BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Greg Foss, Rob Simone, Joe Hall ep291

Episode Date: September 24, 2022

FOLLOW TODAY’S PANELISTS: https://twitter.com/HedgeyeREITs https://twitter.com/JoeNakamoto https://twitter.com/FossGregfoss 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Shakepay is the easiest way to buy Bitcoin in Canada Sign up now and get $30 free after your first $100 purchase! https://shakepay.me/r/BTCSESSIONS LEDN Bitcoin backed loans –  get $10 free with a savings balance of $75 or more for 15 consecutive days! https://start.ledn.io/btcsessions Coinkite offers the BEST Bitcoin hardware on the market. Use this link to get 5% off anything in their store: https://store.coinkite.com/promo/BTCSessions BillFodl: get your wallet backups in solid steel. https://privacypros.io/btcsessions Bitrefill: use Bitcoin to purchase gift cards, earn sats back while you shop. https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/?code=O04UMic9 BITCOIN tips: https://strike.me/btcsessions

Welcome to the show, everybody. Another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish? We got a killer panel today. So excited to have all these guys on. Some, a return guest that's been back multiple times. Always happy to have them. And a couple first timers. I was going to have one of them earlier.

Schedule's got minced a little bit. He's here. He's back. He's ready to go. Anyways, we'll bring them in momentarily. As always, this is live. Anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here.

We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. Do it live. I can write it and we'll do it live. The fucking thing sucks! If you have not already, like, subscribe, share, all those things help so much getting this content in front of more eyeballs.

I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. All right, before we bring everybody in, let's take a look at where we are on the market right now. 19,000 and 2031. It's all over the place. Anyways, around 19,000 bucks per coin. A single U.S. dollar pick you up, 5,256 sats. 91.23% of all Bitcoin have been mined. And in terms of fees, oh, looks like a little bump in the mempool right now. 16 stats per bite for next block. But if you're willing to wait a little bit, single digits will do you just fine. Shout out to sponsors of the show, coin kite.com. God, these guys just have the best in Bitcoin,

hardware. I love my cold card mark four to secure my Bitcoin. The thing's beautiful. It's an absolute beast. I'm going to be doing some workshops on it soon. You'll see. I'll talk about it in a second. But, you know, they've got the open dimes for gifting and all that kind of great stuff. They've got the block clock. The block clock micro just started shipping mines on the way. I'll be doing a video on that. And then they've got things like the Sats card and the tap signer for on the go gifting and or signing transactions. They just got it all here. Check them out.

Coin kite.com. Use code BTC sessions for 5% off, everything in the store. Shake pay. If you're in Canada, easy way to be stacking sats. You can e-transfer in and out, no deposit or withdrawal fees, thin spread. If you use the link down below to sign up by your first hundred bucks for the Bitcoin, they'll give you $30 for free.

You get the same deal every time you use your link to refer friends and family and they do the same. You can also shake your phone every single day for free Sats. They've got a Satsback Visa card. They've got all kinds of different things for you to use. Check them out, shakepay.com. Link below for that deal. Lendon.io, awesome Canadian dudes. And they offer awesome services to use with your Bitcoin.

They've been really helpful for me whenever I'm in a cash flow crunch and I don't want to sell some of my Bitcoin to do something. Well, I can deposit Bitcoin here, get a loan of dollars to my bank account within 24 hours. I pay back those dollars. I get back the same amount of sets. They also have savings accounts for Bitcoin and USC, but it is audited quarterly by a third party. You can also cryptographically verify that your holdings were involved in that audit

so you don't get jerked around Celsius style. They've got their B2X offering. They've got Bitcoin back mortgages across Canada and soon as some select US states. You can check them out at start.ledon.com.i.o slash BT sessions. If you sign up and fund your account, give you $10 for free. Bitrefill.com. These guys help me a ton living on Bitcoin. I can pick up any gift card that I need with Bitcoin, both on-chain and via Lightning

Network. I earn Sats back as I shop. More Sats back with the referral program. You can top up your phone, top up lightning channels. And if you're in the U.S., you can pay your bills and get on that Bitcoin standard. Again, check them out. Links for them down below. And finally, if you're backing up any important Bitcoin wallet, Bill Fottle over at

privacypros.com. I'll get it in solid steel. You don't want that piece of paper sitting around the office, fire damage, water damage, too many things to think of. This gives me peace of mind when I'm backing up my hardware and any important Bitcoin wallet, like nodes, things like that. Get it in steel. Peace of mind. Bill Fottle, privacypros.com.com. Oh, and one last thing before I get into it, I'm going to be in Charlotte, North Carolina for Hoddlewine.

And that's October 21st and 22nd. on the 21st, which is a Friday, I'm doing a cold card deep dive workshop. It's a four-hour marathon. You will be an expert by the time you walk out of that place. There's only 15 spots available. Same thing happening. The day after Pacific Bitcoin in L.A. in the afternoon so you can sleep in a little bit after that Friday night party.

Anyways, I'm going to do that on the Saturday afternoon in L.A. After Pacific Bitcoin, again, four-hour deep dive. And you can grab tickets at BTC session. dot CA slash events if you're going to be around and about town. With that, let's get everybody in here. Let's get chatting. I got everybody waiting by. Rob, Joe, Greg, welcome, gentlemen.

I'm so glad to have you. Let's do a round of intros for anybody unfamiliar. Rob, I'll jump to you first. Let people know who you are, what you do. Yeah, hey, Ben. Thanks a lot for having me. It's awesome to be with these fine gentlemen. So I, my day job is a, the, the REIT sector head for hedge eye.

I've been doing this for about a year and a half. But somewhere along the lines, the guys here kind of figured out I was the resident bick-coiner. So for better, for better or worse, hopefully the better, I've kind of earned that reputation around here and trying to figure out ways to like, you know, you and I spoke, but trying to put out content for our subs and, you know, more kind of kind of, traditional or trad-fi investors to at least get smart on Bitcoin before they decide whether or not they want to get involved and hopefully they will. So that's me. Awesome. Awesome. Well, dude, glad to have

you. Let's jump to Greg. Greg, for anybody unfamiliar with you, which who knows, but Greg, let people know who you are, what you do. Well, hi, guys. Rob, it's great to see you again and Joe. Well, maybe I'll just say I don't have a job, which is good because I have got, I'm busier than I ever have been in my life, trying to help educate the world on the greatest, uh, asymmetric investment opportunity I've ever seen. Um,

I have, uh, over three decades of experience managing money, managing risk to be specific, uh, hedge funds, um, working on,

uh, the buy side of the street. So the hedge funds. And I also got started my career on the sell side, where I worked, uh, on Wall Street. and Bay Street as a credit focused risk manager.

So I got my, earned my stripes in the emerging junk bond market in Canada in the late 1990s, early 2000s. And it's for that reason that I draw parallels to the Bitcoin adoption amongst asset managers. I can look back on my career trying to and successfully. let's call it the equivalent of orange pilling, but it was high yield bonding, Canadian asset managers, making them understand the benefits of a diversified portfolio of credit risk, particularly since they frequently owned the equity of said high yield company, but did not

own the bonds because the bonds are too risky. If Rob and Joe can ever explain that to me that you would own super junk equity but wouldn't own a junk bond that has a prior claim in the capital structure, then you've rewritten and the rules of finance. But nonetheless, it was an education process 25 years ago. Now every single Canadian asset manager has a silo for high yield debt. I expect the same thing to happen over the next 10 years for digital assets in general, but specifically for Bitcoin.

So I've had the pleasure of being on Rob's show and meeting him in person. I think it was down eight, Rob down in. Yeah, down Miami. Yeah, and then I love what you're doing at Hedgeye. And then Joe and I met each other over in Madeira when we were invitees of the president of Madeira who's looking at the benefits of Bitcoin. So this community is, you know, one or two degrees of separation. We're a strong community.

And Ben, you know, you and I have had a long history. fought some deep wars together. I say that tongue and cheek. I won't specifically say what wars they were, but people can look into some of the things that we come out in support of, primarily freedom, right? We support freedom. So that's what I like to do.

So looking forward to this chat tonight, guys. Thank you for having me. Indeed. Well, Greg, always, always good to have you. And I can't wait to see in person again. We'll jump to Joe. Joe, who are you? what do you do i had the pleasure of meeting you uh not not that long ago was it would have been about

a month ago now so uh let people know who you are yeah and beer it's on the on the on the terrace um i think there's an amazing sunset behind us as well it's a very bitcoin a moment um thank you very much for having me ben and it's uh rob i follow your your thought on i'm i'm the resident bitcoiner at coin telegraph there are plenty of us but i think i'm probably the most vocal maxi there is there And yeah, Greg, it was amazing hanging out with you and in particular surfing with you in Madeira. So yeah, I was particularly buzzed to come on this, I don't want to call that panel, this show today. But yeah, my day job is I'm a reporter at Coin Telegraph. And by night, like many of us, I'm a, you know, a rampant bit-comer, desperately trying to orange-pill everyone left, right and center.

And as a result of that, I'm trying to do whatever I can to further the space and to help people understand the coin. So yeah, I recently started a YouTube channel. I'm also pretty active on Twitter. And yeah, I'm doing whatever I can to help everyone and their mom understand Bitcoin and what sound money means to people. Awesome. And you just launched the YouTube, like you put your first YouTube video today. What's the channel called again?

Just Joe Nakamoto. I would call myself Joe Hall, but I have such a common name that I just get lost in the sea of other Joe Halls. Like, you know, those Facebook groups you get added into. And it's like the Joe Hall group. I got added to three of them. That's how common my name is. Joe Hall sounds like somebody that would hit me up on telegram and asked how my trade is going. There you go.

There you go. And I'm, you know, maybe like big boobs and yeah. Well, gentlemen, I'm very, I'm very happy to have you all. This should be a good rip. To everybody that's watching that may not be familiar, maybe you're brand new to the show. This is why are we bullish. The format of the show is super simple. We go by the three R's.

number one, somebody's going to bring a reason why they're feeling bullish. It can be whatever they want. It could be a news item. It could be a personal experience. It could be an app, a piece of hardware. It doesn't really matter what it is as long as you're bullish about it. As long as you're excited about it, that gets to be your reason. So you get to rant on your reason.

Then we're all going to riff on that reason together. So we all get to bounce off our ideas, ask questions, whatever it may be. And then third, we get to rotate to the next person. And we just go through that until everybody's had a turn. Really, really simple. I'm going to get us kicked off here. And so my reason for being bullish this week is I've been diving into a lot of stuff that tutorial-wise that I had kind of put off through the summer because I was doing a lot of traveling and it was difficult to kind of do the deep dives. I had to kind of keep it a bit more simplistic while I was away.

but now that I'm I'm home and I'm home for about another month before I hit the road again I'm getting to do kind of these deeper like lightning hardware node all all this kind of infrastructure stuff that I wasn't able to really like spend the time on before and and it's striking to me how far we've come and so I want to elaborate on that a little bit so my my first experience with Bitcoin was something like this. So this is what a Bitcoin wallet kind of look like in and around 2014, 2015, the Bitcoin QT. All right.

Pretty much you download this. That's how you use Bitcoin. There wasn't much in terms of other options. There might have been like a few decent mobile ones that were starting to come out around then. I remember a co-pay thing. Mycelium was another one that people used.

But like, this was a lot of people's first interaction with Bitcoin. And to be fair, it hasn't changed that much when you're looking at Bitcoin Core itself. This is, if you go down and you download Bitcoin Core, this is what you're going to be looking at. You got your send screen. You got your receive screen. There's some more, you know, fancy options here. You have, you know, I'm in advanced modes. So there's a whole bunch of extra crap in here that you wouldn't.

see in just a regular mode, but more or less, this is what you're going to see. You're going to see a balance. You're going to see send and receive in your old transactions. Okay, fair enough. Now, it gets interesting when I realized what's starting to be built on top of this. And so my first interaction with what I would call like a plug and play Bitcoin full node where you're hosting an entire copy of the Bitcoin blockchain on a dedicated machine that you would be able to connect to remotely was this bad boy.

It was called the Bitseed. And so you could pick up one of these and I think the hard drive inside of it was like either 250 gigs or 500 gigs because the blockchain was still small at the time. And so how would you interact with this? So like this is a tutorial from 99 Bitcoins. You'd have to like log into your router and find, find this IP address. And then you would have to access it that way. And then this was kind of your what you would see as your actual like your dashboard of what to interact with and how you would like connect it.

Like there's there was no instruction on like how to connect things. It was just kind of, unless you were relatively technical, it was pretty inaccessible. Now, it's a little bit different. So you can still now, of course, get Bitcoin Core and that'll download a copy of the Bitcoin blockchain. You can set it so that it doesn't store all of that data perpetually. You can set it so it's just like the most recent Bitcoin transactions so it doesn't eat up your whole hard drive.

But you can also do things like run Spectre. alongside it. And this gives you all this additional functionality. It auto detects that you've got a copy of the Bitcoin blockchain so that you're not trusting anybody else. It allows you to create a hot wallet and do transactions. It also allows you to connect devices, right? Like if I wanted to connect a cold card or a treasurer or a ledger or whatever to this, I can do that. I can create a multi-sig from this as well. I can do all kinds of awesome things. And it'll auto-connect to Bitcoin core on my home computer. However, what if you really don't have the infrastructure to be doing that and you're moving around a lot and you can't be sinking your Bitcoin core all

the time? Well, there's even more solutions beyond this. And now we get into kind of this specialized hardware where you get things like Umbrell. And so the reason I'm on this as my reason for being bullish as I recently did, actually I released it this morning is an update video on Umbrel because so much has been happening in terms of Bitcoin nodes and in particular Umbril, their most recent update, they completely overhauled everything and they added so much in. And so you've got your regular Bitcoin node, but you've got just all of these applications built on top that you can use to interact with your Bitcoin. node. So, you know, I can, I can go and I can connect all of my wallets either through the Bitcoin

node or what's known as Electrum server. But I can also have my own block explorer. And this is all based on the data that's sitting on the device that's on my shelf behind me right over here. And it, it takes up all that data and interprets it and says, hey, well, this is how many Bitcoin transactions are waiting in the queue on your own node. This is the the the fees that are being paid so that you can interpret through the own your own data on your own node that you're hosting yourself how much you should be paying and I'm not losing privacy because I'm accessing my own data that I've downloaded. Beyond that, you can run lightning notes. You can link on top, create lines of liquidity with individuals, set up channels, do payments all day long. People can connect to you with lines of

liquidity and you can transact off and on. Again, linked to this, which is a device sitting on my shelf behind me that is easier to interact with than this thing here that I had in 2014, this little box here. Beyond that, yeah, my lightning node. And then I've got people that will probably listen to this. They'll be streaming sats and paying per minute via the lightning network directly to my own Bitcoin node. And they can leave little messages and say, hey, you know, love the show. You know, all of these awesome things, leave messages all directly to my node. You've got awesome visualizers where you can zoom out and you can explore the lightning

network and look around and click on individual nodes and see who they're connected to and see all of these amazing things. It's pretty spectacular. Beyond that, we're familiar with this. Tallycoin. You can set up your fundraiser, which I got to give

a tip of the hat to Talleycoin. They took criticism from experience over the past number of months. They've made

major updates to how things work in particular. You upload an XPub, each new donor, new address. Thank you, TallyCoy.

I appreciate that. So this is great. And you can do things like not only add an XPub, for a wallet. You can link up a lightning node. You can also link your own paynum. So again, anonymous payments to this so that you're not showing like static addresses. So you're not showing you're not even showing an address. Somebody can link to their pay name so that there's no

indication that, you know, there was a link between the two of you at all. Beyond this, you also have self-hosted, decentralized exchange where I can go and exchange my can. Moose Kninkles and I can get sats, cold heart sats for my, my moose shekels that I've got sitting around. So there's all kinds of incredible things that are here. And like these are just the things that I've downloaded. The one that I wanted to point out is this one. It's called Tail Scale. It's an additional app you can get. And and you know what that does is all a sudden my umbril's on my phone in half a second with a tap and i can access it from anywhere on the globe everything that i just went to is immediately accessible and it's more reliable than a tour

connection i don't have to like remember remember and bookmark and download a different uh a different browser i don't need tour browser anything it just automatically links to everything and i mean it's the when you go into the app store when you see how much you can do with what I would say is a relatively user-friendly interface. And then you see the precedent that's being set by umbral and then all of the other node implementations that are in the midst of building all of these great tools. I've just done Razby Blitz. I'm doing an update on my node, which is one of the first node videos I ever did.

I've got a start nine coming. I'm going to be grabbing a noddle in November. There's so many options. And this is the beautiful thing about an open source environment where people can freely compete. And we see the innovation is just going through the roof. The amount of options that we have now versus when I first started interacting with Bitcoin. And again, not everybody has to interact with this stuff. not everybody has to be doing this, but they can.

And it's becoming easier to. And what does this do? It makes it so that Bitcoin is less vulnerable to state attack when people are running and verifying rather than trusting. The power is in the hands of the individual and it makes Bitcoin more resilient. In particular, it makes you more resilient to state attack if Bitcoin, not if, but when when the coin comes under it. So I'm bullish on the state of what is being built at Bitcoin and the capabilities of the average user today compared to when I first started in Bitcoin.

So I'm going to open it up to you guys, comments, questions, anything about your experience over the course of interacting with Bitcoin that you have to say. Feel free, jump in, whoever wants. Yeah, I'll go. I mean, that was a tremendous sales pitch for Umbal as well. I've got to commend you there, Ben. I hope they're paying you handsomely. Zero dollars.

I just want to buy one right now. I mean, I run two nodes, and one is off my old Bloomberg laptop because it's like a fuck you to Bloomberg. And the other's like an old laptop just because, you know, and I, and I, I travel a lot with work and passion. So I've never bothered to, like, upgrade my node setup, so to speak. So to see that actually in live, you know, every day is a school day, right? but that really felt like a learning, you know, experience.

And I was like, damn it, I want one of those. Why do I not do this? But so my question would be, why is it easy to like travel with that? You know, an umbrella is like this big, right? And not all that big, the samurai, no, it's also like this big. You just chuck it in your suitcase. You bring it with you? How does it work if you take it like a two-month?

No, you don't need to travel with this. So that's the beauty of it. So when I held up my phone and I said, hey, this is connected. That app, that tail scale app, it, My umbrale sits right here on my shelf. And I, when I was in, uh, when I was in France, I could literally hit up a switch that says connect. And then I can tap and basically open up umbral in the browser on my phone and access everything securely, remotely, however I want. Um, which is amazing.

I did want to, I did want to mention one thing. You said, I've just got a note on a crappy old laptop. Yeah. That's the best part about Bitcoin is that you can. can do that because what did I do? Everybody's saying, well, there's these plug and play solutions and everything. And what about like, you know, not having to rely on this? What did I do?

I bought a think pad. I bought, I bought like a 300 Canadian dollar think pad, loaded it with Linux and started running Bitcoin Core, started running different programs. And I'm learning how to just basically turn my think pad into a node and run everything. on the cheap instead of having to have, you know, higher-end stuff. And so that'll be another tutorial. But the versatility of being able to do whatever the hell you want, that's the important thing. It has to be accessible.

Yeah, no, I completely agree. You want to have to do it, aren't I? Maybe if I leave it like a nicer node running at like my parents' house or something because it needs to be somewhere static, right, that, you know, no one can get to it and then there for a while. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So if you're on the road and you just have one plunked somewhere, just, you know, and it doesn't, other than the initial download of the Bitcoin blockchain, after that, there's not a lot of data going through. You don't need like a high speed connection and you can connect to it remotely. You don't need a lot of resources on it. So you just kind of, it, it homes away on its own and you don't really need a lot of maintenance on it. So I'd love to plug it in at like an old Bloomberg office without them realizing. Yeah, absolutely. There's a question in the somebody said,

which think pad are you using? It's like a T450S, I think. Yeah, T450S is what it was. It cost me 300 bucks Canadian to pick it up. And it's pretty, it's like an I-5. It's a, I don't know, I think it's like a 500 gig hard drive. It's, it's works pretty well. Like it's snappier than having a Raspberry Pi running your node, right?

like and it's more versatile. Plus, I'm learning command line. I'm on a learning mission right now because I feel like I was deficient when it came to Linux and all these other things. I'm learning command line. So I'm, I feel like an idiot as I'm. Ben, if you're saying this, if you're saying you're deficient, what does that mean for the rest of us, man?

Yeah, if you're a Christian, I'm completely lost. I just, yeah, I don't know. Like, I feel like if I'm teaching people all to do stuff, I should know how to do even harder stuff than that. So yeah, I'm in the midst of it. But let's open it up to Marl or Greg. If you have comments, questions, anything. Greg, you want to go? I'm trying to unmute myself here. That's how technically challenged. I thought you were just spinning up a note in the back. Yeah. I'm taking a screenshot. So I understand how this works. So that's a really cool reason to be bullish. I'm going to riff on it from the back end. All right. Look.

I understood, I don't know, 10% of what you were saying. And that's okay. You know, there was a time when I did know command language MS DOS programming, you know, because that's what you had to do when you first got a personal computer. Because I grew up with a rotary dial phone, okay, people. I think, you know, that in itself will distinguish me from, you know, my age group. Rotary dial phone point being, I graduated from university without ever having used a personal computer because they didn't exist.

All right. And then when I did a graduate degree, they were chisped right on the edge. All of this is to say, look, I can't tell you from a technological side, the bullishness, because you did a great job. What I'm going to do is come at it from the other side and say, having lived in the world of finance for 30 years, 30 years ago, nobody ever. talked about Fiat. And now, and I'm not trying to say this is my reason to be bullish, this is going to you,

Ben, basically to say with all of this technology, yeah, I can see it, I can feel it, but it doesn't, you know, I can't relate to it that well because I'm not a, you know, a new, I'm a newbe in the technological world, the true technological world. When I have a problem with my iPhone, I don't try and fix it. I give it to my kids and say, can you? please teach me how to turn this thing on or off properly. But what I do know is that over a period of so long, where Fiat was never a word in the financial markets,

now becoming a word that a lot of people are questioning and understand it. So I'm just going to draw a parallel from a finance perspective. The technology that you're referring to, I see happening with questioning the Fiat system. because Fiat 10 years ago wasn't really a word and now even young kids are understanding Fiat. So technology-wise, my technological observation is purely subjective, but it's a questioning of the current system, the technology of the current financial system. So hopefully that's a riff that you guys will appreciate because I add zero to the technological

side of a bit coin, but I do see it in a different lens through the, you know, the use of terminology in the Fiat circle, excuse me, in the financial circles and the term Fiat. So I'm going to try and figure out some of what you said someday, Ben, because, you know, it does interest me, but I can't add anything on that. Have we made like a rotary node, Greg, like a node that you literally do like that. Well, that's true. genius absolutely we need like actually that would be kind of

that would be a cool thing to sit on it on a shelf behind me a node inside of a rotary I want to build that yeah yeah yeah um send my bitcoin what I would like to do is or this sounds like something Rodolfo from Coin Kite would do but to to somehow send a Bitcoin transaction by manually dialing a rotary phone

oh my god because he because he previously did a hand he he sent a bitcoin transaction via ham radio through a snowstorm from canada to the us i don't know if you guys knew that i didn't know that that's crazy he did yeah how did you check the the ad like how did that well like how did he do it like i i think he he had i'm trying to i think he constructed the transaction and then he re he he yeah yeah i'm not sure exactly how he did it but he I have a friend using a most code transaction. He created a signed transaction and then broadcast it via ham radio to somebody in the U.S. who was then able to relay it and broadcast to the Bitcoin network.

That's wild. So it just kind of goes to show as long as you can reach one person who has access to the Bitcoin network, your transaction cannot be censored. So you can blast that via as a radio signal and somebody can pick it up. and then ensure that it hits the network. It's pretty wild. The internet ever goes down in your city or you get turned off, right? So everyone grab a ham radio and be at the ready. Figure out how to do it before, you know, for Klaus, good old Klaus launches.

That's the cool thing. Like with things like mesh networks, with the fact that Bitcoin doesn't need to necessarily connect directly to the internet at the time of creating a transaction, you know, you have Starlink. you have things like that where there's so many internet access points somewhere in the globe all you need is some way of communicating like i think it was andreas ontonoplas used to say you could have smoke signals and technically if somebody that had access to the bitcoin network saw that smoke signal

they could relay your transaction like that's that's how unstoppable bitcoin is and that's the rotary phone is a possibility you know it could happen i mean i have a friend that's doing a morskode transaction or he's trying to work out a way in which to do it. Yeah. I was speaking to last week. And it just makes me think that Bitcoin has come up with the wildest ideas sometimes. And it also gives me hope for the space. So yes, you can build on top of this beautiful, amazing UX, um, humble experience.

But in the same breath, you've got people that literally thinking, right, I need to do a smoke signal Bitcoin transaction. That's just mad. This is why Bitcoin will fail because we're that, we're that far. They're like, hey, we're going to, we're going to sanction an individual Bitcoin address. And Rodolfo's like, how do I do a ham radio through a stone? Can I sign language it? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Rob, but he'll, I'm sure he'll be back. On the, who is, somebody in the comments was mentioning, because I want Rob to get in his comments here, but somebody in the comments was mentioning Gottena. And just on the topic of, um, not having to rely on on everybody having an internet connection. Sorry. No worries, no worries. I'm going to go to you for your any comments or questions regarding the topic before we.

But I just wanted to mention one thing. Level 99 Slackers said waiting for Gotenna to stock more of their mesh nodes. What he's talking about is so Gotenna, they, they offer these USB dongles. And effectively what it does is, It creates a network that anybody can link into and call the mesh network. And as long as one person somewhere in that mesh network has a connection to the internet, then all of them do. So you can basically, you're basically broadcasting your own Wi-Fi and other people are picking up on it.

You can all communicate independently. And then you can eventually, if one of them is connected to the internet, you can then relay to the worldwide web. However, you can still just connect independently as a mesh network between each other. And mesh networks were used a lot in the Hong Kong protests when they were shutting off the internet. It didn't matter. As long as you had a mesh network going, you could all communicate and coordinate together without the internet, which is incredible. So yeah, I think good recommendation, level 99, maybe I will be picking up one of these. It sounds like a land party in a way, no?

Remember land parties? I don't know. You used to play like Call of Beauty land parties. I'm 29, so I don't know. Like, how old are you, Rob? I unfortunately never had a land party. I was more of a on the couch like split screen. Yeah, I can relate.

I say to my friends all the time, like, when in high school, like when me and my buddy should have been out chasing girls, those Friday nights and like my friends based on playing Halo, like I regret none of that. Like those are the best. Look you now, man. Rob, I was going to go to you and before we round up this topic, just get in your thoughts on like kind of how Bitcoin has evolved, the accessibility of kind of different software and apps.

Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, totally. Well, I mean, as I was listening, I guess like the thing that resonated with me and maybe another reason to be bullish is how all of that can develop and work over a very long period of time being built deliberately and game theoretically, not rushed out the door with some shiny bells and whistles, you know, with inherent weaknesses and bugs that wind up costing people a lot of their hard-earned wealth. So that's kind of, that's, you know, one of the amazing, amazing things about the entire system and just seeing like, you know,

2014 versus 2022 and how far it's come, but like how despite going very deliberately, it never lost its way, right? Like people are still on the mission. It's a pretty amazing thing. So I don't know. That's all I got, but kind of resonated with me. That's awesome. Yeah.

Anybody that's, again, timid around, around this type of stuff, I really do encourage you to, don't think that you need a bunch of prerequisite knowledge to start diving into this stuff because oftentimes the tools are the teachers, right? When you start up a node, the node itself is the instructor. The act of doing it forces you to ask questions and learn. So, I mean, same thing as doing anything, learning languages. You just kind of just have to just expose yourself to it. That will conjure up questions, which you won't know the answers to at first.

and you'll gradually answer them and you'll gradually grow and learn. So that's all I'll say on that. I'm going to leave that there. I'm going to do a rotation now. Everybody in the chat, thank you for being here. Lots of good questions about,

I just want to mention, Yellow mentioned, Antonopoulos also used to encode a transaction into JPEGs. I do remember him having like a cat picture and he somehow encoded a Bitcoin transaction into it. And so like, again, that's pretty like a pretty, unstoppable network when that's that's the level that you have to get down to to try and stop

a transaction happening pretty awesome um in in terms of other things mentioned um i'll leave that one a while somebody asked if i'm leaving the castro regime of north cuba i'll leave that one right there i did want to mention it though um somebody did ask uh the tradeoffs and disadvantage is running on a Raspberry Pi versus a laptop of some sort of or some sort of actual PC. The main thing is in the quality of hardware, right? Like a Raspberry Pi, you know, it's less powerful. You can do less with it. You can do less intense things with it.

It may slow down if you're running a ton of stuff on it. I personally haven't had one crap out on me, but I have had the little microSDs crap out on me. Luckily, most of the important information is stored on the hard drive, not the SD card. So you can swap that out easily enough. But yeah, it's just, it's just less, maybe less bang for your buck. Like, you know, like the think pad that I have was 300 bucks.

And it's also a full computer that I can do whatever the hell I want with and work on. Like it's actually pretty snappy. Plus I can run all the Bitcoin infrastructure. But it needs to be like if I want the node to be always on and functional and access remotely, has to be plugged in and on, whereas a dedicated device on a shelf behind me, I can access it anywhere at any time on the globe and it's still just at home running. So tradeoffs, it might be, right now it might be a bit more expensive actually to run a dedicated machine because with all the shutdowns the past couple of years, Raspberry pies were a little harder to get a

hold of. Production is still like slowly starting to ramp up. So yeah, and just in inflation, but you can still get cheap, cheap think pads and things like that. So make your own decision. I obviously kind of have to be trying everything. So that's why I literally, there's three of them running on my shelf behind me. And within, I'd say, five months from now, there's going to be six. So, yeah, anyways, I'm going to wrap that one out. We're going to do a rotation here. And I'm going to jump to Joe. Joe, you are up next. And so my job. is now to ask you, why are you bullish? Sure thing. I mean, when we first asked this question, I was like, man, how much time we got? Like, I've got a big jillion reasons here. So I tried to think,

okay, I'm here with three North Americans who are vastly more experienced than I am in terms of markets, macro, you know, all the things that tend to get spoken about in the Bitcoin space. What can I bring to the table in terms of my own experience or in terms of my own interaction with the Bitcoin space to explain why I'm bullish? And I thought, okay, I've been traveling like for the past five or six years, sort of nonstop until the pandemic. And then over the past four months or so, I finally sort of reconnected with the UK where I'm from originally. I spent a lot of time in sub-Saharan Africa, in the Caribbean, in like, lots of sort of weird countries around the world. And this is the sort of the first time where I've managed to really hang out with Brits again and realize that there's a thriving Bitcoin community in the UK.

And it's been freaking fantastic to realize this and to not realize. this sooner. And it's also made me realize, oh, God, why am I leaving, knowing that there is this incredible community of Bitcoin is. And, you know, literally just in the past three off months, I mean, I'm sure you've seen the headlines of companies like Coin Corner, who are doing sort of negotiations all around the world, fast bitcoins, you know, these are I love man companies, but they're doing amazing things with the Lightning Network. And then on top of that, it seems like there's a new meetup that's popping up in the UK on a weekly or biweekly basis. I mean, where I am right now in Leeds, where my girlfriend's flat is, there's now a Leeds

Bitcoin Meetup, which there's only been three so far, of which I've attended a zero, because I've had prior engagements and things. There's also Satoshi's Place, which has just popped up, which is a Bitcoin hub and education centre. And this is despite the bank's best efforts to jam, you know, a rod in the wheels of this, you know, Bitcoin bike that's rolling across the UK. because you talk to any Bitcoin business owner or any Bitcoin exchange, and they all have problems with the banks.

And it's the usual story where at first you're like, oh, classic, you know, Bitcoin is just being victimized by the banks because banks are threatened by it. But it's not. It's just, you know, people at banks don't know what Bitcoin is. And the easiest thing to do when you don't understand something is just like cancel it and just move on from it. So realizing that all these Bitcoin businesses in the UK have also endured these

problem with the banks and they continue to persevere. It continue to go effectively against the ground. grain and to be a success, the guy at Satoshi's place, a really lovely man called Adam, he had three Bitcoin ventures fail before he managed to create Satoshi's place. And why did they fail? Banks, banks, banks every time. So I've just been really buoyed, I guess, by the Bitcoin community in the UK. It's something I didn't anticipate.

And I'm very happy to have been sort of a part of in my own sort of small way in going to these meetups, not the leads one. Sorry, I will turn up soon. But, you know, the UK ones. And of course, someone mentioned it in the comments earlier. Greg Foss is going to be in Edinburgh in October the 21st and 22nd, I think. I'm not sure about that, but don't correct me on it. For the Bitcoin Collective Conference.

So, yeah, that's also like the big celebration this year from the UK sort of Bitcoin scene. And it's going to be a bloody great time. You should all come. And it makes me incredibly bullish, because, you know, what makes you more bullish than your own countries like normal people you know it's the plebs at the end of the day that make this movement and the plebs in the UK don't mess with them you know they're serious they are bloody good people um so yeah that makes me very bullish i i love i mean this is kind of the the the the the strength of bitcoin is that base level grassroots movement right those individual meetups that

grow and spread out of nowhere um and and you know The nation state stuff is all well and good. And that's that's a beautiful thing to see as well. But like I feel the true strength is what you're talking about. Creating those move, those ground level movements, creating those relationships with other Bitcoiners. You know, creating those potentially circular economies of, oh, hey, we're all in a meetup. We all like Bitcoin. What do you do?

Oh, I actually have a use for that. Maybe I could pay you in Bitcoin or advice. versa, those types of things that begin to crop up from those interactions. Bitcoiners in MeatSpace, I think, is a very important thing because this is how we're going to build communities and have that actual opt-out moment of, well, you know, this system over here isn't doing so hot. At least we've got this as an alternative. And this works.

it works for us and we're relatively insulated from all the crap going on over here so i i mean i love that i'll open up to uh rob or gregg if you guys want to tag in here yeah rob go ahead yeah sure uh well i mean oh what what joe is just talking about you know i live in um i live in connecticut about 45 minutes north of the city and uh actually this is the the hedge eye office i haven't gone home yet but it was so kind of inspiring similar to what Joe was saying. And it gave me a lot of hope. So just I think it was two or three weeks ago, someone sent around a Twitter thread or started a Twitter thread about the first Bitcoin meetup in Greenwich.

Now, like understand what Greenwich, Connecticut is and kind of what it's the home of. It's basically like, you know, the epicenter for. Some would say, you know, the greatest center of wealth creation in the world. Others say it would be the epicenter for the greatest, you know, set of problems we've ever seen. And to have a bunch of, you know, homegrown grassroots bitcoiners starting a meetup here. To me, like, okay, so clearly, clearly this is, you know, getting out into a world that used to be

incredibly opposed to it, trashed it, laughed at it, called it stupid, called us stupid, said we were wasting our time. I don't know. It just, you know, I couldn't think of it, you know, I don't know, maybe like a more unlikely place for that to happen,

at least in my world, in my part of the country. That's surprising, right? Yeah. You're like, what are you doing here? Why do you care about Bitcoin? Yeah, like, yeah, like it's the week. weekend, go home. Like, market opens at 930 on Monday. Like, you know, seriously, like, it's, it's, it's a different world. And to see it permeate this kind of part of the country

that is known for being a mortal enemy of Bitcoin is great. So, you too. You're also opting out of fear. You also think that it's a scam. Yeah, yeah, cool. Maybe we should have a bit. I mean, it's hope. Yeah. That's great, guys. Yeah, so I'll just quickly add that. Well, firstly, I'm looking forward to seeing you in the Bitcoin UK conference, Joe. As I mentioned before, had a great time with Joe in Madeira. Learn a lot always from the younger kids. So very, very pumped to hook up again in the UK now. This is a shout out to the UK collective because I was on their podcast a couple of times. And let's be honest, their podcast was a crypto podcast when it started. And the fellow, well, yeah, they did. But now here's the truth. I mean, I only focused on Bitcoin on their

podcast. And when they announced the conference to begin with, some of the more toxic Bitcoiners, who I love, by the way, came at them hard. What's this? You guys are a shit coin conference. Don't attend this. And my first opinion or, you know, defense was, look, I'll go into anybody's barn and fight for Bitcoin. You know, just, you know, it doesn't have to be a Bitcoin only conference. But these guys have assured us. And when I say us, it was Jeff Booth and myself, both of us who would go, doesn't matter. But we would like it to be more Bitcoin focused. And these guys say, look, we get it. We went down shit coin alley. And we realized why it's Bitcoin, not. not crypto. So they are not, you know, they put their own money at risk, all right, to fund the

reservation of the venue. And they're great guys. And having honestly traded financial markets my entire life. I've actually never been to the UK. So I'm looking forward. Yeah, no, I haven't. So I'm looking forward to going. And just as a side, crazy. aside. The first time I was supposed to go was last Christmas. My son was playing professional hockey in France and we were going to land in London and take the channel over to France over the Christmas holidays. And of course the COVID thing shut everything down. But coming back to this, so look, they went down the path, these guys that are doing the Bitcoin Conference UK. And they've rebranded themselves. And I believe them to be honest. They're not out to make

money on this. They're out to educate. And that's the key. Education is always key. So I'll support them. I supported them to begin with because, as I said, I, you know, I'll go into anybody's environment to defend and pitch Bitcoin. So I shout out to the toxic bitcoins that came after them at the outset. You know, I can't remember the guy's name. Bitcoin Lobowski, I think, was pretty, uh, he pinned a tweet at the top of his profile for a while as well. Okay, so it's all good.

I mean, it is what it is. I'm not going to change the world. But I'm looking forward to it because I can't say I've ever been to the UK. That being said, the number of UK bitcoinsers that Joe, you and I have come to know, even expat bitcoins like Princey, you know, living in France now. But just a solid guy that Rob Rinded, who we met over in Madera as well. and then just it's contagious when you meet people that want to expand the, as Rob was saying, just expand the discussion outside of the normal echo chambers, you know,

and Greenwich, Connecticut, I've certainly been there a number of times. I can tell you, you know, yeah, it is a bit of a different part of the world. Very Wall Street-centric, very Fiat compliant, we'll say. But education, people, it's that simple. And if you're not aware of the passion that's available in the Bitcoin community, you're in for a shock because whether it's Bitcoin Lobowski or, you know, guys that approach it a little differently. So we'll say, let's say like Jeff Booth, who, you know, can basically attack you without you even understanding how mortally wounded you are when you talk with Jeff Booth, right?

So like it's all cool. It's a learning process. So Joe, I'm looking forward to that. I will support the Bitcoin, UK effort. Very happy to see it. It's a financial center of the universe, one of the, you know, four or five true. financial centers of the universe, London and then the UK. Of course, New York City and then we'll debate over what the other ones are. But the point is you need to get Bitcoin ingrained in that

type of community. Why? It's the solution. Most of these people don't realize it. It's their life raft. They need Bitcoin because they're so myopic. They have no clue what's coming down the pike for them. So yeah, great work. I like your, I like your, um, reference to I'll go anywhere and talk Bitcoin because I think it's useful to be able to step into these things and it's

there's a line of thinking that I don't agree with where it's like oh if somebody shows up to an event that's not Bitcoin only it will be seen as it will be seen as an endorsement of

things outside of Bitcoin I think that's bullshit because if somebody sees it as that and they don't hear don't care to hear what you have to say when you're there then that's kind of their fault for not because like any any actual bitcoin that I've seen at these like okay let's take for example Joe you were with me at surfing Bitcoin yeah shit coiny hey but that's France right yeah France is like shiny things yeah France is right now it's very shitcoigney but in the midst of serving Bitcoin which is it was an awesome event I had lots of fun there but there were some shit coiny things on stage.

The beautiful thing that I saw, though, is that in a lot of these panels, there were people like Daniel Prince put onto these panels and they called out every fucking thing, every single thing. They were like, what are you guys talking about? This is bull.

And they would just explain flat out with no apologies why it's bullshit. Another, again, uh, Philip, no? Yeah, Prince Philip. Philip was big on that. Yeah, exactly. And it was beautiful to see.

And I think it's important that you get the reality juxtaposed to the fantasy of shit coin land. And people need to be exposed to that. And I think it's a beautiful thing. I think it's an important thing. And it's not only that, but like it needs to be thrown into non-Bitcoin events. And I think like Samson Mal recently said, hey, we need to start getting. out to not just where we're all hanging out with our buddies. We need to go to things where we're

totally out of our element and throw ourselves into the mix and be humbled again a little bit where everybody thinks we're fucking idiots for a while until it starts making a lot of sense and a lot more people start paying attention. I think that's important. Now, before we do a shift here, I wanted to mention something. I mean, I'm all for toxicity, but I don't know, Joe, is this over the line? Isn't the UK similar to a damp Alcatraz? Oh, I mean, that's kind of complementary to Alcatraz there. Whoever said that. I mean, at least Alcatraz, you're going to have a warm bed

come the wintertime. We're going to have no energy. Yeah. I don't have a very high opinion of the UK, as you can probably tell. But what I do have a very high opinion of is UK Bitcoiners. Like, I left the UK a few years ago because I disliked it strongly. But Ben, just to your point about I forgot, oh yeah, going to environments where Bitcoin is perhaps might not be friendly. I've been trying to network my way into mainstream media publications in the UK, so the BBC, The Guardian, Financial Times.

And I don't know if you saw the piece recently about Jemai McKelley, where she's writing about, you know, maximalism. Well, she's going to be on stage at Bitcoin Amsterdam on a panel about, does Bitcoin have a media problem? And it was a panel that me and Princey put together. because we wanted to sort of address this elephant in the room, which is that, you know, the media buddy hates Bitcoin, and we need to do something about this.

And yeah, so she's one of the contacts that I've been seeing her regularly, like, you know, going for drinks with her and, like, trying to persuade her, trying to just tell her the truth. You know, Bitcoin isn't a Ponzi scheme, but she generally thinks it's a Ponzi scheme. Anyway, she does this article about, you know, maximalism and how, you know, maximalism is just the same with crypto. And this was despite the fact that I connected her with people like Corey Clipson from Swan, and Rizzo and I can't remember which other Maxis, but like, you know, big name Maxis in the space.

And, you know, this was me putting myself in a uncomfortable position, you know, trying to relate to some of the works at Financial Times, who's incentivized to not really get Bitcoin. And she really doesn't. And you can see that really in reading her words instantly. What's your feeling? Do you think that, I mean, obviously, if she's having these conversations with you and these other people, then she's, she's open to at least the idea of conversation.

It's not like she just wants to say things and not hear responses to it. So do you think that ground will be broken there? Do you think there's some fruit will be? I think it's an attritional battle, right? You know, I'm, we get on well and we respect each other as journalists, I think. She might be like completely slandering me behind my back. I have no idea. But, you know, the fact is, you know, I made time for her.

She made time for me. and we tried to connect on something which clearly, you know, she has been reporting about for years. And I was also in that camp for a while before I realized, holy shit, you know, Bitcoin is like the biggest or most important invention to affect this century. And she respects me, I think, and she, you know, we get on well. And because of that, I'm able to sort of keep the relationship going and hopefully make some progress. But then she published this thing that she published two days ago. and the reaction, I mean, it was just like some of the arguments you made. I was like, come on.

Like, this is not true. Like, this is literally lies. You're publishing lies. You know, mining isn't decentralized. And, oh, no, Sailor bought 0.6% of the supply. Yes, it's called capitalism. This is the world that we live in. If you're rich, you can buy stuff.

Sorry, that's the way it is. It doesn't affect, you know, Bitcoin. The best part about Sailor buying 0.6% of the supply is if he wants to enjoy it at a later date, he has to actually use it. It's not like inherently by owning the Bitcoin, he'll forever be able to get more Bitcoin. Having Bitcoin doesn't guarantee you more Bitcoin. That's proof of stake.

One thing that like I run into just like dovetailing off that a little bit, it's really hard for traditional finance people to extract themselves out of the traditional mindset where like the amount of shares of a company stock that you own determines your vote right so like they go into this and assume that it's the same when in reality as we all know this kind of like breaks that model and it's a completely new paradigm so like even if you say it to someone like in the back of their mind she may just be assuming that's similar to shares of stock the more Bitcoin that Michael Saylor owns, the higher his voting interest in the system, which is obviously not true.

I personally think that's something that we as a Bitcoin community got to get on and make sure people understand that that is not obviously true. And it's really important to separate that, right? You should talk to Rob. I want to connect with as many like Bitcoiners that are willing to just have a chat and be like, listen, you know, I'm not a drug dealer. Always. It'll be civilized.

Yeah, I mean, it'll be civil. be honest. I mean, we can talk about the strengths, we can talk about the potential weaknesses, you know, I'm sure Foss would agree, but that's critical. It's something that like, you know, the media that reports on traditional finance, 99.9% of the time, they just assume that crosses over and it doesn't. Yeah. That's the thing. It's completely new, right? But yeah, I just want to explain that sometimes when you put yourself into these uncomfortable positions, it can backfire. And I've just seen it backfired and me massively. And, you know, I'm learning from this mistake, of course. But, you know, I want to go into the barn with everyone, as Foss says. But I'm also aware that

in me going into the barn, sometimes it's going to, you know, the barn might come down with me. I don't know whether it actually goes. I feel like it toughens you up, though, because for every failure, you learn what went wrong, right? If you go in and you do your best at representing Bitcoin and trying to speak factually about it and, you know, you try different ways of approaching it and explaining it. And if that doesn't work, then you learn, okay, well, there's one way that didn't work. Let's try a new one. And through multiple failures of doing that, you expose yourself to some ways that do work.

And I don't know how many different metaphors and ways of explaining things I try over, you know, the past six years of making videos. And then in particular, when I'm one-on-one or in groups of people explaining things, and I see that moment where somebody goes, oh. And then my brain goes, use that every single time. Every single time that's the way you explain it. So that, you know, those are those moments that you're looking for. And they don't always come, but putting yourself in those positions with skeptical people sharpens you. And it allows you to get through the message that works more often than not,

the more times you put yourself in those positions. So love that topic. I'm conscious of time, so I want to keep rolling here. And I'm going to toss it to Rob. And Rob, you are up. I'm going to ask you, why are you bullish, man? Yeah, sure. By the way, there's some work going on in the office.

Can you guys hear me? Okay, I just want to make sure. Yeah, you're all good. We'll just assume that it's a rack of minors. It is. Right, they're buzzing, right? Yeah, totally. We didn't stand up.

But so really quick, I am bullish on my son and my daughter and my newborn son. And I say that because it's been fascinating. My oldest son, Rob, who just turned five, he's kind of getting to that age where he's asking a lot of really intelligent questions about everything, right? And I feel like maybe our generation,

when we were hitting that age, we were asking a completely different set of questions about the world that we were entering. And for better or for worse, later in life, we kind of had to start from zero as it related to Bitcoin, right? And it took a lot of effort. Maybe like, you know, for a lot of people, it's myself included, right? Like when I first heard about it, it's not really the optimal time to learn something new. Like your prime learning years are like literally where he is right now.

And I, you know, I see Robin. And he hears me talking about Bitcoin with my wife, Kate, and he's starting to ask questions about it. Like, dad, what is that? Like, hey, dad, what's that black box on your computer with a red light around the base? Like, what does that thing do? Like, how does that work? And it makes me really excited because he, like, he and my daughter and my youngest son now. And by the way, all of our kids, right?

Like, anyone who starts a family and, you know, has the ability to kind of get them started early and expose them to Ben's work and Foss's work and Joe's like it it's it's laying a really really fun interesting foundation that like we even though we over you know most people overcame it that's listening they're listening to this right now they're not going to have to overcome that obstacle and I just think that's really exciting and it makes me bullish as all hell because they're going to enter a world maybe maybe thinking about it and starting from zero from a different point in time than we did. So that's it. Can I jump in? Yeah, go. Go ahead.

I just, yeah, beautiful. And I'll just say one of my hashtags for the kids, right? We're doing this. No, man, but that's perfect because, you know, no, it's like, yeah, you know what, what I'm doing to try and help my children to leave the world a better place than the world I came in. too. And so far it's not. So, you know, yeah, I'm bullish because the kids will, it'll be a natural progression. Much like the iPhone for children now is just an extension of their body. For me, it's foreign because, you know, I hate to bring it up.

But yeah, I grew up with that rotary dial phone. So anyway, this is for the kids. Please learn math for the kids. Well said, Rob. I love it. I love the topic of Bitcoiners. having children. I also find that a lot of

Bitcoiners are having children because I think maybe that lack of of nihilism that belief that there's something good around the corner that there's a reason there's something beautiful being built

there's hope for the future and people see that and they're more likely to gravitate towards building another generation and they have hope for that generation, a hope that a lot of people that are unfamiliar with what's happening right now are maybe devoid of, right? A lot of people are just very, oh, the world's going to hell in a hand basket. Because, I mean, when you see like everything outside of kind of what we are dealing with,

it kind of is, you know, like that's, that's all you ever hear. You know, this is going to shit, this is going to shit. Everything's going to shit. But then you have bitcoins that are, hey, we're building families, where we're building communities, we're trying to create relationships with one another, build sustainable circular economies. It's awesome to see. And on the topic of kids earlier this week, my, my,

daughter drew a picture of our family and I love this. It's so great. Look at my shirt. There's my shirts. It's beef of Ben, I swear. It's not beef of Bitcoin. Yeah. And then and then like I all of this in the thread, all the people saying look look what my kids made. Look what my kids made. It's all and I love seeing that because this is an entire generation of an entire generation. of kids where this isn't weird. It's not a change. It's not a shift. It's something that they will have always known.

My daughter has never existed in a world where Bitcoin didn't exist. That's right. It's great. She will do it. Yeah. She will grow up having always known it as just a happy thing that's that's around the house and that we use and daddy had. There's no like, you know, there's no uncertainty.

There's no, there's no questions. as to, hey, what's this new kind of interesting, you know, at the time, somewhat questionable object. It's just part of their lives permanently. So. Yeah. It's a great thing. Joe, what's your thought on the, you know, young bitcoinsers being raised by other bitcoinsers? I mean, for sure.

I mean, I don't have kids personally, despite my partner's best efforts. Not that you know of. Maybe there's some. I think, did you meet Sophie, Ben? I do you meet Sophie, Ben? I do it, yes, yes. And Greg knows as well. She's amazing. But, no, kids are way off yet for me.

But, however, I am always on the lookout for human interest stories while working at Coin Telegraph. And one that I recently wrote, but I'm waiting for the, we're making like an animation of the story, is about how a bitcoiner, and he won't mind me sharing this because it's, you know, the story's public or will be public. He spent, he's been a hoddler since 2012. And in 2017, and in 2019, he paid for rounds of IVF for his children. Because, you know, he just was so happy and hopeful, as you say, this sort of fight against nihilism to bring children into this world.

And I think that, yeah, Bitcoin is hope. And if you are hopeful for the future, then inevitably wants to bring a family into that future and, you know, continue your bloodline or continue, you know, this happiness that comes from it. So yeah, I can't see. That is a phenomenal reason to be bullish. Bullish on Bitcoin are kids, I guess. And also conversely, you know, you've got the, what generation is coming up to like,

it's not the boomers, but the after boomers. Silent generation, they're sort of dying off now and it's the boomers after that. And with that comes this tremendous wealth transfer. And what are all those millennials and Gen Zs and the generation after that? What are they going to be doing? They're going to be buying Bitcoin, aren't they?

Let's be honest. They're not looking at gold. or, you know, commodities or maybe they're looking at Tesla stock or like, you know, the Wall Street Bet stuff, but they're definitely looking at Bitcoin. So yeah, I think this generational shift is that the Bitcoin and families are part of. Yeah. It's a great reason to be bullish. It's, yeah, it's exciting to see. I love every time, you know, somebody, somebody says, oh, you know, we've got another little one on the way. And Bitcoiners are breeding like rabbits. They are. They're very fertile, Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. There's a very fertile.

Yeah, there's trying our artist, right? All that toxicity means a lot of testosterone kicking around here. We've got to get it out somehow, I guess. I'm going to mistake. Greg, and I wanted to start to transition to Greg, but on the next generation of Bitcoiners, or do you want to, we can segue right into your reason? Well, yeah, no, I said my for the kids thing.

So that was, I tried to leave it there, but I'll segue into mine by just stating, look, what kills me is that my oldest son is almost it's only three years younger than Joe, which is amazing because, you know, Joe and I hung out in Madeira. And I'm not going to say, you know, we were much closer to being, you know, two buddies than a father's son relationship. And I have, so my oldest boy is 26. I have another son who's 24 and then I have a daughter who's 22.

All of them own Bitcoin. All of them know that their dad is a bit of a. live wire, right? You know, my daughter's one of my biggest fans. She bought me. I wish I had it here. I have it in my office downtown in Toronto now. You know, do the math.

My cap, she bought it for Father's Day, do the math. And so it's a little bit of a, you know, it becomes a family, family event. And so that'll segue into this, why I'm bullish on Bitcoin. I want to start by saying this, all right. This is a saying. I'm not sure who said it. I think this is big in the Bitcoin community. And I'm not saying we have to die on this hill, but great expression.

It's better to die for something you believe in than to live for nothing, right? And I think there's too many people in this world right now that are actually living for nothing. And that's not going to segue that well into my topic as to why I'm bullish on Bitcoin. I'm coming at it from another angle. this has been a historic route in global bond markets where people are learning the risks of owning a bond for the first time in over 40 years. And so that's why I'm bullish on Bitcoin because I'm so darn bearish on people who don't understand all the risks that are intrinsic in various investment opportunities. So for the longest time, just to simplify it for the viewers,

equities and bonds were inversely correlated because when there was a sell-off in equities, people traditionally ran for the safety, I'll use air quotes, the safety of bonds. In fact, Ray Dalio, the world's largest hedge fund, built an entire business on that simplistic relationship where he owned a leveraged position in bonds against a full weighting in equities. And the reality was when the bond, when the equity sold off, so the portfolio would lose value there, the bond prices would increase. And since he was levered, he used bank leverage to lever his treasury position. It was called risk parity.

And it was a great model. And it was a big enough model and success that he grew. into the world's largest hedge fund. Look, it's over for Ray. Okay, that is no longer a reality because treasuries have now become a risk asset. It's unbelievable, but I need to take it one step further, not just a risk asset because of inflation concerns. They have become a risk asset because of credit risk, potentially default.

I'm not calling for the default of the USA just yet. but the math is absolutely horrendous. So there's credit risk in treasuries now that the market's figuring out. And the bigger one is liquidity risk. Okay. Bank of America came out with a research report on the resiliency of the U.S. Treasury market. And I believe it to be one of the most concerning reports I've ever read.

And it's going to fly under the radar of 99% of the people out there. but it basically is predicting the days when bid offer trading spreads in treasuries widen so much that the market doesn't function properly. And you can't get proper, assuming the non-manipulation of treasury prices, you can't get proper signals because the bid offer spread is too wide. And so imagine if you have a bid offer spread on two-year treasury bonds that even if it's a dollar bid offer difference, that can translate to a meaningful, i.e. almost 50 basis points difference in the price you're buying something on the bid versus the price you're selling it on the offer.

And that 50 basis points of Delta, imagine all of a sudden you're having discount rates that can change by 50 basis points just because of the illiquidity of this supposed risk-free pricing asset in the world. Every single asset, risk asset in the world, is set off of the U.S. Treasury yield curve. If you don't understand that, just trust someone who spent their entire careers in the bond markets. And Rob, I'm certain would say, you know, the real estate investment trust, same sort of

thing. How do you formulate an appropriate discount rate to calculate? calculate the expected returns on free cash flows. It's so difficult if you're playing around with a 50 basis point bid off or spread on a two-year bond. Okay. It is so important to remember now that we have people that are getting destroyed in their safe haven, you know, risk balancing asset class.

The global bond index is down double digits. Okay. The global bond index has never been down more than 2% on an annual basis in the last 30 years. This year it's down 14%. And it is getting destroyed. Total debt in the world is $400 trillion, US dollars. Okay, $400 trillion. Just assuming that that global debt, and it doesn't, but I'm going to simplify things, assume that global debt mimics the global bond market and the total debt is down 10% on a mark to market basis.

That's $40 trillion of global wealth that has been marked down in price because of an increase in interest rates at the central bank shenanigans. factory. These people finally got off of negative interest rates in Europe and they're wondering, oh my goodness, how is this happening? Guess why it's happening, you knuckleheads, because you manipulated the price of capital or the discount rate for capital into negative territory. It's shameful, but true. So bonds are now a risk asset and people are going to need to find assets that ensure against other assets losing their value. As you know, I've said for a long time from a credit perspective, I believe Bitcoin to be default protection on a basket of fiat currencies.

Credit default swap markets on sovereigns right now are sickly. Oh my goodness. They are widening in lockstep with every, you know, increased fear in the market. And here's two things that I'm going to warn people about. Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse First Boston. Think Credit Suisse First Boston. Look at their CDS. That's correct, as we always have to look at their credit defense.

Credit Suisse First Boston is the Lehman Brothers of 2022. Oh, don't worry. Everything's well contained. The market cap of Credit Suisse is $12 billion. It's a rounding error. It's like, see ya. 12 billion dollars the global debt markets just lost 40 trillion and here we have one of the largest banks in the world with a market cap that being their risk absorbing capital equity

capital is worth 12 billion dollars that's a joke and it gets worse Deutsche bank is only worth 18 billion dollars if Deutsche bank goes down Germany is fucked okay and together 12 billion plus 18 billion billion is 30 billion. What was the Luna Terra market cap? 60. 60 billion Luna and Terra were twice as big as two of the most systematically important financial institutions in the world today. It is over, people. Your Fiat Ponzi is collapsing right in front of your eyes. You better figure out where you can find insurance with no counterparty risk. That's why I'm bullish. because people will ultimately figure out that Bitcoin is insurance on the Fiat Ponzi.

Oh, and the best thing, there's no counterparty risk. I'm buying this insurance from an insurance company that's decentralized. It can't fail. It's because you bought this beautiful store of value. It's not like buying insurance from AIG when you're Goldman Sachs and then realizing, oh my God, if AIG fails, all the insurance I bought from AIG, from AIG is worth zero and therefore I'm going to fail as well. So understand that the world is waking up to credit default swaps. The world is waking up again to contagion risks. The contagion to the

world of two institutions that are worth 30 billion U.S. dollars must be a hundredfold that. In fact, it's probably the equivalent of $3 trillion. So it's a thousandfold the size of their equity capital base. Oh my friggin' lord. We are in a heap of trouble in the Fiat Ponzi. But don't worry, Jamie Diamond. You were right. Bitcoin is rat poison because Fiat is the rat.

Jamie Diamond, I'm using because he came out yesterday, with some, you know, food. But that being said, that's Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett's. Oh, Bitcoin is rat poison. Oh, come on, people. Please start doing some homework for the kids. Wrap it up in a nice bow tie. Ben, thanks for having us.

I'll go around. I'll stop riffing, but I said this most importantly. I've never been more nervous than since the great financial crisis, 2008, 2009. This is not a drill people. The Fed has lost the plot and there will be a lot of people that pay the price for incompetence at the highest degree in the most important risk chair in the world, which is that is the Federal Federal Reserve. So I was just saying, Rob, the incompetence at the Federal Reserve is just so monumental and that there will be people, particularly young kids around the world that pay the price. Unfortunately, mostly in developing nations where, you know, the, uh, the U.S. dollar wrecking ball is destroying economies around the world.

Hey, guys, I think I blew up my, my screen. I was trying to share something as can you hear me by the way? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So like getting, you know, maybe this is like actually some of, uh, hedge eyes work in the background. Like everybody, everybody's talking about, um, you know, consumer balance sheets and how strong

they are. Uh, what they, what they fail to do is. is look at the liability side. And getting back to what Foss is saying, you know, the reality is we're going into like a really tough economic environment right now. You know, and it's Fed induced. But if you think about what that means, when if unemployment ticks up like the Fed is trying to do right now, people are going to lose jobs, people are going to lose incomes, the ability to service debt, consumer credit is going to to fall off a cliff, this all-time high and nominal consumer debt are going to be credit losses

to the banks, right? And so that's at a consumer level. And that's before, you know, business, you know, commercial industrial bank credit losses. And, you know, what that really means is that when you look at a company, like a bank's capital level, that's not really the capital level. But you have to adjust it for expected credit losses on a forward basis. And it's a fancy way of saying that like contagion it's it's going to get if it gets bad and it seems more likely that it will it's going to happen quickly and it's going to spread fast and so i think i think that's what faust was alluding to i was just trying to add to it a little bit in a way in a useful way absolutely it's very useful and that's the truth banks are regularly insolvent and it doesn't help when

germany which is the only thing really holding together the european union from an economic basis Their credit quality is falling quickly. Their economy hasn't grown really in five years. They have the challenge of the energy crisis over there. And by the way, oh yeah, Deutsche Bank is a house of cards. Okay. So it's really sick. And people just got to be aware.

Don't get over your skis, people. This is not a drill. It's not a time to be brave. It's a time to stack sats. disciplined, but don't go all in at any point in time, keep some powder dry and get ready, as Rob said, risk happens fast, okay? And just when you think you're timing the bottom of the market,

guess what? There's another huge leg down and everybody is running for the exit. What do they call it? It's like crashing from oversawled conditions, like tends to happen. Yeah, well, that's what it always takes, right? Yeah, crashing from oversold positions. Guess why? Because when you're managing a hedge fund and you get a margin call,

meaning you have to raise cash, you don't sell what you want to. You sell what you can. And that basically ensures that the spiral continues. So it could get ugly. I'm still of the opinion that there will be a notional pivot by the Fed. Why? Because the math doesn't work any other way. It will destroy the economy, which will ensure a doubt.

the debt spiral accelerating because tax revenues will fall off a cliff. And you guys already made mention, I think it was this one, I guess it was another podcast I did today, about the truth of the U.S. tax revenues. They don't even cover their interest expense one turn after paying entitlements and military spending, which you could argue or fix costs. So it's the equivalent of having it. Rob will appreciate this. the equivalent of having an EBITDA interest coverage ratio of less than one.

If you looked at what a corporation would be rated, guess what? A solid triple C at a maximum, meaning one level above default. It'd be talking to restructuring advisors. Pardon me? It'd be talking to restructuring advisors. Absolutely.

Now, this is the reality of it. I hate to tell the truth. If the truth hurts, you know, go cry to your mummy because not enough people are, telling the truth. So thanks. Greg, there's a few things I wanted to quickly touch on.

Number one, I just thought this was very interesting from Preston. Preston Pish tweeted out this chart of the UK bond yield curve, basically hockey sticking up. And in one of the comments down below, and again, forgive me if I'm not like linking things correctly here, but there's a tweet from Luke Grumman said, the bursting global sovereign debt bubble in 100, the first bursting global sovereign debt bubble in 100 years is accelerating. The outcome below is still inconceivable to most market participants.

A few more weeks like the last few, and it will go from inconceivable to inevitable to imminent, shockingly fast. Let's watch. And the quote that he put in was, as Luther described, the deteriorating situation in Germany, it finally dawned on the B.O.E's Norman, that the game was up. The German economic position was now irretrieverable. As a central banker,

all he could do was provide a temporary loan to buy a little more time. Germany was now in deep water and sinking. The numbers would not add up. It had a GDP now of 13 billion that was shrinking by the month. Reparation debts of 9 billion and foreign private obligations of 6 billion, 3.5 billion of its short term that could be pulled at any moment. the American ambassador in Berlin, Frederick Sackett, cable to Washington, that unless Germany received $300 million immediately, it would declare national bankruptcy and default on the $3 billion. It owed to American banks and investors.

The only country that eventually paid the Americans in full on their war debts was Finland. This is from Lord of Finance book called Lord of Finance. But anyways, he's kind of alluding to the idea that, I guess what you guys are. talking about, about contagion, where shit's going to hit the fan and we're going to see who's swimming with no trunks. Is that your kind of... Yeah, yeah, Luke. Luke, I'm a huge fan of Luke's. I love his mathematical approach to calculating the debt spiral. He's, you know, he, you and I don't live in the United States. Well, I guess only Rob does, but the reality is the U.S. is in a

privileged position of when the U.S. dollar strengthens, it doesn't hurt the U.S.A. per se, and in fact, makes foreign imports cheaper because your currency will purchase more. But it's very insular because what it's causing is problems around the world, particularly with debts that are owed in U.S. dollars. It makes a foreign borrower who has borrowed in U.S. dollars have to pay more of their local currency to come up with the same interest payment to meet the contractual obligation on their US dollar denominated debt. Luke has been steadfast in this analysis. I will say this, it could happen suddenly and chances are that the next financial crisis could be the last

financial crisis, but I'll throw out some optimistic pessimism there. There's an author that I've been following for probably 20 years. His name's John Mulden, who in 2011 wrote a book called The End Game, where he was basically calling for the imminent collapse of sovereign nations based on their debt spiral 12 years ago, okay? 12 years ago is not that long a time, but certainly with everything that's happened since then that have just accelerated these debt spirals,

you'd think that people would finally be getting the message. they are it's happening when you get jeremy seagull up there pitching you know uh berating the fed for being a bunch of children and uh and then you get uh these debt spiral calculations that uh well even shifty pete is out there uh you know he's finally figured out the debt spiral and how that might impact gold so he's trying to use it to that narrative but at least people are doing the math And the math is secondary if people have confidence in the system. But as soon as they lose confidence in the system, that's when things collapse. That's when storing something in your mattress is better than keeping it anywhere in the world,

according to a lot of people. And that's when the system stops working. So not that I want it to happen. I'm just saying the probability of it happening has never been greater in my financial career, because the numbers have never been worse. and the information is getting disseminated by smart people like Luke Groman. And then some not so smart people like Shifty Pete, but Shifty Pete still has a lot of followers.

So he's saying the same message, you know. Okay. I want to segue into a question that somebody put in the chat specifically for Greg. And I don't want to leave them hanging here. And this is not directly related, but we're talking. about Bitcoin as an opt-out of all of this insanity, a way to kind of hedge yourself against this. So Yellow actually had an interesting question for Greg. He said, a worry I have is what kind of attack institutions can do with shorting Bitcoin through futures markets and or trading

so-called paper Bitcoin in non-spot tools. They can potentially make, is there an attack there that we can't see it? Can they use their printing machine? in their favor. If yes, what can we do to balance it out? I have to admit my fear is based on not knowing their tools, but knowing their greed and need to control. So Greg, what do you think in terms of the institutionalization of Bitcoin as a way of suppressing what we hope Bitcoin can do for us in terms of hedging us against all this other insanity? Yeah, firstly, a great question. by yellow and you know it's a possibility there is no question that a central bank that prints its own money can hedge by short when I say hedge they can short an infinite amount of cash

settled futures in on the CME and then fund their potential losses by printing more money to keep shorting and suppressing the price of Bitcoin on a cash-settled futures market. That's markedly different than shorting Bitcoin, where you know the fixed supply of $21 million and assuming that the borrow function works properly in the physical market, you can only borrow so much Bitcoin. In the cash-settled futures market, there is that potential. No question, is it happening? My belief is certainly a degree of it is happening, but not by a central bank, probably by other Wall Street players that are trying to correlate Bitcoin as a risk asset to other risk assets and then using the cash settled futures market in the BITO function or, you know, the creation redemption function of the of the cash settled futures ETF.

all of this is possible. All I will say is just keep an eye on the open interest in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to see if there's a really big player that's out there. Meaning, you know, I hate to say it, but yeah, maybe the Federal Reserve. How do you defend against it? Education. How do you educate? Well, you get more politicians like Cynthia Loomis, like the Texas Blockchain Commission.

there's a group down there that's got political ties that is promoting Bitcoin actually as the solution to the Fiat Ponzi where you could get the USA to have the intellectual property of Bitcoin residing in the United States so that they could use Bitcoin essentially as a call it security against the U.S. dollar. And a good friend of mine, Jason Lowry, who I'm not sure if you guys know or if you don't follow him. I mean, this kid is off the charts, brilliant. I've met him in person and he just, you know, he works for the U.S. Space Force, okay? And he's studying Bitcoin on behalf of the U.S. Space Force. These are the types of kids that are going to eventually move into power where the old guys that are put out to pasture like the Jamie Diamonds, they won't be impacting the world so much. much. So yellow, yes, it's possible. Is it happening to a certain degree? I believe it is. Is it, though, responsible for holding down the price of Bitcoin? I would argue, and this is what a lot of

people forget, it could also be pushing the price of Bitcoin up at certain times as well when the speculative fervor comes in and they use a cash settled futures market to own, to air quote, own Bitcoin rather than own the physical. And people, People always forget that side of the equation. If the Luna Terra debacle had happened and there wasn't a cash settled futures market with a lot of open interest outstanding on the short side against Bitcoin, my belief is Bitcoin would have fallen far further than it did during UST Luna, Elon Musk coming out as a seller, Celsius debacle, all those other things that caused risk in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

If you didn't have a short base, it would have just fallen off a cliff, much like it did back in 2000. And when was it? 2020, I guess, when it just went from 17,000 down to below 3,000, but just in a straight line, right? So there's, I coming from the hedge fund business, I believe that, yes, there can be evil shorts, but there can also be short. that facilitate smooth market functioning.

I'll remind you, there was no bailout for UST and Luna, even though their current, their market caps were twice as big as the bailouts of the market caps of the two candidates that I think are going to have to be bailed out, which is credit suisse and Deutsche Bank. Okay. Putting it all in perspective, coming back and forth, Bitcoin is stupid cheap. In fact, I think it's trading at about one one thousandth of what it should be trading at. But I'm only Greg Foss. If I happen to still work at my hedge fund where we had, you know, five odd billion dollars to invest in, this was a while ago.

Maybe the price would be a little higher because I had five billion dollars to invest, not like five wooden nickels like I have right now. You know, like, I mean, it's just a different world. So it'll come, be confident. And by the way, it is positive that the price. price of Bitcoin is low because people in the world who really need to buy it at this price are able to get a larger chunk of Bitcoin for the same fee at dollars invested. I'm talking about most of the people that live in the less privileged countries of the world, not North America and not United Kingdom, okay?

The people in the world that really need it, whether it's El Salvador or Obie's project in Africa, Joe, I mean, this is why you can be sort of happy that the price of Bitcoin is at levels that I view to be insanely inexpensive. Let's put it that way. I love it. All right. Gentlemen, I'm conscious of time. I got to start rounding things out.

So what I like to do at the end of every show is do a quick round of any final thoughts you may have. And then I'm also going to challenge you to give a recommendation. Now, the recommendation can be on literally anything that you think is interesting and of interest to the audience. So that could be a book, an article, a video, an app, a device, anything that you think is worth people checking out and paying attention to and using or reading or watching. Doesn't matter as long as it will help educate people and show them something new.

So I'm going to cap us off. First off, on my final thoughts, you know, a lot of the macro stuff, I tend to, I feel like Greg Foss at the beginning of the show because I sit back with these conversations and I glaze over. I understand like you were saying, about 10% of it and I just go, oh shit, that sounds bad. But I do get the general gist that the, you know, like the House of Cards Ponzi scheme is having a difficult time staying upright. And I do understand that much. In terms of some of the other topics that we've touched on, again, community building the, you know, what is happening in terms of accessibility with Bitcoin and individuals, what is happening in terms of meeting Bitcoiners in meat space, creating those relationships and building and building families.

I think all of that is beautiful. and it's a beautiful kind of inverse to what Greg is talking about in terms of Fiatland. Because everything in terms of basically Greg gave us the reason why he reinforced the previous reasons by pointing out the opposition of what we're living in now versus what Bitcoin and living on a Bitcoin standard encourages. and I think that's a fantastic juxtaposition. And so in general, I'm super happy that all of you guys came on. I think this is a great, well-rounded conversation. I really appreciate it. In terms of recommendations, I'm going to kind of play on my earlier topic.

But rather than touching on plug-and-play notes, which is what I was kind of largely talking about, I'm going to recommend. recommend people try and run a node on their regular machine. So if you have a laptop, if you have any sort of a home computer, then what I'd like you to try and do is go and download Bitcoin Core. Okay. So you're going to download Bitcoin Core onto your computer. I do have a tutorial on how to do this. You can just search that up on my channel. And then if you don't have a lot of hard drive space, don't worry. You can set it so that it only takes up a tiny amount. So the default, if you set it to, it's called a pruned node where it still downloads all of the information, all the history and verifies it.

But then after that, it discards everything already verified. And it keeps only the most recent two gigabytes. Okay. So you can prune your node so that it only stays up to date on like the most recent stuff. It still verifies everything. And then download either Sparrow wallet or Spector. wallet and connect that to your note. All right. That's that's my challenge to you. All of that stuff that I mentioned is free. You can run it on on a computer you already have. And so that's

my challenge to you is see what it's like to run a full copy of the Bitcoin blockchain and connect your own Bitcoin wallet on the same computer to it. There you go. Give it a try. You can search that up on a search up my Bitcoin Core tutorial, though you won't necessarily need the transactional stuff. Just search up the beginning, the initial setup. And then search up either Spector wallet or Sparrow wallet. And there's instructions on how to connect to your Bitcoin core node right there. And I'll leave it at that.

So I'll rotate over. I'm going to pass it over to Joe. Final thoughts? Any recommendations you may have? Sure. Thank you very much, Ben, for organizing this. It was an absolute pleasure to hang out with you gentlemen this evening. It's getting a wee bit late in Europe.

I won't lie. So apologies from fading a little bit. But yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, bullish on nodes and the U.S. that's coming from them. Bullish on Bitcoin families and bullish on Bitcoin, the life raft. Really good takeaways there. But yeah, for me, what was I going to do? I was going to recommend something?

Is that right? Anything that you like, anything that you found useful in your Bitcoin journey. On my Bitcoin journey. I mean, it's something I sort of live by, which is that it's never too late to do the right thing. So whatever that thing is that's bugging you or maybe, you know, you're losing sleep over. And it could be during your Bitcoin journey as well, right? It's, you know, if there's anything I've learned over the past two years of horrible human existence through, you know, being forced to live in a box and not being able to see family members or friends

or go out into the streets, for example, it's been realized that, you know, the importance of those social interactions. and yeah, if there is something that's bugging you in life, then, you know, they might also think that too. So, you know, it's never too late to do the right thing. So reach out to that person or say whatever you can to that person. So, yeah, it's not really a thing to sort of recommend. I think that's a great. I'll take it.

I think that's a fantastic recommendation. I think that's one of the best recommendations we ever had. You know, don't sleep on things that you should be doing today because there may not be a tomorrow to do them. Right? I love that. Awesome. Thank you.

Rob, you're up next. Any final thoughts, recommendations? Yeah, I mean, just bullish that everybody's in this room right now, and I'm talking with you four guys. Just thankful for the, you know, the opportunity to share the stage with you. And it's the fact that everybody's here doing this, that's, yeah, stack sats. Absolutely. Keep stacking them.

Just keep rotating that forever. Just keep going. It's just bullish. It couldn't be more bullish than the fact that everybody is here doing this at, you know, my time, 750 on a Friday night instead of doing anything else. So recommendation. I actually, I don't know why it took me so long to read this book, but I just finished Twilight in the Desert, which is a fantastic book.

It's about, it was actually written the last time we thought as a world that we were going into peak cheap oil around the time that we invaded Iraq. And it's just a fantastic read. It basically makes the case without given too much away that Saudi Arabia is not as oil rich as we tend to assume it is. And that that has like dramatic implications for the world. And by the way, it was written 20 years ago. So yeah, yeah, that's it. It's a great read. And it's very, it's not like too technical. But it also speaks to exactly why, you know, it's important to think about, and maybe, maybe recommend, you know, tangential recommendation of that. Think carefully after you read it about like who, who, if someone's into politics, maybe a lot of people here aren't, but if you're into politics, like, think carefully about energy policy because it's extremely important. And we're asleep at the wheel right now and acting like a bunch of drunk idiots in terms of like forward thinking.

So that book was an eye-opener for me. That's fantastic. Greg, you're up. Well, what a pleasure to be here with you guys. As always, I learned stuff. And it gives me hope, okay? So, you know, I'm a little jaded in my view of the financial risks that we're facing right now. But if it, you know, thank God for Bitcoin.

Okay. So Bitcoin is hope and Bitcoin is freedom. I encourage people to continue to do their research. and understand that it takes hundreds of hours to truly appreciate the beauty of Bitcoin, hundreds of hours of study. So on that note, my recommendation would be to a shout out to one of my good friends in the business who I know Rob knows and I think you know as well, Ben and Joe, James Lavish, who puts together some really good research.

He publishes it under on Substack under title of The Informationalist, but it includes topics like credit default swaps. It includes topics like the debt spiral, the reality of the US debt spiral. In fact, I was able to nudge him to write about that. And he said that the increase in his subscribers when he wrote that was exponential, right? And so it just shows that there's people out there that are concerned about the metrics of the US debt spiral. And so James and I are a partner on a platform, a free platform called Looking Glass Education. Twitter handle at looking glass edu. This is a free,

this is a free education platform that is actually been translated into 14 different languages as we speak and is being used in El Salvador, for example, to teach the truth about the Fiat system, stuff that you won't learn in a school. Because if the Keynesian's actually, taught you the truth. Nobody would put their money in banks because they would realize how absolutely risky, truly risky commercial banks are. So I'm a partner in this. It's a free. There's a course and everything. Please follow it on Twitter. And there's a course. There's even a

Bitcoin exam, 50 questions. How well do you understand Bitcoin? And I'm proud to be part of that because here's this is what it's all about is education and helping with the kids so my final word of advice just hug your kids all right just go to your kids and hug your kids it's all about yeah and and and and and and we do this because we care and uh you know what I have this behind me I wasn't going to show this but uh I was awarded this uh T-shirt I keep it on my chair just to remember uh I was awarded this t-shirt on a trading floor uh can you see what it says we're I'm the world's worst trader, okay? And so I don't try.

And in fact, I'm not that bad because I know when to cut my losers and harvest, you know, and hold my winners. But don't try and outthink yourself here, okay? Dollar cost average into Bitcoin. If you own zero Bitcoin, I'm afraid you are taking an extreme amount of risk relative to having a proper portfolio allocation. You decide what that allocation is. It's got to be greater than zero. And if it's even as low as two or three percent of your overall net worth, that two or three percent could literally create the insurance and the generational wealth that you may well lose on the other 97 percent of your portfolio because the Fiat system goes, kaboom. I'm not wanting that to happen.

I'm telling you, though, that the risks of that happening are extreme right now because we have a job. drunk driver in the world's most important risk chair, which is the Federal Reserve. It is shameful. The lack of intellectual integrity and the abundance of intellectual laziness in that risk chair is risking our children's future, and I am not going to stand up for it. So Luke Roman, congrats on calling out the Fiat Ponzi. Jamie Diamond, you are a shameful, shameful father. Okay, I hate to say it, man, but you are a shameful father.

Do your research. Let's understand that there is hope. There is freedom. It's called Bitcoin. Thanks for having me. Send the hate mail to Ben Sessions. I get enough hate mail. You Jamie Diamond supporters out there, okay?

Thank you so much. See you guys. Awesome. Gentlemen, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. this is a lot of fun and you are all welcome back anytime have a great night thank you guys be well everybody thank you easy guys sure awesome everybody watching thank you so much for being here i hope you had a blast seem like the the comments section was going wild they're very very happy

to see your questions comments and everything um as always uh like subscribe share all those things super important they really helped get this content out in front of more eyeballs And that's very important. Thank you so much for everybody that does that on the regular. I do see it. I do appreciate it. Thank you to those that stream sats and boost and all that kind of stuff and drop tips and everything. Again, huge thank yous all around.

Now, a couple of quick things. Of course, if you want to help the show in another way, you can hit up the previously mentioned sponsors down below. Coin, Kite, Shake, Pay, Lead, and Bit Refill, Bill Fottle. They're all down here. All of the gentlemen that were on the show, their Twitter handles are linked below. So follow them all. They're awesome. If you aren't already following them, then you should be.

Again, a quick reminder. I'm going to be in North Carolina on Friday, October 21st, running a cold card deep dive, which will be a preface to Hoddlewine, which is going to be a lot of fun. You can go to hoddlewine. party for that event. But if you want to come to the cold card workshop, BTCsessions.com slash events, the same event will be happening in LA, following Pacific Bitcoin.

So Pacific Bitcoin goes Thursday, Friday on the 10th and 11th. I'm going to be doing it on Saturday, November 12th in the afternoon. So you can sleep in after that party on Friday night. And you can hit up and sharpen your cold card skills. Expect to walk out of their being an expert by the end of it. But anyways, only 15 spots per event available, 15 tickets only so that I can make sure that the quality of instruction is top notch. And I can get to everybody.

So yeah, check those out, BTCSessions.ca slash events or if you want to help me out, share those to anybody that you know that is in Charlotte or L.A. or will be for those events. That would be hugely helpful. Awesome. And finally, if you really liked what you saw, you can drop a tip at my strike page, strike.me slash BTC sessions. Get there. Type in any amount you want. Hit the tip button. You will see a lightning invoice or if you tap to the right, a regular Bitcoin QR code. With that, I am out. Have yourself. a wonderful day or evening. I'll see you guys next time for your daily session.