BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Seb Bunney, Scott Dedels, John Haar ep386

Episode Date: December 22, 2023

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What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. Another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish? Killer panel tonight. Very excited to have all these gentlemen with me. A couple first timers on the show and a returning guest. And so it should be a great time. Of course, I hope you have all had a wonderful week.

I've got my mid-afternoon evening coffee going with my, you know, I'm not into JPEGs, but I refuse to let them take the wizards from us. this relic of the past from our Bitcoin back in the day, I refuse to relinquish it. So it is mine. Cheers to those that also refuse to do the same. Anyways, we're going to be diving into it. Of course, this is live.

Anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. thing sucks.

If you have not already, please do like, subscribe, share all those things. They help a ton. That little like button just below the screen. Give that a tap. Share this on whatever socials you're on. And of course, I'm on the warpath to get 100,000 subscribers. My goal is to do it by the end of 2024. If you can help me get there, then hit that subscribe button.

It means a lot. And with that, I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Before we bring in our guests, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. I am pulling up timechain calendar.com and simultaneously I am pulling up the live chat to the right side of the screen. So from now on as you guys begin to comment and throw in whatever comments you like, of course, it will be live for the world to see for better or worse. But I digress. Let's take a look at timechain calendar.com.

We're sitting at 42,161 U.S. dollars per coin. A single U.S. dollar will pick you up, 2,3.3. 372 sats. In terms of fees, a little bump again today, and I saw it was kind of the past couple of days. It was peaking up pretty high at times, but 127 sats per byte for next block. Any time fee, 24 sats per byte. Mampool is still purging anything south of around 12 sats per byte. And then in terms of Bitcoin mine, 19.57 million of them, that's 93.2 percent of the entire supply. Shout out to sponsors of the show, HottleHoddle.com. If you're stacking stats and some of your priorities include peer-to-peer trading, instant self-custy, and no K-YC. This is a super easy place to do it. You can sign up with nothing more than an email address. Once you're in, choose a currency payment method and an amount.

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and you can always swap them out with additional parts later. So check them out. C-DOR. All the links are down below based on your shipping information. Last couple here, shout it to Nunchuk for assisted multi-sig. I love their HoneyBadger program. This is an assisted multi-sig set up on your mobile device. You can use tap signers, cold cards, and tons of other hardware.

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So shout out to all of them. And with that, enough my rambling. Let's get everybody in here. So I want to welcome to the show. Scott and John, once I get them up here, and Seb all three. There we go. Welcome to the show, gentlemen.

Thank you for being here. This is a beard-heavy episode. I've noticed. I feel like we've got a solid group in here. So welcome. I think quick intros are in order. So I'll toss it down the line for a quick. Who are you and what do you do? Let's go to Scott first. Can you give yourself an intro, man? Yeah. And thanks again for having me on today, Ben. I'm excited to be here. I am the company, CEO of a company called Block Rewards. We are a Canadian software company building tools for employers that want to think about transitioning their compensation and reward strategy. to a Bitcoin standard. So that's my day job. I am also the host of my own podcast, which goes by the same name, the block reward.

Block reward is as new, but gaining steam. We're on all the major platforms, YouTube and Rumble. And Seb has been on us already. We're looking forward to the other gentleman on this pod, joining us one day soon. Awesome.

I love it. Well, welcome, man. And we'll be seeing each other in person soon. We'll get into that. momentarily, but thanks for being on here, man. I appreciate it. Let's job down to John. Dude, good to have you. I regularly hear you on spaces and chat with you on spaces from time to time, but can you give yourself an intro for anybody unfamiliar? For sure. Great to be here, Ben. Thank you. As they say in the sports talk radio world,

first time, long time. If you guys are familiar with that, first time participant, long time listener. So great to be here. Yeah, so part of the team at Swan, Swan Bitcoin, Bitcoin only financial services firm. I'm part of the Swan private team in particular. So that is our high net worth concierge offering high touch service for our high net worth clients, bringing the whole platform of Swan to them and some perks that come along with Swan Private, but really just trying to orange pill the world. And I am very grateful that I get to do that as part of my job at Swan.

And then quick background. I'm in New York. I did the Wall Street career for about 13 years. Got into gold and sound money back in like 0809, found Bitcoin many years later, and then joined Swan in early 2022. That's awesome, man. Well, I'm glad to have you and see you as opposed to just hear you for a change. So yeah, welcome, welcome. And we'll jump finally down to Seb. second time on the show, I think, now. Yeah, yeah, second time.

And honestly, Ben, it's such a pleasure. Like, I think if anyone in the crowd has kind of not necessarily watched many of Ben's videos, which I'm sure they've watched a ton of them. But if they haven't, you've got to check out his videos. By far and above, like the best video, what do you call it, video channel when it comes to custody, when it comes to any of these kind of topics. So I truly value the content you create. you're well and above anyone else in a space. So I really appreciate being on. Thanks, man.

Again, I love having you. And yeah, I'm glad to have you on the show. If people are unfamiliar with you, what do you have your hands in? For sure. So I co-founded a platform with Greg Foss, Dasby, and a couple others. And it's called Looking Glass Education. And our whole goal is to try and kind of distill down a lot of kind of the Bitcoin talk, the macroeconomic talk, the finance talk into kind of layman terms. And so we create a lot of free content that is available on our website looking glass education. We have courses.

We have content for teachers. And then I also like to write. And so Daz and myself co-authored a book called Beers for Bitcoin. And that's kind of like a very distilled down version of kind of Bitcoin for the layman. And then I just finished writing a book, which just went live this week, called The Hidden Cost of Money, which I'm pretty pumped and excited about. Yeah, man, it's making the rounds. It's making waves for sure.

Well, it's, it's good to have you back, man. And again, I'll vote for the looking glass education. It's such an excellent resource as well. And yeah, man, we can't have, I don't think there's such thing as too many educators in the space. So, yeah, thanks for doing what you do. With that, we're going to dive into the meat of the show. So anybody watching that's unfamiliar, this is why are we bullish? And the premise to the show is very simple.

Each one of us comes with a reason why we are bullish, something that we're currently excited about. And so that can come in many forms. It might be a personal experience. It might be a new app or a device that we've tried. It might be an item of news. It could be a variety of different things. Whatever it is, it is the person's chance to rant on what they're excited about. So number one, somebody's going to drop a reason why they're bullish rant about

all the little details about why they are particularly excited about this thing. Number two, we're then going to open it up to everybody to discuss. So comments, questions, rabbit holes, wherever we end up, all good. And then finally, number three, we're going to rotate to the next person until we've all had a turn. So reason, riff, rotate, simple, the three hours. So I'm going to kick us off here. And I feel a little conflicted using this as my. reason for being bullish because I've kind of previously used it like not too long ago,

but it's my show. So fuck it. And it's happening tomorrow. So I'm doing it. I'll, you know, I'll try not to beat a dead horse and, uh, and, and spend too too much time. But I am super excited because tomorrow is the first ever sat or day market this Saturday, previously the Saturday sat market, but the Saturday market. And so this is aggregating in my hometown of Calgary, all of the merchants, well, you know, as many merchants as we could get there in the short notice that we gave to come down all of the ones that are accepting Bitcoin. So we've got a ton of merchants in the wings ready. We've got about 30 of them, 30 plus, maybe 35, somewhere in that realm. Basically a few weeks back, I think it was, it might have only been three weeks ago,

four weeks ago, something like that. I put a call out and I said, all right, we, we, you know, everybody's all worried about, you know, the, the, the top down, clamping down upon people's ability to use Bitcoin and, and, you know, things are getting more difficult and, and people don't want us using Bitcoin in certain ways. And I, and I kind of came to the conclusion that the only way that we really transcend that is if we form local communities where people understand the value of Bitcoin and also understand the value of exchanging goods and services for Bitcoin and what that kind of does to a society moving forward where it changes societal dynamics in that if you have money that actually increases in value over time, even if it's just mildly deflationary like years down the road,

you're still a little bit more conscious of your spending habits. And so when you take that into account, you are more conscious of what you're actually purchasing. And so it holds merchants and people that are offering goods and services to a higher standard. And so I love the idea of finding people that are on the same wavelength and thus holding those people to a higher standard in terms of what they're producing. I think it makes us all better for it. And also it just, I don't, I don't need everything I do kept in a database, right? I like the idea of knowing my local rancher or having an egg guy or having my barber except a lightning payment. I love that idea. And I love that that peer to peer creating relationships with people. And so this was kind of the impetus for the market. So basically what we're

doing is we rented out a huge hall in downtown Calgary. And we just put the call out. And there was a lot of response that I didn't expect so quickly. And so I've, my inbox was just full of people. So can I, you know, can I come down? Can I be involved? And so we've got so many different things going on. Again, so we've got we've got a whole bunch of different stuff. Just part of it is listed on this. by the way, if anybody's curious, you can go to Bitcoinbrains.com slash market. So Bitcoin Brains is Dave Bradley. He's the first Bitcoiner I ever met in real life. He also had the first brick and mortar store where you could buy Bitcoin on the planet.

And he was also co-founder of Bull Bitcoin with Francis Pouliott. And he's done a whole bunch of different stuff. But awesome guys. So he's helping me out with this. And yeah, so we put together a bunch of stuff. I'm just going to quickly kind of let you guys know what kind of stuff we have and what kind of people we have coming down to this market. Of course, we've got tons of artists, people selling apparel like hats and jackets and t-shirts and all kinds of stuff like that. We've got

a couple and their kids that do like unique Inuit carvings. We've got a guy who does like solar panels and solar arrays. We've got plenty of people doing like baked goods and all that. We've got IT consulting. We've literally got a candy store that's like Bitcoin branded candy. We've got plenty of different farmers bringing varieties of chicken, eggs, lamb, beef, jerky, all kinds of stuff. We've got plumbing services, heating services. We've got Bitcoin minor heating services. We've got financial coaching. We've got audiovisual services. We've got gift cards for Bitcoin. We've got 3D printed merch. We've got children's. books, hotel rooms in Banff. So if you want to get out to Banff, there's now a hotel that is

explicitly accepting Bitcoin for rooms. And he's giving a discount in Bitcoin. I think it's either 10 or 20% if you pay in Bitcoin, which is wild, which is amazing. We also have, again, like personal trainers. We've got somebody who does e-bikes. We've got golf lessons, hypnosis, retro video games, just like hats, home decor, all kinds. of stuff. All of these people are just, and the important part to me was that it wasn't just a bunch of bitcoins selling Bitcoin stuff. It was like other stuff that you might need day to day. And I think we got that, which is what I wanted because I, the impetus for this also was a little bit to scratch my own inch. I've been living on Bitcoin for a while. I've been using various

services to kind of make that work, which I very much value. But I also, I also think the more I can get local and create relationships with people, the better. So we've got all that. And then we've also got so the Canadians in the room may be privy to a popular Canadian. Well, maybe even people outside of Canada. I think it actually had a bit of a reach. There's an ongoing show called Heartland. That's like it's about a, you know, a small town like ranchers and everything like that.

It's on season 17, I think. But anyways, one of the lead actors from it for the first 15 seasons, he's actually a bitcoiner and a huge freedom advocate as well. And he actually previously hired me for one-on-ones before I actually hadn't watched the show, but I finished a session with him and I came out into the living room where my wife and her parents were watching a show and I looked up. I was like, I swear to God, that's the guy I just got off a session with. And they're like, no, it wasn't.

No way. But anyways, this guy, Graham Wardle, awesome dude, he's going to be down there and he's going to be doing a live Q&A with two of us on stage to his audience as well. So it should be a lot of fun. And then, yeah, we've got some other stuff queued up. We've got some short Bitcoin films that are playing around the room at certain times. We've got some live music, live Q&As. We're showing Tomer Strohites Bitcoin is generational wealth at the last. lunchtime along with some live music. We've got mobile wallet demos. We've also got some

demos of how to do home heating with Bitcoin miners. And then we've just got like a general Q&A where anybody in the room can ask their questions about Bitcoin. And we've also got a bit of a raffle slash scavenger hunt, I suppose, where you have to interact with the vendors. And if you get fun facts about, I can't remember if we're doing five or 10 vendors, then you can get entered into the raffle and everybody has contributed different things that you can win. But there's like, you know, probably a couple thousand bucks worth of stuff that you can win just by being there and interacting with your local businesses. So this is what we've got planned. I'm very excited about it.

It's the first one that we're doing. But I think that I think it's something that we might be able to replicate, do again here. and maybe even replicate in other cities. So we shall see. This is what I'm excited about, gentlemen. I'm curious, your thoughts, comments, questions. I'll open it up. Dude, I've been looking for a market where I could get eggs, plumbing services, and hypnosis.

I've had to go to three different markets for those things, and it's such a hassle. Thank God there's one market with all of them now. You can be hypnotized into paying for eggs with Bitcoin. I will offer. some more thoughts in addition to that. But man, so many cool things there. Total believer in the circular economy. I don't think we need to make it a reality tomorrow for Bitcoin to be successful,

but it is important. And like not to get way too ahead of ourselves here. The lights will go out on me if I don't move enough here. Not to get way too far ahead, but we want Bitcoin to be a totally different financial system in addition to the existing financial. financial system. We don't like we described Bitcoin as gold 2.0. We don't want it to just become gold 2.0, right? We don't want it to just be this store of value asset while everyone else is transacting for day-to-day payments with some other, you know, fiat token. So the circular economy

is huge. I've always felt myself that I'm willing to signal to a business, whether it's a bar in New York City. Shout out PubKee is a bar owned by four Bitcoiners in New York City. You could pay for everything using Bitcoin and Lightning. I've probably been there two dozen times by now. And it's a great bar. I like it. But even if I were indifferent between that bar and somewhere else, I would go there because I want to signal to them, hey, I think it's awesome that you guys are bitcoinsers. Even if there were some product or service that were offered somewhere that, You know, if someone's charging a little bit more for their eggs, I would probably go to the Bitcoin or selling eggs and buy a little bit, pay a little bit more.

I mean, the great thing is that a lot of these Bitcoiners end up, like you said, with the hotel, they end up giving a discount. So that just makes it the easiest decision in the world. But I would even pay a little bit extra just to get the circular economy going just to signal to them, just to meet those people because they're probably like-minded people that you just get along with, would want to have a conversation with. So, man, that's what comes to mind to start. But I wish I weren't so far away in New York City.

But that sounds like a real treat for you guys in Calgary. Yeah, man. Should be a good time. Maybe we'll take it on the road. Who doesn't want a reason to come to Calgary in the winter, right? Yeah. I get to make these jokes because I'm from Edmonton and I relocated to Colonna. But I did come in for this event and I'm super stoked about it.

I think it's so cool that, you know, unlike a conference event, this is actually an event to raise awareness around spending and exchanging Bitcoin, which is so cool. And hopefully other cities will take notice and try to create similar events. So on that note, if your, Colona's a destination place. And we have a local, a bitcoiner in our local meetup in Colona that runs in a bed and breakfast called Adela's. And they take Bitcoin as well. So if you're looking to go further than Banff and come to the Okanagan, there is a spot for you here too. That's awesome.

You know what we should do is we should see if we can string together various properties where you can pay in Bitcoin across Canada. And we just do a big Bitcoin road trip all the way across the country in wherever we'll accept and we'll just pop back and forth until we cross the entirety of Canada, which anybody that's unfamiliar with how long it takes to drive across Canada, I was in in Toronto and I drove to Calgary. And just to get out of the province of Ontario, it was two days of driving. And then I should have split the last part into two subsequent days.

But I just went, I went hard for like 15 or 16 hours on that last, that last leg. But it basically four days of driving just to get from Toronto to Calgary. It would have been another 12 hours to get to Vancouver on the coast. and Toronto is not even close to the furthest east you can get. That's like another couple of days, isn't it? I think whenever I fly from, I was originally from the UK, and whenever I fly back to the UK, it's a nine-hour flight, and I live just north of Vancouver in Whistler.

And it is six hours of flying over Canada, and then it's like three hours across the ocean back to the UK. That blows me away every single time the size of it. Yeah, yeah. But it would make for a very interesting Bitcoin road trip. So I think we should make that happen. I think what's also just so fascinating about this market is when I think about Bitcoin, you always get that question, which is Bitcoin is failing because people aren't using

it as a medium exchange. Why would you use it as a medium exchange? And I think what people don't realize is that at the moment, given the tax system, we're not, Bitcoin is not incentivized to use Bitcoin as a medium exchange, given that it's a taxable event every single time you buy and sell or every single time you buy and sell Bitcoin. And so what I think is just so fascinating about these markets is that you're seeing Bitcoiners swim against the tide purely because they value this money so far and above anything else. And they're trying to create community because they realize that ultimately to create a better world, we've got to spend better money. And I just think it really shows you how incredible of a community we have, given that they're willing to put aside kind of the other disadvantages of spending Bitcoin taxation and whatnot because they're trying to build a community.

they're trying to spread this money that can truly make a difference to this world. Yeah. And the unique, the funny thing about if you think about it, if you, if you, let's say you're living on a pure Bitcoin standard and you spend a bunch of Bitcoin and then they're like, oh, you have a taxable event and you owe taxes. The interesting part about that is you're paying taxes because the value of your money went up and you're paying a portion of the value of the value of. of that your money that went up.

So that means that technically speaking, you're still in the black because your money went up instead of perpetually down forever. And so like when people are like, well, you gotta pay taxes on your Bitcoin if you're living on it. Yeah, but not that I love it, but at the same time, that means that I made a gain

on the money that I'm living on And they asked, and they basically said, we need a portion of that gain. That still means that I've made a gain. And if it's a loss, then while I pay less taxes at the end, because I claim the loss, right? It'll be fascinating to see the first developed country that takes off this kind of taxable event and turns it, so it competes with basically just any other currency. Because you're suddenly going to, you're removing that barrier. You're removing all of that friction to use Bitcoin as a daily currency.

I think that is going to be super interesting. Yeah. And I am also curious in terms of what, I mean, at what point do you treat it as, is it obligatory to treat it as such when, you know, if we had countries that were like, we've already got El Salvador where it's legal tender, but if you have a country at some point in the future where they were like, this is this and I don't think this coming anytime soon but they say this is the currency here

like it is aren't there aren't there stipulations in and around that where you can't basically like tax tax conversion of a currency if you're using it as a currency itself I believe that if people are trading in foreign currency accounts like from a brokerage perspective I'm pretty sure yeah I'm pretty sure they would get hit with gains. Yeah. But yeah, I think, you know, if you're a international traveler and you exchange a bunch of money and let's say you're traveling for a long time and you go from dollars to euros and you know, the exchange rates are going to fluctuate. You know, you converted it all at the beginning. It's not like you have to track your gains on it when you use it later in the trip.

So yeah, I think that's true. Also, I believe the Luma, Cynthia Lummus, Kristen Gillbrand bill that was proposed. It's not not a past bill by any means, but was proposed at some point in 2022, I believe that had somewhere around like a $200 level that said transactions below this would just not be subject to capital gains whatsoever. I think that would be huge if something like that got passed. And then I will just say, you know, hopefully the IRS isn't listening to me, but I don't think they would even care about me making the statement. If you buy a dozen and eggs, if you buy a $30 shirt, you know, I don't think the IRS is going to say, hey, you have a $3 gain on that thing that you bought. No matter how many tens of thousands of IRS agents they're

adding in the U.S., I don't think they're going to look at that level. Yeah. Like, you know, if you buy a $5 latte and they come for their 50 cents, then like, how much money are they putting into the effort of that collection for the reward is? So there's to a degree, there's that. I mean, I say this, and I'm sure SWAT is ready to swoop in through my window. But yeah, I think you're to a degree. Like, there's only so, so many resources they can throw at that. And, you know, if they're trying to pick up nickels, like, I don't, I don't see why they would.

Yeah. If you're buying a car, you know, they'll probably go after that. Yeah, tens of thousands of dollars. But kind of tough for them to go after. the local guy selling eggs. I think the other thing that I think is fascinating is when you start thinking about, let's say they do remove some of these barriers, especially the taxable event barrier, all of a sudden, and I always found this really fascinating when I stumbled upon it,

we always hear about Gresham's law, which is that bad money drives out good. But the only environment that happens is when you have legal tender, when you have someone saying you have to use this money, well, naturally, people are going to hoard the good money and spend the bad money, because the retailer, wherever the merchant has to accept it. But the moment you remove those legal tender laws and you're actually now in a free market, the reverse is true. And you have that, I think it's called tiers law.

And that's where good money actually drives out bad. Because if you're a merchant, you're going to accept Fiat. You're never going to accept Fiat. You're going to accept Bitcoin. And so I think that when you remove these barriers, you remove these hurdles, all of a sudden competition naturally allows good money to start percolating through society. And I think naturally, if we did remove those barriers, that's the beginning of the end of field, I believe.

Yeah. And it's funny, we were talking about this earlier, but, um, uh, you know, the, the hotel owner who's giving a discount for Bitcoin is coming in the door because he, he, he wants the Bitcoin. He's, he's incentivizing people to, to, uh, to pay that way. And, and kind of, so I started using Zapright recently. So, um, uh, John and, um, and Will Cole and, uh, and Preston, sorry, not Preston, Parker Lewis.

So it's basically a nice landing page for payment links and everything, and you can link up your own Bitcoin wallets. But one of the cool things is they do have fiat options that you can integrate there too alongside Bitcoin, but they give you the option to add a premium to any Fiat payment that you get. And so obviously, it's a huge pain in the ass getting fiat for me. Like I don't get it. It goes to a third party.

They're going to scrape away a bunch of it. And then it's going to take however long to get to my bank account, even worse, because I'm in Canada and some of these payments are coming from the U.S. So I've got to convert, which they'll scrape off even more. And so, like, for me, I want to disincentivize somebody paying me in Fiat as much as possible. So I add a 10% premium or maybe in some case, I'm probably going to bump it up because I was doing the math of what I'm enduring by getting paid in Fiat. And it's just, it's not as worth it to me.

So I think, yeah, you're going to say, you're going to say, see however you decide to to denominate it, but I think you're going to be seeing a lot of incentivizing on the part of merchants for people to pay them in the better money. And I think that's what drives it because at the end of the day, the person that's paying is going to have the option, but they're going to look at the incentives set up by the merchants that are actually selling the goods and services and they're going to go, well, I guess I'll use this other money because it's, you know, people are very, they look at the first first order effects of things and they just see this sticker price.

And they say, well, I'll pay this way because it's better. So yeah, I think you'll see a bunch of that. That's a great point, Seb, that I had not really considered before. You hear Gresham's law talked about a lot. And usually people are just like, oh, yeah, everyone wants to spend a bad, debased money and get rid of it. And people are just like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. But then you think about it's a transaction.

there's someone on the other side of that transaction. And if they have the opportunity to accept the money that's not being debased, of course they would rather have that. So I think you make a great point about the legal tender laws that are actually driving those dynamics. And if you remove those, the merchant is going to say, don't pay me in dirty fiat, pay me in the money that's not being debased. That's a great point.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the proof of concept for that already happens today in countries where they accept U.S. dollars and their own. local money and you see differential pricing and markets where they would rather have the dollars. So to me, this is like, it's probably actually the precursor, like just before hyper-bitcoinsation is when you go into shops and you start to see prices side by side, and then it starts to be everywhere. And it goes from being weird to being like, okay, now we have the choice and then gradually and then not, right? Yeah. And I think this is how it starts. I think it starts with

local tight-knit groups of people. I think the tactic that was taken before was maybe a little bit naive. Bitcoiners just like circa 2014, 2015. It was like, let's get every big company to accept Bitcoin. But the companies weren't accepting it because they wanted it, because they recognized it as a better money. They were accepting it because they saw some hype.

They thought it was a good marketing. opportunity and they were clearly immediately dumping for Fiat afterwards, right? They were plug in into BitPay or whatever and get in the dollars. So for them, they didn't care. And then they saw it as, oh, we'll do this and we'll get new customers. But like the odds were that, especially at that point, there weren't that many people that were super stoked about paying with Bitcoin in the first place at that point. It was very niche. And so what you got is companies, announcing this, oh, we're accepting Bitcoin. They kind of weren't because they were just dumping it.

And then at the end of the day, they gained basically no new customers. And then eventually you get the new headline of, oh, Microsoft stops accepting Bitcoin because why would they put in the effort to keep everybody informed on how to do things? And so I think now you're in a situation where you've got a core group of people that already do things day to day. they already offer goods and services on their own for fiat mining, and they like Bitcoin. And so it's only natural. If you can round them up and just plant that seed and say, you know, you can accept Bitcoin for what you're doing. And there's a group of people in the city that will do that with you.

I think it reinvigorates that, but in a better way where the person is accepting it for the quote-unquote right reasons, they actually value the money as opposed to, oh, this is going to be such a great marketing thing for me? Like, that's not the point. It's interesting. And I'm going to plug Scott here because he probably won't plug himself. But when I met Scott a few months ago, and Scott has been kind of telling me a lot more about people receiving Bitcoin as a form of payment for their income. And what's interesting is you start thinking about it and you realize when it comes to merchant adoption, a merchant has to have a POS system that accepts Bitcoin. there's a lot of infrastructure that goes in place to accept Bitcoin that suddenly creates a hurdle for many merchants to adopt Bitcoin to receive payments in Bitcoin.

Whereas what's fascinating about receiving a portion of your paycheck in Bitcoin is it flips all this on its head. You don't need to implement much infrastructure, if any, at all. You just need to kind of reach out to a company like Scott. And all of a sudden, you have these big corporations. If you've got employees demanding, hey, I want two, three, four, five percent of my income paid in Bitcoin. They no longer have to go through exchanges. And on top of that, if you're getting more and more employees asking for Bitcoin, you're now orange-pilling companies without them having to use any form of infrastructure,

without them having to receive Bitcoin in terms of merchant services and whatnot. And so I think that another way to slowly orange-pill the corporate world is to approach it from the, hey, I want to be paid a portion of my wages in Bitcoin. And you reach out to someone like Scott at Block Awards. And I think this is another interesting approach that I think as a community we haven't thought about too much. on top of that, the last point I'll make. And Scott kind of raised my kind of like hyperhouse this, which is the fact that if we, let's say you have like Microsoft, one of the biggest lobbying companies in the world, if you start getting a large portion of employees saying, hey,

I want to be paid in Bitcoin and they have all of these lobbying dollars. And all of a sudden, they're pro Bitcoin. Then we've got more and more players that are on our side that have a lot of power in politics. And so I think that this is another back route into politics and having support on our side to kind of push regulation in our favor. Yeah. Yeah, I think I think earning Bitcoin is another key sort of positive feedback loop for changing circular economy because it also changes the reason for companies to want to accept Bitcoin because if you have Bitcoin already, that makes it even easier to pay your staff in it. You know, so these things sort of go hand in hand. And I love that. I love using the term better money. It is better money. Our slogan at Block

rewards is earn better money. I think like this idea like well if you have if you were presented the opportunity or the choice to earn one of two kinds of money and one is better than the other like your time's finite like why would you want to waste your time and uh with the money that like you said at the start band and you're you can earn money that's programmed to become less valuable over time or you can spend your time trying to earn money that is designed to really reward your efforts yeah 100% and I think I'm I'm going to try and put a bow on this topic but i i'm not i'm unsure if it's going to bleed into the the next topic or not if we're going to change gears but either way i'm i just wanted to say to everybody that did

reach out partake in this fly across parts of the country to be here for it um i i want to say thank you everybody that has uh gotten the saturday market to this point and uh and i'll let everybody know if it was i'm sure it'll be a success um but i'll let everybody knows know how it goes and hopefully we can replicate it again elsewhere. But with that said, we're going to do a rotation here. Scott, I'm going to keep it with you, actually. I'm going to toss it your way and I'm going to just ask you the same question everybody gets. Why are you bullish?

Well, I was planning to the sat market thing, but since you stole it, I'm going to have to come up with something on the fly. So my brand is about hyper-bitcoinization. And so it's not a thing per se, but it's been on my mind. mind over the last little while as we're heading into 2024 and thinking about all these massive tailwinds that are occurring for Bitcoin all at once. I think in the Bitcoin community you have this there's a there's a fair amount of sort of battle-hardened skepticism and I don't want to say jadedness, but like the longer people are in Bitcoin, the more they get wise to like let's let's just be patient about this thing. Let's have the right level of optimism versus realism. And

And I think what happens on that as an offshoot is the notion that since hyperbidiquinization hasn't happened as an overnight event, that that might mean that it's not happening or it might not happen ever. And my opinion of taking stock of everything that's going on as an observer of the ecosystem and everything that's coming is we are living in hyper-bitconization right now. it started with the Genesis block. Like, this is it. It's not going to be an event.

It's not like Christmas Eve or we're going to wake up. And it shouldn't be because if it did, that would probably be so insane that like the world's not ready for overnight hyper-victonization. It's more like, you know, it's less like Christmas. It's more like puberty. You know, it's a process and it's going to take time. This thing is going to take some time to unfold. Humans have been using money for like 5,000 years.

And so we can't expect people to understand that there's a better money just because that money exists. And things like this market, you know, Bitcoin is among other things, the sum of human action. And we observe that action and we contribute to it. And it's that part that drives the adoption and the evolution of how money and our understanding of money works. So I think, like, you know, turn off your dystopian predictive programming, Netflix, and stop watching the news. Like, these things are designed to make us fearful of the future because people who are afraid of the future are going to be wanting certainty. And they're going to be scared of the unknown. And so the reason why we have these things happening in the media is because we have the greatest technological source of optimism that could ever possibly have.

have existed in our hands. It's like we have the plans to the Death Star and we're sailing away and they know we have it. And so they're in this this bent on focusing on things that are negative and there's a lot of reason to do it, you know, ignores the pending ETFs. And we even see debates about whether or not the ETFs are going to be a positive thing like, yes, making it very easy for huge organizations to buy Bitcoin en masse is going to be a positive thing in the short tim. Trust me. FASB, making it easier for companies to hold Bitcoin in their corporate balance sheets. This is a big deal.

Gold being completely impotent is a big deal as a narrative around store of value. I think about in previous cycles, ordinary people didn't care about inflation or it wasn't such that it was a pain point that would actually make people start to question how money actually works in this question of what money is. this announcement yesterday about Rivers new link product. So like my lot of other thing is take stock of all of the innovation that's happening already today and then multiply that out. Like Bitcoin today has probably harness like 0.01% of the collective human brain power.

Like it's a good 0.01%. We've got some good brains in here. But like imagine what this thing is going to look like when we get 1% and 3% and 5%. and 5% and the collective inertia and innovation that's coming. And all of the people who aren't Bitcoiners today that are close to figuring it out. And on Twitter over this last couple of weeks, there's like Darth Powell and Owen Benjamin and all these people who are like, they're literally on the verge of orange pilling themselves by working their way through. You can see it. You can like watch it happening

in real time. And you know, I think about block rewards. We're one small company in one small town in Canada and we're building something really cool. And there are countless companies like us that are doing cool stuff. And so we get to be a part of like, I know it's people have endless amount of time to think about Bitcoin and what it might be and where it's going and what it is. But we're living through it now. Like this is it. Hyper-Bitcoinization is happening. We're here for it. I couldn't agree more. I won't take up the other gentleman's time to comment and everything I kind of took over the beginning of the show there. So I'll open it up to Seven John if you guys want to dive in at comments. Yeah, that was fantastic, Scott. You covered a lot

there. One of the things you reminded me of is a book that's probably near and dear to many Bitcoiners' hearts, even though the word Bitcoin does not appear in it because it was written in like 1997, I think. And that's the sovereign individual. And you just reminded me of this because I I think the parallels to what's happening now with, if you want to just call it Bitcoin monetizing or go as far as say hyper-bitcoinization, the parallels to what happened with the Catholic Church and the control that they had over all of Europe and then how they lost that through basically, I mean, a whole bunch of things, but one of the biggest ones was the printing press. And this book and then the free flowing of information and you couldn't just say, this is the

Word of God because I told you. And by the way, I'm Catholic. So this is not meant to be like an anti-Catholic thing. But it's just a point of fact that they got to a point where there was just control over the whole population, telling people when they could do things on different days and selling of indulgences and all that craziness. So you had this dynamic where there was basically an invention and it was the printing press. And if you look at that point in time, the Catholic Church would not have wanted this to have happened. But at the end of the day, they ultimately didn't have a choice. And this reminds me of the quote, there's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

But you probably don't want to describe all that as like, oh, it was a piece of cake. You know, it was so everyone should have saw this coming and there were no ups and downs because I think that was not the case whatsoever. And that's why this book is so incredible because they detail some of the things that were happening approximately in the year, you know, 1500, 1600, and some of the things that were going on, there was like huge back and force. Like you may have would have thought that the Catholic church was like, they're like grabbing onto their power and like trying to maintain it. And I think the analogy today is really good because you have someone like Elizabeth Warren with

this, you know, trying to abuse FinCin and doing things that are blatantly unconstitutional, expanding the bank secrecy act, which is unconstitutional to begin with. So there's, you know, expanding an unconstitutional program. Those things are going to happen. I don't think we should be so complacent to say, you know, Bitcoin's going to win no matter what, we're fine. I think that would be too much. I do believe that it is a technology and an invention and a network that will win over all these things. But there is going to be a back and forth. There's going to be the Elizabeth Warren's, and she's not even the first one to do this. Isn't this like the third time in the last two years that they're trying to make self-custody of Bitcoin de facto illegal based on KYC and data collection that

is literally impossible to do. So these kinds of things are going to happen. I ultimately believe it's a technology and an idea whose time has come. So yeah, super bullish for all the things you said, but you reminded me of that and wanted to share that analogy. I think you bring up some really good points, John. And again, Scott, that was such a good approach. And for thinking that on the spot. I wholeheartedly agree. I think, you know what? I think line of the night is definitely hyper-bitonization is like puberty. Because the reality is, it's exactly like puberty. Puberty, we go through highs and lows. We go through our first love, which is probably El Salvador, and then we're going to have breakups. We're going to have all of these events in our lives that are just going to

trigger some wild emotions, and some of them are going to crush us, and some of them are going to create immense change. But I think what's really important is we go through this as like a phase shift as opposed to this single event, just because naturally, although I think as a community, we have a deep understanding of Bitcoin, we also do not understand all of the advantages and disadvantages as to being on something like a Bitcoin standard. And not everything is going to be rosy. It's also going to create pain in certain ways, just like we know, if you have a lot of debt, all of a sudden your debt in a currency which is increasing in purchasing power is going to be incredibly burdensome. So I think it's really important to think about how can we transition

in a way that creates the least amount of damage, how do we transition in a way that benefits the most amount of people? And I think having that at the back of our minds as we're seeing this slow adoption is really important. Yeah. Also, the, the puberty analogy is great because all of us have the temperament like we're going through puberty too, flying off the handle at each other, screaming about simple little things. Yeah, it's very akin to that. Premature. I sold my Bitcoin early. Yeah, exactly. Oh, no. How embarrassing. Yeah, I think, again, like it's, it will seem, I will say in the context of history, it will seem quick, right?

It will, like, for those of us living through it now currently, it's going to seem very long, especially if you've been sitting around, for years basically saying, oh, it's obvious. This is how it's going to pan out. But then it takes the other, you know, 7.9 billion people on the planet a decade or two to figure it out. It's, yeah, that's, that seems like a long time when you are when you are certain of something and it takes 15, 20 years for you to see it play out, that's going to be a lifetime. But in historical context, when people are looking back and they're going, holy crap, these people base their monetary policy on like a handful of people in a room and they would actually move the amount of money as if that could create or ruin wealth as opposed to, you know, reallocate it. It's almost like nobody understood that creating more money didn't create more wealth. it just reallocated the percentage of the economy to those that had the control of the printer.

And I think in that context, when they're looking back, they're going to say, man, all this happened in like 20 years or 30 years. Like, that's crazy. But to us, I mean, that's like most of our like entire adult lives is watching this slowly play out. So, yeah, it's hard not to be impatient. Right? It's hard not to realize that you're living through probably one of the biggest seismic shifts in humanity in quite some time. And it's just rough realizing it and waiting for everybody else to get on your level. That's also why it's so refreshing to be with Bitcoiners in person because it's just the look and you know, you know.

I find it for one of the funniest things when people come up to you and they're just like Bitcoin has failed. Like who's using it? And you're just like Bitcoin is worth, I don't know what it is right now, $700 billion, $600 billion. And we're talking about something that has been around since 2009. And at one point it was like, I think it was the fourth largest currency in the world. You're talking about something that has just arrived in 2009. And I think people get lost in their own spectrum of time when in the grand scheme of things, something that is 12 years old at the pace or what is it 14 years old at the pace at which it is

right now is just truly truly profound truly profound yeah Joe Wisenthall who uh there's worse guys out there on Twitter than Joe Wisenthal but sometimes he has these takes that I'm just like oh my gosh he had said said something in the last month or two he said something to the effect of uh he was actually you know throwing Bitcoin a bone and he's like oh in 14 years Bitcoin is now, whatever it was at the time, $700 billion market cap. He said like, oh, it's impressive or something. He's like, but, you know, the 10 biggest tech companies in the world, like they have amassed more value. And I just remember thinking, I was like, okay, so these mainstream talking heads in financial media, five, six years ago, they were like, Bitcoin's a tool bubble.

Bitcoin's a scam. It's a Ponzi scheme. And now the critique is, okay, well, it's worth $750 billion. dollars but you know Microsoft is still worth more it's like do you guys even realize how far you've gone with this if that's how your critiques are changing you know like maybe you could at least acknowledge that you're doing a 180 here but they don't that seems to be lost on them on to your point as well john it's the thing i find so fascinating is that when the government steps in and intervenes with interest rates and suppress interest rates you're naturally redirecting capital to tech companies and growth

companies because you're extending their runway. Bitcoin has just seen hurdle after hurdle after hurdle. So we're fighting this huge headwind while these growth companies at their prices have just got these huge tailwinds. And so I think it's like comparing apples to oranges. Yeah, I'd agree. It's it's it's funny how again, the goalposts always get shifted for a lot of Bitcoin detractors. But I also have to say that, you know, there's definitely people that kind of come into the space and they have a specific idea of, you know, their interpretation of how Bitcoin should work and so and so forth. And it's still very early. We don't know exactly how all of this infrastructure is going to work together. But I see a lot of people when it's not

exactly as anticipated and that, you know, you kind of have to, you have to be ready to learn and adapt to how this network handles the world, right? Like, the network is going to kind of grow and handle different situations in very interesting ways. And so it's kind of up to you to adapt and learn how to most efficiently utilize that for yourself. Because at the end of the day, in its current form, most people aren't going to be interacting on-chain regularly. Like, those movements are going to be aggregating probably a whole bunch of different financial and economic activity all at once.

And so it's up to us to kind of decipher what the average person's interaction with Bitcoin looks like. And I mean, right now, we're at, we're at one of those funny puberty moments, right? We're at a point where we've seen companies previously have to grapple with how they can be more efficient on chain. You know, we saw that end of 2017, you know, Segwit had just been rolled out, but nobody was really, like it wasn't rolled out on exchanges or anything yet. Exchanges weren't batching. Every single withdrawal was an on-chain transaction. And so all of a sudden, you know, at end of 2017, I remember paying $100 plus dollars for a transaction. And so exchanges then realized like, holy crap, we can't be doing individual

transactions for every single person. We're like, our customers are getting pissed because the transactions are brutal. They're not going through quickly because the men pool is backed up. And we're, you know, we're getting screwed on fees too. Like we're unable to deal with it. So they ended up batching and doing all these things, adding segue. And now we're seeing similar things with exchanges, adding lightning and adding all of these different things. But for the first time, consistently,

we're seeing individual people have to be cognizant of how efficient they are using the main chain. And so we're hitting a puberty moment right now. And we're not even really in a bull run yet. So, like, in a way, it's kind of good because the people that are around right now, you have time to learn tools to kind of mitigate those factors. But, like, you can't just sit there and stand still and they get pissed when it doesn't work and you're, you haven't adapted to this very young network going through puberty. Like, you've got to be ready. So, yeah, I think my number one takeaway from, from this topic is things.

seem to be moving slowly, but at the same time, we're hitting those hurdles and there's these bursts of change that even us as Bitcoiners who know what's up need to adapt to and need to learn from. And yeah, it's happening. It's happening, everybody. But with that, again, I love this topic. I think it's super interesting. But with that, I'm going to put a bow on that one and we're going to keep it going.

I'm going to toss it down to John next. And John, I cue you up with the same question everybody gets. And I'll ask you, why are you bullish? So my answer is going to be very briefly. I'm bullish because it's early. And I think I can describe that in a bunch of different ways. Early in the sense that Bitcoin is $700, $800 billion market cap compared to gold, which is call it $11, $12 trillion.

Bitcoin still has to 15x just to match gold's market cap. And as I was saying earlier, most Bitcoiners would be of the view that if it, we use gold 2.0 as an analogy for Normies to wrap their head around, but we're not just trying to make Bitcoin the digital version of gold in all the same ways in the same market cap. So to have 15x ahead of you just to match your next comparable asset to me is incredibly bullish. and it's also a sign that we're early.

It's also something that I'm amazed that because I come from the world of Wall Street and institutional investing, specifically the world of fixed income bonds. And one of the ways we used to value corporate bonds, for example, is what we call relative value or looking at comparables. So you would take all the bonds in the particular industry, whatever it is, autos, pharma, banks, etc.

And you look at them and they each have a different credit profile. and they just have different spreads, which equates to the bond's price. And you would look at them and you kind of say, well, this company's better than this one. This one's better than this one. So you look at the one ahead of it that's better as a better credit profile, better management, etc. And you say, well, it's not going to trade tighter than this one. So that's kind of the best it can do. But that's the whole point of relative value analysis for evaluation.

People on Wall Street should understand that. This is like their bread and butter. But I've tried to talk to them about Bitcoin being, you know, still has to go up 15x just to match its next comparable asset. And you think that would land with them. You'd think that'd be like, oh, wow, there's this like really high ceiling. And it's not even a ceiling that has to stop there. It's not like once Bitcoin gets to $12 trillion, it has to stop for some reason. So you'd think that would land with them, but surprisingly it doesn't.

I think it is because they don't really understand even the concept of sound. They haven't read a book like Sebs or any of the other books about sound money. Other ways that I think were early, I have had conversations with my former colleagues who cannot tell the difference between Bitcoin and FTX. I mean, literally to them, it's the same thing. I've had a conversation with a former coworker of mine when I asked him what he thought about Bitcoin. He said he's even more confident that he wants nothing to do with it because of what happened with SBF and FTX, which obviously just displays a complete confusion about what's going on.

Also, bullish because why I think it's early is because if you look at how many people, I think, have actually adopted Bitcoin in a meaningful way, not like I bought $50 in my Coinbase account in 2017 or 2021 and I haven't looked at it since, like a meaningful way. It's a pretty small number. just on Twitter recently, Pleditor, who I'm sure everyone follows, he looked into a survey that Coinbase did, and they like kind of rigged the survey to heavily wait it with people who work for crypto companies. And of course, to Coinbase, it's crypto, not Bitcoin, but they wanted to give it this

impression that a higher number of Americans are like using crypto every day. But I think the reality is that we're much earlier in the adoption cycle than what Coinbase wanted to provide, make people think based on that survey. So I think we're just, we're super early, and I think that's a reason to be bullish. And then just one thing to kind of tie it into that and the topic we were talking about before, I think Ben, you were hidden on something that I think is just like why Bitcoin is so fascinating and would love to hear your guys thoughts on this. I think there's two ways to talk about Bitcoin. There's talking about sound money. And you could almost be talking about any asset. Like you could be talking about gold. You could be talking about Bitcoin and all the

amazing things about sound money. And then the second way is how does that asset succeed as sound money? And that gets into a conversation about all the things you were mentioning, scaling technologies. How do we actually scale this thing to 8 billion people so they can use it every day to buy what they want? In my opinion, the first of those topics, the sound money is like it's a shoe in. Like we need sound money. the whole people who say you need to have more units of currency for economic growth, they're just wrong. It's not a difference of opinion. They're just wrong.

The other one, I do believe it's not as clear. The path, and this is kind of what you were saying, Ben, like it's not as clear because not everyone's going to have an on-chain UTXO. That's the direction Bitcoin is heading. And even Bitcoin plus Lightning is not going to get 8 billion people using Bitcoin as a network for everyday transactions. So now you're talking Bitcoin plus Lightning plus Chami and eCashments, and those don't really exist yet.

So that's kind of my framework for talking about Bitcoin. One, I think, is very clear cut. The other one, it's not really built yet. So there's much more uncertainty there. I know I said a ton, but I will pause there. I like it, though. I think, yeah, I think that, you know, I like your buckets of how to,

how to talk about Bitcoin. And, you know, I think, I guess to elaborate on that, Bitcoin is is many things to many people, depending on why you're first coming to it. So, you know, the earliest, like obviously there's, there's most people, their initial interaction is speculation, but then it turns into long, you know, for those that get it, it turns into long-term savings. But there's also, you know, there's, there's the, the, the, the, the, the, the bucket of effectively preserving purchasing power is kind of like where even speculation comes from.

It's like, I don't want to be poor. But then there's also like this to a degree like escaping control, surveillance and coercion. And there's that aspect to it as well. And that's where like the on chain scaling and like the other, you know, privacy solutions and like how, how does the average person get to transact with. sound money, but in a way that can't be, you know, that is still as censorship resistant and is still like, you know, you don't want rug pull risk or, or you want a acceptable tradeoffs for what you're trying to do. And so like to a degree, yes, like you need, you absolutely

need that that verifiable, unruggedable base layer where you are certain of the rules of the system. But then do you need your coffee to be etched into the time chain for the rest of humanity to see in perpetuity moving forward? I'd argue maybe not. But also people are putting dick butts on the blockchain right now. So like, who am I to say? But either way, you know, the, I think the economics works itself out here. And, you know, this is, it's not really a choice in the long run in terms of if we want verifiability of the base layer, we got to keep that thing lean.

And so where do those tradeoffs come? They come in the form of expense on the base layer and tradeoffs in subsequent. layers and side chains. Yeah, I was thinking about a couple points as you were talking. And one, you know, the stats in Canada were something similar at one point. I remember seeing something like one in six or one in seven Canadians. And just in my day-to-day experience of talking to people, there is no way that one out out of every six people owns.

Like, just crypto, anything. It's definitely not. And then even at like zooming out at a bigger level, there was a pod, the TFTC episode that kind of blew up a little bit a couple days ago with Fred Kruger. And he, first time I've seen him, brilliant dude, talking about a bunch of different kind of Bitcoin post-ETF analysis, Wall Street guy. And, you know, lots of interesting insights if you watch that episode. And then the next day he was tweeting, he tweeted out something that was sort of the effect

of once Bitcoin hits a million, the party's over. And I was like, oh, like, okay, so you're still thinking that this is an investment. Like so even within people who are so quasi in the Bitcoin community there there is like a spread of opinions around what this thing is and where it goes to your point about how early we are. Right. And there's lots of smart, smart, smart people who even kind of understand, I'll say aspects of Bitcoin. That clearly have a differing opinion about what it's and state could be post-purity. Yeah. So I'm curious your thoughts here as well. Scott, you brought up a couple really good points.

First off, John, I wholeheartedly agree. I think when people are just like, look what Bitcoin's done. It's gone up from $1, $2, $3. Now we're sitting at $42,000. Like we're well along the way and we're just like, no. I think that we're still talking about the economics of Bitcoin. We're still talking about the price of Bitcoin. And we barely ever talk about all of the other aspects like how Bitcoin or how money

influences our social sphere, how money. influence our environment, how money influences politics and businesses. And this is where what I think is just so fascinating is that, and to your point, Scott, when Bitcoin starts hitting 500,000, a million dollars a coin, all of a sudden, I think people start to realize this is not just an investment. This is actually realigning the incentives in society and altering how we behave in society. Because all of a sudden, if you have a money that's incentivizing you to save as opposed to consume, people are going to start flooding into that money. Money's going to be pulling out of real estate. Money's going to be pulling out of equities.

money is going to be pulling out of the traditional finance bond market, you name it. And I think this is where at the moment, it doesn't really matter who you're voting for. If you're voting for left, if you're voting for right, if you're voting for Democrats, Republicans, because ultimately they're a product of a system that is incentivizing greater and greater intervention, given the amount of debt that we have. When we have a money that all of a sudden is incentivizing us to save, incentivizing us to be productive, incentivizing us to collaborate, because it's the only way to obtain in value is to offer value.

suddenly it's shifting all of these incentives in society. And so again, to your point, John, I think we're so early because the average individual doesn't really understand how our current system has massively misaligned incentives and doesn't really understand to what extent, even on monetary. We have like zero transparency in our monetary system in politics and you name it. And for me, it's interesting because like I told you guys, those two buckets are how I think about things, like the importance of just sound money and then how does Bitcoin scale to become sound money?

Buckets one and two. I am fully sold on bucket number one. Bucket number two is the one where I think there's much more uncertainty. Things need to play out. But for the average person, you can't start with, like it goes in order. Imagine trying to talk to the average person about Bitcoin scaling solutions when they're not even aware of the impact of fiat money and central banking or even commercial debt banking within the Fiat system on broader society.

Like they don't care about lightning. They don't care about transaction batching, Chami and eCashments. Like you have to start with the importance of sound money to a normal person. So yeah, I think that's just that's just the order of operations. It has to come first. And then once they're on board with sound money, because think about some of these people who believe the narrative that, oh, you need more units of currency to get economic growth. And if we of fixed supply money will enter into a depression because my high school economics teacher told me that the gold standard caused the Great Depression. Even if you could convince them that Bitcoin is sound money for 8 billion people and we can

zap sats to everyone instantly and it's totally secure and everything works, they won't care because their view is going to be, oh, but fixed supply money is bad. So you have to convince them first that sound money is the answer to so many problems. in society and then you can start talking to them about okay and here's bitcoin's plan to scale and to be sound money for eight billion people in the world it's i wanted to have one little point which is a slight tangent but it kind of just popped into my mind off what you were saying john talking about the depression i just recently listened to the what bitcoin did podcast with um mind block on her name the lady that started custodia uh katelyn long kailin long and if any of you guys

have an hour or so and you want to burn it go and listen to this point this point. podcast. One of the things she mentions, and I had no idea about this, is in 1920 there was a depression before the depression. And this depression isn't talked about. It was just as deep. It had just as high unemployment rates, supposedly, but it was only nine months long. And the reason why the depression happened is because after World War I, the US tried to go back onto the gold standard at the same rate, but it had far more debt. So you had this huge deflationary shock collapse in throughout society. So of course we saw this depression, but the central bank didn't intervene.

And all of a sudden, you let the free market play out. You allow debt to wipe clean, and it lasted nine months and it was over with. And so this is one of these things that's showing you, like, when we allow the free market to kind of take hold, when you allow the free market to kind of wipe clean, a lot of this malinvestment, it allows the economy to come back stronger. Whereas when we continually intervene, we're just, we're misaligning the incentives. We're incentivizing fiscal irresponsibility. Yeah. It's people are just utterly incapable of keeping their hands off.

When there's when there's a lever to pull and there's a button to push, it will be pulled and pushed. And so Bitcoin, that's all Bitcoin did, is it got rid of all the dials and the levers. And all you can do is press on and you can't turn, there's no off button. And so like that's, it's just, is it working? Yeah, it's still there. Cool. That's it. It just removed all of the complexity and then people have to now tailor their behavior to the machine as it's running. And that's what we get here. And I just think the pro central banking crowd will say, well, we have central banking to stabilize the system and to prevent financial crises from happening. I just don't understand how you could make that argument. Great Depression, 1929, 1971, you had to remove the basis.

unit because the system was so unstable. 2008, you have the greatest housing and financial crisis since the Great Depression. Then during COVID, I mean, COVID is unique, but you have to then, you know, inject all these new reserves in through QE. That does not seem like a stable system to me. I think you have, it's a very hard case to make that Fiat currency central banking has made anything more stable. Yeah. There was, there was a talk a little while back was safe and he made such a good point and he's just like I can't I don't think I've ever seen an animal that have got diabetes but I've also never seen an animal that has a PhD in nutrition or a master's in nutrition yet we've got all of these accolades

we've got all of these degrees and we're supposedly understand what we're doing yet we're making the system usually worse yeah and look at obesity rates all of those all of those PhDs have not vastly improved society have they Yeah. Well, nonetheless, again, I enjoy the rabbit holes that we went down with this topic. And John, thank you for that. And with that, we're going to do our final rotation. I'm going to pop over to Seb. And, dude, I'm going to cue you up with the same question. Why are you bullish? Take it away. So first to start, I would say when you look at money, money is meant to serve three functions. It's meant to be a store of value, a medium exchange, a unit of account.

Now, let's forget about these second two for a second and look at a store of value. When money loses value over time, naturally, we're going to try and seek value elsewhere. We're going to try and find that inflation hedge. So what do we do? We pile all our money into real estate. We pile all of money into farmland. We pile all our money into equities, you name it. And so all of a sudden, all of these assets just go up and up and up.

And that means that the average house no longer is being used for its utility purpose, which is to live in, to put a roof over your head to support. your family. Instead, it's being used purely just as an asset. And where I live, I rent a basement suite here in Whistler and the little ski resort. The average house is $4.5 million. It's insane. How can anyone afford this type of stuff? And even in the Cedar Sky Highway, which is from Vancouver up to Whistler, it's about an hour and a half drive, the average house is 100 times the average person's wage. So we've got all of the skewed asset prices because of monetary intervention, because our money is losing value over time and people are looking to seek to store that value in other

things like real estate what i think is so incredible about bitcoin is and i just take a step back and quickly describe why but bitcoin price uh well because its price goes up its purchasing power goes up over time rather than seeing our cost of living go up we see our cost of living go down now what's interesting is well first off why does that happen for those that may be unfamiliar when you've got a a fixed supply of currency and you've got increasing technological advancement, increasing productivity. If you think about technological advancement, we're always trying to get more for less. So if we're always trying to get more for less, then prices should fall over time, not rise. So if you've got a fixed supply of currency units, 21 million with Bitcoin, naturally, prices are going to fall.

So all of a sudden, if you're now incentivized to save in the currency, you're going to see money flood out of a lot of these other assets like equities, like real estate, back into the currency. So why am I bullish? Because the average individual is going to be able to slowly begin to afford a house again. The average individual is going to be able to support their family and have some form of sovereignty rather than having society built upon renters. So I think Bitcoin is truly incredible. And again, this is kind of going back to John's point, this isn't something that's happening

overnight. This is something that I think is a lot further down the line. But you're shifting all these incentives in society. If you incentivize people to save in the currency, they no longer have to seek inflation hedges and all of these other types of assets. And I also think, again, it takes a lot of money from all these startups that, although yes, I think there's a lot of startups that are creating a lot of value in society, there's also, we're burning trillions of dollars into a lot of these unicorns, 90% of them fail. And that is immense capital destruction. So if you're incentivized to save, people are going to be a lot more conscious how they direct their capital. If they're a lot more conscious of how they direct their capital, then people are going to have to increase the amount of value they're offering to society. So it's kind of, there's a few different things in there, but I'll let you. you guys riff on that. Yeah.

I mean, this is one thing that I find it, it's hard to communicate. Like you're talking about, again, the, um, financialization of everything.

And this is a, this is a very difficult thing to get people to understand because, again, we, we've, everything in society is, as the quality of just about everything is degraded, and that includes our education coming out of school.

And so you don't get the bare bones basics of any sort of fiscal responsibility by the time you exit high school. Like that's, that's, you know, that's on top of what you, you know, you learn all this other, I'd say borderline useless crap throughout high school. You graduate, you have no idea actually how to live.

So it's incredibly difficult to describe to people that are used to just looking at surface level, like prices are high. Who is selling the thing? The landlords are evil. And so, you know, that's about as far as it goes for everyone. In Canada, we're seeing the same thing where groceries are super expensive. I can't afford to feed my family anymore. And we have our own prime minister saying, oh, it's the,

the grocers. They're the ones that we need to, like, they are making record profits as measured in fiat, like pure numbers terms, but not accounting for the percentage of their, you know, how much are they actually keeping? What's their net? And so like percentage wise, you know, that, it's still slim as hell margins when it comes to, to major grocers. And so like we, we have a a whole group of people that is not used to looking beyond like, this is expensive. This person's selling it. They have upped the prices. There's no why that comes after that.

There's no, well, where did the person get this product from? Where did the person that created that product? How are their prices informed? What things did they have to buy? They don't realize that it's all kind of cyclical and coming around. and they don't realize that it goes beyond just what you see. And I think the hardest part to explain to people, which I've tried to distill, is that, again, when you have all of the goods and services that currently exist in a system,

if you just add more currency units, you don't create anything. you just all that money just represents the same stuff that already existed. And it's just a matter of, okay, well, what percentage of all the money do you have now? Less, unless you're the one who printed the new stuff. And so it's like, well, you can now, now you can buy a lesser percentage of all the stuff that existed. And so the tricky thing with inflation is trying to explain to people like it's not, it's much more insidious than even our day-to-day when we're saying under regular conditions, oh, it's a couple percent or whatever. It's much more in cities than that, Seb, you pointed to it is we are constantly

able to, through human ingenuity, able to create more stuff with less effort. And so not only are we losing the couple percent on the pricings, it's we're losing the, God knows how many in just efficiency that we've gained as people. Like you go out, it's definitely not more expensive to create a can of Coke than it was 50 years ago. It's orders of magnitude cheaper to create that product in terms of like human effort and the scale at which you can do it. It should be orders of magnitude cheaper to buy a can of Coke right now, but it's not.

it's like, you know, multiples and multiples of what it originally was. So people don't, they don't even realize that the inflation is like the few percent, plus all of this stuff tailing it, trailing it that has happened beforehand. So, I mean, that's kind of my main hurdle in trying to explain this stuff to people. Yeah, I was just actually at the airport on my, after landing, when I'm after landing, waiting for my bags, telling somebody what I was doing here. And the first thing that came out of his mouth was, well, you guys are going to have to fix that volatility thing.

Yeah. Sure. To your original point, Seb, you know, I think about this sometimes and I wonder whether or not you can actually pull apart unit of account and store of value because I really think the two are sort of like inexorably linked because it's really what you're talking about, right? Like as the store of value, as money fails in its function in a store of value, that's when we start to see unit of account get weird.

And vice versa, right? Like when the price of a bottle of Coke didn't change for like 65 years, that was as a result of store of value doing its thing and the unit of account staying the same. So I do think that it's this, yeah, it's a super weird thing to, for people understand, but and it's going to be painful to get there. But I'm so, I want to agree with you, and we've talked about this before with real estate, like the prospect of Bitcoin making life affordable for average people is one of the most exciting things about it.

Yeah, for sure. I love that, Seb. I like to say I'm one of the crazy people that believe sound money is going to improve our systems of education, healthcare, science, food, art, architecture, energy. Maybe I missed one or two there, but I fully believe that. And I know people, normies, so to speak, would think that's absolutely insane for someone to say that. I don't think it's that crazy if you consider that money is the tool that we all use to coordinate all of our behavior. Unless you're going to live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and completely forego money and specialization and trade and all the things in a modern economy,

money is going to affect everything. So it's not really that surprising to me that to say that it's going to affect all these systems. If you corrupt the money, you're going to corrupt all these systems. This is why Bitcoiners say fix the money, fix the world. One thing I will mention that it's kind of talked about in Bitcoin circles, but maybe not as much as the others, is this idea of perpetuating wealth inequality. And this system or wealth concentration, I should.

should probably say if I want to be really accurate about it. Because if you say wealth inequality is a bad thing, some people might say, oh, are you saying that wealth should be equal everywhere? No, I'm definitely not saying that. It is natural for wealth to be unequal. People are different. People have different interests, different skills, et cetera. But I think there's unnatural levels of wealth concentration.

And I think our system has, to put it very succinctly, has pumped up asset prices. Like you said, homes that are costing 100 times the average wage. in some areas, just financial assets in general, people who had a retirement account that has been invested over the last many years and they've been earning 8 to 12 percent because that's what stocks in the 60 portfolio, 6040 portfolio have returned for them. This is causing unnatural wealth concentration, especially in an environment where this is not real investing. If you truly invest and you take the risk and you do the analysis and you do the work, you deserve to get a return for sure.

But that's not what this system has been for decades at this point. It's basically every time there's been something bad that is going to happen, whether it's 2008 or COVID, the system gets bailed out. What would have happened to people's financial assets in 2008, whether it's your house, whether it's your stock portfolio, if the fiscal authorities and the monetary authorities didn't step in, those people would have lost their shirt. But since we bail out the system, we perpetuate it, and 2020 was the same thing again, financial asset owners keep getting bailed out. Their money keeps multiplying at this rate because it's just the system that keeps charging along and keeps

inflating, keeps inflating. And I think it's just, it's absolutely terrible for unnatural wealth concentration. I wouldn't blame a young person for being pretty disheartened if they don't have a house, they don't have a 401k, they don't have a brokerage account. They're not going to be feeling very good right now. And I think that's pretty warranted. So in addition to all those systems that I think broken money corrupts, it also just, it really hurts this unnatural wealth concentration. And it's just imperative for us to stop this train before it gets too late. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Scott, do you want to dive in here too? You know, I think I made my point on that one. I'm good.

All right, fair enough. I was going to add one point to what you were saying, John, which is, I think it's super fascinating. And that is, at the moment, you can see this in action where people just cannot afford to even get into the housing market. We're seeing this wealth inequality. And as you say, wealth inequality isn't the best word. It's wealth, wealth, more wealth concentration. But millennials today, I think what is it, we own 4% of the housing market. What's interesting is the baby boomers, when they were our age, they own 35% of the housing market. So you're seeing over time that concentration of wealth just because assets are so pricey, we just can't get into the market in the first place. Yeah.

It's again, like the, you've seen endless streams now of these videos. of people that are not even in, not even in jobs that would, would be looked at as, oh, it's just a temp job. You see, you see videos now of nurses,

you know, crying in their cars because they can't afford to live. And they're like, I don't, I don't understand. I literally did everything I was told. I went to school. I trained in a job that's in demand that people need,

like people need nurses. and I went and I worked and I I can't feed my family and like where I can't cover rent. I can't put food on the table. And they're, you know, and they're like, I'm making $30 something dollars an hour or whatever, which to me sounds good. And I don't understand how in a what's what was traditionally known as like a good career, I could be struggling to survive. And, you know, John, I think, again, this, your, your mention and Seb as we're going down the rabbit hole of, of, of, I guess we're in a situation where, John, you were saying that that wealth can be concentrated, uh, how did you term it? You said, um, artificially or like a natural wealth concentration. Yeah. And so like in, in, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a

functioning society, wealth would be concentrated on those that have brought forth the most value to society. And that couldn't be further from the truth right now, right? All you see is like, you see the wealth on Wall Street. It's all financial products. It's all speculative. It's all, hey, we're closest to the money spigot. And it's no wonder that that builds up so quickly when, of course, you get the purchasing power first. And it's all, you're capitalizing on people trying to escape the monetary debasement, even though they don't fully understand why they just know, well, I got to trust somebody else to take my money and do something with it because I can't just be good at something and save for retirement. So yeah, like people don't realize how much

this breaks society just by having a broken money. It's the basis of everything. And I think too, like those videos where people are going live just to vent about their frustration of being a participant in society, that wasn't a thing. Like four years ago or eight years ago, like this is not being a normal thing, and it's not meant to be a normal thing. And this is why, back to my rant, about like, it's going to be painful for people to get there. But it's part of having a really fertile ground for people having the actual impetus to go out and start caring about what money is and how it works is when it's finally broken enough

that you can have a real job and work as, you know, as many hours as you're expected to, and you still cannot be, you know, living a regular lifestyle. And this is happening now. Like, Canada is not the way. We're banana republic. We should be able to have an expectation to have the kind of lifestyle that we thought we would have growing up in a country like this.

And a lot of people are finding out that that's not the case. And it's because of what's happened in the money. Yeah. And where it gets a little frightening is where, so some of what you guys have mentioned, Ben, you were talking about, like people can identify there's a problem, right? Whether it's prime minister in Canada, grocery prices are too high. How you react to that problem can be very different. Like he's saying, go after the grocers, this evil grocery managers, whatever.

That's a very different response. And I also get worried with younger people because they identify there's a problem. And a lot of them tend to end up maybe supporting like socialist authoritarian policies. And you almost want to not be too hard on them because it's like they are in a very difficult situation and they're identifying a problem. It's just that's not the right answer. So you hope that we can kind of stop this train before it gets too late. I think one of the reasons to potentially be optimistic.

is you look at what happened in Argentina. So this one's like you can look at it both ways. It's like Argentina voted in a libertarian guy who's sympathetic to a narco-capitalist ideas that, you know, if I used to read about those on the Mezes Institute blog, like after the financial crisis and I was a total weirdo for reading that. And now there's a guy who's the president of a country of 40 million people who believes that. It's crazy when I think that. So that's the positive side of things.

He calls central banking a scam. calls legal tender laws of scam. The flip side is Argentina had to go through some really bad times in order to get there. Similarly, in the U.S., we had the Gilded Age, which is the late 1800s, happened roughly like 10 years after a civil war. So you have to wonder, like, does it have to get really bad before it gets better? I hope that Bitcoin is this Trojan horse for peace, as some people call it, and that the existing system can go out with a whimper rather than a that remains to be seen but that's you know playing both sides there it'll be interesting to see how it plays out John you bring up like such good points and one of

the ones I think so fascinating because you're talking about a lot of the present generation they can lean towards those socialist tendencies because they're not really questioning the system is there's the founder of Toyota he came out with this thing called the five wise and the five wise is kind of it's built around that kind of like our first principles thinking which is any time something is happening ask why is it happening. And then once you figure out why it's happening, ask why that thing is happening. And then why again and then why again?

And you're trying to get down to that root cause. And what I find is interesting is there's so many individuals you talk to and they're just like, I can't afford rent right now. This is my landlord's problem? And then it's just like, why don't you ask the question, why is your landlord raising rent? And then once you figure out why the landlord's raising rent, ask why he has to cover his expense and so on and go down this chain until you kind of hit a roadblock where you can't really, you're trying to get to that root of that problem.

And it's scary because when we're in a, a system that is constantly taking more and more and more of our time because naturally our purchasing power is declining. Our cost of living is rising. We have to work more. We don't have the time to critically think. And to your point, it's really easy to fall into these totalitarian, these authoritarian regimes because we're simply trying to pass off thinking onto someone else because we just don't have

the time. And so I think it's so important for people to question, why is this happening? And if you think you know why, ask again, why is that happening? Dig a little deeper than that super superficial layer. Yeah. Yeah, it's, it happens so seldom that it's, you know, you almost got to go back to being a kid. Well, you can't have that. Why?

Because I said so. Why? Like, you have to go back to that mindset in order to get anywhere. I guess maybe that's part of the going through the schooling system is, is by the time you get out the other side, you stop asking why. Do what you're told. Anyways, gentlemen, okay, so I'm conscious of time. I've got to start rounding out here, but there's a way that I typically like to finish up the show. And the way I usually do that is I just do a quick round of two things.

Number one, final thoughts, anything like what your takeaway from the episode was, anything that you didn't get off your chest, welcome to throw those out here. But number two would be recommendations. So recommendations can come in any form. It could be as simple as a piece of life advice, something that you found useful in kind of your journey in Bitcoin and otherwise, that you think people watching would find useful. But it could be a more substantial, okay, maybe here's a website to check out, here's a device I liked, here's a service that I like, here's a blog that I read or a video that I watch, whatever that may be. So anything that you'd like to kind of throw out there, I am going to use this opportunity to shill for, for Seb and I'm going to say go grab the hidden cost of money. It is on Amazon and you can,

is there is there a better, would you prefer people to grab it on Amazon or would you prefer them to grab it elsewhere if it's better for you? I don't know. Well at the moment it's on it's on Amazon and if it's easiest for you to order on Amazon by all means go and order on Amazon. If you live in Canada or in the States, you can always reach out to me as well and I can sign a copy and semi-sats and I'll ship it down to you as well. And I'm more than happy to do that. There you go. Well, either way, I'm very excited to dive in.

Preston Pish had plenty of kind words. Again, you've got Greg Foss chiming in on the cover with a quote here. You've got the foreword by Daniel Prince. And I mean, Severe, again, the stuff that you guys have been doing with looking glass education is phenomenal. So I fully expect to thoroughly enjoy it. But I'm giving a preemptive stamp of approval nonetheless, and I can't wait to dive in.

So, yeah, go check it out. The hidden cost of money. Is there an F-bomb in Fost's quote on the cover? It doesn't be. You know, I was looking at that, and I was thinking, like, I feel like he said it that way, and then the editor was like, oh, we've got to change that. He tried.

He did his best. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But yeah, go check it out. and offer your support. And if you want to do the full sandwich, then pick up a copy of the hidden cost of money, Lynn Alden's broken money, and then, and then, you know, it'll be a shit sandwich, but get the deficit myth in between there, and you'll be good. Thanks a lot, Ben. Honestly, it means the world. I really, really appreciate it. The last few days have been a little overwhelming. Well, it's good, man. I mean, you put in the work. This is this,

this seems like a solid a solid resource here so um and then yeah i i think that's pretty much it in terms of final thoughts again like it's i i i think the puberty uh you know a comparison was was spot on and uh we'll continue to go through it for a little while longer and uh that's okay we'll just be awkward and irrational for a little while and and uh we'll we'll come out of it it's a face anyways with that i'll toss it down the line scott i'll go to you final thoughts recommendations go man sure yeah uh you know i think this thing happening tomorrow morning in calgary is a really cool example for other people in canada or wherever you are if you're listening to start thinking about you know copycatting and see how many of these events can pop up elsewhere this idea of uh trading

for all kinds of stuff is just really cool. And I do think it's part of this natural evolution of changing the perception of what Bitcoin means in culture. And as a recommendation, I would say, if you're not so into reading, Seb was on Preston's pod this week. And that episode was really also worth checking out. So for those who are less interested to sit down

and plow through the text. That's my recommendation. Awesome. Love it, man. You guys are too kind. Well, toss it to John next. John, any final thoughts, recommendations, anything top of mind? Go ahead.

Yeah, so what comes to mind, I won't show swan too hard, but this is kind of tangential to swan. We do a ton of Bitcoin education. So we just came up with a, I want to get the URL, here. So it's welcome.swainbittcoin.com, welcome to Bitcoin, Bitcoin 101 type thing. Really great resource. Natalie Brunel is the host of it. She does a fantastic job. We'd recommend everyone check that out. If you're interested, you could use it for yourself. Oh, awesome. Thanks, Ben. You could use it for

yourself. If you are starting to get those text messages from people, which have not started for me, I should have mentioned that. That's another reason why I think we're early. In 2021, I did get these texts from people like, hey, John, I know you're kind of into Bitcoin. Like, can we, can, you know, what's going on with it again? That has not really started to happen at all for me right now. So I think we're very early in this, in this bull cycle, what if you start to get people in your life that are, you know, wanting to talk to you about Bitcoin, they want to learn more.

This is a great resource. I would just, you know, show the idea of going to in-person Bitcoin events. Twitter's great. Zoom is great. It allows people to connect that couldn't otherwise. connect, but the in-person stuff is fantastic. You're going to meet like-minded people that you probably get along with on many other topics beyond Bitcoin. And then just in terms of orange-pilling friends, I think there's something to be said for not going too hard. Maybe just have a few

screenshots on your phone of like, you know, dollars purchasing power since 1913. We've all seen it. You know, like there's probably a handful of others that rather than sending someone, I mean, sending them a book if they're willing to read the book, totally great. If they're willing to do the podcast, great. Sometimes just sending people like a few screenshots of photos on the phone might be better for them. It's not as intimidating. So that comes to mind.

And yeah, just some thoughts on how to meet Bitcoiners in real life and learn about Bitcoin and share it with people. I love it. And you know what? I've also wanted to, I'm adding to my recommendations here, by the way. You should go and you should check out, of course, block rewards.ca. So, Scott, I'm shilling for you, but I'm going to get you to give a quick description of what you guys do, just so people are privy to it.

Yeah, thank you. So we want to be able to incorporate compensation, Bitcoin into compensation in whatever way an employer can imagine today. So I think that when I think about the way people get paid, sort of a buzzware, like the term is total rewards. That's the total basket of things that you take home from work. So that's your salary and your bonus compensation could also be your benefits. And then if you have some kind of a savings plan. And I think that Bitcoin has a place to be considered in each one of those baskets. So it can be something that is cool and different.

employers can consider offering it as a way to stand out or attract and retain staff. Obviously, Bitcoin's a savings tool. It's the Apex savings tool. So forward-thinking employers who want to start imagining how Bitcoin could be a standalone or a part of a retirement strategy for their employees. We have a product to do that too. And then people who want to start thinking about taking part of all their salary in Bitcoin. So we can facilitate some or all of these things.

and really the purpose of it is to be able to work with companies small, big, in the middle, and build sort of a custom strategy and help them roll it out with education and support so that their staff might feel comfortable to participate and take advantage of it. That's awesome, man. Well, go check it out, blockrewards.ca.com.ca. This is explicitly in Canada, correct? It is for now, yeah. And yeah, I just love this.

Like, to me, the idea that Bitcoin is better money is really triggering for people who don't understand that it is better money. And so I just want to use this term as frequently and as frustratingly as possible. And it's like inception. You know, we can just, it starts with a seed and people go home and they're angry and they're laying in bed and they're thinking like, what the fuck is he talking about better money? It's volatile magic, nothing, beans. And then one day, they're going to be wanting to trade their time for it. And that's kind of the goal. That's what we're hoping to do.

Awesome. I love it, man. Great. Well, we'll toss it down to Seb to wrap us up. Final thoughts, recommendations, all yours. Yeah, I'd just say when it comes to recommendations, Scott, you stole my second one, which was, Ben, you stole my second one, which was Scott. Block rewards is awesome.

And I've only just got to know Scott in the last, I'd say, three or four. months and it's been such a pleasure. Yeah, super cool company block rewards. So if I was to change, I would change it to one or two videos, one that I mentioned during the talk, which was the Caitlin Long, what Bitcoin did podcast. If you're, if you're kind of new to Bitcoin, it's probably a little over your head. It talks a lot more about the politics of Bitcoin. But if you're down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, it is a phenomenal talk and just kind of a few insights that really blew me away. And then next up as well, and this isn't even a Bitcoin resource. It is Max DeMarco, which is another bitconer in the space, creates phenomenal Bitcoin videos.

He just released something, I think it was like two days ago, on seed oils. So if you are not familiar with seed oils, if seed oils are in your diet, then you got to get those seed oils out of your diet. Go watch Max DeMarco's video on Ced oils. You can find them on Twitter. But yeah, and I really appreciate everyone on the call. And it was great to chat to you, John, and great to meet you because I don't think we've met before.

But outside of that, again, then it was awesome. And I appreciate you having me on. Awesome. Yeah. Thanks for being here. And thanks all of you for carving out the time on a Friday evening to join me. I really do appreciate it. And again, obviously, everybody in the chat, thank you for being here.

I encourage you to follow all of these gentlemen. Their Twitter handles are down below. And from there, you'll be able to find everything else that they are partaking in. And yeah, gentlemen, thank you for being here. And of course, you're all welcome back anytime. So have a great weekend. Thanks, me, tomorrow. I loved it.

See you guys. All right. I'll see you guys later. Awesome. And everybody, thank you so much for watching, of course. Again, go follow all these guys, see what they're up to. Before we round out, of course, please do like, subscribe, share all those things help a ton. Little like button below the screen, tap that.

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I'll see you guys next time for your daily session. I'm going to