was in here earlier, and he always brings copies of the sovereign individual whenever there's, whenever these events happen, and he just hands them out to the first people that find them. So if you're,

if you're going to Miami, find C.K. And get yourself a copy of the sovereign individual. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Is it, and, and, and,

find it prescient given it was written in like 96 or something like it's pretty it's pretty wild some of the stuff that was said in that book that early on um you know just just kind of looking at the impacts uh that a global communication network would have and and extrapolating out and the only piece of the puzzle apparently that was missing was global censorship resistant money and here we are so um Yeah, anyways, give it a read if you have not, get your free copy from CK. He's going to get mobbed. Now that he knows, he's going to get mobbed. I'm sorry, CK.

Yeah, yeah, sorry. But David or Jason, do you want to dive in on Nigo's topic? Yeah, well, first of all, I just want to say I'm officially following yellow. I'm sorry, King. I don't know what happened there. So, but yeah, Niko, I completely agree. I just got to spend some time in Turkey. And it was wild what percentage of the population is using Bitcoin.

Sadly, they're actually using, like probably number one most popular is Tether on Tron, if you can believe that. Like, it's like the most unholy thing I can imagine. But right behind Tether on Tron is Bitcoin. God, it's just sounds about saying it aloud. But yeah, we went to the Grand Basin. are like the oldest market in the world, the endpoint destination of the Silk Road, and at least 10 different stores like Bitcoin money exchangers. And like as if it's just the most

normal everyday thing to interact with it. And they have, I think they said 12 million people in Turkey use Bitcoin or, you know, tether on tron every month so uh the the user base there is just insane and if you like we sat in one of these kiosks for a while to just see like who the the demo was what type of people are using it russian guys ukrainian people i mean it's as the world falls apart the need for bitcoin just becomes so blindingly obvious to the people who are on the front lines of that deterioration And so, you know, if you're if you're from a war-torn region, Bitcoin is by far your best tool to be able to have some, you know, some standard of living. So it's just, I completely agree that Bitcoin's becoming real to people and real and a way that it's never been before.

Yeah, 100%. By the way, Ben, it seems like yellow happened somehow. he got in here. Do you hear that? Don't stop believing. Dude, he's been in my apartment for six months and he cleans out the fridge every night. Yellow really has to get out of here. Like, this is too much. Some people in the chat seem to have taken offense to Olive Branch because yellow is Greek. But I'm going to say olives are fucking delicious.

and ever since my Greek trip last year, when Yellow gave me a ride on his motorcycle, I've been on an olive kick and I pick him up regularly and I just eat olives out of the jar like on the regular. Also, I can't believe I'm going to read this, but... So Yellow dropped in the chat, and David, just know, if you're not up to snuff on like the latest Twitter drama,

this is actually not about you. Great. Okay, let it rip. But Yellow said, Bailey, what the fuck? I thought we were friends. What the fuck? You guys are all the same at the end of the day.

Smile to my face, shake my hands, say we are friends, then trying to joke on me. This has no. Brutal. I will not elaborate. People that were on Twitter will understand what it's referring to. I drew the ire of somebody late last night, and that was their reply to me. Nonetheless. Oh, wait.

I did see this. You know, dude, there's too many people getting too upset about what happens on Twitter. It's like, just like, take a chill pill, you know? Everybody used to just calm down a little bit, but anyway, I feel like if people acted on Twitter, how they act in real life, everything would be a much more decent place in the world, you know? But that would also take away a lot of the fun. They don't, they don't. There's so many haters on Twitter and then I don't see them in real life.

It's amazing, right? It's like they don't, you know. It's almost as if the face you can detect nuance. Or you just don't want to be a total asshole right? Much higher probability of getting punched in the face. Exactly, exactly, right? It's so much easier to be a keyboard warrior. Anyways, so sorry to derail you, David. Jello just pops in whenever he wants. But yeah, I think that, you know, and I do hear that as well, like not only in Turkey and Venezuela as well, right? The popularity of stable coins is through the roof. But I think that like it's a false sense of like financial so, like it provides a false sense of financial sovereignty. I think when people really do. wake up to, and I think it's inevitable that the dollar is, it's more stable than what your local currency, but, you know, it suffers the same problem. I think, you know, at the end of the day,

I think it might take a while, all roads lead to Bitcoin. You know, not like, not to state the obvious, but the number one shit coin is the US dollar. And like the, if you created a shit coin with the parameters and the fee, of the U.S. dollar. It would be the worst of the worst. Not even Justin Sunstron is as fucked up as policy as the U.S. dollar does. And I think stable coins, like not to, not to throw any shade at anyone because I like a lot of people that are in the stable coin business, let's say. But I think stable coins are going to be the biggest rug pool of our entire industry's history because these are just wrappers of a bank account. They, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they're bank accounts. I mean, you're just parking money in someone else's bank account. And, you know, the moment the government wants to shut this shit down, it's over. It's done. And people are going to like, wake up and realize one day, damn, the stable coin I thought was stable was stable until the tail wrist kick in. And then it's not stable at all. So, you know, I feel like, um, you know, I feel like, um, um,

the world is like going to wake up to a painful lesson one day and there's going to be 50 million people wiped out in an afternoon. Bitcoin is the only stable coin. So people need to remember that. Amen. Yeah, I mean, to Nico's point, his original point, talking about sort of the reasons why we see adoption happening globally. I had a great conversation just yesterday.

And we didn't get about two minutes into the conversation about Bitcoin before the other person on the other side of the table was like, there's a lot of other countries out there whose currency is horrible. Like, would this help them? Like, yeah, I would. And so I think that, you know, when you're talking to an American, like the point about like the dollar being a shit coin, like to an American, like, your money is not broken right now. And like, people don't think that way. And so it's a little bit harder for them to see the value necessarily until they start to put themselves in somebody else's shoes or maybe they're thinking out ahead or they understand sort of a bigger picture. This conversation I had immediately went to this person's experience in Kenya and saying like, well, this is what it was like when I lived in Kenya seven years ago and this is what money looked like and this is how people behaved and acted.

And like I can see this Bitcoin thing fitting into a place like that very well. And so, like, there's hope and there's, like we say, like when there's a need, then people are going to gravitate towards it. And like Bitcoin is there when people need it. And if you're in a sort of a privileged place where your bank account doesn't get frozen and your money works all the time, then you might not be quick to pick up on it. But a lot of other people around the world are. You know, and the idea like we mentioned about Nigeria's CBDC in saying, you know, there's there's some danger in there, right? Like this is why we're vigilant.

That's why we talk a lot about this kind of thing, right? Because it's sort of like two sides of the opposite issue saying, you know, government says, well, this Bitcoin thing, we can't control it. So we're just going to make our version of Bitcoin that can be controlled. Like there's danger in there. Right. And we were talking about the internet before. Like the internet got off to a.

start where everyone's just like, hey, convenience, I don't need to worry about privacy at all. And like, that's sort of the internet that we have right now. Like, there's danger in that. So I think being vigilant about all of those things and sort of keeping a tab on how these things get rolled out in other countries is really important. And there's really important conversations happening. And, you know, I'm grateful that those important conversations are happening. So I think that it's one of those things that if we let it go too far or like if If something catches on, then it might be hard. It might be harder unring the bell.

So, you know, it was like I walked away from that conversation I had yesterday feeling really good because the person was making the connections on their own. Like, hey, let me think about other countries around the world, even though I'm not there now. So, you know. And can I just say that I'm so excited for the Federal Reserve to launch their stable coin because no one's going to fucking use it. And then they're going to have to acknowledge that the reason why people, like, Bitcoin's not, like, valuable because of the technology. It's not valuable.

It's to escape then. It's to get rid of them. Like, it's the monetary policy we're trying to fucking get away from. And they don't realize that. They think if they just fucking bake their monetary policy into some fucking token that we're going to, like, eat it all up. No one's going to use it. So I hope that people can stop saying, hey, let's stop CBDCs, because then when it fails, then we can laugh at them. If we actually put up a fight, they're going to try to blame us that it didn't catch on.

No, it didn't catch on because people don't want your totalitarian inflation bullshit. So, dude, bring on the CBDCs. You know what they're going to do, though. They're going to be like when it fails, like it's going to be, I imagine the rollout being similar to Nigeria, like single digit numbers of people in the country using what is there. And so then it's going to be like, hey, if you want your UBI, you've got to accept it via the CBDC. But the best part is that only accelerates the reason that you would want to use Bitcoin. Sure, you get like, you know, if that's the mechanism through which it's incentivized and it's not through force, then, okay, great, we're giving payouts to everybody if you utilize the CBDC.

Fantastic. People start doing that. Well, you start to see the, you realize that as you're getting your UBI and everybody's getting your UBI is devaluing the currency that you're getting. Well, I need to escape to something in order to keep the value that I've just gotten for free. And so people like start basically trying to play the system and go, okay, I'm getting free stuff now that will be worthless in the future or the longer that I hold it, the less it's worth. I need to, you know, their capital flight needs to happen to something that's going to retain as value. And so it just, it, it, it, it, it, this, the vicious cycle just takes hold. And so I, I, I, if that doesn't happen in the U.S., it's going to happen somewhere. It's, it's, it's that tactic, I think, will be used at some point. And it will just further prove the point. And at some point, the UBI won't even be attractive enough to bother, you. using the CBDC, I think.

Yeah, I mean, just like to add to your point, Ben, like, it's incentives versus coercion, right? They have to coerce people to use a central bank digital currency versus Bitcoin is just, dude, number go up. You know, Honey Badger don't care. And then, you know, like, I think incentives are going to like rule the day. I mean, like, dude, what, what happened with the with the China ban and then the hash drop like 50% in the middle of the last full market, which by the way, I suspect was the reason

we didn't hit 100K. It was like literally in the middle of the last runup. And the hash rate recovered dude like I think it was within a year. Now it's making all time highs. Like no central authority, no CEO, no nothing, right? It was just like the mere incentives of Bitcoin alone. And then central bank digital currencies don't have that. Right. And I think David, to your point, like I think, That's the reason they're not mentioning. They're just focusing efficiency of payments. Efficiency of payments. And it's like, what about inflation, bro?

Like, that's why we're here. Dude, are you a bit coiner from 2011? Like, are you, are you Roger Baer talking about how fast these transactions are? The only use case for a stable coin outside of escaping the monetary policy is because you want to break the law. And I'm not saying the laws are just. So I mean, there's perfectly valid to want to break the law. But for some reason, you can't use a bank account to do the thing you want to do. You either don't want to have to be tracked on paying taxes.

You don't, you want to buy unregistered securities. You want to do a foreign currency exchange that the central bank doesn't allow. Like, it's all regulatory arbitrage. Like, that's the only reason you would use someone else's bank account and give up interest and give up, uh, uh, insurance. So it's like, okay, you know, either the government is just going to like become, one big black market, you know, money laundering scheme, which I guess now that I'm saying out loud, that's kind of maybe what they are. But anyway, yeah. So can I, I'm just going to push back a little bit on this notion because I agree with you, but I do think that it's important to realize

that the world is not filled with Bitcoiners yet that thinks like the four people on this little rectangle. All right. And I want you, I want everybody listening to be aware, that if the Federal Reserve came out with some sort of slick marketing or slick messaging and said, here's some money that has all of the good properties of Bitcoin, but it's backed by the government. As ridiculous as that sounds to people that know what we're talking about, people will eat that up. And what we need to do is go and actually like, that's what we hear. Like you go and talk about it. Yeah, but it's like it's not real money.

If it's not backed by the government, there's just a lot of uninformed people out there. and we need to get to them before this happens. I think in the long run, you're right. Like there's incentives and you realize that money's melting away and you want to get into something safe. And that's why we're all doing what we're doing. And inflation, the monetary policy doesn't get changed. But people aren't thinking about monetary policy right now.

I don't, you know, obviously we're in our own sort of Bitcoin bubble sometimes. And we forget that. Like, there's people out there that think that the money has to come from the government. And like, this is just as good as Bitcoin, but from the government. And maybe I'm wrong. Hopefully I am. I'm not rooting for that. To be clear, I'm just saying, like, that's why it's important that we go out and educate

people and just sort of make sure that other people know and we grow that sort of the Bitcoin space to the point where there's enough people to push back against something like that because, you know, the incentives will take care of it in the long run, but like a lot of damage could be done in the short run. So I'll just throw that out. I'm willing to bet you one ordinal that by the, The time CBDC launches, okay, one year within its launch, it has less than 1% adoption. David, that is not a lot of skin in the game.

I mean, maybe I'd take the bet if I knew what an order to was, but whatever, it's fine. I hope you're right. I'm not, you know, I'm not stating as a certainty. I just talk to a lot of people who aren't into Bitcoin, right? Like, and this is how they think. And I'm trying to change each one of their minds as I go. Yeah, dude. I mean, so the Bitcoin Echo Chamber, something, we talk a lot about this on Simply Sessions, Ben, right?

It's just like Bitcoin, like we make Bitcoin content and then other Bitcoiners kind of take it. Like the difficult part is like breaking into mainstream consciousness and then them asking, you know, what is what is money. But I think the system is getting to a point where it's breaking so hard. that like Tim Poole for example this week he was like talking about the new new republic bank failing and at the very end of his like monologue he was like you know what eff this i'm just i'm not gonna give you advice but i'm just gonna buy bitcoin you know and i think that we're seeing more mainstream people for example the bitcoin conference right you see a lot of like people with huge audiences and they're speaking at the bitcoin conference so i think the the bitcoin bubble like you

said jason or the echo chamber like i call it i think it's starting to break Like it's starting to burst at the seams, you know? So in five years, like, I, you know, I'm, I feel bullish, I guess is what I have to say. It's been happening. So, you know, it's one of the things that we really try to do with the conference is like pierce the mainstream narrative and like inject, like, concentrate our forces so that we can like push Bitcoin into the consciousness for 72 hours, basically. and like as we like just interact with people it's become clear like this is happening like on its own like the jessica vons of the world like there are people that are like the drakes of the world like people that are already mainstream people who have like would call themselves like toxic maximalists and like put laser eyes on their on the profile picks like like that's pretty crazy like that's uh uh anyway anyway i agree i okay so i've got a question just in and around Again, that breaking out, again, Nico, in line with your topic. David, in line with the conference and Jason, my question to you, coming from the progressive side of Bitcoin,

how do you view the impact on progressives, thoughts on CBDCs from Robert Kennedy? Do you think this is helpful? or do you think that progressives are looking at him as not representative of their views? Like where is that, where are we at here? Right. So you're asking me to like reporting from outside of the bubble. This is what I'm saying on the street. It's like as much as I like what Robert Kennedy is saying about CBDCs and about Bitcoin and I agree with all of that.

When I'm talking to my normie friends who are progressive, I think that it is going to be a hard sell for like a typical like average like middle of the road Democrat in the United States to like support Robert Kennedy. I mean, he's got some percent, like he has some percentage of support. Maybe it's like 20 percent or something in the primary. I'm getting a lot of skeptical looks because of his policy, his stance. on other issues, right? So I think that they might be... I wonder what issues are. So I think that I'm getting a lot of skeptical looks, and I think that like that's probably going to make it more difficult to convince somebody, you know, that that RFK's policy on CBDCs or on Bitcoin is something that should be paying attention to. That's like the cynical take. I think that,

you know, I talked to that person and I sort of, you know, a couple of them in a row. And well, maybe I'll re-look at it. We'll see. Like they shut it down completely. So who knows? Like there might be a chance for optimism there. But I am getting a lot of like, hey, like that guy's sort of fringe and I'm not into it, which doesn't bode well for his ability to translate the Bitcoin stuff to people, like to everyday people. But I hope that I'm wrong.

No, but I think when the question is how, how. do we reach certain mindsets, the skeptical look, the, the look of that Bitcoiners have on everything else, don't try to verify and scrutinize until you can't scrutinize anymore. That needs to be had. Because if, again, me and Nico talking about this yesterday on the show, but it is massive that you have a democratic candidate. for president, which I'll be it like Biden's probably running again. And so like how much clout does that?

Regardless of the fact that you've basically got the second in line in the Democratic Party if there were a primary debate saying that CVDCs are no good and that Bitcoin is a better option. I think that's important, but I do think we need to get to a place where you have other voices that the vast majority of, say, Democrats or here in Canada, liberals or whatever it may be, can hone into not necessarily the entire message, because obviously, like we talked about earlier in the show, everybody has their own way that they're coming to Bitcoin, and it appeals to people in different ways.

But to have people basically across the entire political spectrum hone in on, why is this important to us and then be able to convey that? I think that's important. And I'm curious, sorry, I'm making this my. And this is weird because, again, I probably came from closer to, you know, where Jason is on the political spectrum initially. But my question to you is, what kind of a person do you think bringing up the virtues of Bitcoin, in like a recognizable person.

What kind of a person do you think it would take for your regular kind of run-of-the-mill progressive friend to go, oh, maybe I will take a second look at that and not be like, oh, RFK, Matt. So the answer is quite simple. I think that a lot of what RFK is saying right now, you can sort of read through his Twitter feed and somebody's going to agree with like 80, 90 percent of it, like somebody who is buddies with me. And really thoughtful stuff about like the importance of Bitcoin and the freedom it gives people to transact without government interference.

Like this is absolutely critical. And people respond well to that. Like what, you know, if you want the honest answer to your question, like all you need is is RFK who is okay with vaccinations. Like that's the problem. I think that's, you know, take it or leave it. People might have their opinions. But if that's the target audience is like the buddies I'm having. hanging out with off to the side here who aren't in a Bitcoin already, they're going to hear

that message a lot better if they're not given a hard time about the vaccine. And that's it. So, yeah. I think what I'm hearing from that is perhaps just a cycling of the news where perhaps like that's not the main issue and you have somebody else who like there's always going to be Bitcoiners are a unique bunch and you're always going to have some sort of a controversial opinion on something because if there's one thing, Bitcoiners, they are opinionated and known for being outside of the norm.

So maybe it just takes a couple news cycles of like, that's not the main thing that people are mad about. And somebody that I agree with on all of the other issues is now, talking about this and multiple people. And it's all going to overlap of like, oh, geez, I disagree with this guy on this thing, but I disagree with this other guy on the same thing, or on a totally different thing, but they both overlap and they both say that this is useful. And maybe that's just what it takes. And I think that's going to take time, but that's okay. Well, to piggyback on Nico's point earlier about the adoption of Bitcoin with those that need it,

you know, if you go intra-society, it's like the people that are embracing Bitcoin are the people who are on the front, they're on the front lines of those Fisher lines. So there's always going to be some fringe element. Like in the start of the Bitcoin adoption, it was the most disenfranchised. And it's like working its way towards like the mainstream every view. But you have to be disenfranchised in some way to have really been like, you know, I feel like on the Bitcoin wagon. So it's, I think like it's going to be a while, I feel like before we reach the person who's like, I have a mainstream view on every opinion that there is like, you know, it's probably going to be the guy using the CBDC when it comes out.

I don't know if such a person exists when they're not monetarily incentivized to do so. I don't think that that would be possible. Nonetheless, okay, gentlemen, I'm conscious of time. We are running short on it. and I need to do a rotation. And I'm going to toss it to David and I'm going to cue you up and I'm going to say, why are you bullish? Take it away, man.

Yeah, so I'm bullish on two things, actually. And first off, I'll start with the shameless shill to reinforce what we're talking about. I'm bullish on the Bitcoin conference. I'm bullish on the biggest gathering of Bitcoiners this year, anywhere in the world. We have people coming from all walks of life, all countries. We have potential presidents. We have CEOs. We have plebs.

We have kings. We have the whole gamut of life and culture. And it's like infused into this wacky, insane three-day experience that's almost like an acid trip, but rallied around sound money. I'm very bullish on that event. I'm bullish on some of the announcements that are going to be happening there. And I'm hopeful we're going to be able to pierce the mainstream membrane this year as well. And we got a couple surprises that we're working on that will really blow people's minds.

So RFK is a taste of things to come. So the next thing I'm bullish on is I'm bullish on blog. space. I'm bullish on transaction fees because they are going up and to the right. The transaction fees, if there was a derivative and I could buy them, they're pumping. And I think that this is just the beginning of what's to come. And, you know, I was thinking the other day, like, I need to make one of those memes where it's like the domino meme and you know uh like this starts with a small domino and there's the big domino at the end and like the small domino is like bitcoin magazine tries to create a cover on an ordinal and like the big the big domino is uh you know

two hundred dollar transaction fees on bitcoin so um small domino be some dude puts a fucking jpeg on the base name so you know BRC 20 tokens man i i i um i don't know if you've looked into these. I don't know if you all don't spend any time. You should spend a little bit of time to understand what they are. It is, you know, I call it ERC20 tokens on meth. It is, you know, an abomination in terms of how it's built. If you want to mint one of these things,

you just press a button, basically, and it creates 100 transactions on Bitcoin, like in one click of a button. I mean, it was just like boggling inefficient. But as I kind of looked at it, it's clear to me that this is something that is going to stick around longer than a few weeks or a few months.

I'm not sure if it will survive a whole cycle or not, but this is something that I don't see going away anytime soon. As long as there's money to be made, people are going to do this thing. It's just that's the incentives. And, you know, we're seeing. this amount of congestion that's being created in the Bitcoin network with, I think, based on what I can tell, less than 10,000, less than 15,000 people playing with these things.

If you have centralized exchanges, list these things, pump this market up with liquidity, and you get 100,000 users in here gambling on BRC20s or 250,000 users gambling on BRC20, which is nothing relative to how many people gamble on ERC20 tokens. the transaction fees are going to blow out. So why am I bullish? If you want to see the Bitcoin community get focused on actually building shit, make transaction fees $100 and see what happens. It is going to take over every single person's total focus,

every company's total focus, and you're going to see more shit get built in six months time than has been built in the last four years. So I'm bullish on our ability as a community to respond to this. And on the back end of this, for Bitcoin to be in a substantially better place than it is right now. I find this topic super interesting. The reason being is we always knew no matter what with the block size being what it is. And Segwit was a way.

So those, I always have to recent. myself because there's a lot of people that that don't even know the history of like the block size wars and Segwit and all of that. Basically, when you do a Bitcoin transaction, the bulk of the data and the data, the amount of data that you're conveying on the Bitcoin blockchain is what dictates how much money you're paying. The bulk of the data is the signature. Basically, you saying or your hardware wallet or your wallet saying, I approve this transaction, the bulk of that data is the signature. And so Segwit took that and made it not count towards the total size of the block,

which is constrained. Hey, we only have a set amount. Constrained by design because we want or the consensus is that we want people to be able to download and verify the entire history of Bitcoin's transactions. And so that's what we're running a full note is. I can, you know, in a day's time or less, if I'm running like some decent hardware, I can download and verify the entire history of Bitcoin's transaction base. And that gives me certainty over the supply of Bitcoin and a whole bunch of other parameters.

So I, we always knew that, hey, if we're going with smaller blocks, the tradeoff is, everyone that chooses to can verify or like most people that choose to can verify there's going to be obviously if you can't afford any sort of computation if you can't have any sort of hardware that's going to be difficult but we want as many people as possible to be able fully verify everything on chain okay fantastic the tradeoff is that eventually on chain transactions become for large settlement. And it may be settlement on behalf of many individuals. And so we start to see extensions of that. Lightning network. Lightning is locking up Bitcoin between yourself and another individual. And the transactions that happen on lightning are basically saying,

how do we divvy up this Bitcoin at the end of the day? When we settle to the main chain, who gets what? And that's a lightning transaction. Well, now I get a little bit less and you get a little bit more because you gave me a beer. Whatever it may be. It doesn't matter. And you can also extrapolate that out. I'm not just paying you, but anybody else you're connected to.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, hop, hop, hop, hop. Like beads of an apicus moving down, you can move those transactions. Amazing technology without compromising the base layer and the ability of anybody to to verify on it. But we're going to be continuing to bump up against that. It was an inevitability that with 8 billion people on the world, you can't have everybody doing the number of transactions they're doing nowadays and having them all be on chain.

We saw lots of innovation around, well, innovation. I just people realizing they needed to use features like transaction batching for exchanges. point base. There were a number of entities that dragged their heels on it and to their users were like, dude, I'm not going to pay $15 to withdraw every time. You've got to get your shit together. And now we're starting to see that with lightning. Exchanges are slowly beginning to implement lightning withdrawals. That's fantastic. That's a great service to offer. It needs to be blanket. And we will see other options. We'll see things. like fetament or cashew, we'll see other options.

And there's going to be degrees of custody with that. You know, a fetament, unless you're like a key holder to the multi-sig, it's meant to be community-based. But it segregates the rug pulls, right? It's not like a, it's not like a 2008 rug pull wherever like mass. You can't rug your friends. You can't rug, you know, strangers. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I mean, you could if somebody bought into your, if somebody decided to go into your fetament and they had no idea who you were or your cashew mint and they had no idea who you are. It's possible. But my hope is that people treat it as this is meant to be a small community. And so we'll see.

It's still infinitely better than than imagine having cashew mints or fetaments or whatever types of centralized options, even if they have great features. And then when they rug pull, the CEO of Bitcoin is like, hey, we're just going to print a bunch of Bitcoin

and make sure these people get bailed out. That's impossible. And so what ends up happening at the end of the day is, geez, I put money in something where somebody else had a degree of control and I got rugged. And there's no central bank to bail me out. perhaps I should be a bit more conscientious of where I put my capital.

Perhaps I should consider what services I use and keep it local to the community or deal with the fees of being on-chain or deal with the fees of having some sort of an LSP provide me liquidity. And you just said something. I don't know. I've never heard it said like this before. But it's soon to be cheaper to run your own node and to verify Bitcoin. then it will be to send a Bitcoin transaction.

So you can't use the system. You can't afford it. But you can't afford to make sure that those that can are doing it right. To be fair, I would love that with the Fed. Dude, I don't mind paying $100 for a fee if I know that, you know, I'm sovereign. Right. And like at the end of maybe that's very selfish of me because, you know, I didn't get in as early as you guys, but still class of 2016, you know, and I don't mind paying $100, you know, a Bitcoin transaction.

If it means, you know, like, I know for a fact, you know, my money is mine. And it's exactly, you know, you touched upon this, David, right, which is this is just going to spur innovation, right? This is what the Lightning Network is literally for, right? I loved how you described it, Ben, is why I'm a huge fan of your tutorials, right? Lightning is a bar tab. That's literally what it is. It's a bar tab. And at the end, you know, you check out of that bar tab and then that's it.

Right. So, you know, the, and again, like, I don't think the base layer was meant for this. Because if you do go the route of bigger blocks that requires much higher resource requirements, much higher resource requirements means a much higher barrier. to entry, meaning it's going to cause centralization. We've seen this with Ethereum, right? The largest Ethereum validators are exchanges, right? Which the Office of Foreign Asset Control, which is part of the U.S. Treasury,

is already pressuring to censor transactions, right? So if we do want this decentralized network, right, you want the barrier to entry to run your own node as low as humanly possible. What's it cost right now? Ben, you're an expert at this, like two to three hundred bucks, right? I would rather, you know, like, you know, I would rather want something like that than the Frankenstein creature that everyone else, everyone has to deal with right now, which is, you know, central banking and state money in general. Like, I think we're going to look back 50 years from now and we're going to look at the idea of state money and government money. And we're just going to look like that was a horrific idea.

You know, you could have made the case. Okay, that was the best solution. until 2008, but, you know, it's not the case anymore, you know? So anyways, this might take. I think this will be super interesting in the way of perhaps you get into an instance where or an individual or family or a municipality, whatever it may be, they take careful consideration of we've got X amount of capital. We're going to allocate a handful.

not only will I allocate a handful of transactions, base layer to opening channels, but I'm going to batch that. So I'm going to take my Bitcoin in a single transaction to be as efficient as possible in one transaction. I want to open up channel, channel, channel to multiple entities. And maybe that's not even on the individual level. Maybe that's a small town or a family or a company or a couple. company or whatever it may be saying like in a single go I'm going to because I need to be as

efficient as possible with on chain is I'm going to go okay boom I'm I'm you know my city the city of Calgary I'm going to open channels for our municipality to the following location boom boom boom boom boom boom boom and and you open those channels based on things like even geopolitical risk. Like if you open up just channels to the U.S., the U.S. sanctions you, well, those channels just get closed. But if you have a channel from one country to another

and then back to people in the U.S., it changes the game in terms of that, in terms of on-chain efficiency. Like the first step was seeing companies like Coinbase, batch transactions. The next step is going to see individuals batching transactions. Soon you're going to see other entities, companies, municipalities, fed amints, whatever it may be.

You're going to see all kinds of people trying to figure out how can I actually be efficient on chain. And that's the fee market. That's what happens. People try to find the most efficient way to do things because what's scarce in Bitcoin, sats and computational space. And we're dealing within those laws. And we need to deal with it.

I mean, there's scarcity, something we don't experience in Fiat land, right? Well, you know, I find that in our industry especially. It's filled with a lot of technologists who like to theorize and like to think and like to conceptualize and they like to debate their opinions. And the free market doesn't give a fuck what you're. your opinions are. The free market is fucking water pouring down a mountain and it is going to flow where it flows. And those who can make transaction fees the most efficient, save their users the most money, they will win. Their solutions will win. People will adopt them. They will grow.

Those that can't figure it out, they'll die. And so it's like, it's like kind of like takes your hypotheses or your predictions or whatever. It's like fucking puts them to the test and the put up or shut up is like, do they actually work? Do they actually get adopted? And if you think back to like the block wars. If you think back to like the genesis of the lightning network, this was the context in which the lightning network got launched. Like this is the context in which people started taking transactions fees seriously because for the first time ever we had to start paying them. And so it's like lightning was one of one of several ways that efficiency was brought to transact the to solve the congestion issues on the network. Now lightning is not a

panacea. Lightning has its own problems. And, you know, I think, you know, We got to be careful not being, like, lazy in terms of like, okay, it's a good narrative to be like lightning solves all the problems and then, you know, but does it really. And so I think like as fees go to $100, et cetera, and it puts all of this pressure on lightning network, we're going to see like where the shortfalls are with lightning and what needs to be spent, you know, more work spent on. And then, you know, there are, when I think back to like what we learned from the block force, like the key thing that I think we learned from that process is that you can't hard fork Bitcoin. Like that's, that's, that's the only takeaway I really take from it is like you can't hard fork Bitcoin. And so, you know, if you can't hard fork Bitcoin, you have to live within the parameters that exist. Okay, there are there are other ideas out there too that haven't had their moment in the sun about how we can improve efficiency. because lightning kind of sucked up the intellectual curiosity, and then fees went down,

and then it went back to the state of like, oh, this is just all theorizing and not actually, you know, fucking practical crisis. So, like, I'm interested to see, like, what other fringe ideas do we have that works within Nakamoto consensus that haven't had their chance, and maybe finally are going to get their chance? And I don't, I, I, the one thing I can guarantee is that if we go to $100, Bitcoin transaction fees, this problem will have the smartest minds in the world at the largest scale in the world working on it. Like there's no, there's no problem at Google that's going to have

more genius developers and engineers and thinkers trying to figure out how to build solutions to solve a scalability problem or whatever than Bitcoin's going to have. So I'm I'm interested in seeing what comes from it. Yeah. I mean, so to your point, I agree with everything you're saying, high transaction fees, innovation, which is exciting, and who the hell knows what's going to actually happen, right? It's like this meme of saying, like, easy times cause inefficient use of the block space. And then, like, inefficient use of the block space creates hard times, right? And then, like, now you have this hard.

Now, like, hard times are going to create efficient use of the block space again, right? So we're going to, like, we are going to be finding ways around it, right? Bitcoin's fourth turning. Right. Yeah. So here we are, right? But I, you know, and David, to your previous point, too, also like your first bullish thing, I'm also bullish by the Bitcoin conference too because I'm going to be there.

And it's my first one. Let's go. Let's go. Exciting. I'm going to be there signing a book. So, yeah, all sorts of good things are going to be happening down there. I just wanted to say you said something, you said fringe views or something, David. And I just wanted to say you sound like somebody from the fringe minority with unacceptable views.

But seriously, it did bring up, again, a memory of about a year ago now. And I did want to say that was a really. rough time about a year ago and thank you very much for being like you know it was quietly in the background well maybe not so quietly but uh i will say um a very heartfelt thank you um you were in my dms you were offering a lot of support and uh and that meant a lot and it really did um it it helped a lot through a tough time So I appreciate you. And yeah, thank you for being a resounding drum of support through a crazy time in Canada.

So I appreciate that. Well, I sacrifice traveling to Canada ever again over that situation. So, you know, well, the fringe idea I was thinking of is like, you know, Dip 300 tweeted about it today. there's a lot of people to have passionate views about that. There's a bunch of like kind of outside, outside reviews that I've never gotten kind of their, maybe their time in the dialogue.

And you know what, Ben, I appreciate your comment on the Canadian trucker element. That was actually a very special piece of Bitcoin history to be a part of. And, you know, I will say this because, you know, there's a lot of things that we support in the Bitcoin ecosystem. that are very Bitcoin-centric things, and we try to stay out of the limelight that we're supporting them. But whether it's fucking lawsuits against characters in our industry, or whether it's policy stuff in D.C. or whether it's Canadian truckers getting fucked, or whether it's rebels in

Myanmar, whatever it is. We try to be supportive as much as we can behind the scenes, and I appreciate. that comment. Yeah. Thanks, man. It did it did indeed mean a lot and uh, and again, everybody out there that was like just offering support through that, that time. It was, it did mean a lot. I saw every single message. It was it was overwhelming and, um, it was literally impossible to get back to all of them, which means even more. Um, when it was fun. It was fun. Okay. fucking crazy, but it was fun.

It was in retrospect, maybe. At the time, it was fun, and then it really wasn't fun. As all great things are. As all great things are. Yeah, true. But nonetheless, yeah,

I really appreciated the sport from you, Bitcoin Magazine, and just, you know, kind of everybody that chimed in. And Nico, you joined me on my, like, first show immediately afterwards and that was greatly appreciated. Yeah, man. I was speaking through the camera and I felt the energy, bro, and I think I dropped this like

multiple times during the show. Ben, this is the separation of money and state, bro. This is a form of revolution. It's a peaceful one. It's not kinetic yet. And, you know, you're a freedom fighter, man. and you know you stood up for what is right and i think that you know 10 20 years from now even though what you went through was extremely tough man uh you know individuals like you man

that uh you trade that for anything yeah i mean that's that's like that's history yeah and and and and again it's it's it was such a learning experience because i mean david i don't know if you know this but there's a girl from poland um and and And she saw the Canadian trucker protest. And what she does is she's a human rights activist for people in post-Soviet states where the government is like encroaching on various rights. And so she saw that. And so as the war in Ukraine broke out, she was basically just trying to get protective gear to individuals.

And so she saw, she tried to go through Fiat rails. It was going to take weeks. And then she saw the Canadian protest. And she was like, it seemed like that kind of worked. Like it actually got, the vast majority of it actually got to where it was intended. And so she looked at that and she was like, I'm going to try this. She got protective equipment into the country for individuals there on day two of the conflict. It would have taken weeks otherwise.

And myself, Jeff Booth and her had a conversation. We did a show afterwards. But it just, again, it kind of highlights, like, we are people of all different kind of mindsets and political affiliation or whatever it may be here, even just on this call. And there's something in Bitcoin for kind of everyone. And this is just another example of it. Anyways, I don't mean to plan the seat, but I'm just saying like maybe next year at the Bitcoin conference, you should have her name's Luda. And she's fantastic. She speaks at the Human Rights Foundation.

She was there last year in Oslo. Fantastic. Tell her to shoot me a DM. My DMs are open. Oh, I'll pass it to the right person. I will. All right. Awesome.

Gentlemen, we're already over. I apologize. guys. I hope none of you have hot dates, but I'm going to rotate anyways. This is my hot date. This is my hot date. Yeah. Jason, I know, I know your wife is probably just off to the side being like, he seemed like a nice guy when I met him in person. He's really holding up our hot date. So now she, she adores you, Ben, and she knows where I am. So, you know, listen, the kids are older now. We're not doing bath time anymore. So I'm like, All right.

You're a different point than me. If I was running late and I had a hot date, my wife would be upset because we've got to get the kids to bed. We've got to get a lot of stuff to do with. Nonetheless, I'm going to toss it to you for a last reason. So I'll cue you up with the same question as all. Why are you bullish? Thank you. I can make, we can make mine quick, too.

Like, it's pretty basic. I've got time. And if Nico or David need to drop early, just let me know. the side to that that's fine i'm gonna i'm gonna stick around i'm gonna listen to every word you got to say it um so i'm like i'm bullish because two weeks ago there was a press release that went out that like officially established for like the world to know like this thing called bitcoin magazine book so like i'm just talking about david's shit right now um i think that um i had the great privilege of like working with um with that team and uh to to sort of

produce my book and to get it out to the public. And when that press release went out, there were two books that were sort of highlighted in it, which is Alex Gladstein's Hidden Repression book and my book. And that's sort of just the launch point. And I know that they're working on a lot of other books that are essentially just geared towards getting people like information, getting people educated about Bitcoin. And, you know, I just say from my personal experience, working with everybody, on that side of it, like super committed, super hardworking, like very responsive and absolutely geared like on point messaging, right? Like I, you know, like the copy editor who looked at my book like understood Bitcoin and

like was able to make comments on my manuscript from the very beginning that like took the fact that I understood what Bitcoin, you know, like the book was about Bitcoin. Copy editor understands Bitcoin. I'm not wasting time trying to explain things to somebody, right? And so I'm really bullish because that means in the next couple of years there's going to be a lot of great content, like long-form content that's going to force people to like really think and learn about Bitcoin and from a lot of different perspectives, just like we started our conversation with. You're going to, like not every book speaks to every person, right?

Like I decided to sit down and start writing the book because like I couldn't find one that really spoke to the people that I was hanging out with and wanted to, like I wanted to teach Bitcoin. Like I wanted to help them. And so there's going to be more of that. And that makes me bullish. I think that, you know, ultimately the potential to reach people is going to grow from this. So, you know, like Bitcoin magazine has been absolutely like awesome to work. with you have like the conference and the magazine and the online magazine and now you have the books and like I said just an opportunity to really showcase a lot of great information, great talent

out there who wants to put it out in the world. So yeah, new like that's why I'm bullish. Hey, so I'll say this because Jason is too classy to say this and doesn't want to start any like be first that's going to like haunt him for a long time. But he, he's, went head to head with Gladstein's book and his book is out selling Gladstein's book all day. Let it be known. Let it be known. We have a new champ. I did not say that.

I think that did not come from me. That's awesome, dude. I got to say like, again, to have, to have this type of content hitting and again, just like to pull up the page here. Again, there's, there's Jason's right there. but I'm very interested also to take a look at philosophy of Bitcoin. I have Bitcoin is Venice and check your financial privilege on my shelf right now. And of course, I'm going to be picking up a copy of both Jason's and Gladstein's book here. Yeah.

Again, to be able to get published and to be able to get these into the hands of people quickly and easily is incredible. David, I've got you on the call here. I don't mean to keep on chilling shit to you, but I'm just saying, I'm going to cue this up with in the midst of everything that was going on last year, late March, sorry, late February, early March,

I ended up under crazy circumstances. I ended up leaving the country. I was in Costa Rica for a while. While I was down there, I tweeted out like, hey, are there any Bitcoiners in and around where I am? And a couple guys messaged me. Funny enough, when I met up with them, both of them ended up being Canadian expats that left because of what was currently going on. But one of them is a writer. And so I want to give a shout out to Adrian, Adrian Barrick.

And he's moved down to Costa Rica now. He's there with his family. They invited us over. Me and my wife and my kids. We came over. We hung out and had dinner and played by the pool and all that stuff. Anyways, dude's writing a book. It's called Crazy Farm.

It is almost like a metaphorical fiction book based on Bitcoin, teaching the teaching like the interesting. like the values and and and and how bitcoin works uh i got a sneak peek of the first chapter i thought it was very unique and very well done um he just tweeted out today he's seeking a bitcoiner who loves fiction to read and edit a bitcoin inspired novel i will pay in sats he tagged myself and a bunch of others um but yeah i i got a copy of this the first chapter like last year and i sent it over to guy Swan to take a look at. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

If anybody wants to give them just follow at Crazy Farm book and maybe he'll send you a copy or maybe he'll send you a sneak peek of a chapter or something like that and you can offer criticism, comments, whatever it may be.

But my genuine hope is that he's able to pump out this book and get it published because I enjoyed I thoroughly enjoyed the angle he was going for. And especially for Bitcoiners, I was reading, I was like, how's this going to connect and everything? And he got to a certain point of the first chapter. And I was like, oh, man, that is such a fantastic metaphor.

So if you're looking for a unique, fictional, metaphorical look at Bitcoin, again, at Crazy Farm book, I think people enjoy it. will come out. I haven't read it in its entirety, but what I read, I thought was unique and a great way of looking at it. So shout out to Adrian. And thanks for the burgers. Well, I just started following them. And if anyone's got a great book that they are investing their time, energy and passion into, that's going to further Bitcoin adoption, bring into Bitcoin magazine. We do this. We strike a partnership with the person who's creating the content. And, you know, book publishing is not a super lucrative business, but it is a very

important business. A book leaves a very lasting impact on someone. And we want to publish the best Bitcoin content possible to touch as many people as possible, make as many Bitcoiners as possible. 100%. I think since we're on the topic of various books around Bitcoin, I was maybe going to throw it to Nico and ask some of the great reads that you've had, some of the things that you appreciate in and around the literary space in Bitcoin. Yeah, man. So to be honest, the book that really, really like, you know, I do a daily news show, bro. So, you know, it really kind of gave me a good perspective on the world and it really kind of,

you know, solidified a lot of my talking points. You know, I mentioned this very early on. Actually, the first time I mentioned this was at Bitcoin 2020 in the meme panel that I did with Greg Zag. Yeah, we are, you know, every single day there's narrative trench warfare on the battlegrounds of the internet. And, you know, we're trying to win over the hearts and minds of individuals and really kind of break through the traditional left, right, you know, BS divide and conquer. and what you were saying earlier, Ben, about, you know, Bitcoin being the great unifier. And the book to me that really, really resonated with me and really kind of opened my eyes was Check Your Financial Privilege by Alex Gladstein that, you know, David, you guys published.

That book resonated with me a lot. I just got the latest copy, you know, about the latest book that he dropped in regards to the IMF. Jason, I have your book as well. I haven't got to it. But just to talk about Jason's book, because I have been, this has been troubling me for quite a while, right? Which is I started to notice a pattern in Bitcoin. And the fact is that a lot of Bitcoiners, I would say the vast majority of Bitcoiners are hardcore libertarians. And I believe that Bitcoin is all-inclusive. So I think, Jason, your work is so important because, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's coming at it's coming at it from a different perspective, which is so necessary. Because this isn't, you know, just a libertarian technology.

This is a human technology. This helps everyone equally. This is the most equitable equal money the world has ever seen. state money doesn't even come close. So I know that was a bit of a rant, Ben, but, you know, just giving a shout out to multiple books that recently really, really resonated with me. There's so many books beforehand, like the Bitcoin standard, of course. But, you know, those are the ones as of late that really, really impacted me the most. This might get me canceled.

I don't know. but Soft War by Jason. Lowry, Lowry, Lowry. Who? What? You never heard of it. I don't like what it says, but, dude, what an interesting concept. I've never seen Bitcoin framed in that way before and I thought it was cool.

I saw in the comments, someone said they're working on a Bitcoin erotica. Okay, I was going to bring that up, but I didn't want to ruin Jason and Nico's excellent. We would love to publish that. A Bitcoin smutbook would be awesome. I've been trying to get a calendar done, like a pinup calendar of like central bankers, you know, posing nude and like really disgusting stuff where people are like, oh, these are people that control our money. So if you have an erotica novel that you think is top notch, it needs to be on point with Bitcoin content.

It's got to be, we've got to walk away educated from it. Let us know. I for the later this goes up as audio only for for people so I got to read the actual comment from narwhal tacos. I'm writing a Bitcoin erotica novel, but to be honest, the macroeconomic philosophy sort of kills the hot, sexy, dirty talk. I mean, that's pretty hot to me. Yeah, I know. It's been half staff already. Fantastic.

Honestly, though, like the the amount of content. coming out for for all walks of life for all different ideologies and for people that are looking for different stuff like again and I I don't want to I'm going to speak ill of like anything but there's there's there's a lot of different types of Bitcoin books and and there's like a fiction book actually the first Bitcoin conference I picked up a Bitcoin fiction book it I ended I'm not finishing it I wasn't like a huge fan it kind of like it took a ton of liberties and kind of created its own story and it was very kind of detached from like the actual history of Bitcoin. So it kind of like pulled me in a different direction and I didn't finish it. But I love the idea of people getting creative with Bitcoin. I love, I think as fractal and crypt did a bunch of AI stuff and basically made a graphic novel that is about, if I'm not mistaken, I don't think it's. it's been released, but I think they're printing it and they're looking at putting that out. It looked incredible.

But yeah, there's such unique things coming out of the Bitcoin community. And it's a unique way to look at the world. And when you combine Bitcoin, this juxtaposition of an entirely different way of building a society against our fiat world. and then you add artistic minds into that, you get amazing things coming out of that. And you see that with the art. You see that with the books. And we're going to see more of it.

I'm so excited about it. Can I just say that on the other side of that, every, at least every six months, we get a manifesto sent to us by someone who is a, a raving lunatic. And it is like a novel written out on like loose leaf paper in hand. I mean, it is crazy shit. And like every, every year at least we get one package that is like, you know, for Battalic. Because people like, I don't know, they think we somehow can get in touch with Vitalik. And Vitalik has given us like a standing like thing. Anyone who sends me mail just open it and just tell me what it is.

I don't even know if he cares when it is to be honest but and like we get the most whacked out shit you could possibly imagine like literally insane

these like literally insane thing so it's not all great but that's not mine right you're not talking about mine right this unhinged rath winger fringe minority with unacceptable views

Set us this book. You never have been a product of a progressive for Bitcoin. It was interesting. I just want to take one second to thank Niko for his kind words. Because I do think that I wrote the book. Maybe I'll just clear this, the air. Like, I wrote this book before I started right,

I got the idea to write the book before anybody knew who Troy Cross was or Margot Pius or Alex Gladstein hadn't published, like, check your financial. None of that existed. I just sort of sat down with a Google Doc. And it wasn't motivated because I looked at the Bitcoin space and was sort of like offended as like this liberal progressive and I'm offended. I need to write this thing.

It was I was motivated as a teacher and I know what's going to reach people and I just wanted to provide something that could actually speak to a different viewpoint. So like the offense wasn't like from a political standpoint. It was like a pedagogical standpoint. So I say, all right, I want to make something. And I didn't realize sort of how brave I was being at the time. And I'm glad I was because I just sit down last night and talk to my son about like, what, like, why are these people on Twitter mad at me and saying really mean things?

Like going through that kind of talk about like, you know, this guy just doesn't agree with me politically. And he's really using bad language. And you shouldn't really be upset about that. And, yeah, that's going to happen. And he was just worried, like his big thing was he doesn't like how people mispronounce. our last name. Like it's just it's pronounced mayor. It's not Meyer. So why are they doing that? So it's like it was just a lot of people don't like what I'm doing. And a lot, lot more see the value in it. So I'm really grateful for that. And I appreciate your kind words. And it's been a wonderful adventure.

And I'm absolutely like, again, I'll plug it. Like I worked with Bitcoin magazine books and it was awesome. It was great. And if you wrote a book about Bitcoin, it was good. You should work with them. Bad ass message. Dude, fuck the haters. Yeah. Feed off the haters.

So, dude, kudos to you, man. Awesome. I especially appreciate it because I think of kind of myself going back to, like, say, 2015. So that 2015 for anybody, like, I'm in Canada. That was a Canadian election. And so we we had and I was like hard left at the time. And you know, I had a lot of viewpoints around even like like obviously social issues. But and that was kind of my driving like impetus for leaning that way.

But like I had economic views as well. And I feel like having a voice in my ear or or having a conduit that would say like here here's the reality of. kind of the economics of the situation, I feel like that would have helped immensely in terms of a lot of my opinions on these things of going like, oh, geez, like money is literally just like a tally system for how much stuff there is. And if you screw with the tally system, you're just reallocating who owns what. It's not that you have more stuff. And like that, that simple concept, like what seems simple to a lot of Bitcoiners is is not is not common knowledge for the average person. It's like, oh, we're going to print more money and people will have more stuff.

It's not how it works. It's like what percentage of that money is going where? And is that resulting in a greater wealth gap? I mean, yeah, quantifiably so. And if I had had that where somebody, you know, with my set of ideals at the time, had been like, hey, like, there's, there's an aspect of this you're not exploring. Maybe you should explore this.

That would have drastically changed kind of my framing around a lot of stuff. And not only that, but like, it changes the voter base. And it changes what the politicians then enact. Because if you're doing something and the vast majority of society understands what you're actually doing, then their vote is affected. And so like it's, it's very powerful having these voices of like, hey, we need actual, we need monetary sense actually to be ubiquitous amongst everyone. We need people to understand the economics, the economic reality of everything more widely.

And then that becomes, once everybody understands that, it becomes a non-issue. And the issues pretty much strictly become social at that point. Like it changes the narrative. And so then it's just like, you know, how do we decide to live our lives on a social consensus? It's not like a monetary like being able to siphon away years of people's work in one's Felsworth. Like, it's, it changes the dynamic of elections is what I'm getting at.

So I think it's interesting. And again, Jason, I very much value what you're doing. I love seeing people like yourself, Troy Cross, Margo, and like a lot of other people from that side of the political spectrum presenting this. And so, again, to call the Niko from earlier, it's a great unifier because at least we can get on the same page about a particular issue and then the rest is just kind of second tier issues because I do think that this is one of the most important issues in all of society.

So I got to give a quick shout out here to the show's number one fan. He's back. I missed him. He was away for a few weeks. David Bailey, I don't know if you know of another excellent David. He watches the show on the regular. He sometimes shows up hours in advance. He hates Bitcoin, but he loves being here to tell us how wrong we are about Bitcoin. And that is Mr. David Wong.

He wants us to know about modern monetary theory. He really does not like Bitcoin. He knows that his credit cards work just fine. And he's here from time to time in the chat. I will also note that his alter ego for the first time ever, they've been present at the same time. David Wong is here. Also, David Wrong is here an alter ego that spurred from the common appearance of David Wong. So I thank you both for being here.

and I encourage your further discourse in the chat. I'm glad to have it. David, if you want to meet your hero, BTC sessions, we got you covered for a ticket to the Bitcoin conference. Just let us know. We'd love to see you there. I would pay good sats if I could meet David Wong. But David, I'm serious.

David Bailey, particularly, if you're willing to offer him a ticket to the conference. Mr. Wong, I would love to get a picture with you. I don't even care if you continue to hate Bitcoin for the rest of your existence. I would just, I'd be honored to take a picture with you. We could cover up your face if you're a privacy advocate. But I need to meet you, man. I need to see the face behind the chat.

So I would love it. Yeah, I'm just going to say my wife's giving me the curtain call here that I need to come help her. But I just really quickly want to say, Jason, it was an honor and a privilege to publish your book. Thank you for working with us. Nico, Swan, thank you all for being a partner, an advertiser, a supporter, speaker of the conference. And Ben, thank you for being at every Bitcoin conference from the beginning. Thank you for everything that you did in Canada. Thank you for working with us.

And thank you for having on your show. So guys, I'll catch you guys later. Love it. Thank you, man. Thanks for being. All right, gentlemen, we're going to wrap up. Obviously, we're going to do it at the very end of the show. I like to do just a quick.

Any final thoughts you may have, any recommendations you may have. And when I say recommendations, something that's been helpful in your Bitcoin journey. It could be a book, an article, a video, a website, an app, a piece of hardware, whatever it may be, something that you'd like to point people towards that you use. think is of value. I think my final thought here is that Bitcoin offers something to everyone. And if you want more people using Bitcoin, you need to hone in on what it offers to that person, not what it offers to yourself. We've got RFK into Bitcoin. And so what I might paraphrase from one of his relatives is ask not what Bitcoin can do for you.

Ask what you can do for Bitcoin. And what you can do for Bitcoin is to appeal to the individual you're speaking with, not to yourself. I think we would all do well to ask questions of the person asking us questions rather than just talking at them. And that will be my final thought. In terms of recommendations, I'm going to, off the top of the show,

I recommended a handful of YouTubers. I'm going to, that's my recommendation. So I'm going to bring them up once more. I'm buying Nico and Jason some time to figure out what the fuck they're going to say. Darren Honey Set on YouTube, D-A-R-R-E-N-H-O-N-E-Y-S-E-Y-S-E. Go subscribe to him. The B-T-C-C-C-O-U-R-S-E on YouTube.

Go subscribe to him. And Ian Major, I-A-N-M-A-J-O-R, go subscribe to him. All excellent providers of Bitcoin education, practical tutorials, and we need more of it. And then also a shout-out across the ponds to decobey. KuV Bitcoin. Rogzee is friggin awesome and what he's building

along with his team is unparalleled. I looked at their courses and how they're constructing things and I felt small. They are doing incredible work.

And again, if I could structure my stuff the way that they're doing stuff, if I could be a fraction of what they're accomplishing in France. And they've got an uphill battle. There's a lot of shit coining happening in France. And they've got their work cut out for them.

And they are the guys for the job. Good for them. Fuck yeah. Fuck yeah, Deku of Bitcoin. You guys are awesome. Roxy. Love you. Great meeting you in Beirits.

Anyways, nonetheless. I'm going to, I'll wrap that here. Toss it to Niko. Niko, final thoughts, recommendations. You go ahead. Yeah, man. Bitcoin or slavery. This is my final thoughts.

I can't wait to see a lot of you guys at the Miami conference. And, you know, the touching the tip ceremony, really, really looking forward to that as well. And yeah, man, excited to see you in the flesh as well, Jason. And hopefully we get a chat. And my recommendation is this maybe it's this YouTuber that you guys haven't heard of. but, you know, he's amazing at tutorials. Ben, could you share the screen? It's BTC Sessions.

He's one of my favorite Bitcoin YouTubers. Maybe you guys have heard of him. Maybe you haven't. Definitely subscribe to his channel. He's fucking awesome. He's got dutchy hair, though. I don't know about that. Dude, honestly, I might copy it.

I might copy it. Maybe I'll. Do you think he might do that in a live event with people being able to purchase tickets for that? Yeah, dude. And like, could you imagine if that event was called touching the tips? Like, you know, it might be epic. I don't know. I'll see if I'll Google it after we wrap here and maybe I'll chill it before the end of the show. But thanks for bringing that up, man. I love it. Awesome. Dude, again, I'm glad you're here. I get a double dose of Nico this week. So thanks, man. I love it. Jason, I'm going to toss Do you have final thoughts, recommendations, take it away. Yeah, I think I'll just echo your final thought, which is just if you're trying to explain Bitcoin to somebody,

meet them where they are, right? Like, it's your responsibility. If you care about Bitcoin, then you need to just sort of realize who you're talking to, what's going to resonate with them, what's going to be a complete turnoff and is not critical for you to get them to agree to in order for them to understand Bitcoin,

just sort of know your audience and do a good job. as an ambassador for what this technology is because the world is not filled with Bitcoiners yet, but it will be. And we need to work towards that. There's a guy named Mickey Koss who's gone out and written a bunch of articles for Forbes. And these are articles about Bitcoin that are actually reasonable about Bitcoin. So if, you know, among many of the other recommendations I could think of, including yours, like, my

My book has an appendix that is like, hey, here are resources if you want to keep learning. And like, Ben, you're on there. But like, just so people know how to like set up a freaking hardware wallet. But if you're looking for like somebody out there where you can send an article and you're like, oh, Forbes, like I've heard of that. Then it's not like something else. And Mickey's doing good work. And, you know, the last, he's got a whole series of things.

So that's my recommendation and happy to do so. Yeah. Dude, I've got to say, Mickey, I can't remember who initially recommended him. But like out of the blue, I was like, I got a vacancy. Who can hit up Friday show? And I got a bunch of comments like, oh, get Mickey. Get Mickey. He's starting to write.

He's starting to do a lot of good stuff. He's awesome. He came on. He knocked it out of the park, man. First, first, like, public appearance. And his, his. his and actually he pinned it he pinned it i got to bring it up i got to bring it up because it's so good anyways his his quote that i thoroughly enjoyed was bitcoin reignites the american dream in cyberspace

and exports it to the world hmm oh that is a quote and a half good job and he was so articulate in what he wanted to say um i got to give mickey a shout out here dude is doing solid work. Also, a genuine thanks to Mickey. He recently dropped a piece in Forbes where he highlighted a handful of Bitcoin educators. He included me in there. And I'm very grateful for that. The thing that I'm most grateful for is that he included my tweet of how to create a Bitcoin space heater out of a miner,

which was dedicated to Elizabeth Warren and Greenfield. piece. And that is now forever in the pages of Forbes. So I'm very happy about that. I thought that was fantastic. So again, Mickey K-O-S-S. His Twitter handle is at Plebius, P-L-E-B-I-U-S, Economist, E-C-O-N-O-M-U-S.

And you can just search them back on the previous, Why Are We Bullish? Mickey Koss. This is a name. Anyways, thanks, man. he's great and likewise i'm excited to be in miami and see everybody in person and if you want me to if you have a book that i've written that you want me to sign with an orange pen i'm bringing multiple orange pen so i'll be in miami i would love that also uh jason and nigo i'm going to see you i know

i'll be able to corner nico for it but my goal for why are we bullish on the week of the the the conference is I'm just going to corner every person that I can that's been on the show or that I would like to be on the show and I'm going to ask them why they're bullish. And I'm going to sprinkle in a bunch of plebs as well. And so like if you've got a good rant on why you're bullish when I meet you a couple of minutes or so, then let me know. I'm literally just doing it with my phone. I'm going to super cut it.

That's sweet. That's a good idea. I like that. Yeah. So awesome. gentlemen thank you so much for being here nico thank you for doing yet another fucking show i am so to eat up another two hours of your time this week but i love it and jason uh massive congratulations on the book um it's much needed and uh i hope a ton of people read it and i will be plugging

for sure i can't wait to get my copy um but both of you thank you guys so much have a wonderful weekend i'll see you guys again soon i'll see you thanks do later Ben bye guys awesome everybody thank you so much and also hats off to David Bailey for popping in as well

awesome dude thank you for being here everybody in the chat thank you so much for being part of the show I got to give a shout out to of course yellow always here don't stop believing man I know you can't wait until you never hear that song

again but I appreciate you powering through this is feel like this is going to be a greater underdog story than like, I don't know, a league of their own. Is that a good comparison? I don't know. I feel like that's a poor comparison. Anyways. Nonetheless, also to Chris, Chris Alamo, my timestamp master.

Chris, you regularly drop me. This dude comes to my emails and he's like, yo, I watched your three-hour cold card video and I made time stamps for all of it. You know, I watched and I'm dropping multi-hour tutorials on the regular dude just comes through with timestamps like a boss. I feel, I almost, I do feel bad that he's doing this, but Chris, I love you. I owe you a keg worth of beer. I don't even know you'd drink beer, but let's have a beer down in Miami. We'll see you there.

And again, I got to give a shout out to Narwhal, tacos, love to see a man, Mark Andre, Edgar C, Bitcoin Deb. Deb, again, thanks for being here. I love hearing about you, orange pilling your son's 20-year-old friends. That's fantastic. Andy, Rand, Joe Blow's music, and, of course, the one and only, David Wong and Fumble and all of these people.

Again, thank you guys for being here. You guys all rock. I love seeing it. I love seeing it. Thank you guys for being here so much. To round out, of course, Nico is on. Nico is on. He's going to be down in Miami.

He's going to be dying his hair. The lovely Mrs. Sessions, my wife, Lisa, will be streaking his hair on a fine morning, on a fine Florida Wednesday morning, Wednesday, Tuesday, Tuesday morning, Tuesday morning, May 16th. We're going to be hitting at 11 a.m. at Bitcoin Grove, awesome new venue in Miami. And Nika's going to dye his hair. And in the process, we're going to do a live stream. We're going to do a simply session.

Live from Miami, I'm so stoked for it. It's going to be a lot of fun. And then we're just going to hang out. We're going to have some drinks. We're going to, you know, I got some stuff. I got some swag. I might be giving away some coin kite swag down there. So if you want to grab it, head to BTCSessions.

DotC.Sion. So, slash touchtips. And that's where you can grab yourself a ticket for hashtag touchtips, ticket. Benico. Touch tips, tribe. So many tips being touched. Anyways, it should be a good time. I'm very excited for it. It should be a lot of fun. Of course, I've got my Miami cold card workshop. One ticket left. One single ticket. Is there a ticket? Let me refresh. Let me see. One ticket left. One ticket left to the Cold Guard workshop. It's going to be blast. It will sell out. and we're like 13 days away.

That's wild. I can't believe it. Anyways, it's going to be a good time. We're going to take you from zero to hero, how to set up your cold card, all the basics of using it, backing it up, restoring it, all that good stuff.

And then we're going to dive into the advanced features and some of the awesome stuff that you can do with it. Of course, if you want to help the show in another way, you can do a variety of things, like, subscribe, share, hit up the previously mentioned sponsors, hollow, hollow, coin kite, nunchuk, start nine you can hit up my website btc sessions dotia you can book me for one-on-one sessions

free tutorials not enough i will sit down with you personally and walk you through whatever the hell else you need to learn uh and i love it i love doing it it is so awesome to meet the people again i'm i'm dragging this i don't give a shit i'm just going to talk about it honestly meeting the people that have been watching the show and and and having the funny thing too is I always come in. This is my backdrop when I have the one-on-ones and like it pops in and people like I'm I feel like I'm on the show. I'm like yeah. I mean, I'm not going to change my camera for the one-on-ones. Of course I'm going to like so anyways, I love sitting down with people and they're like, I've watched all this stuff.

I've been watching the show. I've learned all this stuff. And I just need like these extra, I have questions while I'm doing this. And like it's again, it warms my heart every time. Again, like sessions aside, when somebody says like,

hey, I've watched the show and I'm, I set up a note or I learn my cold card or I'm using sparrow or I'm using lightning or I'm doing whatever it may be, People saying that, it is genuinely the greatest reward. I was inundated with people coming up last year in Miami. And given the beginning of the year, like it was just in the context of earlier in the show, talking to David about like the support that I got in and around all the shit happening in Canada last year, to mere months afterwards be in Miami,

have people coming up and saying like, hey, man, thank you. I used a video and I learned how to do the following. And I don't want to get too sentimental about it, but like multiple times I had tears in my eyes and I had to like mask it as I walked away from people because it means a lot. A lot.

And it's, it's, it's incredible to see my, and I know, yeah, I see you yellow. I see you in the chat. It means a lot when, when my small channel impacts a lot of people. And, yeah, I don't really know how to elaborate on that, but it's, it's meaningful. And thank you guys so much because it's, it's huge. And like any way that it helps, don't ever feel like you're inconveniencing me by coming up and saying, hey, I watched a thing because it's, it makes a difference for me. I don't know if that sounds selfish or not, but it does.

And when you come up and you say, hey, man, like, love the videos. It means more than you can imagine. So nonetheless, Anyways, I'm going to wrap there. BTC Sessions.C.C.Sia. Again, the people that do the one-on-ones, fantastic. You don't need it if you don't need it. If you're fine with the videos, shit's for free.

Everything's for free. Just go to YouTube. If you do need the one-on-ones, then I'm there. Also, in-person workshop, just on the website right there, person workshop btc sessions.ca uh and then outside of that if you want to help in any other way i figured out i think the most simple way to do it is i just set up a geyser fund so geyser is awesome they're doing all kinds of awesome like fundraising stuff if you want to just send a simple tip if you want to send like a dollar or buy me a coffee or help me you know run my voltage node or

whatever, like buy additional hardware to do tutorials, just go to Geyser.fund slash project slash BTC sessions or just go to geyser. dot fund and search BTC sessions. You'll see me there. And yeah, you can just drop SATs there and do easy lightning tips there. That's probably the easiest way. It is on my website as well. It all goes to the exact same place.

It's non-custodial, by the way. I linked Geyser to my own personal lightning node. we're just badass. So shout out to Geiser. You guys rock. Anyways, with that, I'm going to wrap up. Thank you guys so much for watching. This is a good one.

I thoroughly enjoyed this. A heartfelt thank you to everybody, just on the theme of the show. I'm excited for what the coming years has in store for Bickwin. I'm excited to see a ton of you down in Miami. I can't believe it's only 13 days away. That's wild. But nonetheless, have a wonderful evening wherever you may be. I'll see you guys next time for your daily session.

We have BTC sessions. Bitcoin is every money. You can't stop it. Get yourself some Bitcoin and hold it yourself. Pure to peer exchange. You know, people are going to organically come to it and gravitate towards it, especially in the world we're living in now. It's incredible.

It's a great tool, and I can't wait to see it proliferate everywhere. Total the Bitcoin.