TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #660: Building Amid Chaos with Will Cole

Episode Date: September 13, 2025

Marty sits down with Will to discuss the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk and its potential political ramifications, Bitcoin's evolving mainstream acceptance, Zaprite's new ticketing platform, and the integration of AI tools in software development. Will on Twitter: https://x.com/willcole Zaprite: https://zaprite.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: Bitkey https://bit.ly/TFTCBitkey20 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Obscura https://obscura.net/ SLNT https://slnt.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 And that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. It's one of those weeks, Will. It's fucking insane.

Unfortunately, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's hard to gather the thoughts with, I mean, not only the last 24 hours, I think the last seven days, we were just talking before hit record. That woman, Irina, was murdered on the bus. We had pretty, I would define them as catastrophic disclosures about vaccine studies on Capitol Hill, the Maha hearings earlier. I think they were pretty profound. And then obviously, less than 24 hours ago, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which really hits close to home.

I didn't realize he was 31. I knew he was young. I didn't realize he was that young. It's incredible, right? his accomplishments to 31 or unparalleled. Yeah. And we're recording this on nine 11. It's just weird vibes this week.

I must point out that, you know, we've been talking about doing this for like weeks, maybe even over a month plan was just to come in and talk, you know, some good old fashioned Bitcoin. Right. But obviously we're going to have to mix in some other stuff now.

Yeah. No, I mean, the Charlie stuff, i'm sure we'll touch on potential motives all that stuff but i think just in general you speaking to the profound impact he had as an individual on political discourse in the united states particularly for younger generations i mean again i didn't realize he was 31 i didn't realize he started turning point usa when he was 18 so he's been on this grind for

13 years and whether you liked the way he operated or not i think it's undeniable he had an incredible impact on younger generation particularly how they viewed politics most importantly how to engage a political discourse i think that was i mean obviously the the worst part about this is that he was a young father with two children i believe his son is two years old we'll never know his father his daughter a couple years older both lost their father but i think the way in which he was assassinated at one of these events which have become rather famous where he sets up a tent and engages in socratic dialogue with people who vehemently disagree with him i think that is desperately needed these days and the grace and patience and respect he brought to

those conversations um is something even though i didn't agree 100 with everything charlie said over his career like i really respected the format and it's a shame that he was assassinated during one of these events because not only uh an elimination of his life but an attack on the medium itself which as bitcoiners i think it's pretty close to home because we we attend a lot of these socratic events whether it's debates or discussions about the protocol and they're very effective in terms of helping people better understand a subject or have tough conversations about things sure yeah i mean i would start out by just saying like there's a lot of people that are going to listen to this who actually followed

charlie kirk like closely and i was not one of those people like i mean i was aware of them i even met him once uh briefly um and uh but i'll probably say some stuff where people are like i've listened to 100 hours of his stuff and i'm not one of those guys you know i didn't i didn't listen to 100 hours of his stuff but i'm aware of what he was doing i was also surprised how young he was um i just assumed i don't know you know how hard it is to become persuasive yeah it's so hard to become persuasive and he was i mean if anything like that's kind of what he's famous for he was like a super persuasive person like unbelievably persuasive person that was like his whole thing was that he could go to these college campuses and he can engage with

young people and you could persuade them you know or at least like change their mind a little bit you know even if not all the way it was like that talent like it's something i think about all the time like in work but mostly in like a work environment like sort of retail persuasion one-on-one teams of software developers stuff like that not like wholesale persuasion the way he does it which i can't even imagine being good at that um it was always fun to watch the clips and stuff that would come through because i know how hard it is to become good at something like that it's a very difficult thing to do and to see someone that was 31 i mean he was like that though i mean the last like three i'm kind of aware of him post covid you know um and

uh it's an incredible talent like um very rare like very rare talent to have especially that young you know i think of guys like christopher hitchens and stuff like that like he didn't strike me like that until much more advanced age he was like you know master persuader in that in that that sense yeah no i think my exposure to charlie kirk is very similar to yours i never tuned into his podcast or yeah watched a whole um stream of those debates that he would do but picked up the clips and i would watch those and yeah then to your point extremely persuasive and yeah the way in which he was assassinated

is just very uh i don't know very jarring and just to get to to sort of jugular artery videos in one week of people dying in terrible ways is it's not good to watch it's not good for anyone to watch

but um yeah i will say like one you know whatever i have one charlie kirk story which is this this january i was in dc for the inauguration and you know we went to you know dozens of events and stuff like that but we went to one aptly that is uh there's a political uh republican donor foster freeze who died uh recently but uh his family still runs this event in dc um during the inauguration it's at the i believe it's called the museum of the bible um and uh so we were going

to the museum of the bible it's very beautiful building great museum all this but the event was it was an odd collection of characters like not the typical inauguration event that you would expect uh tucker carlson was the mc you kind of expect that uh the guest of honor was connor mcgregor okay we're already getting into weird pairings um there's a lot of media uh but there weren't that many politicians at like an inauguration thing which is a little bit odd and uh and there were a lot of young men there right uh that were there to listen um and what was really funny is you have tucker you know biggest media personality in the world right now you have conor mcgregor you would imagine for young men like one of the coolest guys around you

know ufc fighter champion all those things and then uh in the back charlie kirk wasn't speaking he was just in the back listening and when the event when the uh stage event was basically over you know i went over to talk to him and he was every young person there you know you got tucker here you got you got uh you got uh ufc royalty over here everyone's mobbing him anyone under 30 was just on charlie you know and i didn't i i didn't know that much about him i found that is like interesting i was like huh you know you got all these like political celebrities athletes stuff like that and like charlie's the guy that all the 26 year old guys want to talk to yeah yeah and it's um i think the message the politics aside but i think his sort of life

message i mean obviously he was a devout and very open christian and yeah love god loved god talked a lot about uh the bible scripture would um would basically verbatim recall lines of scripture during during his debates and it was extremely impressive but i think i would not be surprised if he was being mobbed by the young men in their 20s because his message was hopeful in an age of, I don't want to say despair, but it's tough times. We know that. That's why we're in Bitcoin.

Well, that's a notable thing. From what I've seen, of course, and if someone's watched hundreds of hours of him and disagrees, but from what I saw, and I see tons of clips, it's not like I was unexposed, um is that uh charlie was generally like a white pill guy he's a positive guy um um obviously when you're debating there are like negative aspects and you have to like you know you know win a debate but like i don't know most of the stuff i saw was actually like hopeful nice

respectful um uh biblically oriented um yeah that's good stuff that's a good person yeah no that's what the young generation needs and not in any way trying to compare myself to uh charlie kirk but it's the message we try to get here i mean we talk about a lot like get married have kids and do good things be a good person go to church i think it's a simple message that is being well received by the uh the young men in the world today because it's the only one that seems to make sense and i i guess this dovetails into potential motives and yeah well that like it it was just weird how it unfolded and i sent a tweet out and i don't know whether i need to amend it but it's like literally 30 minutes after it

happened when it seemed like at that at that point in time that um somebody in the crowd had been arrested for sure for shooting him um that old man um people were saying people yeah we're like immediately i think some people were saying like we know who he is we know his name it's not the guy or something like that yeah yeah um yeah that's what i worry about particularly i mean going back to the political climate in the country right now with i mean everybody was already pretty riled up with the uh the death of um arena the video i mean she really died last month but the video was released was released last week political tensions high and then you just throw jet fuel on the the political tension fire that that is kind of notable i mean like

you know when you're talking about motives there's a lot of things but uh i remember you know we were walking to cooper's uh here in austin texas i hope the freaks like that uh i'm holding down the fort here um in the in the tftc tftc studio but uh parker and john and i uh were walking down and we were talking about arena and one of the things i had told them at that moment was like i find it really interesting like how much guys like charlie kirk have like sunk into this issue i think it's probably the only time i've mentioned charlie kirk in a conversation in months you know and uh i was like no this isn't going away and we were talking about the the guy who was offering the the um uh the money for the murals and stuff like that yeah yeah and uh that

you know this wasn't going to go away anytime soon it was like a galvanizing moment um and uh charlie was a big part of that right like i mean i think that was over the last few days one of the if not the only you know thing he was really focused on uh in his public messaging um and i'm sure that uh when you compare something like the arena you know you know murder with something like you know george floyd's death and like the aftermath of that and like how people or galvanizing on the right a little bit around this is like you might want to stop that momentum yeah yeah that's one thing well you either stop that momentum or i mean if you're thinking extreme adversarially and i think there's nefarious actors out there want to accelerate

really drive the country to a powder keg to divide and conquer like that that's what i I think it became clear to me last night, again, going back to the tweet that I wrote that I sent out quickly after he was initially shot. I think my perspective on what happened yesterday changed quickly. I mean, it seems obvious that this was a very professional operation. There's many people out there saying, oh, you don't need to be a Green Beret to make that shot from 200 yards, which may be the case. however i think a few think about where he was shot in the jugular um and the fact that there was sort of a distraction because that guy sort of held his hands up and said it was me and it wasn't him and yeah and then the um it certainly i mean like sorry it does it doesn't take a green

beret but uh it might like it seems like a pretty well executed plan uh that in as we're recording this i don't think the shooter or at least they've announced that the shooter's been found so pulling that off getting away uh it doesn't seem like an amateur job yeah i don't think it's been verified yet but i saw steven crowder was um sharing a screenshot apparently of correspondence internal correspondence at the atf um where they they found a rifle in the woods with um with the clip in a there was i believe there's three more bullets left in it and they had antifa like trans stuff written on it which oh yeah if true not confirmed yet at this point but if that's true that screams like like set up just trying to lean into that accelerate

sure and there's a lot of talk about civil war in the united states right now that is the last thing we need oh yeah yeah count me in on the non-civil war uh side of things yes um very much so um no yeah last thing we need but like i don't know uh yeah you got that uh i didn't hear the crowder story about antifa whatever that doesn't i mean if you talk if you talk the way charlie did sorry not the way he talked but about what he talked about yeah there's going to be a lot of leftists in particular who are furious with you you know um you know anything from you know his uh love of god to you know the uh you know sober understanding on uh uh gender and sex to uh to an evolving view on israel it's like there's a lot of uh

there's a lot of people that would not like a lot of those things yeah and it never really occurred to me but it made sense yesterday like he was 31 and if you look at the a corpus of his resume over the last 13 years like i would not like when it was first brought up yesterday i saw somebody talking about like i was like oh yeah this does make sense like he could have been president one day if he continued oh sure down this path 31 year old with master persuasion skills who has a young generation like like galvanized politically and is a moderate it's like yeah that was the other surprising thing is it like you know i have generally right-wing views some would say far right views and uh i always found charlie to be

pretty plain you know um like he wasn't a far-right extremist or anything very far from it um uh i've i've met uh quite a few more extreme people including you know when i look in the mirror um so yeah that that side of it is is actually you know you know that he you know to be persuasive in that way you have to be palpable to palpable to like a lot of people and he was i mean he was very very popular in a non-extreme way um yeah you know well obviously we're less and 24 hours out um yeah fog of war uh probably need time for this to uh to develop before we make any any uh any takes on the situation they're they're well rounded with enough information but yeah it's it stinks to me that's all i'm gonna say oh it smells terribly yeah look i mean i got

into it last night and i don't want to go too far off on a limb but i will say i was a little bit surprised by how charlie was talking about israel in the last few weeks um both with megan kelly i saw the clips from that um and uh and on his own show talking about like what funds like leftist marxist ideology in the united states that type of talk gets you in trouble it's gonna presidents killed before yes it has yeah it's uh it's uh i mean it's maybe it's impossible not to talk about i mean it sticks out like a sore thumb and the fact that he hadn't always been on that oh he was he was one of the biggest israel defenders for the long was he pentecostal i'm guessing something he's a believer in judeo-christian values yeah yeah yeah which

sounds pentecostal to me yeah um which is the you know you know biblical israel is is modern day israel sort of believe it's like pentecostal southern baptist although i don't think he was southern baptist but i don't actually know so yeah no that would that would be in line with that yeah yeah and then there was netanyahu was tweeting about his death before it was officially announced and really yeah yeah i didn't know that yeah i don't follow him no it's uh we'll see let's we're less than 24 hours all right we're gonna let it go yeah we're gonna let it develop but the uh no that stinks it's uh no it stinks like crazy i'm sure you know you'll probably have whitney on after me or something like that and have a real discussion on this of someone who

actually knows how the world works in that way yeah she's actually supposed to come on hopefully next week oh nice um times are tough the uh i guess just to wrap this up because we do have bitcoin stuff to talk about yeah actually not because i mean whether charlie like what like the political landscape right now is like it's crazy you have a bunch of like this week is crazy beyond like french prime minister uh kicked out essentially god damn it these reactions i'm sorry i hate listening the apple reactions going automatically yeah uh french prime minister um kicked out japanese prime minister resigned you have been overt overthrowing of an attempted

communist coup in nepal they blew up burnt down their parliament building uh you have of china last week with their military parade meeting with russia india brazil and the misfit countries if you will uh then you have jerome powell and donald trump going out there our fiscal and monetary side of things here in the u.s getting getting more make more chaotic you had that bls jobs report revision come out where we have almost there are no new jobs they just lied about it for it's very funny to see that like that that you know i don't you know that's a lot of things you just mentioned i don't have takes on pretty much any of them although i will say on nepal though one thing i will say is that like you know uh you know congratulations to jack

dorsey it seems like every time he invents a new product uh you know we had the arab spring when twitter's coming out now we got the uprising nepal and like the bit chat you know uh usage is uh shooting up like crazy there it's like he seems to be a uh agent of change himself yeah that is i mean have you used bit chat yet i i have i i was only using it on mesh though so it's just you know me and my brother uh or something like that like i tried it actually at a diner down there and there's one other person they didn't say anything back to me so uh it what what is amazing to me is that mesh networks actually work now right that's cool like you know i've been following they're not following but like i was interested in it you know maybe seven years ago

and it just wasn't very good uh but it seems like mesh networks are really good now yeah and i think the way that jack and callie are building out a bit chat and incorporating oster and things like that to expand not expand the range but add functionality like offline online functionality to help people communicate from further distances it is it is uh incredible to see in the fact that in indonesia there was another uprising but the chat um down really not significantly there as well and so like people are using it on the ground and it makes sense particularly if you're to protest um and they're protesting i think in nepal specifically i think the kick straw that broke the camel's back was just like basically in there's a blackout on social media so like

all right download this app we'll communicate being that mesh you can't shut this down it's pretty cool yeah yeah and in i don't know if you remember during the arab spring like twitter was the thing oh yeah like at the time uh it was it was very i don't know from an american standpoint in new york city at the time it was very exciting to to see how you know there's something like twitter was being used it's just funny to see that you know bit chat is now you know the the twitter of uh of you know 12 years ago 15 years ago that's what i'm searching right now like did egypt uh i believe egypt sued twitter did they no they didn't they did not decision government along with others in the region try to block to restrict access to twitter

and facebook sure in late january 2011 yeah 2011 there we go went as far as shutting down nearly all internet and so their data access nationwide for several days um the stifle connection yeah i mean it does kind of feel like that i remember 2011 very well i mean that's when i learned about bitcoin and so like you know the arab spring the occupy wall street stuff um like uh which i actually think is 2010 um uh but it's all you know in that in that little range um i don't know i'm getting those vibes yeah yeah yeah i mean here in america i think in the united states specifically it's like it does seem like we've been under a color revolution for something i think covid blm like made that very clear like yeah it seems like

the political apparatus you can't spread covid at at blm events no no you can't that's the important thing you can at church you can spread covid at church but you cannot spread covid at um a blm event yeah you have to be able to express your your discontent with or at five-star restaurants in northern california no that's fine too french laundry yeah yeah so freaks this rip of tftc was brought to you by our good friends at bitkey bitkey makes bitcoin easy to use and hard to lose it is a hardware wallet that natively embeds into a two or three multi-sig you have one key on the hardware wallet, one key on your mobile device, and Block stores a key in the cloud for you. This is an incredible hardware device for your friends and family, or maybe

yourself who have Bitcoin on exchanges and have for a long time, but haven't taken a step to self-custody because they're worried about the complications of setting up a private public key pair, securing that seed phrase, setting up a pin, setting up a passphrase. Again, BitKey makes it easy to use, hard to lose. It's the easiest zero to one step, your first step to self-custody. If you have friends and family on the exchanges who haven't moved it off, tell them to pick up a BitKey. Go to bitkey.world, use the key TFTC20 at checkout for 20% off your order. That's bitkey.world, code TFTC20. Over 10,000 investors downloaded the original how to position for the Bitcoin boom when Bitcoin was just 27K and it called for 120K plus. That

targets now hit. So what's next? Ter Demeester is back with the 2025 edition, refreshed for the mid-cycle moment, packed with new data, new insights, and Ter's latest price outlook. Plus, you'll get exclusive access to charting our way through chaos. Ter's new 30-minute Q3 2025 presentation explaining why this bull run might be only just beginning and what forces could push it to the next level. Read the first ever mid-cycle report from Adamant Research at unchained.com slash tftc that's unchained.com slash tftc and also if you're using unchained you can use the code tftc for 50 off any of their services go check it out now but it seems like it and it seems that's the i can bring this back to charlie kirk like it seems like we

have been getting to a critical point of people throwing their hands up and many moderate leftist even sort of coming to respect the policies of trump particularly tough on crime because it's like hey we live in a society we need to enforce the rules and the laws that have been laid out we and um by not doing so for many years like you're making places really unsafe where you kind of have to experience it a little bit to appreciate it right is like you ever seen that meme that's uh it's like the guy laying on the ground and like it's like an out-of-body experience and uh the caption i saw on that was uh you know the libertarian leaving my body every time i smell pot on the street yeah that basically sums up my politics at this point in life you're and i was a

very dedicated libertarian when i lived in new york you know 2011 2012 like that that time period it was also like bloomberg's new york you know and i'm making wise cracks about you know trying to ban big sodas you know taking our choice away from i don't even drink soda um but um you know i was also younger i was in like you know my my my uh 20s um and uh it's it's very easy to grow complacent with uh the rule of law and law and order when things are going good it's very easy to look at that and just say like well but there's these minor injustices or these minor inconveniences that um that maybe we should fix and then you're downtown in austin you know 15 years later and there's uh literally dozens of criminally insane crackheads running around and

you have to think about moving your office right and so like you get that little bit of experience of even just a little bit of chaos like a you know you know oh we're just not going to arrest people if they steal stuff under 500 bucks right and um you know i hate to say it but like i think basically every like baptist woman in 1994 that lived in waco was essentially right about the world in general you know like uh you know you know gateway drugs and all this it's just like yeah you get a little bit of chaos and look what happens it doesn't feel good it doesn't feel safe of course they're going to say oh it's the safest time of it's like cooking the books you know just like cpi you know the jobs numbers are fake cpi is fake obviously the crime statistics

are fake obviously people who live in downtown san francisco or even downtown austin where i live know that it's worse than it used to be you know um clearly that is true um so you introduce just a little bit of that and it's easy to look at someone like trump who has this you know sort of law and order philosophy um and uh even if you're younger and you have those idealistic views you know i was i was in bloomberg's new york it was it was very contained safe environment uh i don't even remember seeing crimes um but these people do they see it every day yeah i'm bringing this back that's my biggest worry with the assassination of charlie is that we were getting to a point where even people who are left of center were beginning to say hey this

is not like we can't have ukrainian people escaping wars coming to the united states for safe harbor getting stabbed in the neck on a train uh and yesterday's events could be uses a divide and conquer like get away from that conversation it's left first right like if they try to try to frame this as some trans lunatic that killed him um some radical leftist trans uh if that comes out to be um the claim of who killed charlie clark kirk i'm gonna be very skeptical um i will as well um charlie's more important than that i think um has the eye of more important people than that, I believe. Yeah.

That's why I sent a tweet out last night. I think it's imperative to show relative restraint, particularly in the short term, because I think that's what they want is some misguided backlash and confrontation, move people in the wrong direction, get them distracted, and hit them against each other. You know, what I think about the most is if there is a, you know, an uptick in leftist murders, politically motivated or otherwise, just, you know, could be general chaos of murders or it could be political assassination type things. If there's an uptick of that on the left, I really worry because imagine the backlash against the left.

Little Norm Macdonald for you there. Yeah. imagine the backlash it wasn't yeah what was his joke that's what i'm really worried about here what was the uh the uh bill cosby jokes it was uh it was a friend of his says um you know um the worst part about the bill cosby thing was the hypocrisy and uh i disagree i think it was the raping i find that most rapists are hypocrites um yeah well i could just do norm jokes this whole time if you want we could

you know i'm just i mean but yeah the whole like you know you already see it on msnbc cnn i mean i don't watch them but i see the clips and stuff like that they're like they're they're already worried about the backlash you know and it's like the back i mean like you don't want it or anything but it's like i'm kind of worrying about the the the political leftist assassinations right now that's kind of what top of mind yeah you know in this moment yeah and that was the other just disheartening thing and because it is extremely nuanced because there is a radical left that is rebelling in what happened yesterday and these are demonic soulless people and i do believe there is a radical left that does not want to engage in dialogue and try to figure things out they

want to brute force their terrible ideas on the rest and we've seen this throughout history i think a lot of people have been bringing up um the spanish civil war um and franco and what happened there um with the attempted well the communist regime there before it was overthrown i mean they were killing conservative political opponents happened in germany as well yeah weird times yeah uh you know in terms of you know top of my list you know i'm worried about downtown austin where i work and the criminally insane that are intentionally left on the street, um, because, uh, you know, Jose Garza likes them to be, uh, terrorizing people on the street. Wouldn't do it if he didn't like it. Um, and, uh, you know, then it's maybe, you

know, uh, you know, you know, worry for some of my friends, uh, who are publicly, you know, out there, uh, more right-wing people in a world where those people are being targeted. Um, then like seven things and then maybe some backlash you know that that's kind of the list of my priorities right now yeah yeah so freaks this rip was brought to you by our good friends at obscura obscura is the first vpn that can't log your activity by design instead of empty promises obscura fully embraces the bitcoin or don't trust verify mantra they can't log your traffic even if they tried obscura believes that user data is toxic waste in addition to private payments via lightning you can sign up with an account without having to give any personal identifying

information. It's a beautiful thing. It's the VPN I use every day. It's incredibly fast. You can go on streaming sites with it. They don't say, hey, you've got a VPN. It just works. So go to Obscura.net. Use the code TFTC25 for 25% off an annual subscription. Obscura.net. Use the code TFTC25 for 25% off an annual subscription. Sup, freaks? This rep at TFTC was brought to you by good friends at Silent. Silent creates the best military-grade Faraday apparel for your everyday life. We're in Bitcoin. Hardware, securing your hardware in Bitcoin is very important. You want to make sure you're not leaking any signals, Bluetooth, RFID, NFC. Make sure you get silent apparel. It is patented technology that makes it impossible for those signals to leak.

I've got the crossbody bag here. I keep my phone in it when I want to unplug and make sure I'm not being tracked by big tech and potentially the government. Easy in and out. They've also got a wallet that i've been using as my daily driver i was using ridge wallet for a while for the rfid blockers that is very thick and was big and hefty in the pocket now i have the silent card holder which acts as a wallet essentially they've got these great sleeves for hardware wall protection if you want to make sure that you're not leaking any of those signals nfc the q's nfc compatible don't want to leak it just want to be double shore protected from emfs put it in the bag go to silent or excuse me slnt.com slash tftc to get 15 off any and all the products on their store

important to note silent is also a company with a bitcoin treasury they accept bitcoin for payment so if you're on a bitcoin standard and you're looking for military grade faraday protection for your everyday life go to slnt.com slash tftc you'll get 15 off that's uh i think part of any of this is these events, these tectonic events, they're meant to jar you, shock you,

get you discombobulated, and force you to make bad decisions, where I think the best course of action is to really lean in and focus on what to do. Do your thing. And so it's like us, Bitcoin, I think a lot of these,

I'm not going to say these political murders to be solved by bitcoin i think we believe that bitcoin can bring about a better incentive framework that that takes away a lot of the uh the funding mechanisms for um a lot of the uh terrible stuff that's going on right now yeah i mean i think about that a lot because it's you have to figure out where to focus your energy and you know for me especially over the last couple of years um because it's very easy to get too cynical i mean i've i've gone through modes of that obviously and just like obsessing over black pills and um you know my conspiratorial mind you know swirling and uh that's where like you know even like stoicism

doesn't help me on that type of stuff i tried it didn't work for me you know um and uh but you know what what seems to have worked for me is like focusing on family focusing on church focusing on like being productive and you know doing stuff and i i i have thought about this a little bit um is what is it is it jimmy's book over here uh the thank god for bitcoin yeah oh no fiat ruins everything or like people say bitcoin fixes everything and sometimes i'll mention that to more casual friends and like really fiat ruins everything like i don't know what about you know sports i'm like well yeah i can make the argument that fiat does ruin that and so it does and i don't think i'm over rationalizing it too much is that um it is a white pill and it is a very

rewarding thing to you know you know see a chaotic world and uh things that are popping up that are not pleasant and take you away from uh the things that bring you joy and that you should be focusing on to be productive and and have purpose and things like that because it does it feels very uh good to have this outlet you know in the bitcoin world where i do believe that the people working on it are working on something that can fix a lot of a lot of these problems and that fiat does indeed as jimmy says in his book ruin everything and everything and that's not really too hyperbolic um and uh yeah so i i do i do feel what you're saying there is being productive working on bitcoin because

i can't even imagine how i would feel productive outside of you know being civically engaged in local or national politics if i weren't working on bitcoin i don't know what else would would bring me to like i'm actually doing that i mean i'm sure there are things obviously like you know you need people you know working in factories and farming and stuff like that i'm not saying there's no there's obviously a purpose in that but for my psychology it's like it feels very direct i would say yeah yeah this is like pertains to all the crazy shit going on in the country It's been laid bare in the last eight months, like Fiat was funding a lot of these insane leftist NGOs and groups that are basically indoctrinating college-age students and injecting this mind virus into not the masses, but a portion of the population that has really terrible worldviews and understanding of reality and how it works. i think that was exemplified with some of the reactions on tiktok and other

ways you said you wandered on the blue sky how terrible was that yesterday doesn't feel good marty uh it didn't uh increase my you know uh love of my neighbor i'll put it that way um so yeah that was rough uh but you know there's you know i don't want to again i don't want to fill my head with horrific thoughts and things like that but i think it's important to see how people are reacting to you know an event of this magnitude and uh yeah it it was pretty disappointing yeah and here we go uh confirmed by wall street journal or wall street journals didn't confirm it but is reporting a reporting on an ammunition charlie kirk shooting engraved with transgender anti-fascist ideology i mean plausible doesn't doesn't seem right to me

i'm sure those people don't like him as well no they definitely don't yeah but even engage in civil discourse with them but i think there's many people could recognize that those people probably did not like charlie kirk and if you're looking for a patsy to blame something on yeah yeah that would that would be probably choice number one yeah it's too it's like that's the other thing too which is actually optimistic silver lining white bullet let's get the propaganda is getting so bad uh and it does get easier to spot right yeah yeah like i'm sure like the vaccine thing earlier this week i'm sure you saw the bernie sanders um doing a press conference with a bunch of doctors behind him and a sign that just says vaccines work it's like you're

just kind of like brute force this thought that um any any thought that the vaccines whether it's childhood vaccines or particularly i think it's very obvious now the covid vaccines um were not safe and effective and were actually detrimental to the health of the people who took them um but like the propaganda like it's just getting so bad vaccines work it's like you are literally look i have seven actors behind me yeah say so yeah yeah that's that's an important thing yeah the performative uh the the perform you know it reminds me of uh joe biden receiving his vaccine on the on a you know a production set yeah and it was like a rubber too i'm pretty sure if i recall correctly no i mean actually uh we have a connection on that it's one of your

youtube strikes was uh i had a doctor during covid um i got covid i gave it to everyone in miami at one of the yeah to you to all my friends so like four days after me all my friends are getting sick and i had gone to this doctor who was a rancher in wyoming slash doctor great man uh doc woods and uh my my my other neighbor had told me like hey you need to go see him he's great and i was like dude i'm fine you know like i'll write it out but i was pretty sick i didn't feel good and so i go in and he's telling me uh you know this is pre months and many many months before like peter mccullough and those guys go on rogan and like this stuff becomes a little bit more uh known is uh uh doc woods just said like you know you're gonna take monoclonal antibodies

ivermectin um you know uh vitamin d all the stuff and i was like i don't know what any of this is Like, can I just like not do anything and just be okay in five or 10 days? And he's like, yeah, just promise me you don't get the vaccine. I didn't really have a super strong, I wasn't going to get it, but I wasn't like, like if a doctor had told me I really needed to do that at that time, maybe I would have done it. Like, I don't really know. I mean, I'm not like, I wasn't thinking about it all that much, to be honest.

And he just said, all you have to do is promise me you won't get it. And that was like a big, weird moment for me. and then uh he went on your show after that because you guys got sick you guys will get all the horse medicine you could take everyone got better like very very quickly immediately yeah and so now when you watch uh when you have experiences like that and it's not just me it was like all of our friends like everyone basically that i talked to in miami got covid and uh everyone got better everyone and and i found out only later when mccullough goes on rogan And I called Woods and I was like, hey, this guy is saying like the exact same thing you told me like four months ago.

He's like, yeah, dude, I send them all my data. Like, like I'm doing the McCullough protocol. I was like, oh, OK, OK. I don't know how doctors communicate with each other. I mean, that was a crazy time. If I recall, Doc Woods and I didn't even talk about the vaccine because I don't believe it was. I don't think that was really the point. I think it was about treatment.

Yeah, it was about early treatment and censorship. of course uh doc was being censored uh was until very recently um still sort of under that barrage from the i don't know what it's called wyoming medical board you know whatever he got fired from his hospital you know literally for giving out ivermectin yeah prescribing it to people didn't have a single death you know he was treating for the most part like like deem most at risk people you know um his age very old um uh uh and no one ever died while he was there got fired a few people started dying in the same clinic i mentioned doc woods on my episode with jessica rose and the fact that our episode got censored because it's like it was insane back

then yeah that doc woods at the time we recorded he was 72 he's probably well over 75 now humble man good man trying to do goodbye his patients hey very um soft-spoken kind-hearted gentleman and you could tell he had dedicated his life to a small community in wyoming for decades and for trusting his gut and trying to treat his patients in the way he thought was best he was drawn by the wayside in a sudden it's disgusting yeah unbelievable um but like it is i don't know i mean kovats very formative i think for everyone that went through it as especially i mean i'm sure you know the kids have a uh you know if you were in school during that time i'm sure it's formative in a very different way about you know being let down by adults um uh but like as an

adult like working during that time it it makes the propaganda easier to spot i think where before where i would have been more skeptical about um early claims of deception and things like that um now when i see bernie sanders with a bunch of actors behind him you know talking about you know how awesome vaccines are it's a little bit easier to dismiss uh performative uh politics and performative uh pharmaceutical outreach yeah well i hope this charlie kirk thing doesn't stop the momentum that we had earlier this week because i think that what was it the henry ford center study that was brought forth during the hearing the study that jessica rose and kevin mcclernand who've both been mcclernand not mcclernand excuse me um both been on this podcast

I mean, they basically prove it's peer-reviewed study. It's being replicated. They prove that there's DNA fragments in all the Pfizer vials and SV40, which accelerates cancer. There's snake DNA in it. Like, it's insane. Yeah. Yeah.

And, I mean, going back to leaning into the vaccine's work of propaganda, it's like, are you kidding me? It's like, and that's, they make it so binary, where it's like you have to believe all vaccines work or you're a loon, where it's like, well, no. Like, I think there's probably some perverse incentives in the pharmaceutical industry and within the safe to say and within the three letter agencies of the government who are creating the mandates. And I think it's OK to question that. And we've got a lot of momentum going in that direction.

We have a lot of momentum going in, bringing back the rule of law and making sure that people are safe. a lot of momentum at the border a lot of momentum from an economic perspective in terms of um trying to depoliticize the fed if you believe it's politicized uh and then you have this happen yesterday it's like yeah you know it's chaos chaos they like chaos chaos breeds bad decisions and we're getting a bunch of wins and obviously when this happens guess what it was an anti-fascist transgender of course that did it so go go into portland and take care of it there i mean yeah look i don't i don't know anything but uh what i will say like to your point there is the overton window has shifted so much like the idea of you know i was totally one of these

people you know in 2017 like i had a lot of cowardice running through my veins you know going to implicit bias trainings and not saying what i actually thought and you know stuff like just being a pussy you know like just being a wimp about this stuff i would never and to a certain extent like buying into some of the brainwashing you know some of it's not just like me you know internalizing it and i don't know i mean like i i used to say something uh about uh like bitcoin in censorship right which is i would talk to people and i still believe this to be true but there are other aspects of you know i'll say what i used to say i used to say um you know one of the reasons you know cold storage with keys that you control is so important right is the censorship

in the world you know being able to say what you want to say without um uh you know negative consequences you know just freedom of speech type things being able to work on what you want to work on being able to associate with who you want to associate with right without having your bank account shut down or something like that do you think that's going to get better or worse right unanimous worse i agree with that still however i'm starting to see more glimmers of hope like in the last two years than ever that like this can be avoided because bitcoin's actually working the culture's actually changing um i still think you have to be extremely vigilant and everything i said if you're in the uk right now you probably feel that darkness more than you

ever have you know right this minute the way i was feeling you know three years ago or so do you think this is going to get better or worse and everyone's saying worse right in the uk you're probably right there i'm starting to see better and i think that guys like charlie i mean like there's a whole group of people have like shifted the over overton window there's bitcoiners that have done it there's people in dc and you know stuff like that that have done it is that i don't think there's nearly as much cowardice anymore i don't think this is easy to like to to do that and so basically i think we've succeeded we've made a lot of progress and we succeeded in the last three years yeah and not only is the over to window shifted but it is being affected as

it pertains to vaccines i think people have been making um enough noise and highlighting a lot of Like doing the hard work to find the data, to surface it, to talk about it, to make it known. And then you have something like happened in Florida last week where the Surgeon General comes out and says, hey, it's not within the ethics of the field of medicine to coerce anybody to take anything against their will. So vaccine mandates in the state of Florida are over. We're not saying don't get the vaccines, but who are we as the state to coerce you to do so? that is a massive vibe shift from only two years ago have you ever read the original hippocratic oath it's been a while it's been a while but yeah yeah it's it's uh it's a fun one it doesn't talk about vaccines yeah the do no harm you know uh type thing yeah look i hope i'm not falling for

like some you know uh twitter real you know you know scam on this but like i'm pretty sure two of the things in the original hippocratic oath are you can also never perform an abortion and you uh cannot assist in suicide really yeah it's not in the current one yeah well those are forms of murder but yes of course yeah yeah so it makes sense this is injecting people with snake dna but yeah what do i know about snake dna either so yeah maybe it's really good for you but then on the israel front too like not only was charlie talking differently about israeli influence oh sure in u.s politics we had tucker on stage with like david sacks and david steberg uh two nights ago and david sacks came out and stood up for tucker is like

tucker doesn't have an anti-semitic bone in his body like israel is a government a state with an intelligence apparatus and they do uh engage in state craft and it is okay to be critical of the israeli government where for the longest time it's been conflated um if you if you critique israel and its potential influence over the united states you were an anti-semite which is yeah what a bunch of losers that say stuff like that like yeah absolutely insane yeah yeah but you know oh sorry go ahead i was gonna say i said it on a podcast i went on the coffee and mike podcast but it was like it was like very obviously insane that we have like ipac and israel does have very obvious influence over u.s politicians and excuse me ted cruz

convinced me the APAC is fine right it's not weird at all yeah it's your senator sir I know right I you know I generally like Ted Cruz I thought that was crazy yeah um it was shocking to hear stated that way I don't follow politicians like I I don't know every position that every politician has I've actually talked to Ted Cruz about Bitcoin before and I found him to be very bright you know and so you know and not that everyone agrees with me on most things uh it was the logic of his uh conversation with tucker on that was seemed very strained uh i mean just even the body language of that yeah back and forth was like this is weird yeah yeah it didn't feel good especially you know someone who i'd had like a couple interactions with where i was like

oh this guy's smart yeah like he seems with it and then i i just didn't know his views on this stuff and it uh it surprised me to say the least and i found it to be incredibly unconvincing i've heard i've heard him be persuasive before he was not persuasive there no 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 i guess it's a good like good team they're like over to window shifting on bitcoin too like i think oh yeah we ever went to windows shifted dramatically and maybe this is we got to find a natural segue to talk about what yeah we do need to talk about but let's do it yeah yeah i talked to a lot of politicians about bitcoin that's changed a lot yeah well like let's talk about through the years crazy internet money bunch of computer nerds uh drug money silk road uh degenerate gamblers speculators trying to make a quick buck mount gox era um continued 2017 2020

then obviously micro strategy comes out etfs announced bitcoin strategic reserve executive order we're at this point and people are talking about bitcoin as a serious reserve asset that should be implemented in everybody's portfolio from the individual up to the pension the nation state whatever it may be it seems like that's becoming a sort of table stakes now it's becoming recognized as table stakes if you don't have exposure to bitcoin you're an idiot um but overton window still needs to move a bit because it's like hey it's just a reserve asset doesn't compete with the dollar it's good to have and we both know yeah that these monies compete and ultimately bitcoin will win out and the window is just shifting towards that slowly but surely

yeah i mean it bears like repeating some of the things you just said too is that especially for americans you know i am one and therefore i i have the best perspective of what this has looked like in america over the years and you know i know it's not particularly hip to you know you know shill for you know the government and stuff like that but for the most part with some very egregious exceptions but for the most part honestly it's been nothing but green lights right things are going our way you know um and to me that's one it's a little bit surprising but it's also worth pointing out like you know even you know the connection to what we talked about before that overton window doesn't shift without like brave people you know without

brave people actually taking action and doing things and making sure that it goes that way it doesn't happen by accident and it's not a coincidence that um things have gone well here i mean heck i'm sitting in texas what do we have somewhere like five gigawatts mining bitcoin in the state of texas right now something like that three to five somewhere in there that's 30 in the network yeah it's nuts that's insane i mean go back seven eight years you know I think this is probably the first time I was on your podcast, you know, or that's not six years, seven years. The idea of that would have been crazy. And you would have come up with all these reasons that governments wouldn't allow that to happen, that the local government, the state government, the federal government would get in your way.

And I'm not saying not to be adversarial thinking like I'm not trying to, you know, again, it's not cool to show, but it has been kind of green lights. you know we're having very advanced talks uh about not whether the united states government should own bitcoin but how they should procure it and how much right it's not even really a question of whether they should have it like that's already you know in the executive order and we have legislation you know that looks to be very popular uh working on that exact thing so um honestly it's hard to embody my you know say 2014 self thinking about bitcoin and you know where mount gox goes down and all this type of stuff you know happens you know it's kind of a dark time um you know it's been pretty nice it's gone pretty well yeah and the uh the resistance

has not been particularly effective or strong um the the one i see the most right now that like some people hail is you know uh is progress on the bitcoin front that i really disagree with is the stablecoin side of things i don't think that that's particularly helpful for bitcoin um i think i think i'm neutral i'm like as a bitcoiner as an investor as somebody who would like to see uh incumbents who have acted what i would deem to be nefariously in the past would like to see them uh stumble like lean into stable coins like go for it i do not care like you're you're totally agree with you there you're on you're you're focusing on the wrong thing i find i find it to be a tragic lack of focus yeah don't interrupt the enemy when they're

making mistakes that's my perspective on stable coins and the people um implementing them sure no yeah i mean i get that i think the way the particularly the way the u.s is thinking about stable coins is like very funny to me it where they're like no it just needs to be regulated exactly like a bank you know you know the issuer you know that's what you're gonna it's like oh so just like ruin what stable coins are good at you know like the whole point of stable coins you know for uh getting around capital controls you know immoral capital controls in many cases um uh you know but uh it's like okay well then it's not you're just accomplished it's like a tragic lack of focus it's like you know we're doing this exciting stuff over here but to your point as

it serves as a uh useful distraction like sure you know whatever it's yeah and it's funny like i think the genius act i mean you probably understand it way better than i did but it seems like circle was pissed that tether was winning all this business and crushing them and so they and a couple others who were also not happy with tether eating their lunch went to the government said you need to regulate this it's like okay be careful what you wish for because if the regulation it's a regulatory mode that you so wish for it turns out to be too restrictive for the end user like you're you're not gonna have a market at the end of the day it's like do you know why people use tether it's not like getting rid of them all of a sudden

because you have this this thing it's like you think they're gonna give you a license to spread dollars around the world while jp morgan like twiddles their thumbs over here that they're not going to be like wait why can't we do that you know like they would do it if they were allowed if they could you know disrupt south korean you know sovereignty and allow you to you know dollarize that economy and like get money out and then like of course they would do it yeah you think just because you get rid of tether that all of a sudden like you're gonna be the it's so stupid yeah and it is uh and like this i mean and i don't i'm not saying i would want companies like this to fail like stripe the collison twins like leaning in it's like how

are you guys how are you guys missing that like we're gonna build our own l1 blockchain for payments and stable coins it's like everyone goes through the ride in their own way right i think we talked about it but there's one of the i believe it was john collison was on the all-in podcast earlier this year and he still doesn't understand the lightning network and other second layers exist on bitcoin yeah i don't you know i'm hoping that zap right can like show people that like we've actually we obviously you know it's sorry i've worked grid zap right right and uh we're doing bitcoin payments and we talk to these companies um i haven't talked to the colson brothers about it um but um we do talk to stripe and we talk to square

and we talk to the fiat processors and we talk to the big marketplaces and things like that and like what i would say is that like what you're saying about a lack of knowledge about how bitcoin is different from 2015 you saw this in the mining space here's a good uh comparison you remember when people first started going out to do like the flare mining and none of it worked and it kind of poisoned the well for a long time yeah right i was there and then and then it started working but like the people that had been burned had a really nasty taste in their mouth about it and they were just kind of stuck in what that looked like in 2017 but in 2021 it looked very very different right well a lot of these marketplaces a lot of these businesses a lot

of these payment processors they were doing bitcoin stuff in 2015 they were you know uh dell was accepting bitcoin microsoft was accepting bitcoin patreon was accepting bitcoin uh uh uh you know uh shopify was announcing you know all these like different and then it didn't really go anywhere right um and it was clunky and the tools weren't that good and the wallets weren't that great and the support wasn't that great and then they just kind of gave up on it right or they just let it sort of die on the vine right and so just like those those uh you know uh off-grid miners had this really bad taste in their mouth i would say i would say it's a little bit less than that they don't feel particularly burned because they didn't invest that much capital into the

whole process but they have they do have a negative view of it as being unuseful at the at the very most and so a lot of what we work on at zap right is talking to these companies um and making them see that like hey a lot's changed in the last you know 10 6 2 years when it pertains to the lightning network its support its reliability its um you know uh accessibility its liquidity you know all those things that um or that it exists at all right and it's not just on-chain transactions that take 10 minutes or 30 minutes or 50 minutes to settle and so like we you know we're talking to those people all the time and um like i think for like stripe and places like that they they've gone back and forth a lot right and uh i think right now they're just they're seeing

this thing that they don't have any previous negative views on and they're like okay we'll give that a shot see how it works good luck yeah yeah it seems like the the whole stable coin landscape is very confused because it looks like they're reintroducing the double coincidence of one's problem with their sort of siloed stable coin sure project sure there's bridges and all these mechanisms but it just complicates it adds cost and ux friction that yeah once you start getting into atomic swaps and all this it's like what are we doing guys like just a really easy thing to do over here um i don't know i'm a simple man marty you know um i've been building products you know on the internet for a long time here and i try to avoid complication wherever

possible yeah well i mean just let's do a comparison too i think you're in a very unique position as it operates sort of being in the middle of all these companies so you compare stripes strategy as it pertains to bitcoin to somebody like square which i know you guys have worked closely with you've implemented it into um the square processor into zap rate as an option and it seems like their team's pretty engaged in in bitcoin and like you look at block as a apparent company of many um subsidiaries that are focused on different niche markets uh square point of sale for small medium-sized businesses cash app retail consumer app proto now the mining thing like they seem pretty all in on bitcoin and have taken a long view i believe cash app

launched by bitcoin at the end of 2017 so right around then yeah yeah yeah going on eight years now and slowly but surely maturing with bitcoin building out their product suite it's been pretty impressive to see them do that oh it's unbelievable i know that like there there's attack vectors even from the bitcoin side on companies like square block cash app um i don't know it looks pretty good to me you know they built unique things you know uh they built different things it's not exactly what i would have built i see it as all good uh in general uh people can buy bitcoin people can sell bitcoin people can store bitcoin people can transact in bitcoin uh it seems like they're hitting a lot of good notes there they're funding bitcoin development uh outside of their

own company so no i'm not cynical about that um and i i do see like a strategy that that i can only assume is going to pay off very very well in the future right i i do think that uh you know they do share a fatal flaw with stripe which is um that maybe covet actually helped a little bit which is you know the very san francisco silicon valley centric right and you know is a broad generalization um that that san francisco silicon valley culture never really understood bitcoin obviously there are tons of individuals and stuff like that but as a startup culture as an entrepreneurial culture as a business building culture and funding culture um never understood bitcoin uh so i think that that's even more impressive that square has made the progress

that they have given that that's sort of the root of their business as well yeah i used to visit down there in like 2019 or so i went to their offices a few times talk about bitcoin stuff and there's several wonderful bitcoiners there but it was very clear to me that that was not a company-wide thing that was a top-down mandate um that we were going to do this and uh i think obviously it's been manifested the most on the cash app side that's where like it's been a good business for them they make money off of it they you know it's profitable you know all those things But, um, I, I have no reason to believe that these other things won't, I'm most excited, honestly, about the point of sale.

Um, you know, at ZapRite, we built like this, like very, you know, we call it a companion app point of sale, just sort of the, you know, calculator screen that you could do on your phone if you also had like a terminal. But, um, our hope was we just did it for people that just needed a little bit of access there. Our hope was always that we would either integrate with another, uh, point of sale, which we still might do or that someone like square would just do that part of it and then we'd handle the rest you know over here and e-commerce and business invoicing and you know stuff like that it's very similar to the decision we just made with uh our latest uh launch on uh ticketing

right was that my original goal was oh we'll just it's very good when you build businesses to have a lot of naivety or else you'd never build these things and so domain expertise when you're building something that's the most overrated. And so I was just like, okay, we'll go integrate in with Ticketmaster or Eventbrite or something like that. And then I find out that like the whole way, one of the major ways they make money is siphoning off transaction fees from the fiat payment processes, and they're addicted to it, and they can't live without it. And that, you know, low, low fee transactions from Bitcoin actually, is at the heart of their business model. And then you look at it and you're like well an event system is not actually that hard to build and so we build

that right uh on i just wanted to be a checkout company but we're actually becoming more than that um but i'm very glad we don't have to become a point of sale company you know in the square you know stripe or i guess it's just square world sorry i jumped around quite a bit there but um you know the point being is that like those companies doing you know stripe is taking a very different angle than square on this um i think that you know david mark has also recently been talking about this with what i think it's what stripe's doing um and just saying like to take it from a guy who's been there right uh you don't want to do this um and of course you know he chose as his uh follow-up to libra being you know working on lightning

yeah and now spark yeah with the state chains and from right here like people are really bullish on spark yeah i don't know enough about it uh other than that we are looking at zap right and into integrating with it because it is something that's going to be it looks like it's going to be the uh critical infrastructure to a lot of the wallet ecosystem going forward um for a lot of wallets i i know that i like wallet of satoshi is back in the united states specifically because they're using spark and so um i think that that's a good thing i don't know what other wallets are using them yet but it does seem like there's momentum building there pretty sure breeze implemented breeze that's right that is another one yeah and so that's

great for someone like us like you know we don't operate a wallet we're agnostic to the wallet uh that you choose is we we want you we want you to get more bitcoin right we want whether you're you know you're business invoicing or you're selling something online or you know you're running an event you know uh the bitcoin park people uh here in austin and in nashville use uh the ticketing system now if you're going to any of their events in september or nems in january next next year is like the whole point is just to get you more bitcoin right and um you know we look at the wallet ecosystem and we tried to support as much as we can uh to say you know come in here uh bring your own wallet we don't ever touch your money um and so i think spark is actually going to open

that up quite a bit and we we love seeing stuff like that it's just more options for merchants more options for individuals to get more bitcoin yeah well let's let's dive into the ticketing like how how hard or easy was it to build and like could it be an event is is it over it's like event right ticket master competitor i'd never when we started out doing it like i i always assume things are going to be way harder than they are it's a it's a good mindset to be in when you build software but um uh relatively speaking events aren't that complicated um and uh now something like what ticket master does where their customers more like uh venues where you have seating charts and all that it gets more complicated there you know getting

getting all that information but like what eventbrite does was just you know i'm doing an event i want to issue tickets i want to be able to you know validate those tickets at a check-in things like that it's pretty simple actually um and of course we already had all the fun checkout stuff right so we just had to apply what we were already good at to these events and what became very clear to us was that the integration path was going to be very very long i would still we would integrate in a second to any of these systems you know when it happens but then we started actually using the product that we had built i was like oh this might be better like this is supposed to be a lightweight and it is in some ways there there's a lot of features that

are missing that you would get in like an event right that that we are planning on building like say transferring tickets like once you buy them transferring to other people you can technically do it but you have to kind of go out of band in order to do that so i'm not claiming that feature for feature we've matched necessarily the the legacy uh ticketing system however what i would say is that it is surprisingly functional it is surprisingly nice and in a lot of ways it's already better because of the way we integrate both fiat and bitcoin it's easy you know apple wallet has changed us a little bit on the fiat side although most people are still using credit cards online and things like that is that just the process of paying in bitcoin there's a lot of

friction that gets taken taken out of the sale both is like someone who's buying something but for your merchant to actually like close a deal to actually get conversions um if you're doing an event and uh and you have to put in you know what is all the billing information on your you know credit card you know all the stuff or just show them a qr code and they can you know zap over you know the 300 bucks for the for the event right away um the actual friction in the checkout process because bitcoin is put on the same level as fiat transaction methods it's really nice and the conversions come through um so you know going back to your original questions like there are some things that are hard uh but for the most part it's not rocket science you know it's it's a crud

app right um we've we've built those before um but we have great ux great design and more than anything we have um a great checkout process that helps event organizers convert sales yeah and i think if you're trying to accumulate bitcoin and you have something that is almost that parody with eventbrite like why leave sats on the table exactly complicate your path to sats by going fiat only and having to convert and obviously for those who are unaware of zap right like this is not bitcoin only like you'll have an event you'll use zap right to sell tickets to that event and people can pay in bitcoin or fiat yeah i want to get ahead of something because you know we haven't i don't know if we've ever talked zap right together maybe we have yes we

have we have me and you like on on the show okay i think all i have in my head is war mode that was so much fun we need to do that again we do uh those guys have already slipped up uh no i mean i want to get ahead of you know like you know we don't have like a be casher mentality on any of this stuff like obviously i'm building a product and it's a two-sided market and i'm going to make both sides of the market a fabulous experience if you're a with bitcoin or if you're receiving bitcoin but make no mistake this is built zap right exists for people to stack sats for people to accept bitcoin for people who want bitcoin and everyone's like well who would in the right mind would you know pay their hard-earned sat it's like that's

not the point the point is there are people who want bitcoin it was the motivation when i joined unchained right was i loved the custody model and the feature i had in my head the entire time when i joined unchained was buy bitcoin directly to cold storage with keys that you control can i get the unchained vault you know and instead of buying over here and then sending it over can i just have it go there directly right same thing with zap right is that i want more bitcoin and And so if I run a business and I'm sending out invoices, I'm realistic, you know, maybe most of my transactions are going to happen in fiat. Fine. I'm going to accumulate the Bitcoin that I can by putting Bitcoin on the same level as fiat there.

And for most of our customers, most of our customers get actually quite a bit of Bitcoin. But for some of them, minority of them, they'll be on ZapRite for three months. They'll get zero Bitcoin transactions. Four months. zero bitcoin transactions five months starts coming in you know and then it goes from one percent to three percent to five percent of their sales on the event side i think that there's kind of two things one is there's a lot of bitcoin centric events uh organized by people who are motivated to accumulate more bitcoin i want to help them those are my people right i want to

help them get more bitcoin and getting bitcoin for events outside of prog the bitcoin prog guys they were so motivated that they basically built their own you know system that's very very good but it's not extensible it's not usable for for other event organizers most of those people really do they would prefer getting bitcoin for the hard work they put on uh doing the meetup or doing the event or doing the you know whatever they're doing and then you know i look at this and i'm uh you know looking at other uh event organizers out there and a lot of them would maybe they're not as motivated as the big conferences that we go to but they would like some bitcoin they would like if five percent of their sales came in through bitcoin these are people doing music festivals

and stuff like that so yeah the motivation you know here is very much you know how do we allow these businesses who are motivated to receive bitcoin do that and i mean you know without sounding egotistical or anything it's like we definitely have built the best way to do that you definitely have i mean here at tftc if you go to tftcmerch.io uh and you buy one of our hats we use that break for checkout pretty confident 90 of the sales are in bitcoin and we have fiat as an option but to that point on the screen share here uh free ad for my favorite soap but i think this is a perfect example if you have a product that's good enough and you are oh that's right demanding bitcoin and like i love this soap i've been using it for the last six months and it

is now my go-to soap i'm buying a bit every month and you can only pay in bitcoin and so and you guys have made it so i go i might check out i go to check out put in the information um i can't do it now because i'm not going to put in my information but i keep like this and it's like i can only pay in bitcoin and this is a product that i have deemed um so good that if the only way i can get it is paying in bitcoin i'm going to pay in bitcoin yeah powered by zap right it's the way things work right the incentive is there because you can't get the product otherwise we have a few merchants that are like that um and um yeah i mean so it's it's built for those people right and uh i don't know if any of you out there you know hosting a meetup and you know doing any

of those things or have have an adventure yourself i i would encourage you to try it out like i'm i'm pretty excited about this one uh it's a really really good product and i think of the world in terms of really good products and this one is one of the one of the better ones out there what is the uh the ux flow like if somebody has an event yeah that's right account we focus more on the ticketing side of it than the event side so if you have an event and you know as a date and a location and all those things it's there but it's not this isn't like a marketing website builder for your event if you're on squarespace or you're on some other you know website builder you know especially if your um conference or something like that is bigger you probably have

a lot of marketing assets out there um now you can use it as a standalone it has all the information that someone would need but we really focus on the ticketing aspect of creating those tickets um you have you know more advanced features like uh you know having a stock or a max order per buy you have all those sort of familiar things that you would get in a more advanced ticketing system um and then uh you have this landing page which is basically a muted or smaller amount of information about the event itself um and then you have you know the list of tickets increment them buy them and really you know you know what we're really good at is the checkout side right of once you've determined how many tickets you're going to buy uh going there and being able

to buy and whatever the merchant is allowing you know whether that's credit card and lightning or that's on chain and apple pay you know any of those combinations are all there and you get to determine how uh what order they go in if you add a discount or premium to a certain type of payment uh, all of that's still there. Everything that, uh, people are, are sort of used to with our payment links and, and invoices and things like that. Um, and then on the merchant side, uh, you have three ways to check people in. Uh, we have a ticket scanner. It's a secret URL. You can share that secret URL with, uh, you know, if you have a event, uh, volunteers or anything like that, that, um, are checking people in, uh, that will scan the tickets, uh, that are delivered via

email those tickets by the way for your end customer they can they can be added to your google wallet your apple wallet you know like any other real ticketing system so you can scan people in there we have another check-in process that's native to the actual web app that you can do as well if you want to manually check people in without scanning and then of course you can print things out where we give you a nice list of everyone who's bought tickets and whatever information you've gathered about them so that you can validate their entry for like a offline backup so there's three ways to check people in um you can you can undo it there are some features that will come down you know you know in the future things like transferring tickets things

like you know uh allowing you know having a more sophisticated understanding of allowing re-entries but for right now for the vast majority of events out there what you see will get you will get you there yeah it's beautiful it's a well-baked mvp i'll put it that way it's definitely viable and like this i think this part is still so cool to me like connect a wallet like cold card being part of it like the thought that you could have an event like this be a business and the sales let's say it's a high ticket item you're you're selling like a thousand dollar ticket it's like boom you can send it right to cold card and have that in cold storage in your your business wallet it is one of the things that event organizers struggle with a lot

is that when you know you know with any event most of your ticket sales happen the closer you get to the actual event right but you have to put up a lot of capital beforehand to actually build out you know the venue the you know you know the lodging you know all the things that you need to spend money on and so when you're also sort of subject to a payment processor that holds your funds for 30 60 90 days before they pay you out right whatever their policy is or can put a hold on that fund uh you know you've heard this before you know hold on the funds because of some you know you got tripped up and and uh some uh incorrect fraud automatic mechanism in their system and your funds are held up is that uh especially for bitcoin uh events is like you

might have uh obligations denominated in bitcoin so you're getting this stuff right away that you can then use towards the event pay your people pay your suppliers pay your uh hard costs and all that is that getting getting the money directly to you is uh is a huge advantage yeah it really is and i can attest to that as a business owner accepting both uh bitcoin and fiat yeah sharing here yeah it's fun stuff yeah i thought it was important to bring up the block because just help people visualize it for sure anybody watching on youtube and if you've ever done it feels very familiar that's one of the things i wanted to make sure is that like if you're used to if you run an event before you're going to see most of what you need right

there right now and of course you know it's going to get better over time we just launched it um i believe on monday um so uh well it's a young product it is pretty fully baked i mean just having apple wallet functionality alone i think that that is what people i mean that is what i've come to um see as a must-have for events like physically physically getting tickets these days is uh or even like having to go to the email and find the qr code yeah um yeah that's like uh so this is the old way of doing it like just being like add it to the wallet yeah i took our oldest to the uh the phillies game this summer and it was just like boom went to ticket master had the wallets on my i had the tickets on my phone sure it was very easy and then the tickets now it's

like nfc you don't even have to do the qr code it's just like boop boop yeah right now we're still doing qrs even on the apple wallet side of things funny enough is like i i do a lot of i go to a lot of sporting events and stuff like that the qr is actually faster for checking in which is which is a nice thing you've done it before you put your phone up and guys like moving it around and trying to get the nfc thing to work uh nfc is one of those things we do want to still support but you know in our test of like you know lining up people at pleb lab and scanning them in is that the qr reader even on the uh the apple wallet much faster actually for getting people in that's interesting yeah or sorry it's not necessarily as much faster it it works the

first time more often yeah well but shifting gears a little bit but sure really diving into the process of building this product is something i miss dearly about being in bitcoin park austin is being around you and others in the space particularly as you implement ai into your production flows sure that's fun let's talk about that because i know you you guys have really been leaning into that sap right yes um eventually i'll become a programmer because of it uh i'm not quite there yet uh i've done a little programming in my past but i am decidedly not a programmer no i mean there are definitely people that have leaned into this more than we have however i will say that like we're pretty motivated we're a small team right so any you

know we have two full-time one part-time uh uh developers um you know we're a team of you know five six people and so uh on the ai side of things it definitely helps like like what i've seen from you know people using uh cod claude code and cursor and uh these models is that like even the difference in the last six months is is shocking um we've even had you know very close to an entire you know a small well-defined simple bug that goes into our ticketing system that gets picked up you know by an ai agent that attempts to fix it and uh puts up a pr that then needs to be reviewed we've had that process go through on very very small things um uh without human intervention which is pretty wild yeah um and i know there's people doing

more sophisticated stuff out there but that's a really exciting thing to see that like someone can put in a bug into a ticketing system then an ai agent can pick it up that it can discern what needs to be done to fix that bug it can make a suggestion and create the code and put it up for a review by a human and that at least once we found that happened to where we were like all right put it live that's right yeah what was the bug i can't remember it was it was very it was i don't want to call it trivial but it was a it was a very easy bug to fix right i can't remember exactly what it was um but uh it was small in nature it wasn't super complicated and we were all surprised and then but but it's easy to extrapolate is what i'm trying to say is like

that might have been a very trivial small thing but um you know i you know we're both friends with you know i'm shot at repulate and we're seeing you know the end-to-end uh processes that they're working towards right is that like you know he just came out with his whole you know uh you know yeah you can get ai to write this code but there's just there's hundreds of hours that go into like maintaining it and like you know you know reviewing it and qa-ing it and doing all these things and rewriting it and refactoring and doing stuff you know that's for building like an entire app but in terms of like supercharging an individual's productivity um you know uh we we i've seen it be

it is hard i i don't want to use the wrong word it's shocking it is shocking uh walking into that world even even on the product management side writing specs and like coming up with the stuff doing really research and stuff like that everything the whole production line of software development it is uh it's impactful everywhere and that's that's what i was going to ask if you had to attempt to quantify like from a manpower perspective like how many more people do you think you need to hire to get the same results by um if you were to do this without ai i'm going to say this and then i'm going to double check with you know tom and nate and nick who are doing all the programming on our side to see if i lied to the audience then i'll tweet if i if i lied or

not i would i i would say they would say that is as if we have somewhere between like two to four junior developers working with us on top of what they do because most of these people are all like we don't have any junior developers these are very senior programmers that that work work at zap right right now and my guess is they would say it's somewhere around two to four junior developers working with us the way we're utilizing ui right uh or ai right now which is not even its full extent i would also say that you know one of those junior developers is john mcgill like our ceo like he's getting he's getting a lot of prs in these days you know uh and i'm gonna be following suit here like john's uh more capable programmer than i am uh as a designer

but uh i'm getting a little bit jealous now so like even someone like john is in there with some of the easier tasks um and can use cursor cloud code to get them there all the way yeah if we're trying to quantify that monetary let's just say junior developer makes 150 yeah somewhere around there yeah you're saving between yeah saving between 300 and 600 grand a year yeah and more than anything for a company like ours it's not even saving money we're just getting to do stuff we wouldn't be able to do otherwise because we didn't have the money to spend that on that anyway or we didn't want to spend our money that way right and so all of a sudden our output i mean zap right is not a tiny project it's not a huge project but it's not a

tiny project and what we've been able to accomplish with a very small team is honestly it's just not really possible you know 10 years ago like you don't build you don't build an application to zap rights stature with, with four or five people. No, just not a thing. It's so crazy. That's shocking. It's, it, it fits my personality. So, so much. It's like every time a company gets big, I want to go start another one, you know? And, uh, knowing that maybe I've stumbled into a world where, um, the company doesn't have to get big for the product to get big. You know, uh, that would be very fun for me. Uh, and then we'll see if I just have commitment issues. And, uh, well i mean it is i think it's you're a fascinating individual because you've seen both

ends of the spectrum um being very high up at stack overflow for for many years talk about ai yeah are you willing to tell your uh stack overflow ai story oh i mean yeah i'll say a little bit about it is that you know one is you know i worked at stack overflow for eight years uh, all that time I was into Bitcoin, but I was very excited about stack overflows of incredibly rewarding business and product, uh, to work on. And, um, and one of those things where it's like, you know, I could even rationalize how I was helping Bitcoin at the time, the, the Bitcoin stack exchange, you know, Peter Woola and Jimmy song and merch and all these guys still to this day, you know, there's a huge repository of Bitcoin stuff. I helped start the Bitcoin stack

exchange from the inside that was very fun um and then of course you know stack overflow itself and the the the aid it was to programmers you know it's fun watching i like watching all these ai companies getting so psyched on their work especially when it comes to uh what they're doing in the programming world because i live that like i remember when stack overflow would go down and what twitter would look like it's like well can't do my job today it's like it was an impactful place to work it was very fun um and the product was very good uh until the end um and uh but there was this moment like i don't know i want to say it was 2018 2019 where um chatbots you you'd hear a lot about chatbots and it's the same thing we're talking about now it's just the llms but they

weren't they just weren't very good yet you know they're very clunky but it was it was all the buzz in silicon valley and and while stack overflow wasn't a silicon valley company we were very attached to that culture even though we were in new york um and of course all of our clients and everything were in silicon valley for the most part and so chatbots were kind of the rage right and i remember we were working on an integration with microsoft on visual studio where you could kind of do some of the things you can do now which are like you could highlight code and then it would you know come up with this chat bot basically inside visual studio and uh say oh here's why you're having this bug you know based off of stack overflow data you know using a neural network that

no one knew how it worked or anything like that uh that was really really fun and the the only problem with that there was an unbelievable product except it just didn't work like at the ux was great and like all these things were really cool it's just you just got wrong answers it was like and i remember when when joel left and everything um and we were getting you know new management and some stuff like that it was uh like i couldn't help but just you know tell all the new guys that came in after joel uh or really just the new ceo wasn't like a whole management change it was really just ceo was just like yeah but imagine if it did work wouldn't this be the greatest product he was like no but it doesn't so we're going to focus on this other

i was like but it might you know uh and of course eventually it did work um and uh and uh stack's not really a part of it unfortunately um i mean i know they're trying and i don't want to be too gloomy on it but i think maybe stacks had its day in the sun and uh oh yeah and i would imagine that a lot of these coding llm specifically probably trained off of a lot of the uh information on stack overflow of course they did right i mean well that was the other thing is uh it's all creative commons that was that was the case the whole time we we had tons of knockoff stack overflows uh throughout the years especially in china and russia in particular um that were you know just because all of the data was creative commons and that was very important to joel when

he started out and like was a very noble thing to do um and it was in direct response to you know Stack Overflow had a boogeyman that they were trying to unseat, which was Experts Exchange, where you had to, like, go pay for answers and all this stuff. But it was, you know, one of the reasons for its success was that it was Creative Commons. So people could go in there and, you know, create unimaginable value for the world of programmers, right? The value, I mean, like the way people would talk about Stack Overflow in 2017, 2018, 2019, it was so crucial to the productivity of the programming workforce. It was indispensable, right? In the same way that Cursor and Cloud Code and all these things are becoming indispensable now. I mean, that was it, right?

And a lot of that value, though, was created because it was Creative Commons. Like people wouldn't have contributed as much if they knew that we were just going to monetize their answers and and keep it in this walled garden. It was about as close as we get for as a for profit business of being like kind of open source was open sourcing all the question answer pairs in the voting and all that type of stuff. And some people, you know, the promise was always if we do a bad job, you can take the data and start up your own thing with all that. like it's your data it's not ours and uh you know it's both part of its success and part of its demise you know at the end of the day it's because uh i don't think anyone broke any laws uh or or any uh user agreements or anything training off of that now i do know that they have some form and i'm not privy to what stacker flow has been doing or their strategy or anything for the past uh five

years but um i do know they have some agreements with google open ai i think they're getting paid something but i i don't think it's um uh i don't i don't think it is uh correlating with the value that stack gave those uh very well yeah that's a fascinating time yeah yeah yeah i mean stack just was a a very necessary product like as you said increase the productivity of the uh we have the software engineer workforce massively and it's like it's like this connective product um company to to the ai world yeah but you know you know going back to bitcoin bitcoin saved me from becoming a has-been which is like it would have been very easy i remembered i mean part of it's just being in your 20s but i remember like building in you know the you know

you know early 2000s you know when when stacks coming alive in 2008 um it's like i i would look with contempt on the people like yeah but i built geocities i'm like who cares you know geocities was a huge deal you know and now i'm that has been except that i get to keep on building really amazing stuff with uh with bitcoin so i i don't uh define my it wasn't my last chapter so yeah that that's good and uh i know we're running long here we've had a very robust meandering conversation about many different topics but one thing just to really lean into the bitcoin side of things what you're building at zap rate um one question um that we'll be asking portfolio companies at 1031 um at a retreat this year which i'm fine to open source on the uh on the podcast

right now but it's uh what doesn't exist in the industry right now that zap right probably won't build but you think should be built that could help you guys oh man uh just on the software side not on the policy side because i would change a lot of policy things as well um geez i mean i it's hard to narrow down only because you know anything that money touches that bitcoin is not predominantly featured in right now um i think that you know bitcoin will be there so um you know on the zap right side there's all these integrations i want to do you know like there's all you know i don't want to rebuild patreon i just want you to be able to use patreon and accept bitcoin you know i don't want to rebuild youtube i just want you to be

able to be paid in bitcoin if you're already a content creator over there right and so there's you know we chose to build business invoicing in a very like robust way or or the ticketing events um event tickets in a really robust way but you know we're not going to build youtube and we're not going to build patreon and we're not going to build all these places where people that run businesses um so there's kind of two things there's one is uh you can do what zap doing and try to integrate with them or just pick your your point or you can go build youtube you know you can't do that uh in a bitcoin centric way podcasting is is a little bit interesting because there's been a lot of podcasting tools um you know the you know

adam curry and stuff like that that have been trying to make sure that content creators there can um uh can you know accept bitcoin but then there's all like the ancillary stuff and i know that there are some things that are working on this so i'm not trying to bad mouth any startups that are out there trying to solve these problems um but a lot of the financial tools around accounting right it's not there yet right like it's still a little bit of a struggle um there are good products out there uh i would say we're still waiting for those products to become great or for the existing infrastructure around uh accounting to become great right um there's you know the treasury management like the castle guys are working on it you know um there's all sorts

of stuff like that there's different ways uh like i like what the anchor watch guys are doing you know i feel like there's a lot custodies and a lot better shape than it used to be there's endless ways to play with that problem right um that uh are suitable to very specific industries uh types of businesses things like that um i would say that uh um gosh what else have i been thinking about recently um i think that on the you know other side is like i worry about with ai uh bitcoin miners i don't worry sorry worry is the wrong word bitcoin miners are going to be fine they're vultures you know they know how to survive but um they have a lot more competition for power now the i mean like the ai stuff is is power hungry

and so i would like to see um uh uh bitcoin companies that are also power producers actually behind the meter owning power production so there's a lot of products out there and and things out there i'd like to see but um i know from from our our side of things that you know we're both gonna we're gonna try to integrate until it's impossible to do so and then we'll build it ourselves yeah and that's what i was gonna say on the electricity side the uh and before i get to the electricity side just on that point like reason we're bringing this up and at 10 31 and just want to see if there's ways that companies in the portfolio can collaborate and number two just like also to highlight the massive opportunity

that exists out there is still so much to build there's so much to build and i you know i'll throw it out there we we have a talent problem we need more talent coming into bitcoin we just need it and domain expertise is overrated if as long as you have a positive view of bitcoin your skill set whether you're a software developer or salesperson or marketer it's like we really do need those people working at bitcoin companies yeah and just to tie a tie a knot in the bow of your bitcoin mining point i think here we go this chart highlights like this the miner is going to if they're consuming electricity at these rates it's not not going to be profitable it's up to 19 cents per kilowatt hour on average in u.s cities you're kidding oh is that is that is that

a retail pricing uh it's not industrial average price electricity per kilowatt hour in u.s city average um okay but this is this is not a good chart for the united states and not only i mean Unless Bitcoin's a million dollars with the current hash rate. Then it's fine. Yeah, then it's fine. But I think this is a bigger problem for the U.S. generally. I think electricity is the raw input of... Yeah, we've got to build it.

Everything. We've got to build nat gas plants. We've got to reinstitute our coal plants. We've got to... I mean, nuclear. I don't even like talking about nuclear. It's just so state-captured. Build natural gas plants.

Build coal plants. Build solar plants. I don't care. Build solar plants. They're great. Yeah. No, but I mean, we've long a lot of our conversations have been about CPI and how it's bunk. And it's funny because you get this info from the Federal Reserve and the sources, the BLS, which creates the CPI.

And you just look at this cost per kilowatt hour in cities and it's up 35, 40 percent in five years. That doesn't seem like what's actually being reported. We need more generation. And I wrote about this chart last week because I had a feeling, an intuition, a knowledge that electricity prices were going up based off of my monthly payment. But I hadn't taken the time to look at this chart, and it's jarring, this jump. And then this one here, it looks like we're breaking away again. Uh-huh. It's going straight up.

That's the wrong type of up and to the right. well i mean well we also have a new entrant into the space that is not price sensitive no and but they also i mean you know so much more about this and they're burning so much like i wonder like they're at some point they will become that yeah but it is crazy because as we discussed here like the productivity of ai is undeniable undeniable like you've seen the videos we've generated it's like we have a team of three yeah we're generating videos that probably would have cost tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in a week uh for two hundred dollars of tokens sure it's insane um but with that being said there's a ton of it's just the this sector

the market's being flooded with money whether or not these companies are actually profitable and burning this much cash is sustainable i think is yet to be determined yeah i mean i know that the programming side of it is sustainable because you know if you're paying a mid-level programmer two hundred thousand dollars a year and you can profitably sell them an ai agent you know for 300 bucks a month it's like that's a no-brainer you know and uh some of the other applications for it you know uh i don't know if that'll be profitable but certainly for the programming world it's it's going to be profitable yeah um and uh you know i'll also say you know one of the fun things is you know i know everyone knows you as you know uncle marty

the podcaster but like you're also quite the product guy you know like we we got to do this a lot together and even the stuff we we played with really early on i remember the vercel tool vo or v0 um that now is just incredible just just getting over the one hump of you can't iterate on a previously done image or you know css file you had to start over from scratch and now that you can actually go from something and not just say like no try it again be better here it's just like no take this bit of it you know the building uis and building um um you know mobile flows and so it's it's crazy that i mean we were we were playing with that like nine months ago and i was like it's almost useful now it's great and you're able to employ not just in your videos but you

have to set up web stores and you have to do all this other stuff i'm sure you're using it there too yeah we are yeah and that was like i remember i vividly remember you pulling me into the room uh in the park and uh it was just for wireframing but it was crazy even then how you were yeah ever so it was incredible and then they had some open source models that we played with i'm very bullish on the open source side right now as well um i watch i have some friends and I've seen Tony and the Maple AI guys, you know, exclusively focus on the open source models in their private AI chats, but also like people running them locally. That's looking like something that we didn't get with the first wave of the Internet, right? You never got private search.

You know, it didn't really make sense, right? is that uh there there is a the a side of the ai side that is actually um exciting and sort of antithetical to the way um early internet companies grew by basically monetizing spying on you right um and that while a lot of these ai companies are going to spy on you no doubt is that um you actually have an alternative like a viable alternative here which is very exciting yeah it's uh i'm happy we're ending on this very gloomy first half of the conversation but there are things to be optimistic about we have tools to make the world a better place to make better products to yeah do things never doom never doom never doom things may be dark go to church have

kids yeah yeah live the way charlie would have wanted you to that was right there yeah wanted here you enjoy your day yeah you too man keep pushing it go to zap right.com check out the ticketing app if you're a bitcoin or a business owner and you're not using zap right for invoicing do it i've been using it for three years now and it's only gotten better our revenue in bitcoin is going up consistently as it should be i think i think it's just uh um i think it's just uh like the thing of marketing how many touch points until you get a conversion for us how many zap right invoices with the pay in bitcoin option we have to get before people just say i'll pay in bitcoin we've seen that go up i love hearing that that just makes me so happy

yeah but thank you for building it you're welcome all right peace and love freaks thank you for listening to this episode of tftc if you've made it this far i imagine you got some value out of the episode if so please share it far and wide with your friends and family we're looking to get the word out there also wherever you're listening where that's youtube apple spotify make sure you like and subscribe to the show and if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms that goes a long way last but not least if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad-free. Make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app

and go to fountain.fm to find that. $5 a month gets you every episode a day early, ad-free. Helps the show, gives you incredible value. So please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time. And until next time. Okay. Thank you.