TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #631: Bitcoin vs Hollywood with Jonny Vance

Episode Date: June 21, 2025

Marty sits down with Jonny Vance, co-founder and writer/director of Tuttle Twins, to discuss creating educational content for children that teaches Austrian economics and libertarian principles, the crowdfunding model through Angel Studios, and how they're competing against mainstream Hollywood's propaganda while preparing the next generation with critical thinking skills about money, freedom, and economics. Jonny Vance on Twitter: https://x.com/jonnyvance3 Tuttle Twins: https://www.angel.com/shows/tuttle-twins STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/VJ2dABShBz Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Coinkite https://coinkite.com Unchained https://unchained.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/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ 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 if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all 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. Johnny Vance, welcome to the show. Thanks, Marty. So great to be here. I don't know if this is bigger for me or for you, because you have had a direct impact on the education of my two children, particularly my older older son. But the younger son picks it up, too,

as a writer and director for Tuttle Twins, an incredibly educational and based cartoon that as a parent, I feel comfortable allowing my children to watch. So thank you for doing that. Thanks for having me, man. I mean, we just make this show in a dinky little office. And so the fact that it's in people's living rooms is always a surprise to us. We just see numbers on a screen. And so we're like, wow. Yeah. An honor to be in your living room, Marty. Well, that's what I'm curious. I mean, it's such a great idea because I think that's a big topic, particularly in Bitcoin circles, but even more broadly with millennial parents and obviously a big topic of screen time, whether or not you give a kid an iPad, whether you let them watch TV, if you do, for how long, what shows. And I think over the last couple of decades, the spectrum of content available for kids has become incredibly woke or incredibly dumbed down. And it's hard as a parent because sometimes you do need a 30 to an hour break to get something done.

And sometimes the screen is the best thing to do if they're tired playing for the day. and it's hard to find good content and when puddle twins first came out we immediately became guild members and and felt very comfortable putting the boys uh in front of in front of a screen to watch this content because it's incredibly educational and more importantly uh its values align with what our values are as as parents what we'd like to convey to to the boys um about values and um things they should be learning about at a young age that's so awesome yeah i mean i make the show and i limit screen time for my kids and so i'm i'm right in the same boat with you but it's like who would you rather have babysit your kids you know elmo or mrs you

know and uh if they can learn something that can help them in life that's been sort of our guiding North Star is let's make this as fun as Phineas and Ferb, but let's put in lessons from these Austrian economists or, um, you know, anti-Marxist lessons or kind of reveal things. So kids are equipped with critical thinking skills for the real world. So it's really cool to see, um, you found value in what we're doing. Well, I mean, to that point too, I think there's a mass misunderstanding of the ability for children to pick up these topics because was it last week or two weeks ago i was sending you a video of my son just um for some reason he was like daddy take a video i want to talk about bitcoin and he was just spitting out facts that he learned

from the two bitcoin focus episodes of tunnel twins and as a father as a bitcoiner i was incredibly impressed at how well he picked up on the themes and the facts around bitcoin I mean, to me, I truly believe he is internalize them and intuitively understands the concepts where most people think you need to put your kids in front of like Hot Wheels or Paw Patrol, whatever it be, something that's at their level. I think people really underestimate the ability for young children, specifically my son's five, to pick up pretty complex topics if it's portrayed in a fun and educational way. kids are incredibly smart. I think, yeah, we've just dumbed them down or, or, or, or, you know, underestimated them. Um, my kid was, my son is, uh, six now and we were out fundraising going door to door. He was selling some cookies that he'd made. And this woman tried to pay him in cash and he was like, um, I'd prefer not. And I said, sorry, he's worried about inflation. Um,

and uh she's like she was laughing she ended up being a Tuttle Twins fan but um it's just so crazy yeah these kids can pick it up so fast and I don't know about you Marty but like I didn't learn many of these principles until post-college and so the fact that these kids are being set up like just seeing that video of your son rattle off all these these truths and facts about Bitcoin in inflation is awesome like these kids are miles ahead of where i was growing up and they're they're so set yeah my wife one of her favorite uh sort of tiktok clips to send around or twitter clips is the clip of the man on the street interview on the college campus where uh somebody from tuttle twins is asking about inflation and you have a bunch of 19 to 22 year olds who can't

answer the question and you're you're going to kids age six to twelve that can answer it pretty eloquently and on the spot it isn't it's insane when when you think about just how dumbed down society has become and again going back to this idea that i think people really underappreciate that children have the capacity to learn and actually want to learn um i remember how excited the boys were when the second bitcoin episode came out they sat down they watched it once and i think they watched it like two or three times the the days after that but they were like excited to learn more about bitcoin and really again internalized it and i guess how did how did you get into cartooning and and how did you decide on on this particular sort of medium and

in Tuttle Twins, the show specifically? Yeah. So Daniel Harmon and I, we co-founded Tuttle Twins TV show. We'd been at an ad agency called Harmon Brothers. That's where I started right out of school. And so we were known for viral internet ads. So if you remember like the pooping unicorn for squatty potty or like purple mattress or Lumi deodorant, we'd blown up a lot of brands and made them a lot of money. Uh, but we were just kind of sick of doing it for other people and we were sick of not being able to do storytelling we kind of had this itch for we want to tell stories and uh we had a good friend named connor boyack and at the time he'd written these books the tunnel twins original series and we approached connor and we're like connor

we think we can crowdfund a tv show we don't know we don't know what the demand is like but uh you know we have these storytelling chops we can explain things complex things like the puberectalis muscle in three minutes. You know, we can explain things really simply and we can make them funny. What if we made a kids TV show about Tuttle Twins and, you know, basically made it the MCU of Tuttle Twins. And Connor loved the idea. And then we launched a crowdfunding campaign like 2019, right before the pandemic. And we were shocked to see all the demand that parents had for the show. And we ended up raising $4.5 million from the crowd. We broke a record for the most crowdfunded kids show. And we were just blown away by, oh my gosh, there's demand. Parents want this.

And so that, you know, season one was finished or was funded. And it's been a grind ever since. But we've now, you know, completed season two, season three, and we're going to be launching season four in the fall. And it really is all due to these parents who crowdfunded it and continue to support us. And we continue to be beholden to them. I think that's a key part is we're serving this audience. We're not serving some agenda or some other like metric or some kind of woke checkbox kind of thing. We are serving these parents and we're here as a tool for you to teach the principles you already believe in to your kids in an easy and fun way and i i think the the model of angel studio is really cool too like i mentioned we're we're guild members and i think in this day

and age where you have the behemoths like disney netflix nickelodeon amazon as well and like finding a unique way to compete and provide optionality for parents looking to get their kids away from the slop is extremely important totally do you want me to talk go into the angel model like so yeah so like let's describe like the angelist or excuse me the angel studio model and so so traditionally in hollywood you have kind of this top-down very centralized model where you have this room full of executive producers the kathleen kennedys of the world green light what they think your kids need right it's very central planning and then you get you know you get the acolyte is what you get from that and you get snow white and eventually hollywood

has a reckoning you know several years years down the road when they have box office bomb after bomb after bomb um angel's system is different where it's a bottom-up decentralized kind of executive model, a bit like Bitcoin, where nothing gets greenlit at Angel unless it passes the guild. Now, the guild is a group of 1.2 million, basically, subscribers to Angel, but they're also kind of executives. And how it functions is it's the wisdom of the crowds kind of principle, where if you read the book, The Wisdom of the Crowds, it basically shows that crowds, when they're not in a mob, when they can think independently, they get things right much better than experts. So you look at who wants to be a millionaire and ask the audience is more right

than ask, you know, call an expert. And it's the same principle here where, you know, you can show something to these, the 1.2 million members of the angel guild. And if they like it, it's probably going to do well in theaters. It's probably going to do well over the longterm. And it's just completing this feedback loop that hollywood has just totally destroyed and so um the end result is i think this last year in 2024 angel was top 10 in the studio box office uh and their rotten tomatoes popcorn meter the audience score is a 95 on average and i think disney's something like a 74 or something like that so they're the number one in the industry and it's all because they've kind of create created it bottom up to listen to the audience yeah and i it makes a lot of sense

to me because again going whether it's tuttle twins or any of the other content on on angel i think it's it's information and immediate different types of mediums and storylines that people are are thirsting for where like i think uh it was funny seeing the i'm sure you've seen the trailer for Spaceballs 2. And just like they've made 32 Marvel Universe movies. They've made how many Star Wars movies over the last three decades? Like it's just a repeat. You can tell there's really no creativity in Hollywood anymore, which is ironic considering they're supposed to be one of the major creative forces in the world. They've got sort of lazy, complacent, And I guess really industrialized in the sense that they know what inputs will produce certain monetary outputs or at least did for a period of time.

But as you mentioned, seems to be that impact seems to be waning as people are like, all right, I don't need another superhero movie. Let's let's let's go on to something new here. Yeah, I, you know, in thinking about it, it's hard not to kind of step out of the Bitcoin mindset of fiat ruins everything. But I think there's a lot of weight to the idea that Fiat has ruined film, where you look even like a decade or two ago, and movies were just much more high quality, like the VFX holds up way better than some of these, you know, most recent movies. And you look at the kind of macro picture, these studios operate on razor thin margins. They're beholden to Wall Street, they're beholden to ESG scores, they're beholden to

oscar kind of quotas diversity quotas and um they have to operate at such short you know term thinking such high time preference where i don't know about you my favorite trilogy is the lord of the rings and just looking at the lord of the rings like even back then granted they had some subsidies to to lessen the economic pressures but they could spend years preparing for that movie for all three movies like there was like chain mail artists who literally spent two years like making 80 million little chains for the for the armor of the movie you know and you just don't have the time or the money the attention to be able to do that today um and so i think as a result we do get lots of you know really low risk bets like sequels and reboots and everything

and you can't tell original storytelling anymore yeah it's like the one of the themes on x over the last week has been people making fun of the cgi of the the new super superman movie it's just like incredibly piss poor and that's like i've talked to uh got a couple buddies in the film industry and that are becoming bitcoiners and they're like really interested to see how like bitcoin as a treasury asset on the production company's balance sheet could help them really reorient and get back to low time preference movie making which makes a lot of sense like if you have a long-term view like four years i don't know how long it takes to make a movie from beginning to end but if you have a production company that's going to make many movies like deciding to put

bitcoin on your company balance sheet so that you can actually create quality over the long run makes a lot of sense to me and there's really interesting ways that you can finance productions with bitcoin now as well um at the early days but that's something that excites me like equipping production studios directors writers with hard money that allows them to focus on their craft instead of being pushed into this high velocity uh burn and churn sort of model just to get things out there to get revenue to make sure that you're outpacing inflation is incredibly exciting it's wild um yeah angel announced this a few months ago but they have a bitcoin treasury so angel studios i think to my knowledge is the first uh you know studio to have a bitcoin treasury so i think it's

like 300 bitcoin and counting so far but the long-term vision for that is exactly what you said, where they can have, they're calling it an endowment for the arts, where you could have your operating company, but then you can have the Bitcoin treasury. So then you can really just, you know, tell stories that matter. I think a lot of people from the angel crowd, no angel from the chosen or from sound of freedom or Tuttleton's, but they don't. And then they look at the Bitcoin play and they're like, what it does. It, one of these things doesn't make sense, but the, the, the angel founders are big Bitcoiners. They see the future of this. They see that you know hollywood was built on the gold standard and now you know we can go back to that

renaissance of good storytelling when you have the time and when you have you know the the money that appreciates faster than inflation so yeah it's exciting just to see you know even in the next 10 years disney's operating i think last year they did like 91 billion in revenue their their their profit was like five billion so they're operating and most of that's coming from the parks tonight are coming from their movies like snow white didn't help them with their profit so you know it's a for us for bitcoiners just seeing where this is going it's not i mean it might sound crazy now but having a bitcoin backed movie studio surpassing a fiat based you know turd maker uh studio um that's not too far-fetched no it's really not i didn't realize

hollywood was built on a gold standard yeah back in the day uh yeah bank bankers um well i think actually it was built on investment before they started taking out debt right so the the movie makers had actually they owned their own studios they owned their own theaters and then that was broken up but then they they uh leaned into to gold as well sup freaks this rip of tftc was brought to you by our good friends at coin kite they make the cold card queue my favorite hardware wallet the most secure hardware wallet on the market as you can see it's got the blackberry form factor full keyboard it's got two secure enclaves you create your private public keys offline the device never has to go online never does go online so you keep your bitcoin secure

if you have your bitcoin on exchanges and you're looking to get it off secure it in the best way possible pick up a cold card queue go to coin kite.com find the cold card queue use the code tftc for five percent off if you're a power user of bitcoin like i am if you're running a business on a bitcoin standard if you're just a bitcoiner wants to secure your bitcoin get the most secure hardware wallet on the market go get the cold card queue it's a beautiful thing so freaks guess what we launched a browser extension it's called opportunity cost and it helps you see the true cost of everything in bitcoin convert prices to bitcoin as you browse the web opportunity cost automatically displays fiat prices in bitcoin or sats helping you think in a bitcoin standard

it works on amazon zillow x your bank account quickbooks you can convert everything to bitcoin it's really cool it's also 100 open source mit license we don't collect any data all of the conversions happen in your browser on your local device it's a great way to recalibrate your life and begin thinking in sats go check it out at opportunitycost.app that's opportunitycost.app what uh what is the most rewarding part of of what you're building at Tuttle Twins and because it is i think for another example um my sister-in-law uh she's in the industry as well and she went to um she went to her my nephew's class for career day and she had to explain bitcoin and she actually just used a three-minute clip from total twins to to sort of convey the

message of bitcoin to my nephew's class and she said it was incredibly impactful and uh so it's like it's like little and that's the beauty of the guild and just what you build because you can you can produce the show launch it and parents like myself my sister-in-law watch it and they're like oh this is actually valuable and then you get it out to other kids a career day and i imagine there's many other examples of of similar types of interactions that parents have had with other parents and children who have not been exposed to Tuttle Twins. Yeah. I mean, I was saying this before, but we just make this in a vacuum where we're just in a dinky little office. And so it's those stories that definitely make me realize, oh my gosh,

we might be doing something here. You know, we've heard of kids asking their parents for allowance in Bitcoin and the moms being like, I don't know how to get you Bitcoin, but having to figure it out. We've heard of kids standing up to their principals and teachers. We had a Tuttle kid who had a Gadsden flag on his backpack and his teacher said, that's a sign of slavery. And the kid knew his history and said, no, it's not. And the principal absolutely got roasted. And the kid was in the right. We had kids during the pandemic who saw our civil disobedience episode and decided not to wear a mask to school and went to the principal's office. And so it's like those kind of stories where we actually see in practice kids building businesses, like acting out what they see in the show. That's the fuel for us. It's just, wow. You know, maybe we could change the future of the country with kids who are so much more prepared than we were. and that know, frankly, a lot more than many politicians.

So, yeah, it's those little stories that really fuel us. To your last point, it's something I've been really drawn to since my first son was born. In Bitcoin, we think about fix the money, fix the world, and my day-to-day is focused on trying to educate as many people about Bitcoin, why it's important, how it works, and how they can use it. in our core demo here at tftc and in the newsletter is i think i believe 45 to 50 year olds so we're talking to gen x and then our second biggest demo is like 55 to 65 year olds so like eking into the boomerville uh land uh sort of landscape and i think i've become more convinced

that i think the highest leverage biggest return we're going to get in terms of bitcoin education is gen z younger gen z and gen alpha our children and that's another thing just resigning myself to the fact that hey this is going to be a long haul and actually the biggest impact we can have is teaching our children these principles from the get-go and then they grow up internalizing that and applying it to their lives and maybe i could see a future where the the biggest impact in terms of ushering in a bitcoin standard is the kids who are five and six today actually applying that to their lives and demanding it because they understand these concepts yeah it's wild i think it's so much easier to teach these principles to kids who have not had

to unlearn anything. Like my son understands Bitcoin, no offense, but way better than my father-in-law because he could just clearly see the emperor is naked and doesn't have to backpedal and say, no, but the clothes are there. They're just transparent or, you know, whatever fiat games adults have to jump through. Inflation is necessary. Anyways, so it's, but I mean, it's so intuitive just to be first principles focused and kids get it. They totally get it. Yeah. And you guys, you're, I mean, you're obviously in Angel Studio now and anybody who's downloading Angel has

access to Tuttle Twins, but you've got something big working with the country of Argentina, which, I mean, when you think about the potential impact you guys could have with this deal, I'll let you describe it. That's when things get really exciting. Yeah, so I'll choose my words carefully because we've had a massive hate campaign from the socialists in Argentina. But yeah, we've been working with the country of Argentina to get Tuttle Twins on air. Originally, when Millet won the election, he wanted to privatize the public TV in Argentina. And keep in mind, this public TV channel called Paka Paka literally showed Marxist propaganda. They have like something called La Asambrosa, Karl Marx, where he's just going around with kids and Karl Marx is just awesome. And so literal Marxist propaganda. Millais wanted to shut it down. The opposition wouldn't let him. And so the second best thing is to put Tuttle Twins on the air. So which right now has, I mean, we've just gotten whole hit pieces written about Tuttle Twins. they say you know they use melton friedman they use hayek and and and they mention a cryptocurrency

that bukele likes that was supposed to be a dick um and uh anyways so they've done they're they're doing their worst and we thought you know maybe the worst case scenario is that we privatize argentine television great but uh second best is we can get tuttle twins and these principles of freedom out to millions of argentine families well this gets to uh a very interesting conversation uh you mentioned the term marxist propaganda and that's another like that's a whole another concept that like i would love the boys to really understand i think you guys have touched on it too is this whole concept of propaganda we grew up to learn that propaganda is a bad thing which when used improperly it certainly can be i would argue that marxist propaganda is bad because

It propagandizes people to do things that are not in their own self-interest or the self-interest of the collective. But propaganda is a tool that needs to be wielded successfully and meticulously and very in a very focused way by people who want their ideals and their principles to be conveyed and adopted. And so that's something I focus on. I wear it on my sleeve at TFTC. Like, yes, I'm I'm putting out propaganda. Yeah. Yeah. Propaganda is effective when utilized and executed correctly. And it's something that we need to embrace. Like I'm trying to propagandize my children via the Tuttle Twins. I'm not afraid to admit it. Like, I think that's where those fence sitters lose the war. It's like, everyone is propagating ideas. If you're not going to propagate slash teach ideas to your kids, someone else will. Like, they're going to learn from the public school. They're going to learn from whatever garbage is on Disney Plus.

Somebody's going to propagate. It might as well be the ideas that you believe in and that you believe will set them up for success. I think we will do an episode on propaganda and maybe talk, you know, ed uh who's edward bernays or something who was kind of the father of modern uh pr slash propaganda and how they uh you know got people to join world war one through some of those films before movies in theaters bring full circle yeah it's something that needs to be embraced more when like and the way to level the playing field to say hey like you just mentioned you're going to be propagandized everywhere except that fact and join what uh these days

would be referred to i think the the propaganda wars are more commonly referred to as meme warfare yeah these days and that's something i think bitcoiners have done an incredible job of embracing and leaning into and thoughts of bitstein come to mind probably one of bitcoin's best propagandists that exist out there i think what separates us from the propaganda from the other side is we're very open like the writings on the packaging we're not trying to hide anything from parents we're not trying to trojan horse kids where you know with some of the most recent movies you can go in and just get bombarded by messages that were not on the packaging you know so yeah what are some examples of uh subversives subversive propaganda in mainstream i mean you

had that whole debacle about the proud family reboot on disney um yeah i mean i feel like they're very common i don't want to yeah maybe throw too much mud but uh yeah there's many you just look at the lineup of the past kids movies and probably 50 percent or more have something that was kind of they snuck in there is bitcoin's next parabolic move already starting two of the strongest historical indicators global m2 liquidity and the copper to gold ratio are flashing green again unchained and tech dev break it all down in the new report bitcoin's next parabolic move could liquidity lead the way if you care about the macro forces shaping bitcoin's trajectory now's the time to pay attention visit unchained.com slash tftc to read the full report

that's unchained.com slash tftc have you noticed any um any other writers directors cartoonists for seeing what you and the team have done at total twins and saying oh wow i should get into this do you think you're in inspiring others to to get into this type of genre of of cartoon or or child programming yeah i mean we've we've heard from many behind the scenes we love what you guys are doing we can't kind of publicly come out and say that but keep up the good work um angel is kind of building this island for artists that just want to do art and it's interesting like you can't make it so divisive that none of the good talent from hollywood will come over. But there are many causative libertarian slash conservative actors, producers,

directors in Hollywood that want to make great films with great messaging. They just can't, they get blackballed. And so Angel is that escape valve and there's room for good stories. There's room for conservative or libertarian or freedom thinking messaging. And there's certainly appetite for it it's just you can't go through the traditional gatekeepers uh you can't go through kathleen kennedy you have to go outside of that yeah and it's never been when you think of i wrote about this that there's like a lot of doomerism out there and times certainly aren't as best as they could be a lot of the fiat grift has leaked into many parts of our lives but i like to look at the positive side of things the silver lining like the the technology that we have today what

we're doing right now in different parts of the country recording a video using mics we'll distribute this over rss youtube rumble we'll get it out there our newsletters and you think of platforms like x while they're double-edged swords they can feed you the algorithmic slop or you can find signal if you know how to filter through all the noise like it's never been easier for an independent creator to put some hard work and passion into the project they really care about and then get it out to the world which makes me incredibly optimistic because i would not have probably if these tools didn't exist i probably wouldn't have learned the total twins because i was completely unaware of angel studios until i started seeing bitcoiners

talk about total twins on x and i was like oh i'm gonna check this out and it's incredible we the modern day as it stands in 2025 it's never been easier to access the right information i think the focus needs to be on educating people how to filter through all the noise because that's a ton of noise and very little signal in the noise the signal ratio but if you can find the signal it's out there and people just need to be better equipped to to find it yeah it used to be the signal was very very strong three channels johnny carson if you can make it on that show everyone in america knew you right but now i guess the the benefit of it not being so centralized is uh government can't control the public narrative nearly as as much right and uh yeah i think the

the disadvantage is yeah the good signal is a little bit harder to find you have to weep through it i'm having flashbacks to tv guide i remember tv guide i remember going to my grandparents house and when you try to you try to plan your friday night out your grandparents it's like you get a tv guide and you look through like the what's it going to be on each channel and you're gonna find it thinking about how manual of a process and antiquated that seems today is is insane yeah the uh what um so you guys are working on season four right now what are some that you mentioned propaganda something you might want to touch on like what other what other topics like you guys have covered a lot already in um the first three seasons but what like how how much more do you

think you guys have to dive into i mean as long as there's appetite our goal is to just have one more season than the Simpsons. So just a small goal. But yeah, for season four, I think one thing we've been conscious of is we don't want to black pill kids. And as we've gone season by season, we can go more out on the branch for some of these topics. We can go down the rabbit hole. And yeah, so some of the topics that we're working on for season four is one is the overpopulation myth we want kids to feel that the world is big enough for all of us and that more people more problem solving so there was a clip i saw recently from captain planet uh back in the day and it's it was so like they were just reading the population bomb and and uh

spitting it out there towards kids how damaging like you shouldn't have big families because the world will end and and um the opposite's been been true so we're really excited about that one we have some amazing guest stars that we haven't yet announced for its season four uh we have one on the uh uh bad effects of charity where if charity done wrong can just totally create dependency of a nation and cripple entire industries and so it must be done correctly and yeah you know teach men to fish kind of message uh we have one on the food industrial complex that we're so excited to launch and to kind of go into both the cronyism that's happened behind the scenes uh and how i think we'll have a anthropomorphic food pyramid that just finds out

that she's a lie it is a food pyramid scheme of sorts uh yeah let's see what else um yeah we have one on dei we're gonna kind of we're gonna debunk it we're gonna have thomas soul um in the episode and just show kids you know equity versus merit let's focus on merit so just just stuff that hopefully they'll have the anecdote for a lot of the poison that they're going to be exposed to you know in the coming years in school is thomas soul going to do his own voice or so thomas soul is a recluse and so we're going to do a younger younger thomas soul back in the day but if we could get if we get old thomas soul he only comes out for um for book institute that's right yeah but interviews are incredible we'll see if we can get him at least a cameo uh is the goal it's just

it's it's kind of like pulling teeth to get him so well it's like modern day you can you use like 11 labs to create his voice pretty uh pretty accurately but yeah most of the time if somebody is living like thomas i mean we just get the the person he's he is yeah one of the greatest thinkers of our time and the most reclusive too and he's getting old he's just he's in his 90s isn't he yeah he's 90s yeah yeah the uh it's fascinating the uh i was thinking like population it is that's population and that top uh typically gets tied in with uh with climate change and all that but i'm just thinking through my mind i'm sure you guys are already well on your way to hiding but like you touch like japan like what's going on with their demographic because it is

it's something that kids really need to internalize like our generation uh yeah like when you think about when we get older um there's going to be a problem with there already is a problem with social security but like you have many more people aging out than are coming below them and that's something i care deeply about is like later in life like thinking like when my parent my mom gets older when my wife's parents get older like how do we take care of them like i don't want to push them into into a home like you need a strong economic foundation and i think more importantly social foundations really that's what i would like to instill in my boys is like hey don't put us in a home when we're older like we should live in a multi-generational

house is something i would like to see um well i would like to see that trend come back where not just on the girl because i've had the incredible experience of uh three out of my four grandparents have passed but each one of them died in their own home and hospice surrounded by my aunts my uncles my cousins myself and that was an incredibly special experience for all of us but uh it's something that's being lost today and part of this population bomb terrible propaganda is is feeding into it right right yeah absolutely yeah i think i'm hopeful we return to that and i know you know people are saying well robots are coming and so robots will take care of the old with the inverted pyramid you know population problem but that would be a terrible way to go

just holding the hand of your robot just that looking into the eyes of your robot um yeah it's gonna be uh really important that we do it right and uh try and fix the problem i think for china for south korea for japan it's like generations too late where we will see population collapse they really like looking backwards china internalized the population bomb much more than the u.s did even though it came paul ehrlich wrote you know he was a u.s biologist um so yeah we're hoping paul sees our episode i think the last the last status on south korea specifically is within two generations they'll have like a 90 population collapse that they don't turn things around yeah which is i mean this gets a broader

point like to your point like the population bomb whether dei whatever it is like the the Propaganda on what I think we would both agree is built on the wrong set of principles and the wrong perspective on the world has strongly affected society broadly, globally, to the point where countries like China, Japan, South Korea, the U.S. even to a certain extent has shot themselves in the foot and are doing things that are counterproductive to the flourishing of their societies and i just thinking this part of my head like so i think what you're doing is extremely important because we need mechanisms to turn the tide socially and psychologically to let people know no humans are good uh we we were meant to be here like there are certain ways we should interact in a society in an economy to do things productively and that are beneficial for the individual and the whole and going back to like

the doomers and like i was a big doomer until i found bitcoin because yeah it feels like there's no way out like bitcoin gives you that way to opt out via your financial life but i think it's really important to have an opt-out option for um sort of educating kids about these these big ideas and that's one of the most insidious things about hollywood and and the messages they've been putting out for for many decades now so i mean it's not every movie or every show but a lot of the popular movies and shows are sort of uh cataclysmic and yeah really strike fear in people and have a material effect on how people view the world yeah it's very clear that art is informing life and life is informing art or at least people's perception of life right um yeah and

we've had to sort of grapple with that as we've gone through this episode too because in many senses you know life is getting better than it ever has before but then you have you have that battle between innovation and inflation and um you know we look at just prices on the surface but when you dig down to time price what people could buy with an hour of their time um we can buy far more eggs now per hour worked than we could back in 1900 um they may not be the best quality eggs so that's another discussion which we talk about the food industrial complex episode, but like, you know, we don't have people mass starvation, like Paul Ehrlich was forecasting. We have obesity problems. Right. And so, um, but I, I think, you know, I think what

we've realized is the thesis of more people, more problem solving still checks. You have people like Satoshi Nakamoto who invented, you know, uh, this escape valve, this, this hope, uh, that can help so many people um and that all came through you know somebody deciding to have a kid yeah it really did and that's i'm just thinking now too like because we just launched an app a tftc called opportunity cost and um which helps you price everything in bitcoin and this is something i've been doing a lot of internal reflection on like we've had ideas for apps and i think as a bitcoin focused media company we always thought like ah we need to get um some bitcoin product in the hands of people and for the longest time it's like all right like something that involves a wallet being

able to send receive bitcoin or get access to bitcoin directly but i think we settled on this informational tool because it's relatively low lift something that we could actually build and something that we don't have to worry about broader point being so there's when there's a lot of bitcoiners out there saying i want to do something i want to do something to help bitcoin or help the broader freedom movement and they think they need to do something very complex or build something grand um and and sort of complicated and very featureful but i think there's a ton of low-hanging fruit um in the information war which we settled on opportunity costs and i think total twins is a great example you don't need to build some sort of financial app

you need to build a mechanism for education particularly for younger people in your case and i think that's one thing because i could i don't want to blow smoke up your butt but um i think i think people severely underestimate how impactful sort of things that are unintuitive can be for having an impact on this movement a cartoon yeah like thinking of a bitcoin cartoon um is so creative and as i've been mentioning it's already impacted my children my niece my nephew and now their classmates to a certain degree and so i think it's incredibly inspiring what y'all are doing with um with tunnel twins and angel studios more broadly and hopefully others out there are listening thinking about how can i help how can i help these small little things that that may seem

unintuitive on the surface yeah yeah yeah and that's humbling to hear man um yeah we're just we we didn't anticipate you know the success it's definitely not come all in a night it's been a grind all throughout so uh but yeah as as we've gotten sucked more down the bitcoin rabbit hole um you know most of our audience are bitcoiners but they are freedom-minded people and they started questioning the public school system and they started questioning now the money they started questioning a lot of things so it's it's been beneficial to not just be a bitcoin focused uh company because we can bridge to so many other topics that you know people care a lot about and uh and we can mix bitcoin in there too so for those thinking like oh i just have to be

focused on bitcoin i think you can triangulate to bitcoin from a lot of different places yeah and that's you're mentioning it before we hit record but we've branched out um outside of bitcoin only content and sort of covering tangential topics that with people that align ideologically but may not grok bitcoin and i think that that's been in terms of tftc orange our guests that's been the most impactful way is like hey i agree with you on this thing about bodily autonomy or geopolitics or macroeconomics let me just sprinkle some bitcoin into the conversation and get you thinking if you think this way then bitcoin makes a lot of sense for you and i think that is another incredible attribute to to totals when you cover such

a wide spectrum of austrian economics and freedom oriented topics that i think just via osmosis people parents watching the show with their kids are like oh yeah i agree with all this why why wouldn't i agree with the bitcoin stuff too it sort of makes sense yeah we i there was this comment from a few months ago where someone was like you guys are spot on with all your episodes but this bitcoin thing is a total myth it just was so funny to me if you think if you trust us with 99 of this stuff like could you learn a little bit more about bitcoin it's uh and their kids are like no daddy this makes sense uh this makes sense what's the process like for for making an episode yeah so it takes about as long as making a child

it's much harder i'm just kidding my wife's pregnant right now she'd kill me Awesome. Oh, nice. Congrats. Grats to you. Thanks. So, yeah, about nine months. And we spend, we kind of came outside of Hollywood.

So we didn't know how Hollywood tells us we should do it. But we just took what we did with ads. And so we just spend about six weeks writing an episode. And we'll do lots of brain trust with experts and with just cool writers that we know and like. And just refine the script over and over and over. I joke around with people like half the jokes in the show we just write for ourselves and they go way over kids heads and then half the jokes we write for kids and we kind of intend for each Tuttle Twins episode to be that family viewing experience kind of the original Pixar stuff where

where the adults can be laughing alongside their kids and then from there yeah we make the animatic which is basically just like the storyboarded version the animated storyboarded version. And then we work with our animation house. We're using an animation house in Ireland who makes the final animation. And then we, after nine months, kick out an episode every month. So it was a bit tricky. We have, being a principled show, we don't take subsidies. So it takes us a long time to find an animation house that doesn't get huge film subsidies. So, and it's been kind frustrating too but yeah the film industry is just swimming in government contracts and subsidies so do you have a go-to one or it's the shop yeah i mean with ireland we found one that would do

without without taking government subsidies so it's a hand-drawn uh no they use something called toon boom so it's like puppeting basically kind of puppet like animation um i wish it was hand drawn that would be awesome let's go back to the the real you know long-term thinking short you know high time or low time preference way of doing things yeah and since since you mentioned it i have to ask is grandma gabby the uh is she the the mechanism for getting the uh the parent jokes out there typically yeah i'd say grandma um can you know say uh you know places to go people to see communist to offend she can say stuff like that a lot of times she's the one who does it for parents um yeah and uh uh yeah we'll just throw in you know lots of different uh jokes

for parents how um how can anybody who's listening to this help you guys out outside of watching becoming a guild member yes so yeah if you want um uh just watching the show is the first step go to angel.com slash Tuttle Twins um uh three of our seasons are free the season four will be guild locks so only uh paying guild members can watch it when it comes out uh but then we release lots of clips on social media I think to date we've had like 300 million views across episodes of the show and, uh, and clips. And so if you see a clip that resonates with you, please share it, you know, and spread Tuttle Twins with your family and friends. Um, that really helps just word of mouth is, is the biggest thing. And what would you say to parents who may be a bit

apprehensive to throw their children into the deep end of some of these concepts? I'd say watch it first. Um, yeah, I don't encourage any parent to just like, trust me, like verify, go and watch what we put down. There may be a topic like the military industrial complex episode that you're like on the fence with or something. Uh, and that's, that's fine. Um, each of our episodes, like I was saying before, it passes the guild, um, only when the parents pass it. And so if you join the angel guild, you can actually tell us, and we read every single comment early on, um, that joke was offensive, or I think you guys are getting this wrong and we listen to those comments and if we see like a pattern um we definitely make some

drastic changes but the point is like we don't make this without parent approval and uh you shouldn't show this to your kid without watching it first i would say yeah uh as a parent the uh the mlk episode i think you guys handled that that topic uh very very uh meticulously and handled it with class and it was uh thanks man i was i was watching i was like oh wow they're touching this and this is this is incredible which one was that the uh uh we've mentioned him in a couple episodes imperfect people or was that the perfect people okay yeah yeah yeah how can you say an affair in a way that kids that goes over kids heads um but yeah yeah yeah well you guys are crushing it um i can't wait for season four and if there's anything we can ever

do here at tftc to help you guys out let me know because i think as i said we're in a meme warfare a propaganda a war for minds if you will or battle for minds and i think it's important and you guys are an incredible example of good educational content that i as a parent feel comfortable putting in front of my children and we need more of that. And I will reiterate to anybody listening out there with young children, do not underestimate their capacity to learn and really understand topics, complex topics, economic topics at a very early age. And you mentioned the allowance in Bitcoin. Our oldest son, he demanded it in Bitcoin too. So I set him up with an e-cash wallet But and he eagerly does chores so that I can send a Bitcoin.

And he's obsessed with watching his wallet balance go up after after completing chores. And it's worked out well for us. He's storing his his chore money and hard money. And he's actually eager to do chores and help around the house, which is incredible. Man, we got to get a tutorial of that. I'm sure like tons of our parents would love to see what you're doing. on that side maybe yeah maybe we could uh maybe i will do that maybe there'll be a newsletter all right here's how yeah we'll we'll hit up our audience with it too yeah because there's so

many parents are like where do i start you know it's so over my head um well marty man what you're doing here with tftc and rabbit hole recap um everything you're doing is such high signal and uh for our audience we'll send this out to you guys too like check out his stuff uh it's really great way to dive deep on bitcoin but also freedom related topics and i was joking around with you before coming on the show like uh you find some of these great freedom-minded voices way before i hear about them elsewhere and so i actually listened to this show sort of to think of potential guest stars for future episodes oh yeah i'm like oh yeah this person is or sometimes to question the guest stars that we're talking to uh in the case of food industrial complex we

were talking to i won't i won't name names but um anyways yeah it was just good to get to yeah just pure signal here we've uh thank you thank you for that we're becoming a bit of a rogan uh rogan uh warm-up show a lot of uh a lot of recent guests over the last couple years they'll show up on tftc first and then a year or two later they'll end up in rogan that's something we're very proud of here and um that's that's what i'm gonna do just and that's it's uh for me it's just following my own curiosity and having done it for so long like not afraid to be like all right as you're saying some interesting stuff let's have a conversation about it so thank you for listening and for the kind words it's uh yeah i'm just some dude following his curiosity likewise we just some

dude it's just making cartoons for our own kids and uh if it works for others great well johnny i meant to mention um we are doing an episode uh with safedine moose um and canes so that'll come out season four we're gonna be debunking canesianism for kids so we'll have to yeah get you an early screening of that but uh we don't hold punches and we went light on we cut the pedophile joke that we had about canes just because it is a kid's show no no scene set in morocco i guess yeah no no but yeah it is a kid's show we we did play around with grandma putting him in a protective bubble the whole time but you know we wanted to tag canes on on not just his behavior but on uh you know the ideas so but yeah i'm excited for you to see it so the debt

doesn't matter we're gonna teach the kids that the debt doesn't matter the debt doesn't matter yeah yeah well johnny thank you for what you're doing freaks if you're listening to this you have children even if you don't have children you'll check out the title twins um incredibly refreshing cartoon that exists uh and it will set your kids on the right path to understanding principles that if you're listening to this show i assume you're you're aligned with at least to a certain degree and it's a hard thing as a parent too to try to uh i'm i'm the the newsletter i write is probably at i don't they tell you in content particularly on social media right at a fifth grade level i don't know how to do that and so i'm like trying to get very complex

concepts out there but i explain them at a higher level and when i go to try to explain this stuff to my kids it's like all right how do i dumb it down i have a problem doing that i have a hard time doing that and so having a resource like the Tuttle Twins where you guys are really good at that and being able to be like all right son sit here watch this then I'll answer any questions you have after it's incredibly beneficial and impactful for me as a parent man yeah likewise thank you so much for having me on and I'm excited to kind of see where the next uh Joe Rogan guest stars come from um a couple years in advance might be you johnny it's gonna be you well you said it marty i didn't say all right thank you so much johnny enjoy the rest of your day peace and love

freaks freaks thank you for listening to the show i hope you liked it if you did like it please make sure you subscribe rate review the show it helps us out a lot and also if you like these conversations i've come to realize that many people listen to the podcast they don't know we have another sort of layer of this media company we have the newsletter the bitcoin brief go to tftc.io make sure you subscribe there a lot of the topics that are discussed on this podcast i write about five days a week in the newsletter we also have the tftc elite tier if you sign up for that become a member we have a private discord server for the elite freaks out there where we're dropping ad-free versions of this show and having discussions about everything we talk about

a day early logan wanted me to make sure if you want to get the show a day early become a tftc elite member you will get that we have our discord server right now it's conversation between myself and tftc elite tier members but we're going to expand that we'll probably do closed q and a's with people in the industry i may be doing macro mondays so join us go to tftc.io subscribe find the button in the top right corner of the website become a tftc elite member thank you for joining us