TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #640: Bitcoin Enlightenment with Pascal Hügli

Episode Date: July 16, 2025

Marty sits down with Pascal Hügli to discuss his co-authored book "Bitcoin Enlightenment," exploring how the abandonment of the gold standard created our current era of monetary relativism and why Bitcoin represents a return to economic reality and individual sovereignty. Pascal on Twitter: https://x.com/pahueg Get Bitcoin Enlightenment: https://thesaifhouse.com/ 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 how can we tie tennis to bitcoin this is i think one thing you just said it's a it's a mental battle it's it's you're all by yourself on an island yeah that's true yeah how can we tie it how can we tie tennis into this is actually this is a great segue

you we were just talking about tennis wimbledon final was yesterday center beat alcazar and pescal was just explaining to me he's been getting into tennis and it's a it's a transition for you because you played soccer your whole life team sport high contact moved to tennis one-on-one mental battle i feel like this is something bitcoiners know all too well the the internal mental battle you're basically know something that most people in your immediate life do not understand or grok and you're constantly battling volleying with them trying to explain why bitcoin can lead to a potential enlightenment which you wrote a whole book about yeah yeah exactly now that's actually a good way to segue into this yeah i mean the

mental struggle is real with bitcoin for sure you know i mean i i've experienced it my my entire life or like my entire life like the last nine years i would say you know like it's it's just been yeah you you come across this thing it really dawns on you and and for me i have to say like my bitcoin story is really because i've been into austrian economics i i was really curious during my university years so it did click once i found it which was wasn't that early 2015 ish or something You know, when I was, I think I told you last time I was in Auburn, Alabama at the Mises U summer school and it clicked for me immediately, you know, and I was like, I was, yeah, I was hooked from the first second. And then obviously, yeah, just grasping everything, the more you get to know, you want to talk to people about Bitcoin and they just sometimes, they just don't care, you know, and then you have to sort of talk to yourself. And every now and then, if we have the all-time highs, the people come and they ask about Bitcoin and how to make a quick buck.

And you're like, well, now is not actually the time I want to tell you about it. Why haven't you come a little earlier? And then, you know, it's just this really this struggle. And at some point I was like, OK, better just stick to myself, you know, do my podcast, maybe do a group of people that maybe want to join me and follow along. and and i'm still sort of here in switzerland a small i have a small following you know of a couple of hundred people but they are now really interested and obviously they have have had the journey as well and they have have tagged along but for everybody else it's just yeah i i feel like i could have with the curiosity that i have at least in in my friend circle and stuff i could

have helped maybe other people financially but in the end it's also not it's not i'm it's not my obligation you know if people don't want but that's that's the thing and that's why i i just always try to yeah be my own call coach and and learn more and that's what tennis is about you know you just nobody you you can talk to coaches but in the end it's with every sport but with tennis particularly you know you really have to go go into the flow and at some point you feel like now now i'm getting it you know and uh it just becomes natural and so that's that's that's the amazing part about it as well yeah you reach uh a level of zen where you where you know the basics you put in your 10 000 hours and you can just sort of operate that's where i feel like

today especially as it pertains to bitcoin i found my bitcoins and we're meeting at another all-time high currently sitting like right under 122 000 per bitcoin which is hard to it's not really hard to imagine when it's like uh we all think this day is going to come yeah and we've been proclaiming that it's going to come for for many years but now it's here it's like holy crap bitcoin's 122 000 yeah i mean the excitement is isn't like that's what i sometimes get you know people who are close to me that are like dude you don't seem to be as excited anymore you know as you used to be and obviously this is probably also some sort of marginal return or declining marginal you not not utility but something is like obviously when it was in 2017 and we had

this first push you know where where i was involved i was yeah like stupidly even making videos to some of my closest friends you know like headbanging my head uh to the all the meme songs that we had and i pulled them up every now and then on my iphone they're like i'm like dude what what was i doing here and and nowadays it's like that's that's what i hear you know why where's the excitement and i feel like a lot of bitcoin or you and others for sure as well feel that it's like yeah it's the vindication obviously but we're so mentally in that in this thing that we're like yeah it always had to come that way it had to the fulfillment was pre-programmed so to say you know and now it's actually happening and so maybe yeah it's this meme you know with the candle you go

like okay 122k and now let's go next all-time high when it's coming yeah there's a diminishing marginal return on dopamine hits you get from from bitcoin pumps over the years that's probably exactly yeah you get to your zen zen state and it's like okay it's happening let's try to usher as many people onto the lifeboat as possible while we can not be too pushy but put the content out there it is here if you want it and writing it and that's what i mean diving fully and transitioning fully into the bitcoin enlightenment um i'm still waiting to get my hard copy but you guys did have a chapter available on uh the safe house so i read that this morning took some notes and i guess let's just start before we jump into maybe we can talk about chapter four the economic

murder of god but it's the book overall you co-wrote it with um ricardo salinas and um one other gentleman whose names daniel jung and he's a swiss uh fellow colleague of mine yeah yeah so you daniel ricardo got together how did you three connect yeah why why this book specifically yeah it's sort of a weird story i mean uh me and daniel we've been longtime friends you know i've been in bitcoin i sort of maybe orange peeled him one of the people i i managed to orange peel because he has this natural curiosity as well and at some point he was like you're in this bitcoin thing can you tell me more and then he got interested in himself and did his own sort of study and stuff and so we've just been longtime friends and then we started our journey as digital

nomads sovereign individuals where me my wife and him because again he was just the one really tagging along we asked some other people if they would join us on this journey and he was the only one that would really come along and and so we went to all these different places all over the world experiencing what bitcoin culture is like in these countries like pakistan argentina other countries and one of the countries was mexico as well and i was googling to see if i could interview or talk to any interesting people who are in bitcoin in these countries you know and in mexico it was ricardo salinas that obviously was all over the internet when you googled for a big coiner a real big coiner you know and i was like wow that's an interesting dude like

he's the owner of 24 companies still you know his conglomerate is 170k uh employees all over latin america mostly mexico and i think into the us as well and so i was like really impressive that somebody like of his ranking and status could could really have the time to to also focus on bitcoin and be that knowledgeable from from what i read online and that's why it piqued my interest, I reached out to him and his team and had to do a couple of rounds until they sort of figured out, okay, that dude knows one or two things about libertarianism, about Austrian economics, topics he's interested in as well. And that's why he then said, okay, you can come to the headquarters and we do an interview. And we did that interview with him, got sort of viral on

on youtube uh went really well and so that's uh why the book was born because i then followed up and asked would you be interested in in sort of co-authoring a book with us and he was like yeah yeah sure let's do this and then we had a couple of more back and forths with him in the end we were the ones writing it uh putting in the hard work in terms of like really doing the typing and everything and and we just spawn a lot of uh the sentences and ideas in the books off of his uh sort of ideas that he shared with us and and we were just impressed uh even though as i said he doesn't have that much time on his end with all the companies he's still pretty well informed and just an amazing dude and so uh yeah that's that's how it came about and um just for us obviously a

great opportunity to do something like this with with a person of his profile yeah yeah and i mean this has been a theme or a sub theme within bitcoin for a while but people like i truly believe that bitcoin is one of the most revolutionary pieces of technology specifically monetary technology that humanity's come into contact with in quite some time in innovation on par with the internet steam engine printing press name your pivotal technological advancement over the last two millennia and bitcoin i think stands in the pantheon of those sort of demarcation technologies and i do truly believe in fix the money fix the world is is something we say a lot here at tftc it's outside of our studio in austin bitcoin fixes

this is a very popular meme and i think it's one that when i put out there gets the most pushback it's like bitcoin doesn't fix everything like that we're not going to fix if we fix the money it doesn't mean we fix the world there's so many other bigger problems and i agree bitcoin directly is not going to solve these problems but i do think indirectly falling back to like economics 101 positive and negative externalities exist as a concept and i think the negative externalities that emanate from a broken monetary system do inevitably touch everything and so if you can fix that problem at the core of the system which is money money is one half of every transaction arguably the most important tool we use as humans like if you can fix that core issue

and turn those negative externalities into positive externalities you can begin to fix everything and i think getting to that point of understanding does but it it sort of you need to have this enlightenment moment personally to get to that point yeah before you even get to that enlightenment point most importantly and what i can grok from chapter four from the book is you have to understand how everything got broken and the core of the system yeah exactly yeah or yeah no that's true maybe maybe to your point when it comes to like the does bitcoin fix everything i mean that's the question that i've been grappling with myself for quite some time and even writing the book you know like

like really okay on what levels does it really fix things you know and maybe maybe this is something i'm still grappling with as i said you know and and even writing the book like maybe sometimes bitcoin get over their skis as well in in terms of what it actually fixes you know and and or i have to put it this way i'm i'm like i had really had to in the book as well that's what we did differentiate between different levels you know the individual one like where it can really for for for like individuals uh like me you and others you can really say uh like fix stuff you know and and and help them to to turn a better life and stuff societally i'm i'm with you in the sense of like if if the core foundation is really broken a lot of things emanate from

that which are really bad but at the same time writing the book doing the research really digging deep into monetary history as well and kind of figuring out how how like amazingly big or even like frighteningly big that the government's um sort of uh grapple or how would i say um strangle of money has always been that was that's something that really impressed me as well you know money had always the state always really had this overarching hand over money and and even though there's like two stories to money you know with the market emerging money governments always wanted to call up money and they have always and so long story short i'm still sort of at the point where i'm like okay will we really be fixing it on a societal um sort of um level or or or is bitcoin

and just really the tool that challenges the old system but maybe never really supplants it but i mean that's that's maybe a story uh for another other day so to say but that's why we also then really hard like um um separated the topics in the book you know that we said okay we want to talk to the individual and really show the individual what has gone wrong you know on a societal level and then how he can really save himself and then we do speculate a lot about a little bit the societal aspects and where he might be going but there we're we're a lot less sure in in the sense of like okay hyper hyperpigmentation will really mean that everything else all the fiat currencies everything will go extinct you know and so um yeah that's that's sort of the

separation we we make in the book but as you said it's it's really important to really obviously then also show the individual where things went wrong and why he's experiencing what he's experiencing, you know, like, uh, yeah, that's because a lot of people feel that something with money is wrong, but they just really can't really articulate. And that's what we try to do as well. Yeah. So freaks, this rep of TFTC was brought to you by our good friends at CoinKite. 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 bitcoin or 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 and sats go check it out at opportunity cost dot app that's opportunity cost dot app and so if you were to try to pinpoint exactly where in chapter four you talk about two monetary sins which is the creation of the central bank and the abandonment of the gold standard does the story of corruption of that monetary system start with the introduction of central

banks or let's even go further back you're mentioning government control yeah over money where would you say the the corruption of the system began well i mean yeah that's that's really hard to pinpoint in the end as i said i i believe that human beings probably also crave some sort of authority and just some sort of fiat structure and they have always you know and that's what i mean when i when we go back in history uh but it never could really get out of hand until maybe the really the foundation or the establishment of the central bank you know and and that's when you look historically exactly uh governments they were around they were messing with money you know with different gold currencies that they sort of debased we all know the story you know

all the bitcoiners know and we we we delve into all of this and really try to show that this has been a historic constant for people who might not know this you know culminating maybe in something called the great depression or the great the basement sorry that's what it was called you know in england when some of the kings were really uh going full fiat already back then you know debasing the gold coins and the silver coins and there's this interesting story actually something that we learned from ricardo himself because he was always reciting this it was really henry the eighth i think was this king back then you know and and and he was debasing uh the english currency back then as well and and people didn't know that this was happening but then at some point they

figured it out because the coins he would then really remelt them obviously and and they had like a core which was out of copper and just sort of a silver coating and and and because they had his face on it as well on on the coin itself there was like this little nose that came a little further apart from from from from the coin so to say and when that was uh rubbing against like the bags that the money was kept in it came off you know the silver coating came off and then you saw the copper coming here the copper nose so to say and that's why this king henry the eighth um he he went down as as sir henry copper knows and that's really when when people figured it out that that he was tricking them you know and so uh that that was always the case um but it wasn't

until the the foundation of uh the central bank where this really got institutionalized and we called it the first sort of monetary sin exactly because then uh they really found the way to to perpetuate you know to continuously stealing from the public by by having this entity that could finance wars and and then also where they could bring in the private sector as well you know because the the central bank the bank of england was really this sort of private entity um in the beginning and it sort of merged then with the king and it was this hybrid and until today we have these discussions going on you know with the federal reserve in the u.s is it is it private is public but it's this weird hybrid thing and and this was already the case with the bank of england

and so um yeah for us this was really the the starting point because everything else followed from it you know the development of the bond market the currency the public currency and it all is so instrumental in in in making this institutionalized money printing that we have possible and and so we we called it and said it started with the establishment of the bank of england yeah yeah and the second monetary sin is the abandonment of the gold standard which set us clearly down the uh civilizational civilizational path towards fiat and you put a nichian lens on it cutting cutting gold's golden anchor is akin to killing god um so interested to hear you elaborate on that. Yeah, exactly. Well, exactly. I mean, the first thing was the

establishment of the Bank of England. And this really had to then go a long way in establishing, as we said, public bond markets where you could really borrow from the public and you don't have to go to all these private people again. And then you could also have the central bank like secretly buying up the bonds and everything. So that was all going on. But obviously, there was always this gold anchor remaining, you know, and with every war in the US and then also during the Napoleonic Wars and stuff, countries sometimes went off the gold standard because it was really this sort of hinge, you know, or the shackles that was holding them back. And at some point, they just went full fiat. And that's what we then called the economic murder

of God, you know, in 1971. And Bitcoiners obviously know this all too well. But we then wanted to put a sort of philosophical framing around it as well, because I studied political philosophy in university, obviously read Nietzsche and was always interested in hearing what he had to say. And for me, he was really so visionary in the sense that he said, well, he was describing what was happening. A lot of people think Nietzsche is like an atheist and he was really against God. And I don't even know if he was, but I think he was just describing a system and human beings were sort of fostering that. And the same is with money, you know, and then there is this book where he writes about this dude with the lantern, you know, that's what we quote in the

book. It is this guy who runs to the marketplace and he's like, we killed God, we killed God, where will we find him? What would we do? And all the people laugh at that guy. And then he really rambles this amazing sort of text you know where he says who are we that we wipe away the horizon with a sponge we kill the sun you know no more anchor we don't know are we going up are we going down are we going sideways and when I read this and he obviously Nietzsche himself didn't at least to my knowledge make any connection to to the money but it it all reads so clearly and you could just apply to the money you know because that's what happened when we really unhinged fiat from gold you know that that was something we hear today quite often like okay um is b is bitcoin

going up or is fiat going down we don't know you know it's sort of uh the price signals are all distorted and so i think even nietzsche unknowingly called it and and and the same we we quote dostoevsky another guy you know a russian rider who said like if god is dead everything is permitted everything is allowed and obviously it's the same if gold is gone then fiat is full fiat and everything is allowed and then we see what springs from that you know all the all the meme coins all the shit coin trading all the companies that have no value but trade at immense highly pes and stuff So, yeah, there is a philosophical angle to this for sure. And that's what we tried to explore in this chapter four that you mentioned.

No, it was I was very happy to see that thread in chapter four. And I was reading it because independently last week when the price went up to like 118, I tweeted out. Like, this is great. when the price goes up obviously it feels good as an individual bitcoiner because you're being validated something you've been screaming for the rooftops for for myself for the better more than a decade now at this point like it is being validated in real time uh but more importantly the price signal is a fact is a signal that other people are getting it too we're getting closer to the point where we're bringing back monetary sanity to the world.

And I did specifically use the phrase, like we're going to anchor the global economy back to reality, which I think many people don't realize. And they intuit it, they understand it, that things are wrong and things are getting more expensive. And even though we live in this incredibly advanced, technologically advanced society with the Internet, We're streaming from different parts of the world right now.

We'll upload this in high definition. Later on, it'll be distributed globally, and the cost to do so is very low. But even so, there are still these negative externalities that have emerged throughout society. You see them in deaths of despair here in the United States, how unhealthy people are. There is an argument to be made that some people are getting stupider. We've got birth rate decline in developed countries around the world, and it just feels like there's this this odd feeling that we're untethered from from reality. And all these negative things are extending from that. But I do hope that Bitcoin adoption increasing, which is evident by the price going up, does send the signal like, OK, this is the money we should be organizing around.

And if enough people do that, you can anchor back to reality, bring opportunity costs back to the economy and force better capital allocation decisions that that lead to better outcomes for everybody. But and I think you guys dive into this in chapter four, too, but I think the best way to describe the sort of intuitive knowledge that things are wrong, but you can't really put your finger on is the fact that we live in a world that is measuring things with Wittgenstein's ruler. which is something that you guys write about and yes it's it's hard to be anchored to reality when you have the measuring standard of things you're you're the decision the the ruler that you use to measure uh the inputs uh that base that you base your decisions off of is constantly changing so that leads to bad decisions at the end of the day yeah yeah exactly yeah because of this economic murder of god you know because like the foundation or the monetary truth or reality was sort of murdered we then entered this this age of monetary relativism that's what we call it you know and

that really follows from it and it's exactly it's this nassim telep quote you know the wittgenstein's ruler i mean he he elaborated on this on his book and it's sad to see him nowadays shitting on bitcoin as well but because he would be among the ones who should really get it but he had this quote you know saying like really i have it here up unless you have confidence in the rules right like reliability if you use a rule to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler the less you trust the rules reliability the more information you are getting about the ruler and the less about the table itself you know and and that's exactly the problem you know and And so it's really like if you have sort of, if you wanted to measure the length of a meter stick by using a rubber band, that's the same thing, you know, because the rubber band is just too elastic.

And so you don't know in the end, okay, what is it? How long is it really? What's the right measurement? And so there's all these sort of analogies that you can, in the end, draw. i mean we had now this cover you can see you know it's really like the dark age and lightning we also had the idea of a lighthouse you know maybe with with bitcoin being really in in a roaring sea because that's the other thing like uh yeah if if if you are on a roaring boat tossing in the high seas and up and down and and then you don't really know okay what's up what's

down you need some sort of lighthouse which is bitcoin you know absolutely scarce so you can measure things against and uh yeah it's just amazing that this nowadays exists and people like you and others are building these uh i saw i don't remember the name you know but uh this uh add-on that you can now use to to measure everything against bitcoin and i think that's that's so important for people to really figure out what's happening here you know and now we have it we can actually do this which is amazing yeah opportunity cost opportunity cost.app if you add the add-on or extension to your browser it does it's crazy i've been in bitcoin for a while now and it wasn't until i built the extension and started using it like even myself having been in

it is jarring when you price everything in bitcoin on the internet it really does induce that sense of okay i need to make sure that i'm really honing in on my expenses making sure that i'm saving in bitcoin as much as possible yeah no and and i mean maybe just to add to this you know in the end this is really the problem if monetary relativism you don't know what's happening then again a lot of things will follow from this you know and we we have this other sub chapter in chapter four where we talk about the financialization of society also not the first to do this you know but we just wanted to really um right on show that there's so many things which are also criticized by many fiat people people on the left you know like in terms of companies who have their their

main business is nowadays not their actual business anymore but some sort of financialized department that they have and that's where they're getting all the money from you know it's so a lot of car companies are actually not selling cars but they are doing a sort of car mortgages and loans you know and that's where they get the money from or macy's is a store that when i was in the u.s obviously i know it the department store as far as i know most of their money is coming from from another business which is sort of then also tied to to financial credit and everything you know and and and there's many other uh like airlines airlines is the best example you know that you can point to uh which is crazy and and so this is really the financialization

and and then uh yeah a lot of people don't see this you know and and they pinpoint something uh maybe superficial and don't see it for the real cause and that's that's that's a problem that we wanted to address as well yeah and something as we're diving down this thread of the conversation something like and that's i think that's one of the harder things being in bitcoin is people will ask like all right like i think the one word sort of rebuttal that people put out there that highlights this overarching question of when will we know we're on a bitcoin standard or more importantly when will if it's not now when will bitcoin be reliable as this ruler right and the one question is like i can't no merchants i can't spend my bitcoin anywhere so

therefore it can't be money um but that's something i wonder like we're sitting at 122 000 now at what price point at what market cap at what level of merchant adoption will we know that that bitcoin is a a ruler that can be dependable um to make long-term economic decisions about i think for long-term savings it's obviously dependable maybe it already is a better ruler than the fiat system but during this adoption and monetization phase how do you how do you sort of know when you've crossed the rubicon of bitcoin being the the standard ruler that you can be comfortable with does that make sense yeah i know i mean it's probably a hard question to really uh answer and and and and to say on again and it goes back to the point that i was

making earlier in terms of like individual wise and then society wise you know like i don't want to judge for society and it's really hard to really also extrapolate and and really pinpoint and then say okay at this point in time maybe all of society will sort of use this ruler and they will have adopted it and and i probably i hope that this will happen but i'm just not really sure and and and i don't want to sort of miss the forest for the trees you know like all speculate about when it's going to happen in society but but i should be and that's another quote that we have in the book you know like uh bitcoin be the be the change in big like all the bitcoiners should be the change they wish to to to happen in the world they should something like borrowing from

muhammad gandhi you know but i mean that that's what i see for myself and i would say personally it already in in a lot of ways is is my standard uh that i go by you know in terms of like the easy thing that we heard with with consumption am i going now will i do that type of consumption um will i will i consume that or will i forego the consumption because i know i could put put it somewhere else and then also you know in terms of like a bigger stuff like a house um should i now go for this or or isn't it doesn't it make sense to maybe wait another year and have a longer time uh horizon there all these uh type of things i mean that's where bitcoin for me is already very very uh valuable and and probably my standard and the more people

that adopt this i mean at some point we might reach this societal point where where it's actually there but it's probably really hard we will only only know in hindsight you know probably some historian will only know in hindsight and can then tell okay this was the time everything switched we are that sort of in the midst of it all we probably don't have the ability to really zoom out and say okay now i think it's switched and and and it's just a gradual process you know market is really a process it's not like this zero or one thing it's probably just yeah gradually still yeah and not not that sudden but i mean sometimes we have the sudden faces yeah like now yeah yeah no it's similar like great wars throughout time

you don't really know that they've started once they have started it's only in retrospect where historian goes back and says well actually world war ii started here um world war one started here with the with the assassination of franz ferdinand i don't think at that time it was like world war one is on it was like oh franz ferdinand got assassinated things are getting heavy and then things escalated and in retrospect somebody comes in it's like yep that's when world war one started yeah no probably that's that's a good analogy as well yeah at 122 000 bitcoin the boom is still just beginning are you positioned for the decade-long rush on july 22nd ter demister joins unchained for a live session the boom is just beginning you'll get a full macro briefing and

a brief intro to how to properly secure your bitcoin for the long haul register now at unchained dot com slash tftc that's unchained dot com slash tftc don't sit on this freaks take advantage of this alpha what else what other like if you were to sort of think of the book that you've written and think of like the one overarching message you're trying to get through to the audience to the readers reading it what would that be well yeah that's that's the thing that's what we were discussing internally as well like what is the overarching message i mean in the end it's probably several messages you know uh because we we wanted to also write a book that's accessible to to different uh groups of people to some hardcore bitcoiners and that's why we have some of the

historic chapters in it as well you know where it really goes deep as i explained with the bank of england and everything and so that's that's really the bitcoin nerdy stuff And then we have chapter four, where it's probably more to the average Bitcoiner or appealing to it, as we said, you know, describing really what's happening here and then where you can also really relate and maybe not only the average Bitcoiner, but also then the average person, you know, the millennial, the Gen Z, these people. I mean, we go into all these sorts of problems nowadays that you have, that you struggle with, you know, if you are a younger person or even a millennial like me, you know, looking for housing and do we even get a house, you know, isn't it too expensive? But then at the same time, we also talk about, okay, is it all that bad, you know, because that's what I'm hearing from my boomer friends, my dad, who's sometimes like, okay, you can't complain. You know, you just traveled the world, met up with this Mexican billionaire, something I could have never done. And you tell me you live in a world which is worse than mine, you know, and I'm like, OK, that's that's actually true. I see what you mean. It's probably not that black and white.

And so that's what we try to address as well. But but in the end, I think the story is really comes down again to this individual thing. you know like you you can understand bitcoin you have to understand it on a on a foundational level also what it does to society really what it does to everything your surroundings around you that you maybe get a better understanding of okay it's maybe not me it's not others it's really the game which is sort of rigged again this quote you don't don't hate the players hate the game and from there but then like okay what can i do okay i can save in bitcoin i can uh at least partly opt out and and and live a better future and and that's what we ended on with the book as well it's not

one of these books which is then everything is going to burn you know fiat fiat go to hell but it's more like ending on an optimistic note that we're saying maybe yeah bitcoin is here to make the world a better place even make fiat great again maybe that how polemically how we how we say it in the book and and and so um yeah we also dive into what's what's happening you know on the banking front with with a lot of institutions getting online helping uh to build bitcoin into their products and offerings and stuff and so um yeah that's that's what we wanted to address as well so um yeah and it's probably also in ricardo's interest because he owns the bank himself he has the companies i mean even though he is a true bitcoiner he knows that there's another world

which is also still spinning yeah and i think two things there don't hit the player hate the game is very important to recognize opt out of that game and into the game of bitcoin where the rules are transparent. You can audit them yourselves and have a high degree of certainty that they're not going to be changed. And so you can sort of base decisions off of the rules that set forth in that game pretty confidently. And then the other thing is this sort of integration of Bitcoin into the institution. I was happy you brought that up because I wanted to touch on that when you consider what's happening today and what's happened, I would say, over the last year and a half since the etfs launch is you've had this different sort of archetype of new bitcoiner

come to market which isn't an individual it's typically a corporation or an institution that is made up of individuals but but operates on a completely different order of magnitude in terms of capital flows and just access to capital that can flow into bitcoin so like on that note with what's happening right now, obviously, here in the United States. Trump administration seems very keen on fostering the Bitcoin industry in the United States. Executive order for a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Nothing's been passed and enshrined into law yet, but they're saying they want to accumulate as much Bitcoin as possible. Obviously, the trend of Bitcoin treasury companies people following in michael saylor and strategies wake uh beginning to

accelerate seeing them pop up not only here in the united states but around the world you've got other nation states adopting bitcoin most famously el salvador where you have the president president piquele sharing screenshots of the the gains the country's made in bitcoin since they started accumulating it obviously we've got bhutan uh up in the himalayas which has been mining bitcoin and using it to their advantage um different archetype of buyer institutions not necessarily individuals but institutions are made up of individuals at the end of the day like what do you think about this sort of archetype of new buyer and new demand source for bitcoin uh as we head into the second half of 2025 yeah yeah i mean it's very interesting to see and for

me and for us in the book and we dive into this as well it was sort of inevitable you know because i feel like some people structure like the the bitcoin's journey into these several sort of stages you know you had like the early adopter stage or like even before you had all the nerds techies then the early adopters then the finance people it was all the individuals the retailers that were first you know which is really neat about bitcoin it's probably the only industry where this really can happen you know it's not the institutions first but then at some point obviously and i think we reach now this threshold where with 100k you know it's really people who have been in bitcoin for maybe five seven six years they made probably astonishingly amounts

of wealth as well you know even sometimes life-changing stuff and and they are they have huddled through all these uh troughs and and the ups and downs and i mean they are now feeling ever more compelled to act out their beliefs you know and and pushing for the adoption of bitcoin and now with with strategy uh having shown this playbook i think this is what we're seeing across different spectrums of of institutions you know like really people the bitcoiners themselves who maybe have even come into positions where they can sort of move the needle inside companies. You know, I myself are sort of a person.

I mean, I'm not a banker myself. I never studied finance at university. And here I am, I find myself among investment managers in one of Switzerland's top banks, you know, as a Bitcoiner. And I can now also try to drive policy, even though within a bank, it's still sort of hard, you know, because there are all these regulations but but yeah there's there's other examples that i can point to like for me dylan leclerc is like the the the best example you know he's like this guy

really young coming from from the trenches so to say and is now moving uh the the the needle with metaplanet and and and i think that's what we're seeing we will keep on seeing this that's why i believe there's so much more to come on on that front because just a lot of people a lot of bitcoiners who want to uh now use this leverage that they have and then the amplifier are the institutions which can do everything on a on a greater scale and that will amplify everything with with all the bad uh the pros and cons i guess you know i mean when it comes to these bitcoin treasury companies i'm not sure this is probably also somewhat overhyped you know and at some point some will will die again i mean i just have anecdotal evidence again but i mean

i'm now also being asked to be an advisor to some companies that want to start in switzerland you know and i'm just a small big corner maybe here in switzerland some sort of expert but i have a small following but the the case or the fact that they're now asking me kind of shows me okay i'm not proficient enough but they just want to maybe have somebody who can slap a pretty face on yeah and source of attention and stuff and so this sort of is anecdotal evidence for me that we might be in the stage where these things are getting overhyped i also believe that maybe in switzerland a bitcoin treasury company might not make that much sense after all because when it comes to buying bitcoin we're world renowned to to be among the best places you

know with the banks where you can already enter we have like all the etps from very early on we have no capital gains on bitcoin so no real mode that you will have as a bitcoin treasury companies a company and i believe it's probably they're similar with other countries and with some it's not you know in the u.s you have strategy they really have like their edge or it seems like in in in japan you have meta planet they have some sort of regulatory arbitrage that's going on there so in some countries it might work but not in all and so yeah i mean it's always the same it's it's it's pros and cons to everything but but i think it's just not going away because of the the force that i that we describe in the book you know with all these hodlers that really

want to the want to be the change that they want to see in the world you know yeah it's uh it's funny it's the chat behind the scenes in the industry right now it's like it's particularly for podcasters is like when you when you're going to join the next treasury company yeah i was I was waiting for you to join soon, you know. To all the listeners out there, if I ever join one, it's a side at the top. My timing is not great, and I'm not fit for purpose for that type of role. I like to talk about Bitcoin. It doesn't mean I'm an expert at capital market arbitrage.

Yeah, I don't want to piss on anybody in particular, but even in the U.S., you might know who I'm referencing. but there are other people you know big podcasters who who now are wearing a hat you know and there's like some company name on it and so i'm like okay this this looks a little toppy to me as well but we'll see maybe maybe not maybe maybe this time is different after all we shall see i'll be i'll be happy just to do what i'm doing here at tftc and 1031 that's enough for me i don't need to uh to join a treasury company but it is it is insane like another thing i was thinking about as we're talking about like institutions are made up of individuals and as bitcoin monetizes the price goes up and the individuals in bitcoin get wealthier they can influence policy they can

deploy capital to build companies and goods that they want to see in the world they can get politically active whatever it may be and this reminds me of um a presentation that turd demister gave in austin early last year during a bitcoin urbanism meetup it might have been two years ago now at this point but it is a pretty wild stat like as bitcoin does a 10x every four to six years whatever whatever it averages out to be like the amount uh the the steps individual bitcoiners make into the top one top 0.1 top 0.01 percent of the global wealth ladder uh increases and i think what he said during that presentation was i don't think we realize how quickly we're going to get to a point where like the 0.01 percent is made up of

like 50 bitcoiners and then you can really begin to use that capital that you've saved and accumulated to change the world for the better which is incredibly uh incredibly uh optimistic in a good way not overly optimistic not naive optimistic but it's an optimistic view of the future where you found this thing you found it early you put in the hard work to understand it uh make money to buy it to accumulate it and hold it for a long period of time and then uh maybe that is the path to fixing all these things is enough bitcoiners who are uh philosophically and ideologically aligned getting to a point of wealth where they begin to deploy that capital and fix the systemic issues in the system no that's that's a great

point and i mean i i know what uh talk i think you're referencing by tour i think it was uh put online as well and i watched it too because i i think it's a journey that many bitcoiners will go through as well you know i mean i'm going through this myself in terms of i'm a true libertarian at heart you know and so when i first discovered bitcoin i was like okay this is really something that helps me not to care about politics anymore you know and in some extent it does it gives me some reassurance you know also when it comes to the portfolio that you have you know like okay maybe maybe what what all the clowns are doing out here maybe it might not affect me that harsh you know because i have my secret stash here and and at least this is giving me

some reassurance you know but then at the same time i feel like it can also be a little naive you know i i just saw this post a couple of days back by max kaiser you know and and again he he wrote a a praise for our book as well because he's good friends with ricardo and so don't want to shit on him at all but he was like he had this meme sort of without bitcoin i'd be forced to care about politics you know that's what we what he posted to some other thing and that he was referencing and i was like yeah maybe if you are that well off like him and you can escape to el salvador that's true but maybe it's not true for everyone not even for every big coiner you know and because at the march and some might not be as well off as him and so maybe it and that's where

i'm then questioning myself again you know no um so maybe it's not that good it wouldn't be that good if all the Bitcoin is just really retreat and don't care about. And luckily, I think that's also not what we're seeing, because as you said, in the US, you have, I think, the BTC Policy Institute, all these institutions that are picking up as well. I see it here in Switzerland as well, all the institutions and entities that are being founded to really influence politics in some way. And then you also have the resources by now, you know, because usually, like all these

political groups, all the libertarians, they didn't have that much money, but nowadays they have it and money sort of moves some things at the margin as well. And so I think that's really interesting. I'm looking forward to see what influence Bitcoiners will have. I'm just reading this book, Satoshi's paper by Natalie Smolensky. And in the beginning, she references all these acts in the u.s that you guys put through um like sometimes even behind closed doors sort of the patriot act the anti-drug money act whatever act there is i don't even know you might know it better than me the bank secrecy yeah the bank secrecy act all these acts you know and she's also in the book they're like okay maybe bitcoin will have the financial power the interest the

stamina everything else to to reverse these things and go up against this and so that that will be very interesting to see and that would as you said your point make the world a better place at least in our eyes probably and so it's going to be interesting how that pans out as well yeah you may not care about political power but political power cares about cares about you it's uh for somebody who's um definitely slanted more towards libertarianism that uh it's it's a hard thing to come to grips with but i think you have to realize you're in a game and you're an actor in that game and you may not like the rules and want to opt out but if you if you're looking for the optimal outcome you probably have to play ball to a certain extent and i think yeah bitcoiners

particularly here in the united states have really woken up to that in the last three years and began to and i think it's also very important because one other thing that really that i learned when I was researching and then writing the book, I went full deep down the rabbit hole towards MMT, you know, like modern monetary theory. I mean, I always knew sort of what it is. I studied Georg Friedrich von Knopp, you know, which is like sort of the founder back in the 19th century and stuff. But researching the book, I did this deep dive on MMT and I found it so fascinating even though i'm i'm not sort of fond of their conclusions i feel like these guys they're spot on when it comes to describing today's system i think you had mel madison on just a few

weeks ago and and i had an episode on my podcast with him as well where we were discussing that trump is really sort of following uh these mmt um policies and and so i found this so interesting because like they they have they're like these mmt guys i don't know have you seen the movie finding the money you know this uh documentary yeah i can really yeah i can recommend it because like there is as a big coiner i could sort of relate you know because they have been jumping through similar hoops in terms of like they're being called monetary fringe people and cringe you know and so everybody laughs at them but then when they really go talk to people and they sort of not orange pill but mmt pill them i mean they they sometimes um really manage this you know

because they're like okay we're in fiat now and then they make all these sort of promises as well you know because with mmt you can finance everything no sort of lack to to the money that you can create and stuff and so as i said even though i don't really uh can subscribe to this theory in terms of like morals and and philosophy wise i feel like this is just what's going to happen in the fiat system. These people are going to be ever stronger voices. And maybe if at some point Democrats are coming back to power, I mean, they will be all over their ears. And so it's all the more important that we have Bitcoin because in an MMT world, I mean, control and everything is just going to be a lot harsher. And that's why it's even more important that we have the

big corners who you take to the stage as well and then sort of uh try to refute them as well you know and and have some counter arguments ready because i think this theory is gaining a lot of momentum and um it's just because yeah it's it's they're promising la la land you know to everyone and and that's what people want to hear in the end yeah and the rules of the game are such that they can like it's in with the realm of possibility in that rule set and so they can go effectuate what they want to happen which is um unnerving because like you said i don't agree with it morally philosophically and it's a complete it's basically like a an admission you become completely untethered from reality and so once you do that here's what's possible you can the

debt doesn't matter you can finance everything exactly printed dollars then you just tax them out of the system yeah but but the thing to me is and like a lot of people like we call them the the useful idiots you know i mean they might just go happily go along with this you know because for me the pandemic or plandemic or whatever you want to call it was like a perfect example for this you know like a lot of people just went along with it they didn't care and so i think the same might be happening there especially if these economists and politicians who are influenced by these economists are then promising them the entire world you know by okay we can we can get rid of climate change we can get rid of this we can finance everyone just because the money doesn't

matter we just sort of have to mobilize the real resources because that's that's what they can't print you know not yet you know at least uh that's that's not possible and so i mean i think people will just go along with it and and then yeah the system itself will have will need more levers to pull to sort of steer people into the right direction in terms of providing the real resources that's why the control screws will probably be tightened you know but i could imagine people go along with it because like both of the systems sort of have these useful idiots you know like the traditional one has these with the people going along the bitcoin system also has these useful idiots like all the crypto people who buy uh into crypto and then end up

being bitcoiners or they start out as you as as like useful idiots and then uh this also helps our cause in the end because more money is is like initially coming into the space and so yeah i think um this will probably be the defining battle going forward for me you know mmt versus bitcoin uh like philosophically again but i just think uh the more i studied it now i i wouldn't just uh laugh it off anymore because i think it's it's a serious serious development and will only uh catch more and more fire at least that's that's what i think yeah yeah i think you only have to look at the front runner for mayor of new york city um to see that it is certainly gaining in terms of influence he's in this documentary as well and um yeah yeah yeah is he i have to

watch this i think so yeah i think it's he is in there as well or at least like one of his advices yeah so it is interesting it is another thing i wanted to like come back on because you brought it up like max um down in el salvador and this idea of like flag theory like just when shit hits the fan just leave where you where you grew up and go find go find a like line of bitcoin or somewhere on an island around the world build your citadel like that is always internally i've paid credence to it in the past but as i've gotten older and had children i find it like just like untenable for me personally um somebody who has a pretty strong nuclear and extended family i think the idea of like abandoning where i grew up from like i was

telling you before we hit record i just moved back to my hometown of philadelphia um partly for this reason is my family's there my extended family my friends that i'm still really close with who i grew up with we're all there and this idea of just abandoning your roots to to go find like-minded people elsewhere just has never sat well with me and uh maybe it's naive maybe it's idealistic but i do think there is credence in being that individual who gets bitcoin and understands or likes to think that he understands a lot of the uh what's causing the problems and the strife and how the game is messed up in the world to sort of put the flag down and say,

no, I'm going to make sure that where I grew up, my home does not just get washed in the wave of fiat debasement and fiat politics and put up a fight to try to slowly but surely convince people that, hey, there's another way to do things and Bitcoin's part of that way. Yeah, no, that's greatly said. I mean, I was going through the same thing, you know, as I said, the book came about because we were traveling as sovereign individuals slash digital nomads, you know, and we were really sort of unregistered from Switzerland.

So like no strings attached, you know, we wanted to really live this life. But after two years, we figured, yeah, it's tough. As you said, I'm also well rooted with family, extended friends. and so um i'm like wow um if you can really pull this off i mean i'm impressed you know i have i have now some digital nomad friends who've been doing this for plus 10 years and so it's crazy but if you then without again calling anyone out but if you look at these people they're living all by themselves usually they have no wife no family and just traveling and so yeah maybe if it's for you then it's it's okayish but like i'm probably similar to you i i couldn't do this and so yeah

going back to to where your roots are and and really try to make a difference like maybe for example peter mccormick you know who's really now uh trying to get his city around and and investing in the soccer club and everything that's just that's another legacy that you can leave and so um again i mean that's bitcoin gives you the optionality you know in in both ways and that's what i like about it and so uh yeah um everyone to each his own i guess that's that's what it is but i'm with you on that yeah no i think i mean maybe that's the most important point to get out of uh your individual bitcoin enlightenment is that it gives you that optionality which is far preferable to the lack of optionality that exists within the fiat system today yeah no that's that's that's

definitely that's that's something uh this optionality which is i think what what what freedom is for me eventually about you know like you get the options you get to choose and and exactly that's also coming back to this whole mmt thing you know um i mean yeah i do understand where they're going but in the end as i said if you can only print the money and you cannot print the real resources you have to source it from somewhere and usually this only goes through like soft force or they're even hard force you know and and then you sort of have to mandate stuff and you have to get people to work in in health care and and that's why because that's where you're spending all the money and then then so the resources has to sort of be a transfer

there and channeled into these industries and so it's all through force and and and in the end exactly that's that's not what what my philosophical underpinning and and belief is about and then that's what i what i prefer about bitcoin you know it's really uh everyone is adopting it freely and and it gives you the choice to either live this nomadic lifestyle or go back and and uh become a tribal bitcoiner in your family and we have a sub chapter on this on the book as well it's exactly this in chapter seven where we talk about this uh dichotomy or just like uh yeah the citadel versus like uh maybe the the nomad or yeah so it's probably going to be the future has will have both i guess yeah i would agree there i would agree there i'm not fucking leaving

this has been great where um where should we send people the safe house yes yeah in the end it's the safe house yeah that's where you get the book it's also on amazon for anybody listening from from europe i guess amazon.de from germany is probably the best site because then you get no shipping costs i don't know if we have figured it out on on amazon.com yet but if you're from the states or internationally like it's the best place is probably to go and order it from the safe house because there it's the highest quality books that you get also in terms of wrapping and everything i I mean, SAFE is really making sure this is high standard, yeah. SAFE, building out a publishing empire, one book at a time.

Yes, he is. He is, exactly, yeah. You're in great company at the SAFE house. Yes, yeah, that's for sure. I mean, it's amazing. I mean, I would have never imagined that we will ever publish a book through SAFE, but I mean, Ricardo being a huge fan of his, and that was maybe his biggest requirement, you know,

write a book which is close to the bitcoin standard and we were like dude this is quite a quite some pressure that you're putting on us here you know and and obviously we didn't want to rewrite everything that safe has already written and that's why we tried to with the philosophical angle that we talked about with the historical angle that might not have been addressed so far and so yeah in the end i hope we we did it but yeah it's it's it's such a privilege to to be on board with him so um can't complain for sure well thank you for writing the book i'm going to wait for my hardcover to show up i'm a i'm a physical book maxi nice yeah to uh to finish the rest of the book beyond chapter four but no i think this message

is incredibly powerful and important i mean there's many different ways through which people come to Bitcoin. I've long been an advocate of the more content, the more angles on Bitcoin education, the better. People often ask me, as somebody who's been podcasting about Bitcoin for eight years now, like, oh, you ever get triggered by all the new Bitcoin podcasts coming to market, all the new books? I'm like, no, the more the better. Each individual has something that they connect with differently. And the more angles you're sort of describing the problem and the solution the better yeah it's true the less we get and we don't get to print any bitcoin at all the more we have to print bitcoiners like you and me or like we have to print bitcoin

podcasts and so everything else is probably fine so uh yeah keep them coming all right well pascal hope you enjoy your night uh and freaks go pick up the book go pick up the book put it on the bookshelf read it spread it and uh i'm sure we'll i'm sure we'll catch up this fall as well because there's gonna be a lot going on great marty thanks for bringing me on uh keep up the work as well and uh too bad i don't get to see you in rica but maybe as you said in fall or somewhere else uh yeah bitcoin is still still a small world at least among the core bitcoiners I'd argue so yeah

every now and then we get to meet we'll run into each other somewhere sure somewhere around the world at some point exactly

cool thanks a lot have a great one thank you you too peace and love freaks freaks thank you for listening to the show I hope you liked it

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