TRASHFUTURE - Too Uncool for Unschool ft. Ed Campbell

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

Ed Campbell has ventured deep into the dark heart of British Bitcoin enthusiasm to bring us dispatches from the front lines of the battle against the state… and also a cryptocurrency themed marmalade that we all agree was slightly too sour. Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! TF Merch is still available here! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

All right, so you brought a jar of marmalade from the Bitcoin conference you went to. The strategic Bitcoin preserve. Milo can't try it because he's like got some kind of dental work in. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's veneers. I'm now going to try the first official Bitcoin decentralized marmalade that's ever been made. Tell me through it.

It's very lemony. Bitter. It's so lemony. Is that a tenant of decentralized cryptocurrencies? The less it gets away from the central currency, the more lemony it gets, of course. Yeah. Oh, you're a sugar cell. I bet.

Have fun being poor with your fiat currency. Yeah. It says it contains organic sugar, organic silver oranges, and organic lemon. But you're getting a lot of lemon. It smells a bit like lemm sip. Yeah. That's what I will.

I'm going to pass it over to it. I'm going to try it again. When I tried it after the Bitcoin conference, I was like, I don't know if I don't like this marmalade or I don't like marmalade. That was something I was trying to ascertain. It's quite an old man food, marmalade. I feel like a baby in a pot.

I'm using this big spoonful you've got there. There's so much marmalade. That's like a whole slice of toast worth of marmalade. The listener, Ed Campbell has just eaten when I could described as a tablespoon of cryptocurrency theme marmalade and is currently engaged in a great deal of grimacing.

It was not, it's really, it's really not designed to be consumed in that way. Well, I mean, I mean, because it was to be something about like, you would do if you were doing like endurance training like before the age of like everything's a supplement and, you know, all the hyperoptimized shit. It was just like, yeah, you kind of, you know,

you sort of have your marmalade before you kind of go go for a big run or something. Not Marmalade Jam, but I guess it's a similar thing. I guess the question I was also thinking about was just like, yeah, like, was there also like a kind of Paddington on the Bitcoin type of situation at the conference? Is that the reason for the marmalade? Because it feels like a very odd thing to give out as a freebie. It wasn't free. I paid for it.

Do you know what I mean? I paid five pounds for this. You paid for it. I thought it was a fun souvenir to have. What else was on offer? This person was selling just like farm shop goods and this was the only. Obviously, Bitcoin product. She was also selling like beef drippings, jam.

Chili jam, beef dripping. No, no, just normal. Beef trippings, that's totally in the realm of something Bitcoin people will be interested in because they have this huge ideological fascination with using beef tallow in place of, like, seed oils and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But this woman was quite like, she looked normal. That's all I can say, like, whatever you're imagining of like hyper-crypto bro, this woman was not that person.

Because I'm going to rip off some nerds. No, also not. Like, she was ultimately, because I could, I had to go and get cash out because she only took cash or crypto. And I didn't have any crypto to give her. Cash or crypto, like that fucking bar we went to in Berlin that time. Yes, yes, yes. And she also very kindly started to show me how I could quickly get some cryptocurrency. And I was like, it's so much easier for me if I just go and get some cash out right now.

That's such an annoying transaction. They now just have some cryptocurrency. And I'm a pound man currently in my day-to-day life. You're a pound sell. Yeah, you're a pound. Your Fiat maxing. Fish out of water. That's right.

At the Bitcoin conference. I was disappointed to learn. I thought there might be like a giveaway. And each one in 10 jars maybe has like a Bitcoin in it. But that doesn't seem to be the case. It's a very valuable jar of Marmalade. If you catch it with your teeth, you'll have luck until next Christmas. Each jar of marmalade has to cost at that point like anywhere between $8,000 and $12,000.

Yes. Depending on what the value of Bitcoin is at the time? You there, boy. What day is this? Why, it's the day of the annual Bitcoin conference. God's a farmalade for all. It's a strange phenomenon. Hi, everybody.

Welcome to T.F. We got Ed Campbell in the studio today. I believe first time on T.F. First time, previous long-time listener. Yes. Previous Britonology, guess. Yes. Don't worry.

If you're listening, they will eventually ask you on. That's what happens. Yeah, we have all. I promise, we're going to get to all of you. Yeah. You're like the podcasting equivalent of the guy, that married Margot Robbie by just, like, working as like a low-ranked producer on film. Just there.

Just there. I'm hanging around. Yeah. Yeah. And look, we, I put together some, some news today, but before we get into talking about Ed's adventure in yet another Bitcoin conference at a time where crypto prices are tumbling, because there's always two kinds of Bitcoin conferences. There's the retrenchment conference where you went, where they're all telling themselves about

why this is just another great buying opportunity. And then there, of course, are the bull market conferences where, you know, they're essentially just doing victory lap after victory lap and gloating. But before we talk about the retrenchment conference, Hussein, you found something and then I found some more things about it that I'd like to wildly speculate about. Can you please tell us about the trailer that you sent all of us for the film that you can describe? Every so often you just come across something very cursed on your sort of, like, YouTube

algorithmic, like, your recommendations. So this is, like, I want to preface by saying, this is my fault, right? Because I sort of have, like, one of my unfortunate hobbies is that I like to lurk on, like, right-wing podcast accounts. You know, I sort of claim that it's for work, but, like, a lot of it is just kind of very, a lot of it's, like, really bizarre stuff. So, like, a lot of it is for work, actually, because so much of all we talk about. You're on the trigonautry Patreon.

I am. Well, well, not quite the Patreon, but, like, I may as well be the amount of times, like, you know, Constance and Kiss and Space is recommended to me. What, like, as an option for surgery? Like, go to Turkey and come back looking like Constantine kissing? I mean, you know, look at his face recently. It's like, you wouldn't, you know, he could, he could very well pass off as both a Turkish Barber and the victim of Turkish Barber.

Women will be constantly kissing you. That is true. That is true. Just as a sidebar, like, their sort of fucking thumbnails on their YouTube videos are really like something else. Like, I would definitely recommend listeners just go, don't watch any other videos. Just like, but just look at like what they have done to their thumbnails to like make themselves look more chiseled and more chad and it's just like it's really it's really bizarre but anyway like

as a result of this i end up getting recommended a lot of like stuff in the right wing kind of like media podcasting space and then just like you know stuff adjacent to it meanwhile i i've just been doing my research bit and i pulled up the uh the trigonometry youtube thumbnails and i can see what you mean about the sort of uh the the chiseled the chiseled constantin aesthetic Whereas Francis Foster is looking increasingly like the, like the sort of like the, is it Eddie the Eagle? What's that guy? Sam the Eagle. Sam the Eagle.

He got, it's fucking Francis Foster got the droopy dog surgery and Constantine Kinsk and got the Chadjah. Like they both went to Turkey to go in wildly different directions. Foster looks like Nigel Farage fucked Sam the Eagle and he is the sort of perverse offspring of that union. He looks like, what are the people in the Grinch called? The who's? The who's? Yeah, he looks like a who. Oh my God.

If you mention Constantine Kissin to anyone normal, they'll go, who? Yeah. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. All I'll say is justice for Francis Foster in this very limited way, because I feel like the AI software, but like they're using to sort of like render their thumbnails.

It's designed specifically to make Constantine look like really chiseled and like hench. But as a result, like it ends up kind of doing a massive disservice to Francis, who just ends up looking more like a sad, droopy dog. You think they're in a like substance type scenario where Constantine kissing is like when you're on the substance and Francis Foster is like when you have to have the week off there must be balanced

So I come across this trailer and this trailer is this called this is called Rotherham right and it's presented as like a trailer for a film and I was like oh at the time because the thumbnail was so small I was like oh like are they like

what on earth is this and I thought it was going to be similar to like the daily wire when they first started making movies and they were like but like the films were sort of like there were bad films but there were films with actual people in it

and I was like oh okay like this might be an interesting way to go. Like, is this kind of like American money going into sort of making, like, British cultural stuff, just making like slop for us, but in this sort of like, you know, high production sense? No, this video is entirely AI. And it's an AI trailer and it's supposed to sort of depict the sort of Rotherham, Grooving,

grooming gang scandal. But the reason why I thought this was both horrifying and interesting and bizarre is because, well, number one, it's like a completely AI, like, rendered, which is to say that like, it comes entirely from the imagination of kind of like right wing losers in there it's sort of a reflection of their paranoid fantasies

and you know it's very kind of like creepy and perverted in many like there's a lot of focus on like this AI this this AI rendered schoolgirl who as with all sort of AI content made by like older men really does a lot to sort of like sexualize her

but it's like this video is like this mixture of these guys being incredibly horny for this school girl and also, like, their own racial paranoid fancies. So, like, in between, like, these clips of the AI school girl kind of getting lured into, you know, the grooming gangs and stuff, like these kind of pictures of. But while there's a depiction of, like, a South Asian police officer. The South Asian police officer, like, at the very end, it's like the AI generated narrator is like,

and you'll never guess how deep it goes at the South Asian police officer, like, opens a door and then, you know, a smile with like, like, Joker facing. the wrong amount of teeth just slowly spreads across his face. Exactly. And also all the sort of like South Asian characters who are kind of presented

as the villains in this all have these like devilish like what you call like Aifex twin cover like grins. That's right. And it's obviously just like it's really derivative and very dull in one way but in another way it's just like

oh no this is kind of you know and their crowd and like whoever's making this is crowd trying to crowd from this film but it's like I don't want to like maybe well maybe I don't know if we want to give the name or not for it because it's like a fairly small account. want to give the name for it only because I actually looked into what

the trailer itself is bizarre don't encourage you to go watch it but it's like this they seem to be setting up a British version of Taken that is set in the fantasy of Rotherham that contains also a London overground train

derailing which I guess it would have derailed quite substantially to get to Rutherham yeah but it also suggests that Sadiq Khan rules the north now Which is also every potential consumer of this trailer's worst nightmare. And it has as well, again, over the like the sort of the man finding the father, you know, like the George C. Scott of this situation, finding the house with the groomers in it,

getting dragged away by like the woke police or whatever, setting up the like one man with a clash against the state and like the immigrants. All of it is soundtracked to a kind of sad movie trailer version of you spin me right round it's also that's an absurdly sexual song like you spin my head right and when you go down so like is the soundtrack from like the perpetrator's view

like it's such an inappropriate like I'm not sure they've been much thought into that? You can only hope not. Yeah. I guess so yeah. So, you know, we've long said AI is the aesthetic of fascism because you can make your, it is the mass distributed

ability to make a kind of good enough for someone who's ideologically committed to it movie about like the paranoid racial fantasies of Rotherham, right? The AI is good enough that you can just sort of make it if you are a YouTube channel with 200 subscribers

And if you can just go, like, I don't know, get attention in Elon Musk's mentions, he'll give you however much, like, the couple thousand dollars you might need to just run enough prompts for a long enough time to, you know, put, make like a 20 minute movie that people would, people will watch all up and down the country and say, oh, this would be banned in the UK while watching it. But the thing is, it's made by a company called Unhinged Labs. The only other version of that I could find is a company in Las Vegas that makes masks for guys with. beards that's called The Formal Badass Mask. The Formal Baddha! That's a 2017 Twitter screen name if ever I had, yeah. Now, it's the only other unhinged labs I could find, but I do know that someone who makes something called the formal badass mask might be interested in Rotherham.

The Americans love it. I wonder if this is someone who started making like enamel pins on Etsy and then pivoted to like being sort of obsessed with Britain in the way that only American ultra-conservatives can be. You'll be shocked at how deep this goes. I just wanted to highlight one of the comments on the trailer that I really enjoyed is one that just simply said, this should be shown in schools.

Yeah. See, I think they've actually picked up on something there. Genuinely, this is an example of the only way to get something done politically in the UK, you know, is to make a touching drama about it. Yeah, that's a good point. The Portovus scandal, adolescence, both of those things, Like TV dramas prompted national level conversations. And obviously I do not think there should be like a racist taken fantasy made by AI to prompt like a discussion about the Grimmigang scandal.

I don't think that's like an appropriate vehicle or something which would be. Wok has infected the trash chute your guests now. That sounds like they are just mimicking what they've seen. They've seen like Alan Bates get his payout and being like, well, how do I do that? How do I make sure that something is done? They're trying to make adolescence for the Nigel Farage era. They're trying to get out ahead of the inevitable coming Farage regime. But we're going to get out what our version of adolescence is.

I was looking on the website, which we're trying to sort of fundraise on. It's called FilmTee. And Filmty says, great films no longer need Hollywood gatekeepers. AI has opened up cinema quality filmmaking to everyone. But getting funded is still tough. So we built Filmetty's a fix fat. Filmsi connects filmmakers directly with backers to fund and turn trailers into real films. No gatekeepers, just filmmakers and supporters. But how it works. Upload a trailer

and then it explains, use AI to create a short trailer that brings your idea to life. And then that's how you sort of like get fun. So the idea I suppose is that like the AI trailers are used as a proof of concept for what you want to do. But like the thing about this trailer is that like it can only exist as an AI film in the sense that like, well, this is very much like entirely a fantasy created by these kind of like you know from from the right that that itself like to me is quite interesting just in terms of like what this trailer is sort of supposed to do what and what it tells us about like the moment the way in which like this type of scandal which is like it's a very very deep scan and there's also one where it's just like whenever we've talked about it one of the things that is very very evident is this like

you know well half like most of the reason why this hasn't sort of been uncovered in the way that like it ought to, it's probably because it implicates the police a lot more than, like, you would think it would be, right? Like, it's genuinely, like, the information that you get in terms of, like, how police kind of have even treated these cases before, like, it's genuinely horrifying. So, like, you can only imagine what the stuff that hasn't come out is like. So it is, like, impossible to do something like this, purely because, like, you know, we sort of know where blame really is.

And so the result is just that, like, these scandals will kind of just be subject to the sort rampant racial fantasies of right-wing lunatics online that nevertheless get channeled into mainstream politics. That and of course also the absolutely wonderful portrayal of the girls' door that her dad just mournfully looks at that contains what can only be described as macaroni art from Beyond Reckoning. She appears to have drawn...

And there's a balloon on the door. There's a balloon, a fully blown-up balloon taped to the door. there is happy birthday and then sort of the letter G and some splotches just sort of also duct tape to the door as well as what appears to be a

puffer fish wearing a bathing suit. So again, brilliant stuff by the AI slob community. Congratulations to FilmT for so far creating a platform to fund and propagate further racial nonsense. I look forward to it becoming like

a company with a royal warrant soon. Anyway, anyway, look, this is We spent 21 minutes on something I wanted to just note. So I want to move on. I want to move on to what we're actually here to talk about. That is, of course, BitFest, crypto and so on. I want to start, though, before we talk about Ed's. More marmalade?

Yeah, I want to start by having more of the marmalade that I don't like very much. I did a little review of some old friends associated with the sector. And guess what? BitFest 2025 actually had a little dust up with an old friend of ours in the crypto center sector, excuse me, the self-appointed sheriff of Bedford, the owner of Real Bedford, the Bitcoin football team impresario, Peter McCormick. Super. So if you don't recall Peter McCormick, in addition to taking over a sort of struggling

local football team with some of his crypto money, assisted, of course, by the Winklevust twins, because it seems like buying a struggling British football team near the bottom of the football pyramid, and then trying to turn it into a story for whatever ideological hobby horse you're trying to be, appears to now be a relatively common thing for American rich guys to do. We could have done it. This was an idea I came up with many years ago to buy a Thamesmead FC

which was and I think still is quite cheap. And the whole purpose of it was not even, it wasn't even to create a story, it was just so that we could make a t-shirt. That was it. That's all we wanted to do. It could have been Trash Meade FC versus the Bedford, the Bedford Bitcoin Warriors

or whatever. They would have hated us, but it would have been fine. What we'd lack in money. We'd make up for in heart, I suppose, I guess. In Rift. Yeah, exactly. We'd be like, look, we can't pay you more, but we can offer you a discount on shirts. So, what happened? Peter McCormick, the host of what Bitcoin did,

still didn't know what Bitcoin did, interviewed none other than, of course, Tommy Robinson. Of course you need to talk to on a decentralized currency channel. Well, they're both Bedfordshire boys. You know, I can understand that. Rival football fans. Yeah. Bedford hate Luton. Gricky. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I guess Tommy Robinson kind of hates Luton in a way. So, McCormick had been due to attend BitFest UK in Manchester, but told his followers that the invitation had since been revoked. He later clarified this decision had been reversed with organizers asking him to speak on the topic of free speech. So basically, he interviews Tommy Robinson for his, like, Bitcoin podcast.

Sure. BitFest UK is like, oh, don't want to be associated with Tommy Robinson, says, hey, you can't come here if you're going to interview Tommy Robinson. And then presumably all of the staunch libertarians in BitFest UK were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You definitely can come here if you've interviewed Tommy Robinson. Yeah, I mean, how dodgy do you have to be when the Bitcoin people are distancing themselves from you?

Like that really feels like. Well, they're not, though. Well, yeah, not ultimately. But for them to even consider it, it feels like a big move from that. So McCormick also said countering any claim that Tommy Robinson is anything but a stand-up guy just looking for the future of his country, who's loved by all races and creeds, said, on my way to the studio,

Tommy was stopped by a Sikh man who thanked him and said he was proud to be British, does not like where the country is headed, and thanked Tommy for what he's doing. Tommy embraced him, listened to him, and showed him respect. That is not the behavior of a racist. This is one of the same's remarkable young man,

tweet. Yeah. Yeah. That's not the behavior of a racist. No. No. Of course. This thing, the local Sikh man in Bedford?

Yeah, the one seat guy who you've got to get his endorsement before you get the marmalade you have to get his endorsement Yeah, yeah, yeah I'm going to get this is not the behavior of a racist printed on a T-shirt Yeah

Maybe they could bring out a sort of Bitcoin Chutney to prove how committed they are to multiculturalism So this is of course, obviously something that absolutely Because that happens all the time, right? You know, you're sort of stopped and vindicated from the beliefs

of your critics by private interactions that occur in the street that you report on later. Yeah, conveniently. Yeah. I was actually told by a passing HMRC inspector in the street that I paid my taxes in full. He embraced me and said this was not the behavior of someone engaging in a Panama paper style avoidance scheme.

Yeah, so, oh God, the Real Bedford team, though. Is he actually calling them Real Bedford? It's an amalgamation of two previous teams, I think. There was like Bedford's United Bedford Town, say, and he, I think he bought both of them. and amalgamated them. So there is like a bit of disquiet amongst like, well, you wouldn't like it if you're suddenly having to cheer on a different football team.

Well, I guess if your team is called Bedford United and you're being involved in a project to unite the various teams of Bedford, it's sort of hard for you to object on a kind of ideological basis. Well, that makes him now the king of Bedford because it's the Royal Bedford team. Yeah, yeah, true. Real Bedford is such a... So stupid. Stupid name.

But this is also something that you're wearing a football shirt at the time. I am. is like as more American private equity funds by British football teams because they're just so used to running their businesses in a certain kind of way there's like this repeated motif of them

trying to like combine all the football teams in given towns and to roll them all into one team and they're just like all of these people fucking hate each other it's also it's just smacks of not liking football yeah just being like oh well famous real Madrid's Real Bedford

it's like so it's all root one and there's no new ones And like, they play at the Burn of Bedford. I mean, there's obviously there's such like a different conversation

but like English football, British football has such like a rich history and the names behind teams are so interesting and like I've developed over hundreds of years in some cases,

hundreds years, 150 years probably max. But just being like, it is like Beckham going to like Inter Miami and that's because that's an American, it's a brand new team.

But just thinking like we are Barcelona Bedford. We are Bayern Munich Bedford. It's so dumb. What about A.C. C. Crington Stanley. How about that? I think

Bayer and Bedford would be a very interesting merger of two two regions. Yeah, yeah. But this is, in this case,

Sheffield United is owned by an American private equity firm and they're looking at purchasing their rival club amalgamating them into one like combined Sheffield club.

Yeah, yeah, this is happening again. That is her, but they're not a much bigger like Sheffield's so much bigger than Bedford is going to get away with

because they're non-league teams. Yeah, Yeah, yeah. But shave, you can't do that in shape. We have got to bring back football hooliganism. It's the only solution to it. We have got to make it so untenably violent that, A, it will be impossible to merge two teams and also that Americans will be scared of buying a football team in the first place.

People need to be throwing batteries at each other. We need to bring back bottling. Someone needs to fight a police horse. See in the 80s when English clubs were banned from Europe. Yeah. And we need to do that again. There needs to be such a disreputation for English football clubs. that all these foreign investors

just give up. That's what I call hard Brexit. You know what I think you're sort of creating the outlines for. Maybe we could make like the AI generated movie trailer for this and like put it up on FilmTee to compete with as from what I can tell is the only AI general, rather it was the only AI generated

movie trailer on Filmmy. Like if you search YouTube as the only thing referencing it. But we could maybe make a rival one where we do like a kind of reverse Scooby-Doo where all of the any British foot ball club overall. That's sort of not sufficiently expensive that it can be taken over

in a private equity roll up. You know, they get like, sort of, it creates some kind of hooligan ghost story that's a frighten off the owners when they come and tour the grounds. That's good idea. Just violent graffiti is one person. Just like a string of associates. Like, have you heard of the Bedford boys? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Smashing

up, you know, they're using fiat currency. Yeah. They're still using it. Anyway, before we get to BitFest, I want to revisit one other old friend, because remember quasi-quartang, they're calling him the king of timing. I've been following this. I got a bit of a spidey sense to look in it before we talk today. That quasi-Quartang, and this sort of leads us into the Bitcoin conference discussion.

Again, this is from an FT article, Quartang, who kept a relatively low profile since his month-long stint as chancellor in 2022. A beautiful sentence. Love that. Told the FT, he's set to become a non-executive director of Stack Bitcoin Treasury, a so-called treasury company that's set to launch in London by the end of the year. To remind everyone here, a crypto treasury company is a company that basically just as a publicly traded company. It's listed on a stock exchange that does nothing but hold Bitcoin. And it's a way to just buy Bitcoin, but like in stocks and shares, ISA, for example, because you're just buying a company whose thing is it buys Bitcoin. So this is just a Bitcoin trade. Micro Strategy now called

Strategy is the most famous of these, where they just sort of gave up on making software and just started buying Bitcoin. Yeah. So Quarting said, as politicians, we talked all the time about enterprising growth. And it's quite fun getting involved with the coal face of this industry, which is, again, just issuing stock, using the money to buy Bitcoin, the price of Bitcoin goes up, more people buy into the company. So you can issue more stock to buy more Bitcoin. It's that thing where it has all the dynamics of a Ponzi scheme, but because everything it's doing is legal, it's a legal Ponzi scheme. That's what Bitcoin treasury companies are, right? Because again, it's like you just get more people in, so long as the asset keeps going up, that's fine. But as soon as it starts going down,

you're forced to sell it to keep the price up and so all of a sudden you spiral down with all the same sort of forced dynamics that caused you to spiral up. So Quasi Quarting is worked out, is now a non-executive director of one of these. It was a company incorporated by the same guy who made the like Nigel Farage

terrified old people gold hawking company. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, Bullion direct. Yeah, direct bullying in fact. Yeah, Paul Withers is the guy. So he's, Paul Withers is pivoted to crypto with the UK's most trusted and beloved chancellor. Bill's brother.

Do you reckon they thought, well, you know, Obviously, these kind of legal crypto Ponzi schemes, they are at risk of this kind of, you know, sudden and really steep downward spiral. So we're going to need to bring in a man who knows all about being in one of those, Basi Qaeda. Yeah, quite. So he's now just posting about it on Twitter all the time. And he says, you know, with Bitcoin, there's quite a lot of conferences and the like that I'll have to go to. That's going to be what his job mostly is, is going to conferences and saying, you know, all of the things that you say at Bitcoin conferences to reassure people and to, keeping their Bitcoin or encourage other people into buying Bitcoin.

He's going to be in more Marmalade than Paddington Bear. Yeah, that's right. So the enemy, like all these, by the way, there's currently a sort of pretty significant downturn in the price of Bitcoin that's been happening in the last month. So all these treasury companies are taking a gigantic shit right now just in time for quasi-quartang's. I think quasi-Quartang is a thing where he could only be involved in a venture for one month. Yeah, I can believe that.

It's like Brigadoon. Yeah, like a bunch of like the stupider treasury companies are. like might zero at some point that's not financial advice where like these companies like they'll have done something at some point like one is called a Florida based life sciences company

used to call it you know it used to be a company now it's called Heath Zilla and just exists to buy ether that's all and now they're like oh shit we used to do something that we traded in doing something for being this Ponzi scheme legal Ponzi scheme not illegal and the thing is crashing same thing for sequins communications, which used to be a French

semiconductor company, now just owns a lot of Bitcoin. Amazing. Yeah. But then again, Zilla really is a fantastic name because Ether and God don't rhyme at all. And they've really just sort of, we'll just put Zilla on the end. It's a bit like Rayall Bedford. It is.

Yeah, yeah. You know, Zill is big. God's Ether would actually work better. That doesn't sound better. Yeah. Zilla is a more distinctive suffix, I guess. Yeah, gods would sort of, you don't, you don't, if you want to call something,

big. You don't say like, oh, it's God's this, because that just sounds religious. And with the Zad, it's sort of religious, but for the 90s. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah, yeah. So, I think, Heath Zilla, I'm afraid we're... Oh, no, it's Heath Zill. The problem is destroying the Tokyo stock exchange.

Real Bedford, we hate Eth Zilla because Bitcoin Maxis hate everyone who does anything with any other coin. Oh, okay. Yeah. So they would consider each one would consider the other's name to be hack and derivative, but they would hate each other. At the same time, who would have guessed this, A lot of the meme coins that the Trump family used to, let's say, amass a huge amount of

bribes at the beginning of the Trump administration appear to be down. The Trump meme coin down at 86%. The Melania meme coin down a shocking 99%. I really thought that, you know, it would add more utility. My meme coin is worth so much more than Melania. I can't stress that enough. If you stick with me, you'll be better off than with Melania. That's a great way to settle an argument to spouses, to be fair.

to release meme coins and see who... Whose meme coin is most valuable? Yeah, see who gets a bigger market cap. I guess if you're president of the United States, that's probably a more useful thing to say. That might meme coin. Like World Liberty Financial is down 40%. This is one of the many users

discussing the stock on Reddit investing forums last month, self-identified as a DJT bagholder, who this is a bagholder for his media communications company, who bought it $46 a share. The stock is now trading at $11. And I just, I'm saying this only for the screen name of the guy who's asking this because that's a great screen name

and then we're going to go into the actual conference. Reddit user simple-minded hatter asked. Yeah, you know. That's good. I like the idea of a hatter who's not mad, but they are just

a bit slow. And therefore the mercury hasn't actually affected them. The stupid hatter. It's just making hats just a bit badly. Or maybe actually quite well, but they've just got no, they can't take the business further. They don't have any vision. The Green Mile

had her ass. When do I give up on move on? So all of this is surrounded by crypto generally being in a huge downturn and it is in this environment. It's like, a sort of post you'd get on mums net about someone's like really shit husband, but on the equivalent male forum, which is fucking Bitcoin. They're just talking about when you should move on from your Trump meme coin.

So Ed, you went to Bitfest. I did. Tell me about it. Bitfest. So I was expecting in the context of the crypto downturn in general, I think at the end of October, one Bitcoin was worth I think it was a record like $126,000 and day I went, which was about two or three weeks later, it was worth, I think it was about

$84,000. So it lost $40,000 in value in like one month. So I was expecting like Wall Street in 1929. Like people just like crashing out. See, we got it. You want this? Mamelat boy. Man wearing a barrel

with a Bitcoin logo on it. But a guy's shooting his stupid accomplice. Simple-minded hat to He's killed one too many rabbit. Eat the marmalade, boy. Yeah, but it was, I think in contrast to, like, most kind of Bitcoin conferences, for example, there's one in Madeira, which I was the guy who found a Twitter called Jack Dorsey.

Jack Dorsey goes to this one. This one is almost like, it's got better wine, basically. But I think this one is like a reaction to that. It was founded by some people who do not like the kind of the Crypto Bro conference. I think the theme of this is like it's like the lifestyle and the philosophy of Bitcoin But what is the lifestyle of Bitcoin other than attending Bitcoin conferences? It's about freedom. It's about libertarianism.

It's about the abolition of the state, of the financial systems, and it can bleed into all parts of your life. Like I spoke to one of the organizers who told me that he spends 95% of his time thinking about Bitcoin. Uh-huh. In a way that I don't really understand how that can manifest. What is the other 5% in his estimation? Breathing, shitting? Yeah.

What if he's late for his Bitcoin conference? he might think about traffic. But they need to think, what if there's a market solution to this involved? Well, what if there's a market solution that involves, like, people? I remember we talked about this years ago, like a market solution that involves people

like bidding on green lights. Using crypto. Like, you could say, how much is it worth for me, for my car, to pass through unimpeded? And then you put up your bid per light. And then you just get all green lights until someone wake who makes a higher bid passes in front of you.

You get a traffic like whale. It's like really like thumbing the scale of the market. But I think there was an interesting real mix of sort of right-wing libertarians, so kind of like real crunchy, hippie people, kind of old school like crypto guys who kind of wished it was still cool, who wished it was still worth a penny and it was all like, we're trying something exciting. I met two guys who say they were behind sort of the early situation

of the rare Pepe meme. And there were so much, there was so much going on. And you know when you're having a conversation with someone and you're like, oh, I actually don't even have the base level knowledge of what you're talking about to continue with this. Like I've done my research about like Bitcoin, et cetera. And I was expecting to be more conventional conversations. But I ended up having to defend the existence of a state more often than I sort of thought.

I was so convinced you were about to say that you were about to defend, you had to defend like the idea of the age of consent. It could have potentially gone that because I was going to ask because I guess one of the things that I remember when I tried to, when I was like working as a sort of proper journalist and I had to,

this was like around about 2018, 19. I did a bunch of like Bitcoin stories when it was like a lot more sort of popular and novel, but it didn't feel as chaotic as it did as it sort of like did during the pandemic and now afterwards.

But like my impression had always sort of been that like they like to sort of like betress their language in sort of like financial jargon. Partly because they're trying to convince people that like this is a legitimate find, or at least they used to want to convince people, this is a legitimate financial

instrument, it's kind of like, it's going to be like the future of currency, it's going to be the future of commerce, the way that it's going to shape society is through that shift in commerce. But like, the impression that I always got was always just like, your knowledge isn't really about the markets, it's about references. It's about like things that you've heard from other people

who are also sort of like boosting Bitcoin or at least sort of like ostensibly part of like whatever you kind of believe the Bitcoin community to be. And you know, you're sort of guided by like a type of libertarian politics, but it's still, yeah, it's still like it, the thing, my impression has always been that sort of Bitcoin communities, however you want to sort of define them, kind of are, they find the references and they find the sort of internal jokes and the internal language to be a lot more important than like its actual utility generally. And it feels like that's only sort of gotten exaggerated over time where it kind of does, it does, you know, the fact that you're sort of talking to a guy who sort of introduces himself as like, yeah, I invented. the rare pepe or I sort of made the rare pepe meme go viral and it's just like number one how do you even respond to that but it's also just like you you are living in a different universe you have a different epistemology right and it's one that is like impenetrable partly because you would have to spend so

much time not just on the computer but like in this very specific part of the internet to sort of even get a semblance of what you're trying to say and I know like did you sort of get that impression during your conversations with people that you were just like, you know, you've been on the computer for so long, but you've actually sort of forgotten how to talk to someone normal? No, I think, and I really do want to emphasize that like a lot

of people were on the surface sort of like normal people. It was a lot of like dads. There's also kids there. Like there was like kind of some kids activities going on and actually the rare peppy artist, I had been told about them, someone was showing me there art and it was just sort of like rare pepip memes and maybe it's just

a fairly appreciate it as I. I didn't particularly appreciate it as art and I just got talking to these. I'm brave of you to admit that you didn't get it. I'm talking to these kind of older guys and it became clear that they were like, oh, we used to do this art and this is some of my art. Oh, it's the rare prep you guys. And there was like, they weren't

totally siloed from like normal conversation. I think they were both Marys. I think they might have had children. It was just like, it was like the frame of references they had. It was like a total parallel culture. And I suppose it's just like sort of the existence of NFTA. to a certain extent, like, the culture is valuable because they say it is, and there is

like this really siloed community that gives it value, whereas me, complete outsider, I was like, I don't get that. It's like the emper of new clothes. This is why I've often, especially as time has gone on, especially after the pandemic, the Bitcoin people should be thought of

as members of like kind of a religion. 100%. That is such a big thing that came away from. It's a belief system. It is like there is. It's so hard to have a secular god for a sort of anti-state libertarian project other than just God. Yeah. You know, but if you want to have an anti-state libertarian project that doesn't go all Waco, right?

You're going to need some kind of central organizing focus of your beliefs. And with Bitcoin for them, it's the concept of being able to apply a market exchange to anything. And being able to be able to say, well, if you imagine, that there are zero transaction costs and zero institutions that would have to be because imagine the traffic light thing if that was just done with normal money. That would be, all of it would be crazy,

but there would have to be banks involved in deciding who could drive when and where. Straight would have to be involved as to handle payments, transactions. Whereas the fantasy here is, oh, well, if you just eliminate, you know, the municipality, if you just eliminate the state, then you can create, you can imagine

a world where public goods don't require a state, to bring them into being because someone will think of something that uses an auction system to solve some problem. I really love this way of thinking because it's so like, I think you have

to have a particular kind of brain disease to get into it where like it's sort of like being like well what if you made a helicopter out of lead and it's like well I guess I guess you could do that if you really push science to its absolute limit but like why? And it's like well like why what

if you had a banking system that didn't involve any banks or any central authority. I'm like, well, I guess you could do that, but then when you look into what it would involve, it's completely insane. Why is this the hill that you want to die on? There was a presentation I sat in from a man named the Renegade Investor, and he basically just listed, each slide was one of Britain's problems and the ones from men. What were the woes, please? The welfare bill, housing crisis, illegal immigration, war was that was a big one. Which one? War in general would be solved if Britain adopted because of a Bitcoin standard.

And I spoke to one of the organizers because I was trying my best to get on board with it. I was like, I'm trying to understand what the argument is here. But I came away from it and I was like, well, that just sounds that you're saying magic would fix it. You've not spelled out to me what the steps are that would fix all these sort of like global crises. And so they're so complicated.

Everyone's trying to solve those things, right? So like, why is this the silver bullet? And I spoke to one of the organizers who told me that to truly understand Bitcoin, you need degree level understanding of six different disciplines. So I think his argument to me was I haven't done the reading. And I think that is actually a semi-religious answer. Like if I said, for instance, like I didn't understand Judaism,

someone might recommend that I've read the Torah. I hadn't like meditated enough on the scripture. And I thought it was such an interesting response to be like, because surely for like it's a financial mechanism that there's presumably quite a simple way to explain to an outsider who you're trying to get on board with your financial. project and to convert to spell it out in quite simple terms and he didn't even try it was like it's on me to educate myself better you're not is it the whole I mean the whole idea and this is again with of Bitcoin evangelism because it is evangelical like it's quite literally evangelical is that if

everyone believes and you register your belief in a market based libertarian community by literally putting money into it then everyone gets rich and everyone gets rich on with their through the worth of their cryptocurrency and the community thrives. But if people don't believe and they don't put their money behind it, then we won't get rich. And so it's like with so many of the sort of modern religions that have come out of Facebook largely, the emphasis, you know, the sort of the thing that Q&N became that set of beliefs is also, I think it's more of a kind of religion than a conspiracy theory, really. Again, it has these similar things of evangelism and belief and sort of the coming apocalypse, right?

It might be more apocalyptic than the Bitcoin religion, but they're both sort of quite religious in tone, that all of it is about coming to that belief system and joining the community. Really, when they say do your research, what they really mean is become ready to become a member of the community because there aren't a series of explanations, really, as to why Bitcoin fixes wars,

but if we all believe that Bitcoin fixes wars and convince enough people that Bitcoin fixes wars, enough people will buy into Bitcoin, especially now at a time where Bitcoin is slumping, that we'll all stay rich again. We'll all be saved. You could use Bitcoin to turn every traffic light in the Donbats red whenever a Russian tank turned up.

It's basically free market Mormonism. Oh, God. Kind of. Yeah. But there was also just the way it was, I think it was much more ideological monetary for these people. I didn't get the impression that these were like the big players. I didn't think this was a whale conference.

No, they were, they was an enthusiast conference. And there is like a difference between the two in the sense that like, yeah, like the people who are like the true believers in sort of like Bitcoin as sort of like a way in which they might be able to organize ideologically or whether like some who sort of maybe see that there is a kind of like political, there is political potential to this. Like they are very different to like the finance guys who are sort of just maybe interested in Bitcoin largely just sort of like make some money and maybe have a bit of fun. Like they're very separate entities. And like I'm, I was actually very curious about whether any of, like, whether that tension was evident in the conference. Like, are there people who were just like, yeah, this movement or like, you know, the Bitcoin movement as far as they can see it has kind of been compromised or undermined by like people who weren't really in it for like the true belief of like a different type of future, but because they just sort of want to make money. Because like that's kind of what happened with, you know, a lot of the NFT guys kind of blame those types of people for like the reasons why NFT fail. And like whenever you have something like this, especially where like there's a high chance of failure, it's quite often that the people who are true believers will blame those

who like aren't adequately like believing in the higher potential of whatever they sort of like are ideologically invested in. Yeah, it was much more ideologically based. I would say like they, you're mentioning the kind of the treasury, the Bitcoin treasury is there. I think largely the people at this conference would be, would hate that. So that is not the spirit of what Bitcoin is. They're like, is it like the, are they Bitcoin originalists?

Are they like, they're obsessed with the white paper and anything Satoshi said is absolute gospel. I think they see, I think it's very much that's not in the spirit of what this is or should be. It is about breaking down financial systems and governments. Actually, the most kind of tension I saw was on a panel about education and it was between, there was three speakers. One was a man named Coach Carbon who I think just sort of like runs. My understanding of what he did was like he just kind of teaches young people about Bitcoin in like a club maybe. Or like he seemed like a sports coach as well. Somehow combining the two.

One was a teacher whose name is Huxley, and I assume that's a pseudonym, and he runs like a Bitcoin club after school, and they have like a... I'll be home, I've got after school Bitcoin. It's not a Bitcoin pickax. It's like, but it's like something that mines crypto

in that club, like whatever it's called. And then they also had a woman who is raising her children in a Bitcoin community in Medira where she's unschooling them. So unschooling is basically it's child-led education, so the child decides exactly what they want to learn and it's entirely at the child's discretion

and the parents should... As long as it's Bitcoin. I guess at a certain extent. But I thought that was an interesting tension because the women who's unschooling her children was just like, take your children out of schools. They are teaching you. It is absolutely useless. It's teaching them like government raw.

And there you've got like someone employed to teach children. It's probably presumably likes his job and it's kind of proud of things that he's done. That's probably the most tension between two people that I saw there. I think there was very much in agreement that like We're all in this not to get extremely rich, but to change the world. Like, Bitcoin is the revolution and a solution.

I mean, the unschooling thing was astonishing. I mean, from your article, you say, Bitcoin bleeds into all kinds of disciplines. In one panel of education, I listened to a woman called Sylvia, explained to an enraptured audience that she's raising two fiat-proof kids in a Bitcoin community in Madeira by unschooling them. Yeah, that's right. They're Alpha Romeo till they die.

Yeah. So Sylvia and her husband, Rob, moved to Madeira three. years ago. She's determined to raise her kids naturally. She tells me her kids never had nannies and that she breastfed one of them until they were five and a half. Yes. I mean, that's how you create a libertarian, isn't it? You breastfeed someone until they're five and a half. You know, there's no

other path for them. Yeah. I fight, because her whole thing was raising children extremely naturally and it's interesting, like, what could be more natural than breastfeeding to five and a half? And it's one of these things is, it was like a, if you know, you know the thing. And I was, like, I don't

quite understand how that intersects with Bitcoin. Like, or is it just that she happens to be breastfeeding children for quite a long time and she lives in a Bitcoin community? But as a cohesive ideology, that's something that I'm not quite getting your head around. So, I mean, look, there's so much of this sort of soup of beliefs in the conservative or sort of libertarian movements that are all about the kind of choice to reject social complexity because of some like primitivist belief that you have, right? I mean, it's the same beliefs that anti-vaxers have, which is, I don't like this thing. I find it to be creepy. And so I'm going to say, well, we were fine when we lived in tribes. That's exactly what Sylvia said to me.

Yeah, yeah. We were fine. Well, wait, breast milk was good enough for all of us, wouldn't it? Yeah. We had our grandfather's just had breast milk every night for too. I mean, it's a sort of more exaggerated version of these, of the belief that, oh, Britain was better when there was like rationing because, you know, everyone was friendlier or, you know, all we needed is, um, under rationing, your mother had two tips, right?

One had milk in it and one had gravy. And that was all you had until Sunday when you got a roast. Yeah. But again, the belief that it's like, well, all of this social complexity I find to be sort of unpleasant and intimidating, I'm going to pretend that it's not necessary for any of the standard of living that I enjoy. I'm also going to pretend that like getting to Madeira without getting scurvy doesn't require this social complexity that I'm comfortable with or being sustained on a pretty

arid island in a large population with access. to the internet enough to have a Bitcoin community doesn't require any social complexity that I'm uncomfortable with, but my child passing beyond my direct control into some place that I'm not in charge of, even if it's like, oh, no, they just learn whatever they want. It's like, no, I'm, they're learning whatever they want,

but in an environment where, like, they're highly structured by what I want, which happens to be mostly for them to not learn anything that makes me uncomfortable. Yeah, I'm raising them freak. While they're under my roof, they're going to be freaks. And if they want to go up normal, they can do that when they're 18.

Okay, but under my roof, they're going to be fucking weird and off-footing. Everything kids learn at school, you can learn outside school, she said. But not everything you learn outside school, you can learn in school. Everything you learn at school, you can learn outside school, but not the school I run. They won't be learning any of that bullshit. Unschooling is simply living without schools like we used to live. Yeah, literally, like in tribes. Yeah.

Yeah, like in like the 1700s. Because when you were nine, you went off and you worked in the clothing mill and you pulled out the threads from the steam loom. Yeah, it was better then. You lost a finger and you couldn't do math. Yeah, perfect. And you learned something. Yeah. Why do you need a finger if you're not doing math?

What, you can't count? It doesn't matter. And then we made it the abacus and it was all okay. Didn't even know he'd lost a finger. So, like, all of these fantasies about decentralizing the financial system, decentralizing education, they're basically all just the same kind of nonsense, primitivist desire to, like, escape the bits of social complexity you don't want. They're fundamentally conservative because they're about, like, attacking the

roots of any kind of social organization that just happens to be the things that tend to make sort of crunchy hippie conservatives or like gold bug paleo conservatives whatever whatever all uncomfortable and they happen to be things like public health often public education public goods they are that's one of the many fronts of wars on public goods and so it's it's like there's so little difference between this and like robert f kennedy basically saying oh we should go back to a version of the world where health is just not something people should expect.

Or the charter school movement. Americans have got to be getting breastfed. That's not the way. That's a guy. You've got to be suckling on your mouth. That's a guy who'd support breastfeeding well into someone's 20s, I would suspect. The 70s.

You'd still be on it. You can't trust these additives and food. You've got to be getting straight out of your mom. It's the same as the raw milk people. It's the same as the raw water people. Then stray out of your mom. Well, quite. Mum milk.

We used to have proper breast milkman. That's right. And that was your mom. Yeah, Rob got into Bitcoin eight years ago and he was educating me and I was educating him about unschooling. We saw all these parallels about decentralized money and decentralized education and freedom. And freedom must be at the foundation of things. My children have been born into the real world and they've been born into the real world

from day one because they've also not in the Matrix. They've always been with me, with my husband, with our family and with our friends. And so again, it's like always under my, it's these fantasies about retaining individual power from a complex society you don't understand by trying to withdraw from it. And this is, this is the Bitcoin community of Madeira. This is also the people like, I don't trust pasteurization for some reason. It's the recursion to like medieval peasant mindset or the lifestyle of a medieval peasant because the modern world has become frightening. I don't trust pasteurization, by only because I don't trust the French. I won't use anything

of any of French. But another presenter that you discuss is, of course, probably one of Britain's most annoying comedians, a man by the name of... My little Edward. Yes, that's right. Dominic Frisbee. Excellent. That is his real name as well. Made the inventor of the boomerang.

Dominic Frisbee is a guy who is... He didn't get radicalized really in the early 2020s. He was like a sort of gold bug, inflation-obsessed public figure from the late 2000s. But back before that put you on the wrong side of stuff. like, you know, probable belief in, like, vaccines or Q or whatever. I don't know what he thinks about these things, but you can see that a lot of his writing, he stops writing on, like, the fast show or whatever in the late 2010s and starts writing more and more about, like, you know, starts just doing a very serious po-faced documentary

about Rotherham, to go back to Rotherham from the beginning. Well, this guy has to be pro-vax because he's regularly caught in the mouth of a dog. So, you know, can't be too careful. So Dominic Frisby gets on stage, and he's, again, makes a lot of, lot of the quite standard claims about like the government is printing money and inflating away your wealth because somehow these people believe that it's important that like a time traveler from the 1920s should be able to like buy lunch with the change in his pocket this these strange beliefs about money there's a woman on this note yeah so what's a shilling so he's uh he even

writes comedy songs does frisbee one called we're all far right now was shared by elon musk again we're all far right now is you can imagine the lyrics I have listened to it I have read them it's basically just a have you listened to it it's knees up mother Britain I was hoping it was going to be freeze all right now

but with the slightly awkward scant it's we're all far right now we're all far right now it hits like every sort of Facebook comment bug bear from like immigration to trans rights to everything of course and now his pride

and the greatest moment of his life of course is when Elon Musk then retweeted him. His favorite song apparently, that's what Dominic said to me. Is it? Yeah, Elon Musk loves to put on right-wing English nationalist parody songs at his house parties that he throws, I'm sure.

But I think Dominic gave a presentation, it's kind of like a comedic presentation about Bitcoin and the culture around it, and I think it was called like Massive Foreheads was maybe the title of it. And it was about being like, all these Bitcoin boosters have enormous receding headlines. Essentially. But he, he

was the only one to offer a critical eye over the chances of Bitcoin as an ever I spoke to about kind of the dip in the market had been like that's just what Bitcoin does don't worry I've got more don't you worry about that and Dominic was the only one to say there's been so much complacency in this market and that worries me I think this could be the sign of something far worse for Bitcoin he was suggesting he was like he's the one who kind of said like this is evangelism there is a belief system here there is like a people like to virtue signal about how much of a bitconer, they are. So alongside his like comedic enterprises, he has written a book about Bitcoin and sort of like, I've not read it, but other books about finance as well. And I thought

it was interesting that he was the one person to point out the Emperor's New Clothes, sort of like needle the narrative of the conference at all was the only one was Dominic. That's interesting. I also think it's quite interesting when a Bitcoin person says like, oh, there's a lot of complacency in the Bitcoin market, which like is true, but also like, what would not be in complacent look like? Because it's like, it's just like a made-up thing that only has money because a bunch of people believe, it has value because a bunch of people believe that it does. But it's not like, it's not like the 2008 financial crisis where you're like, well, they mismanage the banks. Like their balance sheets, like they're there fucking, their risk ratios and stuff are all off.

But in this case, it's just like, well, yeah, the only ways to not be complacent is to be like, well, I shouldn't put my money in the fake money casino. Yeah, what does responsible Bitcoin look like? Or I guess if I bought 10,000 for a pound today, I would be quite complacent. I'd be quite It would have to go down a lot for you to make a loss Yeah Of course he also had His branded mugs for sale

Yeah as well A steal from the video It was available alongside his You were signing books And selling these mugs alongside it He's got to do for his booze man Come on Yeah his notable singles of course

Include debt bomb from 2012 17 million It's six That's so good 17 million fuck-offs from 2018. The National Anthem of Libertaria from 2018. I'm going to marry Gary from 2022. I'm a white man and I'm sorry from 2022.

We're all far right now from 2024. And wrong age, wrong sex, wrong color from 2025. I think this is, of course, your standard evolution of your sort of garden variety libertarian sort of goes from debt bombed in 2012 to just adopting every single one of the sort of conservative Facebook bug bears by 2025. wholesale. I really wonder what I want to marry Gary's about. I mean, it feels

like it does what it says on the tin. It's just a love song. Yeah. It's actually beautiful. It sounds like a Doris Day song. Yeah, yeah. He's one of those like true old school libertarians where he's like weirdly progressive on gay rights, but like really, really anti-everything else. No, no, no, it's just transphobia.

It's just a transphobic song. Okay. But it sounds homophobic, which I think is a branding issue for him. I think, you know, you need to be regardless of the ideology of it, you've got to be clear about which group you're having a go at. This is Dominic Frisbee's album Anthems for the Excommunicated, which also includes Lockdown Blues,

Arise Sir Nigel, and then the Libertarian Lord's Prayer. God, this guy sounds awesome. The Libertarian Lord's Prayer, goodness me. The 17 million fuck-offs one, he performed that, so that's like an anti-remaider ditty. And I think he performed that at the party when they had, like, you know, they took up at the

Trafalgar Square, but they had like the countdown and the cloak. I think he performed it in, he performed it there. So there's a bit, an audience for Dominic. Yeah. And then you also, you met one of the art. I always love Bitcoin art. I've talked about Bitcoin art a lot on this show, of course, not even just NFTs, which were like kind of created as a way to try to make assets

that didn't require fiat currency to buy and sort of that didn't work. And so a lot of Bitcoin art, like, they're like, usually it is like the partners or friends of someone who did buy 10,000 Bitcoins for 20 cents and forgot to buy drugs with them in 2010. or whatever, and often it will just be a painting of the Bitcoin B or like a painting of Calvin pissing on a dollar or whatever. Can I, can I show you? Can I, I might surprise you, actually. Did I show you an example of a Bitcoin piece of art, which shocked me, to be honest.

Oh, okay. It's provocative. It makes you think, look at that. Oh, wow. Did you see what we've seen as well. So it's like an octopus. It's an octopus with a big glowing brain that's like in the middle of a dollar. Yep.

The brain is glowing orange, which is the Bitcoin color. Are they pro or anti-octopus? Yeah, we've given this cephalopod a Bitcoin, and now it's more powerful. I know it's running. We've finally unschooled this octopus. And now it's an investor in crypto. Yeah. Octopodez have spent far too long learning about things that other people want them to

know about, the man. We're letting them learn about what they want to learn. They've learned about stuff like, you know, how to change color to avoid predators or, like, fit into really small areas or just, Distribute problem solving across like nerve endings and their tentacles. Cool. Real thing they do. That is cool. Hey, Octopode is.

You like to distribute your sentience across your sort of entire nervous system. How about you distribute the sentience of the world across a global financial system without anyone in control of it? That's a good point. The artist of that piece is, oh, it's also the dollar bill that it's on has zero in value. I think that's an important part of it. Modern political cartooning is absolutely lost its zeal for just slamming you with. the point over and over again, right? Like, political cartoonists now aren't

labeling giant title waves the debt or whatever quite so often. We've gone back to like early 20th century or late 19th century style political cartoons where they're like completely inscrutable. You know, it's like the Kaiser chewing on a picture frame and then there's like a bear next to him

that's labeled like concerns. Yeah, I love stuff. I love dub shit like that, which is why I love Bitcoin art in general just because it's so like Because Bitcoin is just about constant evangelism, any art made for, it's also why like American Protestants can't make good art because their main concern is we have to get more people on board with Protestantism. So all of this, like this movie, this Christian movie we're making or whatever should serve the goals of evangelism. Yeah. You know, we, this Christian rock must

serve the goals of evangelism. And so with Bitcoin, it's like anything they do, somehow has to center on the idea that fiat currency is worth nothing, that Bitcoin is amazing, that like you can't trust banks, but like that's a relative, with like Renaissance Catholic art, you know, just like portraying scenes from sort of the Bible, well, sort of the painter implying that his, that his patron is the devil very subtly or whatever. A look at a teeth. Yeah. Yeah.

This is a huge opportunity for drama in there because you're just depicting something. you're not really trying to convince anyone of anything. I think this is a Catholic one because I thought it was actually kind of slightly touching, moving. The artist explained to me that he thought it was quite an optimistic piece because he was like, if the forces of evil can produce that,

imagine what the forces of good could make. But then I was like, well, you did make this up. Like, you've not captured, like, it's not like in your stranger things, you've gone to the upside down and taking a photo of like the big bad, whatever. Like, you have invented this. This isn't a phenomenon that exists. to make your point.

Like, you could equally have done like an angel or like a happy octopus or something like... You could have painted an octopus at any emotional register. And you've gone for like, you've created the evil thing and you could also create the solution

you've chosen not to. But you're presenting it as like a lesson, a moral lesson. Which I thought was like interesting. It sort of reminds me of when I was studying the Medea, the Greek tragedy at 6th, when I really hated this place. It's such a fucking stupid plot.

And then I said this to the teacher. I was like, this is so, such a dumb plot. Like, it's so, like, and she was like, well, it shows, you know, what people can be driven to do. I'm like, no, it doesn't. It's made up. Like, you can make up anything.

Yeah. Doesn't show anything at all. Bitcoin's going to fight this octopus somehow. This octopus is really scary. Yeah. It really makes you think, that's like what a world without Bitcoin would be. It would be this scary octopus. It'd be this.

With the glowing brain. Yeah, with the glowing brain. And you know, sure, because I've drawn it. So, oh, can you can you imagine. Oh, God. Everyone needs to get into more Bitcoin. Because that's ultimately. the point of every Bitcoin thing is everyone needs to get into more Bitcoin.

Do you want the octopus to win, fellas? Yeah, we all got to buy Bitcoin or that octopus is going to crush us off. Yeah, and in a weird way, it's like very akin to sort of like this the AI stuff as well. Like, you know, in that trailer, like, looking at the comments and people like sort of sincerely saying, I know this is AI, but you can imagine what it'd be like if, you know, I bet the reality is worse. Or like, you know, you can only imagine what the real truth is like. It's like, no, like you're watching something that's like made up. You're watching something that is fictional.

and your conclusion from that is actually it tells a deeper truth than the actual world that you live in and like I feel like you know you sort of when you sort of ask people about this they don't quite know how to articulate it either and really I think it does come down to just this sense of just like people's belief

like you know the sort of quasi-religious occultish sort of qualities of these types of technologies right and like the ways in which they centre belief and the ways in which they centre like emotion and the way in which like they sort of try to convince the person who's like buying into it that like you know the actual thing the only thing you can trust is yourself and the only thing you can trust is your emotions and don't think about like where those emotions are coming from or who's sort of like interacting with them or how they sort of interact with like you physiologically like you know you just like rely on your gut feeling and that's it and I do and I do wonder whether like in some ways it's kind of a bit of a redundant activity to sort of ask people like okay why do you think that like the orange octopus kind of like presents like an in an alienable truth that you can't sort of determine from anywhere. else. And it's just like, well, they're not really thinking logically, they're not thinking

emotionally, but so much of their emotion comes from, like, just this sense of like, you've invested so much of your time and your energy and your belief into this, like, this theology. And money as well. And, you know, and so much of it is like theological. And, you know, that money was worthless. Whereas now they've got Bitcoin. Right, right. And it's, I don't know. I feel like it's amusing, but it's also very like, oh, you know, these are people who you can't, they're not coming back. or, like, if they are, like, there really does have to be this massive process of, like, de-radicalization. Like, I don't even know if it's the right way to put it, but, like, you almost have to

pull apart, like, the thought process that sort of leads to this sense of kind of unwavering belief. And that's incredibly difficult to do. And I don't, you know, I think when so much stuff just comes crashing, I don't know what the sort of fallout is going to be, but also, like, I don't know how you sort of bring that many people back from the brink, you know? There was an interesting conversation I had, which actually, this didn't make into the article, so this is a TF exclusive. I had a conversation with a guy and he was talking about

the problem with sort of a national curriculum. And he was just saying, yeah, like, they're teaching your children how to read or what to read and like what they're learning. And as someone who's like gone through a sort of national curriculum, although in Scotland rather in England, I kind of obviously can't speak just for the English education system. Maybe it is appalling. Absolutely. But I was like, I don't really understand the issue with someone who's appointed to decide that your children should read the Great Gatsby. I don't know why that's bad. And he failed to articulate why he thought it was bad.

And he was kind of just, I could see him like, is the cogs turning in his brain. He's like, well, the government is bad, but that is an interesting point he's made about the merits of the Great Gatsby. Well, all those children are going to, you know, start relentlessly socially climbing. And then, you know, they might end up wealthy, but isolated. Yeah, they were going to move to West Egg. Yeah, West Egg, the housing stock is going to be completely overrun by sort of British school leavers.

It's going to be unschooling, but you're learning about the Great Gatsby every day. But look, I mean, it's the same thing of, you want to think that you are so individual and so apart from society, this thing you think is something else and something threatening and social complexity, that the idea that everyone's kind of doing the same thing

and that you aren't this heroic economic and political actor is one that you think with things like Bitcoin, this thing that is supposed to realign all, social organizations along sort of voluntarious lines, you think you can do all of that to get away from ever having to be like anybody else, ever having to accept that you do actually live as part of a larger collectivity and you can't just ignore it. And the desire to ignore it is just an enormous ideological front on the anti-public goods sort of, let's say, sector who want to live in the William Rees-Mogg, blood in the streets world, right?

They want to be the sovereign individual that they fantasize about, but all of that is just, you'd keep taking off the masks, and it's just ways to attack the welfare state, right? Because there always has to be enough society left that you have your internet connection for your Bitcoin. There always has to be enough society left that your

wealth is safe or whatever. It's all the, I mean, I find it's sad, is, you know, that these people are just like regular cryptocurrency enthusiasts, like the Strategic Bitcoin Preserve lady, unless she really is just there. Bitcoin. Hocking Bitcoin Marmalade.

Again, someone who's, they're the low level of that Ponzi scheme, right? They're the suckers. I think there's an interesting lack of nuance in their understanding of these things. It's the broad strokes description. For example, someone told me about their aunt who they said it was 80, who

they went to take two grand out in cash out of their bank account and then had to go through like a 15 to 20 minute like check with like the teller, I guess to make sure they weren't being like exploited or something at that. And I made that point to the person. I was like, well, do you not think the bank is like a juicy of care to make sure this like old woman isn't being like stolen from? And he was like, well, no, it's her money. Like she should be able to just take it out. But you're living

in a world where there are no baddies. Like in the, it goes back to the war thing again, like the argument of like, oh, if the state doesn't exist and we use Bitcoin, then war won't exist. Well, you're completely disregarding the possibility that a warlord funded on Bitcoin who was a private army could probably do quite a lot of damage in a world. we do a nation state. I always want to know what the Bitcoin people's theory for fixing so-called wrench attacks is. Right? They say Bitcoin fixes everything, but Bitcoin brought wrench attacks, increase the prominence of wrench attacks. If you don't, again, if you're listening to know what that is a Bitcoin, a wrench attack is a different sort of way to sort of steal someone's cryptocurrency. You could

maybe clone their wallet. You could sort of give them a fake wallet address, whatever, whatever. A wrench attack is just you hit them with a wrench until they hand over their cold storage and they give either seed phrase. You know, it's a institutions don't always create problems. We know this. We, everyone listening to this knows this. But again, it's like, it circles back around to what is this? Well, it's just another tax protest and attack on the welfare state.

And these people are just at a carnival celebrating something they don't fully understand. They say you need six degrees in different subjects to understand it. I think what that really means is they don't fully understand, but they believe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes sense. Yeah.

It was just like an interesting place to be, like, I felt like kind of going on a religious pilgrimage. I'm meeting sort of people with the true believers seeing the people kind of, there was, do you guys know what Noster is? No.

It's like, I'm going to if someone who, you use it listening, which I actually imagine there might be. It's like an open source ultra secure Twitter sort of thing. And I really tried and failed to get my head around it four times

like prior to going to the conference because there was like a whole event on Noster and I just couldn't wrap my head around it and gave up. But then I saw a wee girl who's with her dad on his phone and she was using Noster like she was born to it. Which I guess to a certain extent she was,

she's probably, her parents probably had crypto when she was born, given, like, the timeline. And it's just, it's being unschooled on Nostar, yeah. But it's just like, there's so many, like,

trappings and traditions that you're just, we don't know about, unless you're fully immersed. It was like, it was like the Bitcoin as religious tradition. That was my biggest takeaway, like the devotion. And like,

you're raising your children in this community. We're raising the freak. Yeah, yeah, exactly. They're like, they're the opposite end of the spectrum. horseshoe theory for like being Amish where it's like they're like a version of like the inverse of the Amish where they're like everything has to be technological and every solution has to involve like the internet and like you know crypto and stuff um in the same way that like the Amish are like no technology ever yeah yeah no buttons yeah they're like perfect yin and yang

like they would tessellate together yeah everyone's leaving sort of modernity but in different directions yeah yeah yeah yeah anyway look i think that's all the time we have for today so i want say to Ed, thank you very much for going to that Bitcoin conference. I'm sure it was very unpleasant. I had a great time. I enjoyed it. I went for a magazine called Dispatch Magazine, and the article should be out this week, probably in a different form to what Riley read out, because they will save my dreadful rating. So yeah, big plug for that. Thank you to them for sending me. And thank you to you all, of course, for listening. You know about the Patreon. You know about a list of cities that Milo will inevitably read out. Yeah. If you're

listening to this on Tuesday, the day it comes out, I'm in Bristol tonight. There will be very few tickets available for that, but there's probably some, so why not come? And also Bath on Wednesday night. And in the new year, I'm going to be in Paris, Luxembourg, Brussels, Rotterdam and Amsterdam,

and also I'm going to Belfast, Dublin, Cork, and Galway in January and February. So if you fancy any of those. Alongest to cities, I'm going to be in Berlin in January on vacation. Hang on out, not doing anything you can see. Yes, exactly.

Also, back in Melbourne, in Australia in April, so keep an eye out. Do check that out. All right, all right. See you on the Patreon in a few days, everybody. Bye. Bye, everyone. Bye.