TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #572: The Story of How Money Was Broken with Joe Bryan

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

Marty sits down with Joe Bryan to discuss his presentation of the problem of fiat currency. Joe on Twitter: https://x.com/satmojoe SatsVsFiat: https://x.com/SatsVsFiat What's The Problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtFOxNbmD38&t 0:00 - Intro 0:36 - Joe’s background 9:53 - Borrowing on bitcoin stabilizes the market 13:02 - Unchained 14:49 - Educating on the problem with money 18:57 - The origin of Joe’s story 24:00 - Zaprite & SOTE 25:33 -The power of storytelling 32:34 - Outlining the Fiatello story 51:45 - Response to the presentation 58:39 - Preparing for 2025 Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Fold https://foldapp.com/marty Zaprite https://zaprite.com/tftc Salt of the Earth https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. All right. Take two, Joe. I'm sorry. As I was describing my my poor setup here, some audio went on in the background of my mic.

I didn't know if it was picking that up. But like I said, we met this morning or got connected this morning. you're now meeting face to face, you just released a 38 minute video to try to break Bitcoin down from first principles for beginners. What's the problem? And I think the problem that you're trying to solve in terms of a one touch piece of content or education that would help people fall down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and be compelled to learn more is really enticing. But before we drive into what's the problem, the story of Satoshi versus Fiat Tello and what happens on this island that the civilization gets stranded on, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and how you came to become passionate about this particular problem of educating people about Bitcoin? Sure, sure.

um all right well i guess you start start at the beginning but martin the danger of turning into a monologue so just interject and and and tell me and steer me a little bit here um my i am based in the uk um grew up in yorkshire around the north um of england i I studied physics at university and then went on to become an equity derivatives trader, initially at Goldman Sachs, and then spent 10 years in the city at Morgan Stanley and UBS for the last few years, and subsequently went on to found a sports modeling content engineering business um which was producing modeling uh football so soccer for you guys from an algorithmic perspective um producing automated models and pricing systems

and supplying those to to bookmakers and then we're ultimately acquired by our biggest customer um that was in 2018-19 and then spent the last five six years growing helping to grow that business from a sort of national champion to a to a global player um and on the way found bitcoin in 2020 you know very similar time to a lot of other people um and then had the opportunity to take a step out of that business earlier well last year now we're in 2025 now um and so So, yeah, now I'm focused entirely on thinking about how to further the adoption of Bitcoin in a variety of ways. And so that's a super high level and you happen to dig into any part of that in relation. Well, let's dig into it.

I mean, just broadly speaking, based off of the resume you just listed there, seems like you've been in the business of managing risk for for quite some time and i think that's how many bitcoiners view bitcoin as a way to manage the risk of currency debasement so was it the the risk aspect of risk adjusted potential of bitcoin that drew you to it or was it understanding problems in the world of risk that you were involved in and how systemic the risk may be that drew you to it yeah i think i think you've honed in on it there like my entire career has been managing risk in very in various different forms um and even from a sort of personal perspective and interest perspective that has always been where i was drawn to i always wanted

to be a bookie growing up you know i used to work in the betting shops in new yorkshire and things like that and so you know it was always around you know having a good sense of risk versus reward um and you know that carried through my uh my journey from university to to work because you know i was interested in in derivatives because it was never it's not about gambling you know when people think about taking risk and things it's not about gambling gambling is never doesn't interest me you know i like watching sports you know but i'd rather not have money on the sport you know have a little bet or something like that but it's purely just for interest interest sake the the risk reward comes from you know you want to sharpen your

skills and be able to take the right risks at the right time and appropriately size what it is you're risking based on your confidence of the of the outcome um and bitcoin just blows everything else out the water i mean there is it is just the the biggest asymmetrical bet of all time and you know in 2020 i came you know i i everyone's got these touch points about bitcoin and you know from you know somebody told me about it and whatever um and there have been various points but i was inside the system and you know when you're much like the the crisis article that he wrote about the why the yuppies don't get the yuppie league don't get the point yeah really yeah when you're inside the system you just it's beyond your sort of mental model

to think that something exists outside that you're not aware of because you've been taught and everybody you interact with operates in this system and this is just how the world works. And even finding Bitcoin in 2020, it was found from that perspective. You know, much like, you know, the rest of the world, I've stuck at home listening to podcasts, things. And at that time, I've actually listened to a lot of Real Vision. um and this was in a previous incarnation of real vision before you know um and you know

ralph was going through that similar sort of discovery around bitcoin obviously he come across it earlier but was really sort of digging in asking those questions at a time and i was sort of i felt like we were going through a similar page similar stage but even then it was from a trade perspective it's like you know you've got fixed supply you've got this demand and it was you know almost mechanical but then when you get into it you realize yeah that's like that's part of the story but that's that's like missing missing the biggest almost like the biggest piece and so you end up coming into bitcoin going through that risk-reward high-level view.

But then when you dig into it, you realize it just changes everything. And so not only is it the same, not only is it have the risk-reward you thought, but it's even better. It's even better because what the financial markets don't understand is that once you've walked through that door, that you're never going back, ever. and so it's unlike any other asset that's ever existed and so you know sort of i'm monologuing i'm monologuing here massey but but it's like you know when people and it's touches on micro

strategy and things like this as well when the price goes up the financial markets think people are going to sell it's just that's just not how it works that's not how it works with bitcoin you know i i've i've gone through that inflection point and i'm sure you have as well where like i go to bed at night worrying i don't have enough not that i have too much right i'm getting annoyed and the price goes up and smiling when it ditched 10 you know it's it's you've reached that sort of point and you know that you're not the only one right there is an increasing number of these people all around the world and when you overlay that mentality and that level of um conviction on top of that risk reward from a mechanical perspective for bitcoin

is that all bets are all bets are off it's not a question of when it's a question you're not questioning if it's a question of when um and so yeah it's a very long way of answer your question but it's um yeah i think my my whole career has led me to landing on bitcoin is just the greatest asymmetrical trade of all time and and now there's just nothing else worth working on yeah no i mean that's incredible context for the background how you came the bitcoin as you're explaining it and walking through it i couldn't help I think of a couple of things.

Number one is I would like to get your perspective on how risk broadly in traditional markets, global markets is mispriced right now because of money and particularly how central banks and governments can manipulate it. And then number two, to your last point about hodlers not wanting to sell, I think now as it stands in 2025. I'm not sure if you've read Stone Ridge's annual letter from Ross Stevens this year, but it's becoming even easier for people who do have the conviction not to sell as we get products, whether it be commercial real estate credit products. I think eventually residential mortgage products will come to market. We've already seen Bitcoin collateralized

lending desks. Now we've got lending products using insurance premiums to drive down that borrowing cost for Bitcoin holders. Now heading into 2025, heading into Bitcoin's 16th year of existence, the ability for people with the conviction to not have to sell and just use their Bitcoin as collateral to borrow is only getting easier. And I think that adds a variable to the price volatility that has existed historically that has not entered the market the first 15 years. Now it's much easier for hodlers to hold and apply the whole buy, borrow, die playbook to this asset,

which I don't think many people really appreciate yet. Yeah, absolutely. and you know i'm i'm slightly i'm slightly flipping when i say that nobody's going to sell when the price goes up because of course people will you know their priorities are their families and things like so we still live you know in a fiat world you know for now and so some people take some money off the table to improve their family's life pay down the mortgage and these sorts of things but you're right we're reaching that stage of maturation really in the ecosystem around bitcoin the asset which gives people much more flexibility i think to think about this as

being a core piece of their long-term estate and managing the risks around that for the long-term good of their family um and so you know the development of these new products and you know collateralized uh lending facilities things like which is which is great it's uh sort of drifting more towards the standard products you would have in existing financial markets when it comes to lending against private shares and things like this, for example, which is obviously great. I haven't read his article though, so apologies on that one. This rip was brought to you by our great friends at Unchained. As Bitcoin's role in the global financial landscape evolves, understanding its potential impact on your

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Ridge letter yet. But I think the point the point stands is the the ability for Bitcoin to be kept off the market and really crunch that supply demand dynamic that exists is is only increasing from here. And it seems like traditional finance people are beginning to wake up to it. Obviously, we had the ETFs last year. We've got the strategic Bitcoin reserve being talked about At the federal level here in the United States, you mentioned micro strategy. I think it will be interesting to see how quickly the traditional finance world wakes up to this risk-adjusted opportunity that exists in Bitcoin. And I think that's the what's really great about what's the problem and what you're doing to try to educate people is that most people don't even recognize that there's a problem in the first place, which is insane to think, especially for people in traditional finance who are supposed to be in this world of money making and managing risks. They many don't understand what money is at the end of the day.

yeah absolutely i i yeah i would add something to that in that i think people know something's wrong because they can feel it they can feel that things are not moving in the right direction you know life is becoming more challenging but pinpointing why that is the case is very very hard especially when you are being told it's this or it's that or it's it's them or it's you know in the media for example um and you're you know the cause and effect is obfuscated it makes it very very hard for the everyday person who doesn't have the financial background or has done the you know thousand hours of you know Austrian economics and understanding the banking system and listening to Lynn Alden I think all these

things to really piece that together. And, you know, I think, I certainly hope, what's the problem helps people with that. You know, it's not, it was an accidental creation. In all honesty, I don't see myself as, I'm not prioritising trying to educate people. um but it's something i've created and was then encouraged to do something with because it was effective um and so yeah i'm just so glad to have it out there and the initial reception has been amazing but some of the comments you know i'm i'm very happy being in the background i've never you know posting stuff is is quite uh for i'm sure i overlap a lot with a lot of your audience is it's not where i would like to be in the in the spotlight happy to be behind the

scenes figuring stuff out um so it's been an uncomfortable sort of 24 hours putting this out there and you know um but i've made up with the comments just some the people have watched it so far you know the fact they're going to share it with their friends and like this is the missing piece for them um this just makes it worthwhile um so yeah yeah delighted thank you for having me on to come to talk about it so a welcome surprise at the end of the day well let's let's jump in what compelled you to to make the presentation in the first place was this something just for friends and family was it an exercise and first principles for yourself well it was for it was for friends um i got you know most of us most of us end up and you're slightly different because

um you know you put out the newsletter and so you're constantly thinking about taking what's in your head and putting on a piece of paper and communicating it to other people and i see that that process is a fairly regular one for you i'd expect also in preparing for your podcasts and guests and all of these different things but for most of us i suspect it's not and so you carry this jumble of sort of jumble of knowledge and conviction and insight in your head but you're never really forced to get it down into some tangible form um and i was invited about three months ago by a friend um for a weekend away where he invited about 15 people from his you know his life who all shared sort of entrepreneurial um backgrounds to go and

hang out together you know we'll talk about stuff we'll have a good time but everyone brings something to talk about so you know you can then share it with everybody else but i didn't know anybody else going and you know and he knew my friend and i was like what am i gonna what am i gonna go talk about you know um you know my first thought was oh god i'm gonna have to stand up in front of 15 people i don't know and talk about something you know um but i was like well the only thing i actually want to talk about is bitcoin and so but i didn't know who else didn't know whether anybody else going a new bitcoin and then be to what extent the new bitcoin and so i you know had to sit down and think like what am i actually going to go and talk to them

about and so i end up having to strip it back strip it back and strip it back and be like well if i'm going to talk for half an hour i should try and set a nearer term target in half an hour can i get them to want to learn about bitcoin because in half an hour i can only communicate so much about bitcoin so if i do it that way then it can appeal to everybody regardless of whether anybody in the room has actually heard of it before and so by constraining the problem i then thought about like how do i get this down like what the key things that i actually want to communicate um and then i ended up creating this this story um which makes it with the idea of trying to make it accessible to everybody and so you know since since doing that presentations

coming back you know i've done it for various different people i've done it for my mother-in-law she's in her 70s you know and she she gets it you know but the it was amazing i was just delighted with the way it went because um yeah you just you just see people's eyes pop like we have these aha moments you know as you as you go through it because i mean to give your and hopefully we can put the video in the show notes matty so people can people can go ahead and watch it but i wanted it so that anybody watching it as long as you're a human being with some life experience i can identify a set of issues up front that they're familiar with that affect them and there's you know maybe one or two or there could be lots

and then showing them that actually you know you're confused about where all these things come from and you think they're all separate you know so you know the cost of living obesity homelessness breakdown of family unit you know forever wars all of these things that they all share one root cause and that's the quality of the money so like locking that in up front and then taking them on a on a on a journey through a story where at each stage they're sort of thinking through the logic for themselves and being given a mental framework around which to think about where the issues come from without mentioning bitcoin at all and then at the very end sort of coming back to revealing that actually you know

bitcoin is the solution to all of these to the to the underlying problem and the underlying problem here is the quality of the money and that's because it can be changed and it has been changed and we can dig into you know a little bit of the aspects the aspects of the story there but it really it really works nicely this rip was also brought to you by good friends at zap right if you're a bitcoiner and run a business or an independent contractor you should be accepting Bitcoin as payment. If not you, then who? If we believe that fiat is systemically fragile and is a risk, the rails that that currency runs on are risk as well. You need to begin accepting Bitcoin as soon as possible. Invest in the future of your business. Create

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hydrating freaks and while you're hydrating got to be getting your electrolytes this is the best electrolytes mix that i've ever come into contact with pink himalayan salt with calcium magnesium potassium sodium no sugar it tastes incredible my favorite is the orange and the pink lemonade go to drinksote.com that's drinksote.com use the code tftc when you make your purchase and you'll get 15 off i'm telling you get on it freaks you're gonna love this stuff yeah i think the the release of uh what's the problem is a bit serendipitous because i literally have this book that i've been reading on this trip the power of personal storytelling like spinning tales to connect with other people and that's one thing i think bitcoiners uh historically first 15 years it's

It's really you're explaining Bitcoin, you're talking about historical things and trying to highlight the technical details and the mechanics of the system as it works. But I think humans inherently really react to stories much more passionately than somebody like myself explaining technical and mechanical details of what Bitcoin is. And that's about three chapters into this book. And that's something I'm trying to personally get better at is storytelling. And I think, again, serendipitous that you dropped this incredible story to sort of plant the seed in people's minds. Well, I look forward to your newsletter taking a more fairytale sort of bent going forward. But yeah, it's right. like if you think about the evolution of of bitcoin and the education around bitcoin like

we started out like with the white paper and for people to grasp bitcoin and the the implications of that is a giant leap from just reading the white paper back then and then you know over time there's been more and more layers sort of built on those foundations where it becomes more accessible to a greater number of people, but it's still a relatively small surface area. It's like the cyberpunks and then thinking about the political aspects of it, the governance and then the financial aspects.

It's still relatively inaccessible for your everyday person who doesn't have a background in any of those things, especially when they're absolutely not taught any of the critical thinking around this within the existing in the existing system to even realize that there is an issue and then you know over time we've had more and more great literature more and more accessible literature creates on top of that you know the bitcoin standard and then you know the price of

tomorrow and broken money and all of these things it becomes more and more accessible over time and the leap that people have to make becomes smaller at each stage and you know we grow the bubble and we grow the bitcoin bubble but like there's still a big gap there's still a big gap for people especially outside of certain personality type subsets you know to to to engage or have the motivation or the understanding about why they should even engage why this is even relevant um and you know i said i've tried to orange pill a lot of people and you have more success with some than others um you share books you share videos you try to talk to them about it but it's like you said we we tend to approach it from one or two certain directions and it's like

how do we how do we try and make it as big as possible or as welcoming as possible to get people to the the starting line to want to to want to learn and stories are a great way of doing that really great way of doing that um so yeah i'm but i'm not a natural storyteller but you know it's thankfully you know ai is at a at a level now that i was able to create this presentation you've seen you've seen that there are a lot of years on it you won't have seen it but it's you know the content could be quite depressing perhaps because you're just basically in a world where everything just keeps getting worse um but it's wrapped in that soft cuddly pixar animation overlay which sort of makes it a lot more a lot more accessible than i think

um what i've certainly found in talking to people is that it it it sets off the light bulb in a range of people that you wouldn't expect necessarily if you were talking to them about bitcoin but it's because it connects to people's lives and they they understand they see that connection and they buy into the story you know when that penny drops there's some just you know there's one slide especially and you'll have seen it which is the the flow diagram well you know the fiatello presses the big red button and then you know things start going wrong and and then this and then this and then this and then this. And people just really identify because they see these things.

Oh, Jesus, I never knew. I never knew this is where it came from. You know, those moments, especially women as well. Women as well, because, you know, we don't have as many women in the Bitcoin community as we should. And this is something which seems to resonate really well across, you know both men and women which is which is great yeah that's one thing uh it's been a conversation on this trip that i'm on with a couple of other bitcoiners and brought our wives

with us and the wives conversing um talking about the fact that we all have children and um the fact that money has gotten to the point where it's hard for people to raise families and more importantly mothers to be with their children because they're forced to enter the workforce and and do the nine to five and then many are forced to put their children in daycare or hire an expensive nanny and not really spend that quality time with their children um in their most formative years and i think that that is one of the at least for my wife and a couple of the other wives that are here the conversations i've ever heard is one of the things they're most excited for bitcoin's overall impact is just giving mothers that quality time with their

children back yeah absolutely we've been we've been conditioned now as a society to be very much moving in one direction set of expectations that you know both parents should be working and um you know there is every family needs to make those choices but there should be choices they shouldn't be forced but we're on the wrong side of the line right now because of the fiat system and you know bitcoin solves a lot and solves a lot of things and this this being one of them marty would it be helpful for me to outline um i'm guessing because a lot of views won't have seen the video yet to give a high level

sum of videos the structure because then my hope for the video is for it to become a tool in the arsenal of bitcoins because there

won't be anything in the video that somebody who's been in bitcoin for a number of years will go you know what I didn't know that but the way that it's the way that it's delivered and the structure of it i think is is unique amongst the um the bitcoin material that we have available to us today but my hope is that yeah i would love that the army of bitcoiners end up using this to send to people who haven't had the penny drop yet

and so if they understand what's that what's in there they can watch it themselves understand that this is actually a pretty potent thing that they can then they can then leverage and hopefully bring more people to want to learn about Bitcoin. To then ask them for that first podcast or that first video or that first book, which is really where I would love this to land. Yeah, and I'll tee you up. I think the way you started the video and started the story, more importantly, is this idea of an advanced civilization

that had already progressed and reached a level of success and quality of life that has their ship crash and the survivors are forced to rebuild civilization with the end goal in mind, fresh in their minds of what they know they can build, but they have to figure out how to go from zero to getting back to where they were. Yeah, yeah. Okay, great.

So maybe I'll just spend a couple of minutes just literally whizzing through that the high level story arc so that people have a have an idea um well it really starts with listing problems that people see in their lives today like a whole myriad of issues and then trying to um get people to identify that you know with one or two one or two different things and then saying that this is these are really share a share a cause and it's the quality of the money and then say like this i'm going to take you through a story here i'm not going to lecture you about bitcoin this is you know at this point you don't even know it's about bitcoin you just

know it's called what's the problem and there's a guy there's a pixar guy on the front page with big red buttons and that's that's all you know um and so yeah it's the story is there's your shipwreck hundreds of smart people get washed up on an island they come from a you know advanced civilization so they know where they need to get back to but they're starting from zero and so the very first thing they need to figure out is like what are they going to use as money on this brand new island and you know you have to suspend your disbelief that they can create whatever monetary system they want with whatever characteristics but then the question is you know what makes good money and when i gave this presentation to um these guys in portugal you

know i just see a blank face is staring back at me because you know most people have never thought about what makes good money you know but then this you go through the seven characteristics you know that we that we all know um to sort of set the scene and then they go okay well we're not going to make good money we're going to make the perfect money and the perfect money basically describes bitcoin right without saying bitcoin and so you know you go great create the perfect money but then there's a disagreement two leaders emerge from the island and one called satoshi who's like he says well this these are characteristics of perfect money and we all agree on that so why would you ever change them and then someone else called fiatello he goes

well okay well yeah i get that but what if there's an emergency like what if the people we put in charge of the money feel the need to change something i think we should have the perfect money but we should also have a big red button that we can press and change any aspect of the of the perfect money if we need to of course no one will ever press it of course but we'll have it there just in case and then you know satoshi cannot get on board with this idea so there's a big disagreement you build a massive wall down the middle of this island and on one side they create satoshis and the other side they create fiatelos and they're both identical to start with and it's perfect money on both sides and then it takes the next stage as well and there is no there

is nothing so everyone's starting from scratch and everyone's living trying to figure out how to survive and then you know they're doing their own fishing they're doing their own cutting down on the wood building their own shelters but it's really inefficient nobody's really trading because everyone's living hand to mouth these various things and then there's you know two or three minutes of taking you through the formation of a free market where people begin to specialize because then they're better at doing some things than others and you introduce the idea of competition because there are lots of people on the on the ship and that when people specialize prices start to fall quality starts to increase and then

there's active trading and it's perfect money and then the consequences you know and you also have investment innovation which then drives further quality of life improvements but what happens to the um the money is that the money starts to increase in value the purchasing power of the money starts to increase so nobody has to take undue risk with their capital they still lend it out but they don't have to they keep the money themselves you don't have to have somebody looking after the money for them but the quality of life for everybody improves because of the productivity of everybody even for the people who are not productive in the society and this happens on both sides of the island you see it's uh it's really the price of tomorrow by jeff booth in

you know a poor imitation of jeff booth's wonderful book and you know one or two slides and you know from that point the societies have grown so big that they decide to elect a government and so they elect a government on both sides and it doesn't matter if it's left right big small whatever it's it's tried to make this completely apolitical as far as i can and to make it appeal to as broad a base as possible and then what happens is the government come along and they start to tax the population do government spending in various forms and inevitably they run into a deficit problem and it doesn't matter where the deficit problem comes from but you have a deficit problem and then both sides of the island you know they're running in

parallel effectively both sides have to make a decision about what they're going to do and satoshi doesn't have any choice like he has to raise taxes or cut spending that's the only way to balance the budget because you know he can't change the money whereas fiatello he has a big red button and he's up for re-election right and so he really just prints some extra money for the government gets re-elected so tokyo loses the election you know some people are made redundant the economy becomes more more efficient but prices continue to fall and and quality continues to increase but fiatello prints the money and he gets away with it because population don't know and then he thinks this is things this is great and then the next stage is

you know things start happening in the economy you know he prints the money the base is the currency and the base in the currency starts to distort the price signals in the market you know it increases the business costs business input costs which starts to lead to consumer price inflation in various forms it leads to the um reduction in in quality of goods because businesses are trying to cut down the quality to keep the price the same leads to shrink inflation at least increasing our prices for some decisions which reduces overall affordability for the population and undermines the health at the same time because now the food is having to be um produced with lower and lower ingredients creates a health crisis you know it leads to reduced affordability

combined with asset price inflation so the people who own the assets they they see the benefits the poor and who don't own the assets get left behind the banks start pushing greater leverage you know everyone's now taking speculative risk because assets never go down in price more leverage in in the system people can't afford to buy a house because they they got less take-home money the assets are more expensive and they're already more leveraged so now both parents have to start working there's fewer children there's greater um breakdown of the nuclear family greater levels of hopelessness and addiction you know it tries to walk through all of these things which come as a consequence purely of the money printer like naturally walking walking through these things

And at each stage, it requires more and more government intervention to deal with them. And so the government has to start pumping more money back into the economy to deal with these secondary issues, further distorting the price signals and sucking the productive people away from delivering efficiency within the economy, making it even more unproductive. And then he realizes via Teller that the only way to solve these new holes that he's created is just to hit the print button again. I just print more and more money, more and more money. And it's just the solution over and over again. So it just goes round and round and round.

And then it becomes, it leads to the next stage where he's no longer operating in free market capitalism anymore. He's created crony corporatism where he now has a set of industries attached to the government who are all trying to deal with these secondary issues that he's created through the money printer. and he now becomes protective of those industries over the population and he starts to embed

the relationships with these corporate entities very very close to the government so the population can't really tell where the government ends anymore and these corporates begin and it really cements the destruction of the societal balance it creates the forever wars

and the pharmaceutical industry and the you know the growth of wall street and all of these sorts of things and then it sort of spirals out of control and you know he gets to the point where it's uh he's just having to constantly press the big red button because it's the only way it's the only way out and he's trying to he's trying to balance social um social uh cohesion really um and then so you know we end up with a picture of you know a world that looks very much like today and so people go okay well i recognize that i recognize this i recognize that now i have a framework for where these things came from

right without me having to without us having to say you know it's because of the fed or you know these things because it's done in a nice way within a story and you know obviously there's a lot of detail, which is abstracted away around how money is created, all of these sorts of things. But those are the levels of detail people get to, when they start wanting to read about, you know, the underlying mechanisms for these things. But then, you know, it's sort of draw it back together, because then Vietello is now in this world where he has all

these issues. And then the wall starts to crack down the middle of the island and so you know on satoshi's side he's got this free market you know uh with the money that's accruing in value and the quality of life is lifting for everybody and on the other side you've got a world that looks very much like today but then the world the wall starts cracking and for the first time people and money can move between the two and it becomes very obvious to the viewers like what's going to happen when that wall starts cracking people are going to try and leave leave the tele side of the island to go to satoshi side of the island i mean it's it's just obvious if my money is a is a crew is is becoming higher is having higher purchasing

power year over year in satoshi's and i'm losing money hand over fist in purchasing power in Fiatelos. Why on earth would I want Fiatelos? And just this realization is just so clear, it hits people in the face. And so what starts to happen is people and money leave Fiatelos side of the island and then Fiatelos is having to think, okay, well, I can't just print more money because that doesn't solve it. I've now got to do something else. And that something else is to change another aspect of the money. So I'm going to remove

the censorship-resistant nature of it. I'm gonna force everyone to put it in the banks. They can't just hold it themselves anymore. They've got to put it in the banks. And I'm gonna centralize it all. And I'm gonna make the banks protect everybody. And, you know, check all the transactions and effectively introduce the capital controls

put by the back door and greater levels of population control, which looks even more like today, right? And so, you know, it then sort of spirals a bit further out of control. And then I take people through what the impacts of that are for the various people within society. So, you know, the poor, the middle earners, the wealthy, and then the politically connected. And sort of draw that distinction around, you know, all these groups are impacted, but impacted in slightly different ways. But all negatively.

It's just a question of magnitude. and the only people who are not negatively impacted here are the politically connected because they're the ones benefiting from the money printer. And so, you know, it goes from there to thinking about what's the end game for Fiatello? Because, you know, the only thing you can do is press the big red button.

And so, you know, the end game is, you know, inflation bordering on hyperinflation. It's asset seizures. Now everything's in the banks. people he's going to bail everybody in and you can do that whenever and you know we've seen that in cyprus in 2013 we've seen that in the us effectively in 1933 with the gold you know it's communism because people don't understand what's happened they see society has deteriorated all around them and every stage has been the solution has been oh well the government has to fix this

there's more and more problems the government has created and therefore every stage the solution has always been more government and because the government don't explain where these new issues came from they don't explain that it came from the money printer by first order second order third order effects the population don't know and so they walk into communism which is just the absolute opposite of what you should be doing like the failure of the system is blamed on the failure of capitalism which is the absolute opposite of what it is it's the corruption of capitalism which has led to the led to the issues and you know we see this all around ourselves today um for potentially you know something even more destructive um and then i sort of bring them back

to like you know now we've gone from idyllic islands um on two sides to idyllic island on one side and one side absolutely destroyed um and take them back to those seven characteristics of money so he only changed two of them you know the seven perfect characteristics of perfect money he he only changed the the fixed supply and the censorship resistant and look and look at what happened right and at this point people have very much connected fiatella side of the island to today's world in their minds as well as understanding you know getting some level of familiarity with some of the nomenclature like satoshi's versus fiat etc etc as we go through and then the reveal is that you know it's very clear fiat tellers are terrible

very clear like why would you ever want fiat tellers rather than satoshi's and then the reveal is well the us dollar is just a terrible version of the fiatello because it's you know it's corrupted on these two same measures but it's worse on the other five as well you know portability divisibility you know all these all these all these other things and you know fungibility as well i touch on cbdc's in there you know a dollar is a dollar for now but you know many parts of the world that's that's no longer the case right and and then it's sort of explaining what happens with uh you know the history of debt and the and debasement of the dollar for the charts especially since 1971 and effectively that the money printer is just it's

just destroying the productivity for everybody and the purchasing power for everyone and And it's all, you know, it's fairly depressing, but you get to the realization, right, I understand where this came from now, but I didn't understand the magnitude of this issue. You know, with $36 trillion in debt, losing $2 trillion a year, and $200 trillion of unfunded liabilities, I mean, that's a pretty shocking hole to be in. And that's the best one. you know and then i show all the the percentage changes versus the dollar over 10 years for every other currency and it's a total disaster then you take the dollar over everything you know some currencies have ceased to exist completely and so you know when you when you realize that every slide the situation is actually getting even worse than you thought it was before

but you've already made the mental decision that you never even wanted to be a teller and that's not looking much better than where we are today it just transports people to a much more open-minded place to be like okay i never really realized it was this bad and i never knew where these issues came from right but now i have this mental framework and then the final reveal is okay this is all really bad but there is a solution and the good news is satoshi's are real and that you should learn about bitcoin yeah and that's it how uh how many how many individuals have you shocked giving this person you're giving this presentation in person i have I gave it to 15 people in Portugal. I have given it to maybe 30 others in small groups,

one, two to five. And then I was very kindly invited to a mini Bitcoin conference in Bristol in the UK, which is about 80 Bitcoiners. They amazingly allowed me to get up on stage with microphone in my hands, having sort of took a bit of a punt on me. Um, but that went amazingly well. Um, and you know, nothing but time words from, from the Bitcoiners and, you know, really excited to get the video. And so, uh, yeah, it's, it's great. It's great.

I'm, I'm, I'm so happy it's out there, but Marty, I wouldn't, I can't explain to you how there's one slide in particular which is that flowchart slide about you know the money printer to this to this to this to this and the number of people at the end of that slide say oh my god i never knew this i never knew this everybody should see this right it it blows my mind um and so yeah i just i would just love everybody to watch it all the bitcoins to watch it just once 35 minutes each time and then send it to everyone you care about um and i would i would really love it to be for bitcoins to have in their mind is like the first gentle touch point for bitcoin you send this to people they will then ask you to send them something else

because they'll want to learn about it rather than bashing them over the head, which is what we normally do, isn't it? Yeah. No, it's something I've been taking a lot of introspection on recently, particularly because of an episode I recorded about a month ago with these two guys that run a podcast, War Mode, And there are two blue collar guys that stumbled into the podcasting world and stumbled into some success with it.

But they still paint houses and that operate trash trucks in the Philadelphia area. And I think it was humbling to me sitting there having the conversation. We just essentially did a collaborative episode where it was, all right, you guys come on TFTC and you ask us all your Bitcoin questions that you think are stupid. And there's no stupid questions, just ask them. And the concept of inflation was completely, they could not connect it to the money printer for whatever reason. And through that conversation, ultimately at the end, I think it got through to them. But it reminded me that most people, I mean, it's been been used time and time again, this analogy, but like the fish and water, they don't understand that the water they're swimming in is toxic to an extent because of the money printer and this flowchart that exists and affects everything. and i think telling a story around this is incredibly impactful because people need to

have that that moment where they're they're shaken up and said yeah this is the problem these problems that we all know exist and can feel inherently do have a root cause at the center which is this this red button that the government and the central banks keep hitting um and that's That's the nefarious thing about it, too, is they keep hitting it and keep saying that you have to come back to them like Fiat Tello. Like, no, I'll solve your problems. We're going to hit the button. We're going to do all these things. We're going to make things better this time.

I promise this time we're going to figure it out. And the solution is simply to remove the red button from the equation entirely. Exactly. The only solution is the separation of money and state. The government cannot be allowed to have a big red button. That's it. And, you know, as a message to people, that is much more accessible than trying to explain about the Fed and, you know, what happened on Jekyll Island and, you know, all of these things. So it's like, we can get to that level of detail if people want to drill down to that level of detail.

But if we can give them a narrative, an accurate narrative on which they can sort of hang their mental model, it just makes it much more accessible, I think. You know, this, the sort of the visual of the big red button and Fiatella just pressing this in the background whenever he needs to is like quite powerful. um powerful way of thinking about it for these people but the thing is half the time the population for most of the time the population don't even know he's pressing it which makes it even worse because he's pressing it in in the dark room and then when the effects are coming out he's pointing at everybody else saying it's because of the greedy businessman or it's because of that you know the billionaires or that foreign dictator you know that's where the inflation is coming from not from this thing i've got behind me in the dark you know and yeah i'm

having flash flashbacks to neil kashkari there's unlimited cash at the federal reserve and then jerome powell at the same time asks how do you actually create money we hit a button we digitally create it he literally said we hit a button and we print it print it digitally yeah i mean those two snippets. There was a version of this presentation I actually had those two snippets in this presentation, but I ended up taking it out because I thought it probably dials a bit too far into reality for people. I ended up taking them out again. But those are

shocking things. They're absolutely shocking things to say. But people don't necessarily unconnect the magnitude of those comments to their own reality which i think and if they end up seeing those things after they've seen this presentation they'll understand you know how insidious that is yeah i agree it's an incredible presentation thank you thank you for for making it and hopping on to record this so quickly today um so i think it's important to get the word out there especially as we head into 2025 and things seem like they're going to heat up i mean the price is already bouncing right below and above a hundred thousand and i imagine if things go the

way they have uh in last cycles in terms of adoption waves and people's curiosity about bitcoin it's about to increase significantly and it's important that they have really valuable and credible and easy to understand and rock resources at their fingertips and so i think the timing of you launching this uh on january 7 2025 couldn't be better well i can't take any credit for the timing other than just you know it's it's by chance but i'm i'm glad it's i'm glad it's working out you know the bitcoins going through this uh supercharged legitimacy enhancing phase i think at the moment and that you may go on steroids in two weeks time when the new administration comes in you know it's it's sort of

of the social stigma of being associated with bitcoins gone, is now turning into the opposite. Increasingly, you know, if you're not thinking about this, for yourself, for your company, for your country, you are at risk of being left behind. And And, you know, especially with the, you know, Microsoft, like I said, have done a tremendous job of raising the profile of Bitcoin from a, you know, a company perspective.

But at some point it does tip to being a, you are obligated to be thinking about this and planning for a Bitcoin future. Otherwise you're not fulfilling your fiduciary duties. And the same applies to, you know, increasingly you as individuals. especially when you start seeing the legitimacy coming down from above you know we've gone from individuals holding it almost straight to nation states and now we're sort of filling the gap in

the middle right and when you when your government turns around and says the government's buying bitcoin that is a stamp of legitimacy for the uninformed population that bitcoin is no longer this no longer for the criminals or you know whatever they've previously labeled it as and so i hope over 2025 we end up seeing you know a much broader segment of the population being receptive and actively wanting to learn about bitcoin and for anybody who shows any inkling of openness that would love them to see this presentation and then hopefully we can send them a whole ream of additional content to get out the curve as quickly as possible yeah that's another call to action i would throw out there is if if you're somebody who's mad at

the state of the world you're mad that your grocery bill is increasing month on month it's getting harder to pay the rent at the end of the month to pay your mortgage you're going into credit card debt uh your your medical bills are are racking up and you feel like the equality of the goods and services that you're being provided the market are are going down and um you're out there blaming the government or big corporations for these problems as joe has pointed out and described incredibly well in his presentation what's the problem it's the money at the root of all these problems and i think due to the legitimacy that that has been given to bitcoin that joe just explained the stamp of approval from the governments and the fact

that bitcoin is 16 years old now and uh is not going to die if you think it's going to die you are wrong and more importantly it has all the seven properties of good money i think most importantly that it's open source transparent and anybody can participate and so as it stands today in 2025 if you are complaining about all these things and looking to the government or some other actor to solve these problems you have the ability and the agency to solve this problem yourself by simply adopting the better money satoshis and i think i don't want to browbeat anybody but i think you should seriously consider um watching this presentation if you're new to bitcoin um to understand the problem and more importantly understand that you yourself can

take action to solve this problem for yourself as an individual and collectively if enough individuals take action to solve their individual problems society will benefit in the long run and i think uh i think i truly believe that more and more people are going to wake up to this and are waking up to this and um the the question is just how quickly are the are they going to adopt and take the agency to make the change so that we can fix all these problems that are laid out in the flow chart in in the what's the problem presentation because they are massive as we described earlier they have led to a lower quality of life and a lot of social incohesion desperation despair And it's not a state that humanity should be in.

We have incredible resources at our fingertips. We just need to fix the core of the problem, which is the money. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. We are very fortunate, Marty, to live in countries in the West where we do suffer from these problems. But the extent to which we suffer from them pales in comparison to those around the rest of the world. And, you know, the US in particular now

is in such a good position in the next few weeks for the backdrop for the embracing of Bitcoin and the harnessing of all the good things that will come from embracing Bitcoin. It really is the envy of the rest of the world at the moment.

yeah well joe hopefully this is the first of many hopefully the next time we record i've got a proper mic and set up and i'm not uh next to a busy street in the middle of the jungle with with motorcycles driving by but i think this was a a great conversation i'm pumped that we were able to connect today and thank you for making what's the problem um where can anybody who's listening We're going to link to it in the show notes, but beyond finding that link and sharing it, what else do you think people who are listening to this should do? Well, you can find it on YouTube. I've also created a website where it's embedded at satsvsfiat.com, S-A-T-S-V-S-F-I-A-T.com.

and so if you are just getting started with wanting to learn about bitcoin then you can go and stick your email address in there and you'll get sent some starter material on bitcoin um to help you get up the curve this is my i should say this is not in any way a commercial thing for me this is a charitable educational thing um and so i just want as many people as possible to see this um as i said it's an accidental creation isn't it it's not my it's not my main area of focus um but you can follow um with the same handle on x and you know connect with me as well if you like my um handle is sap mojo which hopefully we'll also put in the in the show notes on on x you know i've been somebody in the background for for a while um but always

happy to connect with people and hopefully can focus on building more great stuff for Bitcoin. Awesome. Joe, keep crushing it. Thank you for coming on and we'll do this again at some point. Like I said, better set up on my end. Thank you so much for having me, Marty. It's a pleasure and you know there's yeah i never thought i'd be on this podcast so thank you for having me

the first time you're gonna be on again that's all we got today peace and love