What Bitcoin Did - The Breakdown of the Fiat World Order | Parker Lewis

Episode Date: February 23, 2026

Has the world order actually broken down? In this episode, I sit down with Parker Lewis to break down Ray Dalio's warning that the global order is collapsing. Parker explains why Dalio is right that things are breaking down, but completely misses the root cause, the currency system. We get into why the weaponisation of the dollar, from cutting Russia off SWIFT to endless money printing, is what's actually driving the world towards chaos and why Bitcoin is insanely undervalued at $67k. Parker also makes the case that if Bitcoin doesn't eventually become a medium of exchange, something has gone very wrong. We explore: • The 5 types of war (and why we are already fighting 4 of them) • What Ray Dalio missed: The true cause of the global economic collapse • Monetary warfare: The exact moment the world lost faith in the US dollar. • Why neutral money is the ultimate defense against global disorder • The fatal flaw of gold THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: ANCHORWATCH BLOCKWARE LEDN BITKEY SWAN CAPE CLUB ORANGE FOLLOW: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny Parker Lewis: https://x.com/parkeralewis

It will be an event. There will be a moment when confidence is lost in the currency. Stop using each other's currencies and adopt a neutral currency. And then the currency isn't a weapon. There's a much better chance of order that isn't dictated by one single power broker, you know, being the winner of a world war. Bitcoin is volatile because it's difficult to, understand. Bitcoin goes up over time because more people do. Parker Lewis, welcome back, man.

Yeah. I think, so I read Ray Dalio's piece on Twitter the other day, and it feels like the most important sort of macro geopolitical story right now. And as I was reading it, there's no mention of Bitcoin. There's little mention of like what's got us to this point, although it's obviously a chat from his book. So I think he probably lays that out earlier in the book. But in the article, at least, there was no mention of how we got here. And as I was reading it, I was like, I want to at Parker's take on this. Because he's basically setting this up as the sort of breakdown of the world order, complete loss of faith in institutions, potentially heading to war.

I don't know. I know you were going to read it. Do you agree with his take, or do you think this is sort of peak dumerism? So, I want to pull something up from, I have a quote of his in my book. But I think that it's peak dumerism. It's not that it's not directionally on point. And I did go and read the whole thing. And it's like I'm not the closest follower of Ray Dalio,

but I do follow him, not just on Twitter, but just as an investor. And so I'm familiar with Bridgewater and his background. and I'm also familiar with people that used to be executives at Bridgewater. It feels like very, to me at least, non-deep surface level thinking. Okay. Observing maybe symptoms, observing things that are happening and trying to explain them at a at a at a at a very surface level without getting into cause and effect i'd say um one of the one of

my takeaways from reading the piece and i can't remember exactly how it was titled it was like the the old world order is dead or something like that and yeah essentially it was like the world order is broken down yeah yeah the world the world order is broken down and the world order is over um and And I was like, well, what was the, like, in his piece as an example, he didn't even define what the world order was. And so, you know, research that I, you know, did of like, and he, I mean, he talked around it, but like, didn't, you know, it's, whenever you're talking that way of, he basically said, the existing world world order is broken down without explaining what that exactly is and just saying that we're going from a place of more order. to disorder and talked about big cycles, but also didn't actually talk about the cause and effect of why things are breaking down.

And so that was just a high-level takeaway that I had from it. And we can get into specifics about the piece, but it talked about there's various different kinds of war and economic war, or kind of leading up to physical war and really intimating,

presumably that it's like U.S. first China, but didn't expressly say that. And he also didn't really have, did mention gold at some part, and that like bonds would deflate again, without just getting into the root

of what's causing it all. So, I mean, obviously, this was one chapter of his book, and I've not read his book. I've got it, but I've not read it yet. I wonder if there's also, he does some of that sort of preliminary stuff earlier in the book. But let's try and lay out what the world order was or is at this point. Because, like, when I read it, what I took from it is it's almost like the post-world world order of, you know, the IMF, the World Bank, NATO, the UN, all these institutions that have been like the rules-based system for such a long time. we're potentially transitioning away from that being as effective.

But I guess the question that I would have is, when people say that things like the UN, NATO, INF World Bank, are no longer working in the system that we're in today. What has changed since the sort of 1940s when these institutions had started, like first came onto the scene? Yeah. So, I mean, one, like, again, my observation is just that what it generally means is that the U.S. has been the dominant world power,

and there were alliances that existed post-World War II. America was, the United States was in control of everything, and nobody would step out of line, and now we're going to a place where, you know, that power structure. And I think he might have even mentioned this in the book, or maybe I'm referencing other things where it talks about these big, global shifts is that

once there's a up-and-coming power that is in conflict with an existing power, that power struggle exists and once the rising power gets large enough, it doesn't, you know,

the order that previously existed that came from the existing essentially superpower, being able to threaten and win is fractured. again, he talks about symptoms on like, you know, not really like expressly how to position, but like one of the things that he didn't address, at least I don't think, is the currency as a causal piece of the order breaking down.

I think he like intimates that in other places. But like one of the examples, and I just pulled this up from my book to like, not set the stage, but like an example of why, like, I just generally don't think of Ray Dalio as a super deep thinker. Again, like, not an insulting way. It's like, there's a broad class of investors. Because I would say, like, Ray Dalio is someone who has said that he's, you know, allocating to Bitcoin, but nothing that he's ever said indicates that he really understands what's happening or how to evaluate it. He's like, he's around the, around the hoop, right?

Like, he's not far off in terms of what I would call pattern matching of, of connecting things together, but also at the same time, not really understanding the core principle. And so, let me just find this. I had a few quotes in the book. Oh, so this goes back to 2017. This was like right after for me, like, I had gone down the Bitcoin Rabbit Bowl in 2016. and I'm watching CNBC one morning, and I figured out both why Bitcoin is emerging as money,

I've also figured out why they're always going to have to print money. And why they have to print money, and the problems with printing money and the problems with the Fiat system that is inherently trust-based to people to a trade, and if you're trading with someone that you're potentially a foe of, you're having to use one of, in the fiat world, you're having to use one currency or the other, right? So for the last 50 years, more the dollar has dominated global trade.

But if you are China or Russia or, you know, if you're looking at the, you know, what the United States did to Russia kicking it off of swift, and functionally seizing all of their treasuries, that puts the currency in the center of a political fight and economic fight and potentially a what he would call a military fight or a kinetic fight. But a root problem of the impairment of effectively like trade as the other side of war is the money and the problem of money.

and the problem of money printing. If you knew that the person that you were trading with and whose currency you were taking was constantly printing it, and you owned a bunch of their treasuries because you were offsetting the debasement and the currency by the yield of the treasuries, but they kept printing it and they kept threatening you, well, you don't really want to continue to trade with your currency.

And one of the things that China has been doing, and Russia really more so out of force, and again, getting into the details of these geopolitics is like, I am certainly not. not the experts of experts, but I can diagnose the problems of the currency is that they're all looking at the same problem, which is how, like, if you cut Russia off of Swift and now they're having to resolve that, then no one wants to trust the other's currency. Russia wouldn't want to trust China's currency. China wouldn't want to trust Russia's currency. Neither than want to trust the United States currency, even though there's talks about Russia getting back onto the dollar.

system. It's like that that bell has been wrong. And so just noting that like, Dallio didn't really go into the root of that problem. And then this was a, this was a quote from like 2017 when I heard him say this on CNBC. I was like, I literally had to record it, like rewind it, record it on my phone. And he said, and he's talking about the financial crisis. But he says, there's money and there's credit. The only thing that matters is spending, and you can spend money and you can spend credit. When credit goes down, you better put money into the system so you can have the same level of spending. That's what they did through the financial system, and that thing worked.

And ever since I heard him say that, then anything else that I heard him say since then, as it relates to Bitcoin or in this case of the world order breaking down, which I think that it is as well. But if you're not able to see, you know, the currency system as in it being weaponized as a chief problem, then how do you, and we've come from a gold standard, we've come from Bretton Woods, how do you navigate through to the other side

of like where are we actually going and how does this play out? If you're making comments like there's money and there's credit, And if credit goes down, you better put more money. And by the way, quantitative easing worked, right? Because everything else he said is like, he says other things that are kind of on point, which is like, oh, we have this wealth gap. And the wealth gap's a problem. It's like, how are you not expressly connecting these two?

You know, how are you not connecting the symptomatic problems you're seeing just like, say, within the United States and the problem of expanding wealth caps to the currency? And then similarly, how are you not seeing this geopolitical breakdown of whatever, however, they define the existing world order to the currency system, right? If you don't do that, you're inevitably not really maybe understanding, again, I know it goes beyond currency. I'm not saying that everything in the world between, you know, geopolitical rivals or potentially war rival. rivals and war comes down to money, it comes down to more things than that, national resources and power.

But money's a big power. Power and security. But money is the basis of trade. So either you're going to trade with somebody for resources or trade with somebody for security. Or if that doesn't work, then you might. go to war, right? Like, in Russia's case, like, and I'm not saying this is the basis of the war,

but like, they could trade for natural gas or they could plunder for natural gas. If they also feel threatened at the same time for their own security, then when they're thinking about the calculus of war versus trade, war versus negotiation, it's like, well, you know, if you were trading and you had a good, reliable trade partner, war destroy capital 100%. Right? Like the broken window theory and that war creates economic activity

100% objectively false. War could be profitable in the sense of like you have some loss but you get a gain that's larger than the loss but it 100% destroys capital. If you drop a bomb on somebody else on a bridge, say well, the bridge has to be rebuilt. That was capital.

And so just noting or flagging that the money and trade, if you have a deep trading relationship with a partner, they're giving you something of value, you're giving them something else a value. There's more order in that world, and you're less likely to go to war because you're relying on them for something valuable. And the basis of trade is mutual. Now, all of that gets broken up,

at a foundational level if on one hand, you're using one country's currency, and on the other hand, that country is both debasing it, actively creating this natural impetus to shift away from it, at the same time as being weaponized. And I think that those were the pieces that both are not directly in Dahlia's piece of keying in on cause and effect. He's basically saying, things are breaking down, which they are. It's just not that valuable because without getting to the cause and effect,

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war, geopolitical, capital war and military. And if you look through them, I think you could probably argue that we're in at least four of them already. Like, I think in terms of trade war, like, tariffs are probably a part of that. Technology wars, like, the sort of race for AI seems to fit that bill. Geopolitical, like, I think the stuff that Trump's done in Venezuela and is potentially wanting to do in Greenland, like, they fit there. And capital wars, like, the freezing of the Russian treasuries, in hindsight, and maybe even at the time, seems like the biggest own goal for the US and, like, destroys the faith in the sort of dollar system in a lot of way. Do you think we kind of fit those four criteria and then the only one left is actual all-out walls?

Yeah, I mean, I think in certain cases, if you look at, you know, the U.S. v. Russia or China, that all of those are checked. I think that, like, even on like the military side, it's like with Russia, you say, hey, the United States, not directly at war with Russia and Europe's not directly at war with Russia. Russia, but if you're providing weapons and money, like, are you not? You know? And so I'd say that's another degree where, and I read this great book. I don't even think it's still in publication, but I recommend it to people.

It's called A World in Debt by, I think the guy's name is Tilden Freeman. but he goes through all of the different relationships of debt of like individual is debtor, nation is debtor, but one of the sections is on debt and war. And in that, he provides a, like an actual logical explanation for what drives war. And he distinguishes, like, he doesn't say, like, there's different kinds of war. He's talking about specifically war. Like, we're going to war. Like, what are the motivations of it?

Because if you're not talking about what are the motivations for an economic war, trade war, a technological war, then again, if you're looking to see, hey, are we progressing to this kinetic military war, you're not trying to explain things at the cause and effect level. Because if you're not at the cause and effect level, then how do you advise somebody? I don't know if Ray Dalio's got the ear of the Trump administration, but he's just like saying this out at the ether.

but he is a very powerful, like extremely wealthy person. It's like, hey, if you have some insight, like what do you recommend is the path out of de-escalating all of these things? But if you're not trying to get to the root of, well, what's motivating all the different actors? And in this book, Tilden Freeman basically laid out, like, and this was written around the Great Depression, between World War I and World War II,

that the two generally accepted, like, rational reasons for war, the ones that are, like, typically said, like, hey, you know, this is a good reason to go to war, is, if I remember, security, in, like, securing trade lines and anything that, you know, your country would need to sustain itself. Or, and this was the one that I felt was more strange, expansionism, empire, empire desires, or you have a growing population you need to expand. And so, you know, the security side would be either the security of someone else that's threatening you,

or you need resources to protect your sovereignty and maybe. be someone just on the other side of a border has those resources. Again, trade is one route. It's a more capital efficient route. But if someone is not thinking about those levels of like, well, why would the China, why would China in the United States be on this collision course? Right. And thinking about the not just like the geopolitics that come through our wavelengths that are,

propaganda on either side, but like really saying, okay, what's driving us off this cliff? I just, I don't think that it's kind of like, yeah, we all get that the shit is breaking down and feels crazy. What is the world to do about it to prevent a worse outcome? My explanation for that would be, hey, like, stop using each other's currencies and adopt a neutral currency. And then the currency isn't a weapon. The currency system isn't a weapon. One doesn't, you know, because I view it in two ways. The currency as a weapon being like, okay, we can print it and you can't. And we're basically exporting to you, taking your goods and services for money that we create out of thin air, versus the currency system being the rails of looking and saying, oh, not only we're using our currency system, but hey, we're going to cut you off. from it and and weaponize your ability to to leverage it to send money to other people. That that would be the single greatest thing the world could do to put trade back in the front

to satisfy potentially some of those needs wants that various different countries feel threatened by. Yeah, I mean, I've got a ton of questions in that. But if we just start with, like, does this? the world need a new order? Because if you look at the things that are sort of creating the order in the world right now, most of those were created post-war, the world is a very different place, does the Fiat debt-based system mean that at this point it's gone too far and we need a shuffle, we need to change things around? Because I guess, like, historically, if you look back over

recent history, the two changes in world order, like the Bretton Woods and then potentially like 1971 Petro dollar system. Yeah, but I would say more, and this is, I feel like, you know, what Ray Dalio was outlining was that the order shifted when, like, essentially there was a great war and a one power went out over the other. And then the winning, the winning power essentially sets the rules and dictates it. Right. And I think that, you know, it's still unclear whether we're heading down that same. because you could say, well, China's a rising power and the U.S. is a declining power, or at least that might be a headline.

I don't necessarily ascribe to it, but, you know, if you looked at something through that lens, you'd say, well, if China won a war, then they set the world order. I think another way to look at it. And that would be how you would define it if you were looking maybe at the pattern matching or looking at the patterns that Ray Dalio had put forward. But in that world, it was always like one country or one set of allies that won a war then dictating the rules to everybody else. If all fiat systems die, then there's a neutral currency,

well, the way that trade occurs in the world is functionally different than it ever occurred before, because ever before, practically speaking, and I'm talking about in the last 300 years, say, gold as an underlying commodity metal or silver, but leveraging various different types of. of currencies that were being coined by crowns or governments. And again, even in those processes, there was, it wasn't a truly neutral trading balance. And so my view of it is that there's a lot of order that will come via trade without, you know, again, and it's not naive. It's like, hey, there are always, you know, like, I don't know who said it, what the quotes were, but like, man in a his natural state is warring and or something along those lines of like, hey, this isn't just if we have a neutral currency, everything will be hunky dory and one man is not going to want to steal another man's oil or whatever other resource land, you know, with, you know,

rare earth metals or whatever is desired for whatever, um, whatever the goal might be of a rising, growing nation. But even in that world, someone could recognize, well, if there was a greater basis for trade, then not just on the margin, but categorically versus how the world exists today from a trading perspective, there's a much better chance of order

that isn't dictated by one single power broker, being the winner of a world war, there could be a lot of order and a lot of bilateral relationships that are far more fruitful, far less antagonistic than necessarily having one side be in a control or power position. One of the things that this piece made me think

is, like, if we're moving towards, like, the world is getting more chaotic, that's for sure. Would it move to like a new world order be a preferable outcome. If you look at the two possibilities, I guess it's either we kind of wind this back, move away from sort of all out war, and the Fiat system continues,

and the institutions that we have today continue, even though they're sort of eroded from where they used to be, is that a preferred outcome, or is going through the pain now to come out to something better on the other side of preferred outcome? And it is something that's quite hard to kind of balance. A way that I describe it would be, it's like, regardless of whether or not he's keying on the right cause and effects, it's like the world for a period of time, had order, order on a relative basis, and there is less order. And, again, that's one of the reasons where I was like, hey, if that's what you're saying, okay, we all can generally see and feel that at different levels.

whether it's geopolitical nonsense, whether it's within countries, right? Because it's not just the dynamics between Europe and Russia and U.S., Europe and Russia, or the U.S. and China. It's in the U.K., you know, in the United States. And, you know, anyone, you know, I can only speak to living in the United States because you can feel it viscerally, is that we're going from a period of order to disorder. You know, not to say they're not related,

but entirely independent from a plain perspective than some geopolitical foe or threat. And so that's just true. It's like things have been ordered and they're becoming discharges. order. Now, I think it's, you know, you can say, well, the order, what was creating the order? Well, it was post-World War II, and the United States was the superpower, and it was the, you know, there was no Navy that could rival it. It protected the waterways. It protected the trade lines. And therefore, it called the shots. And a derivative of that was order. And another way to say, it was like maybe the underlying volatility was suppressed, but it was, it was, it was all. It was always going to be there. And then I would look at it from the perspective of it's not like,

it's something else that's absent, wanting and absent in Ray Dalio's piece, which is he doesn't say what the likely next order is. He might not want to say it because, like, in his mind, if he's just matching history, it would be, well, there's likely going to be a world war. And whoever wins that war is going to set the order. It's going to create the order.

In my mind, looking at it and saying, like, more order generally is better than great disorder. And looking at a country like Venezuela, setting aside the United States and having Nicholas Maduro, but just from an economic perspective, it's like, man, when their currency collapsed, the country went into great disorder. What happens with great disorder? wealth is destroyed and people die, you know, without a kinetic war. That's what disorder is. That's what order going to disorder from. And it would certainly be better, even if you were heading to a path of disorder, if the bottom of that disorder of when things start to become more ordered rather than less

would certainly be better than an alternative where it just keeps spiraling down and down and down and down. And again, in my mind, it's not like, hey, what is the order? Who's the ruling power? Does the United States need to go to war with China, and one has to win, and then the other, it's like, well, like, you know, two people who live in a vacuum who are sick of, fans might think, oh, that might need to happen when anybody else sitting outside would be like,

certainly that would be worse off. Everybody would be worse off if that happened. But someone in the CIA or, you know, some deep state thing might be like, yeah, this is, we got a war game this in this way it's going to go and like, you know, Iran nuts off. But it's like, it's still more, it's more disorder. And it is disorder maybe in their minds with a hope of, of, then. creating order from it, but it's like, again, if you don't solve the, like, trade is the basis of cooperation. It does not sit above, you know, somebody wanting to build an empire and have, you know, need to acquire oil. Again, like, I'm not naive in that respect. But if you have the basis to trade somebody for oil, rather than take their country over, um,

that's going to leave everybody in a better place. If you don't really have a basis to effectively coordinate trade, you're more likely to have an order that's dictated by a large war being won, and then whoever is controlling the military that won dictating order to everybody else. That might be what happens. That's unlikely to be good for everybody living on the earth at this moment in time. If you haven't tried out Club Orange yet, then now is the time. It's my go-to place to find Bitcoiners whenever I'm traveling.

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he's someone that a lot of people listen to. Do you think gold absolutely ripping over the last sort of 18 months has been the market saying that a reordering is like on the horizon? I don't think. I mean, I personally don't think so. Again, it would be easy to say yes because all of these things are happening at the same time

while the price of gold is rising right but for the last five years or three to five years Russia's been accumulating gold China's been accumulating gold um

the yeah in 2022 to three, no, I guess four years ago, I don't know exactly when Russia was caught off, cut off Swift, but that war started around this time in 2022. Yeah. And Russia didn't spontaneously collapse. You know, they figured out a way to trade around it.

The dollar also didn't spontaneous collapse when Russia was able to navigate off of it. And so I think that it's more of a simple, of the currency, being on the brink of, like, when I say being on the brink of failure, it's like, I'm not saying it's going to collapse next month. I'm saying it's heading down that path.

And when, you know, buying gold and silver has reached the retail fervor that it has, that's like, it has Weimar-Germany vibes because everyone is speculative. in financial assets and derivatives. The distinguishment, because you can say, well, hey, that's the same thing as Bitcoin. It's like, the way that I look at it is there's a difference between speculating in gold or dollars, or sorry, in gold and silver to get more dollars, to get more rubble or to get more yen or as an inflation hedge versus actually identifying the one thing that can practically be a solution.

And I'm not closing out that there are certain people, I believe that we have. Peter Schiff is somebody who looks at gold says, we're going back to a gold standard, right? But there's also, and he won't admit this, that the vast majority of people that are trading gold are trading to get more dollars. Now, an example that's not a geopolitical foe of anyone, or at least not today, really,

is, or I wouldn't describe it this way at all, but tether was somebody. They bought physical gold. So they apparently weren't just trading in it to get more dollars. They actually wanted to hold the reserves. I would just say that like gold rising or people turning to Bitcoin gold, commodity monies with the thought process that currencies are being debased is about the currency.

And it's less about the collapse of the world order because the world order, and I kind of hate the term, but it's just like the financial system. is dollarized. And the dollar and the U.S. economy, but the dollar economy globally, the cross-border trade, dwarfs any other system. In the event of an actual dollar collapse,

things like gold and Bitcoin for a period of time will be sold, every credit asset will be sold, every equity will be sold because there will actually be a run on dollars because there's so much dollar debt that exists. And eventually the job, dollar will hyperinflate and everyone will migrate over to Bitcoin and solar gold.

But like, I would explain it less away. Like basically maybe like Ray Dalio making this comment at the same time that there's fear of going to war with Iran and heightened tension between Europe and Russia and the US and China and then gold going up. It's like to me it feels like a fool by randomness thing where it's like you could you could pick any one of those things out and say, this is going up because of of that. And at the underlying side, it's like, well, it, you know, the dollar is devaluing because there's more dollar deposits, even though the Fed isn't creating more base money at the moment,

there's more and more dollar deposits, or more and more euro deposits, more and more yen deposits. And it's the currency stupid, you know, and it's like, and then maybe the fracturing of the, the global order and the global trade systems and partnerships that existed breaking down might, might be underlying about the currency losing its value. So I'm not saying it's not related to that. It's just that it's coinciding at a time that's easy to stick it to it. It's like, you know, but you could have said that two years ago, right? Imagine the same thing.

Like China's actively buying gold and Russia is actively buying gold. Well, why wasn't the price going up? Right. Like, was the world order not fracturing then, you know? So it's like, yes, gold is going up in value. Yes, the order in the world is fracturing. But it's also just the currency is losing its value. It's like, is gold going, you know, like, you could basically,

you could have said the same when the stock market went up because they printed money. You know, is this a sign of the world order falling apart? No one wants to be in cash. They want equities. And so I just, I think it's easy to point it to that. And the more logical thing is just people are trying to get out of the dollar, you know. And a lot of them are doing it for reasons that they're struggling to get by and they need to speculate in something to try to stay ahead. And then in others, yeah, you know, China and Russia are diversifying away.

from the dollar because they don't want to be tied to the dollar hegemony. And that also is rational, but there's something at a higher order that's dictating the fracture. Yeah, that makes sense. I've got a question for you that is pretty much impossible to answer, but I'm going to ask it anyway. You say that the dollar fiat is failing, which I totally agree with, but it's a process, not an event, I think. Like, it's not going to fail tomorrow. Well, it will be an event, but it's not going to fail tomorrow. Okay. So, but the reason I say it's the process is because, like, you could probably say the dollar started failing in 2008. You could probably pick a load of different dates, but that

might be one that you could pick. How long do you think it can last? I don't know. You know, markets can remain irrational for longer than you can stay solvent. You know, Personally, it's hard for me to believe that it goes on for another 10 years. Part of the way that I get there is thinking about Bitcoin and Bitcoin adoption. But also, you know, maybe one thing that I look at is Venezuela. Like an example that I use. That a lot of times people want to talk about, you know, Venezuela hyperinflated because of sanctions. And that's just like totally farcical.

Venezuela hyperinflated because of money printing. The sanctions that actually started cutting off Venezuela abilities to sell oil was in, I believe, 2019 or 2020. GM as a company, GM, the auto manufacturer that's based in the United States, they had operations in Venezuela. And they, in 2013, I believe they, like, wrote down their Venezuelan boulevars. Because if you think about GM's operations, GM had auto manufacturing in the country of Venezuela. They weren't just exporting cars from the United States to Venezuela. They were importing parts and building GM vehicles in Venezuela.

And they were holding boulevars to be able to, yeah, they were accepting boulevars as cash for cars. They were paying out boulevars. And then they had FX reserves because they were having to convert boulevars to dollars to buy parts from their, you know, largely U.S.-based manufacturers. Well, they wrote down, I think they first marked down their Venezuelan boulevars in 2013 by like 10% or 20%. And then the next year, and I might have it off by one year. It might be like 14 was the first year and 15 was the next year or 13 was the first year and 14 was next. In the second year, they wrote it down 100%. 99%.

And then if you Google, when did hyperinflation start in Venezuela? It was, it'll say like 2016 or 2017. So multiple years before GM wrote down all of their boulevars. and literally had to leave the country because they couldn't continue to manufacture cars. They shut down their operations. And over that period of time before Finniswell actually entered hyperinflation, their currency had devalued by 50% against a dollar over like three or four years. and a lot of things that you need to, at least in the United States,

that you need to purchase particularly food, have over the last four to five years, things are more than 50% more expensive. And so it's like there are parallels in that. Now, I don't necessarily think that, you know, three years from there, there's going to be hyperinflation, but if you're looking at data points of like, what types of things happen, like looking at the stock market, like an index like the Dow and seeing it have this hockey stick, these incredibly mature companies, right? These aren't startup tech companies that, you know, have huge ramps and cash flow, but like seeing their valuations start to to mimic what might have been happening in Yemar, Germany as an example. It's like the writing's on those, that wall. And then when I think forward to like, because it was,

be an event. There will be a moment when confidence is lost in the currency. And that is likely at a point where the currency starts to get sufficiently volatile that it causes a bunch of businesses to go out of business, which then disrupts supply chains, which then causes things like food on the grocery cells to start to become sparse. And so if you think about that as one side of the currency problems independent. And then you say, here Bitcoin is, yeah, it's traded down, but between 1.3, 4 trillion to 2 trillion in value. And we go out 10 years of a world becoming more disordered.

And people trying to figure out, well, what's the end game here? What's the answer? Then I don't see how with two more, more full halvings in Bitcoin and just this natural survival instinct of people. Because at the end of Dahlia's piece, he was basically like, hey, you know, the world's going to shit, you might want to think about not being in bonds. It's like, you know, maybe think about gold. But as people follow the rabbit hole of the cause and effect, they'll realize that gold

has the same problem. Like all of this started with gold in Bretton Woods. And, you know, even if you went back to gold, coins, one, it's incredibly inefficient, but two, it's like, it's coined in some, some country's currency that people are having to trade back and forth. And so they all will figure out Bitcoin. And I, again, not a dumerism. I don't want it to happen. I'm just looking out and saying, hey, if Bitcoin adoption increased by 10 times over the next 10 years, which I view to be conservative, then it becomes clearly the second largest currency system in the world.

And once it becomes clearly the second largest currency system in the world, it's like you don't even need to become the biggest. People will, like, the writing will be on the wall enough of a consensus will have somewhere in that point of that extension from like being larger than the euro and clearly being larger than gold, which I don't really think about gold's currency system, that everyone there will be a rapid monetization of Bitcoin that happens out of that time. I don't try to exactly when it happens. To me, it doesn't happen in 20 years.

Great. That would be phenomenal. I'm just explaining the cause and effect of where and why it's going that way so that the way I think about it is surviving all seasons all way. others. If you know where it's going and why and why it might not go back to something like gold and why all of these problems that exist today started with gold, like you really think that all these problems, if you can't, if you can't think about, well, why did all of the, why did we get to the dollar as it is when it started with gold? Then, then, like, how are you

not connecting of like, well, if you just tried to go back to ground zero and start it over, what would you do differently? And isn't this the logical place that it ends anyways, right? And if that's the case, then you can't go back to gold. You have to go to something that actually solves the problem that caused the Fiat system to emerge to solve gaps in settlement, security of gold, the difficulty of transporting goal, which is part of the difficulty of settling gold, you know, over, you know, If you're thinking about the U.S. trading with China,

and imagine you had to actual settle physical golds every time a ship moved across. You could do that, but the gold's sitting in one place. It's sitting on one shore. And you might say, well, we'll put it in Europe because we don't trust each other, but then it's sitting in Europe, right? It's sitting on someone's shores and moving in a vault

because the moving it physically between countries is too costly. And then what is that, if it's sitting in a vault, you know, you might not need to have a Fiat denomination on top of it, but you essentially have a Fiat system, financial system built on top to do all the zeros and ones. And you're like, nope, we're not going back to that. We're going to the thing where, hey, if the U.S. is trading with China, you can send Bitcoin. Anybody who's trading can send Bitcoin, they can secure it. And their country, when they're ready to buy something from us or somebody else, they send it there. They're securing, you solve the problem of how gold is secured. Or not only how gold is secured, how trade is settled. You have a greater basis of trade. Not to say it's all kumbaya. We're not living. in Utopia, but there you have a better shot, better basis of trade, you're not likely to

bomb your trade part or you're less likely to. Yeah. So the actionable advice that Ray Dalio gives in the piece is sell debt by gold. And clearly, gold is not the only option. We think Bitcoin is a better option. But for the gold bugs, like the Peter Schiff's of the world, he's obviously clueless on Bitcoin, but he's a smart guy. I quite like a lot of his other takes.

Why don't you think they put enough weight on the sort of currency side of things? And they don't see that if you go back to a goal standard, you kind of just de facto create fiat again. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I, in Peter Schiff's case, I think that it's because, like, I don't know the guy. He seems like a decently fine human being. but when you've been so right about the problems and you've misdiagnosed the solution that your bias

and just like overcoming the negative psychology of of it like the rational person would say it's some cost fallacy right but um in his case which i don't think that is the case is the cases of the majority of people, which is why Bitcoin wins, is because he has a bias that built around his own personality. He's got businesses built around it. It is not easy to exit a position and accumulate Bitcoin. Or let me just finish that thought. Acumulate Bitcoin and then tell the entire world, hey, I was wrong about gold. Now, Larry Lepard is someone who's like gone from the goal world and basis like, I still think you should own gold, but I think that Bitcoin's going to win. And in his mind, he doesn't necessarily say Bitcoin's going to win and gold's going

to be a loser. I think that that's, you know, the logical conclusion, not saying that, you know, Larry agrees or disagrees. But there's a difference between that, which I think is the rational world versus someone like Peter Schiff, who's, you know, not just been somebody who's advocated for gold, but has banked. and businesses and everything tied to that end game happening. And there are going to be fewer of those people, right? Like one example I would give is when the whole world was going on the gold standard, China went on the silver standard.

And so it's like, people can choose wrong. And then they can have, you know, you can look at it two ways. They can have their wealth expropriated from them, or they can, they can have their purchasing power declined. There's a quote in the Bitcoin standard. I think it's something along the lines of you can't, what is it? It's along the lines of you can't insulate or protect yourself

from somebody else using a harder currency than yours. And that's what we're dealing with the Bitcoin and gold. And I'm not just talking about the supply cap. Um, it's the other properties that make it a superior settlement rail. Um, faster settlement, like ability to assay, right? Like, if somebody looks, if, if, if anybody picks up gold in Bitcoin and looks at them both like, shit, it's going to be one of these two. And they, and they, and they bottom up at, they, they, they end up at Bitcoin. That, you know, that was me. Um, like, and where I first had to understand why gold was money. And, and, where I first had to understand why gold was money. and why it had emerged. And then I was looking at Bitcoin through the same lens and you're a versus B, and you stack them up,

and it becomes fairly clear, fairly easily. And there's part of that that Safe Dean Amuse had a debate with Peter Schiff in El Salvador recently. And he talks about a number of those differences, and I just think that the rational mind ends up there. and, you know, someone, someone has to choose how they're going to store each unit of value. And you can do it in both, but everyone's max, everyone is incentivized to maximize their purchasing power going forward. So I just think, I think it's like not having the ability to see it in Peter Schiff's case because he's so wed.

He was so right about the problems. And now he's so wed to what he was forecasting to be the solution. And you can be wrong. China was wrong about going on the silver standard, and now they're buying gold, you know? And like, that's the other side of this. Like, they're wrong again, you know, and that's, that might be why they, you know, if you were forecasting that there's a superpower that rises and that the U.S. declining and China's going to be the new superpower.

It's like, maybe they're making the wrong currency bet, and maybe that is the weakness of their whole strategy. It's almost like if you had to compare like a Peter Schiff gold bug to some Fiat Maxi person, it's almost more frustrating to be Peter Schiff in that situation where if we're right, Schiff has been 90% right for decades and then just got the last hurdle, just tripped at the last hurdle and didn't move to Bitcoin. Like they might end up buying Bitcoin at the same price. Why do you think Bitcoin, like if everything we're saying here is true,

which I believe it to be, why do you think Bitcoin is still trading like a tech stock we're at like $67,000 now. That seems deeply, deeply undervalued. Is this just like an information asymmetry between us and the rest of the world? It's not that I would say that if you look at Bitcoin and you say, hey, all these things are true. Well, they were true when Bitcoin was $8,000 and crashed to $4,000. They were true when Bitcoin was $69,000 and crashed to $16,000.

They were true at $122,000 and why, and they're still true. today at 66,000 or wherever it is. And so I think that the explanation for that, it's like price is the scoreboard, right? But Bitcoin is volatile because it's difficult to understand. And I would liken this very much to when I gave a talk a few years ago about why Bitcoin is not a hedge. And I gave a recent talk in the same venue. Is that the one that went viral on the Unchained YouTube? It was the huge views.

Yeah, that was an awesome talk. And I gave that talk of like explaining like, hey, there's inflation happening and Bitcoin's coming down. Like, isn't this, isn't this contradictory? It's like, no, it's perfectly explained. And the same thing is true now. Like I gave a presentation at the same venue like two months ago. and the, I wish I had done it, like I wish I could have done it right now,

like, you know, with Bitcoin at 66. Because it's the same thing, it's like, hey, the world is becoming increasingly disordered, and you're saying that Bitcoin is supposed to be the answer to that, but it's going down, it should be going up. It's like, well, you have to understand Bitcoin. You have to understand that. and then have the world event happen and then buy it.

Right. And if you don't know, like in the explanation of inflation, if you don't know that Bitcoin is the solution for inflation and why, like the long-term one, not the in the next five days or ten days, but why it actually permanently solves the problem of money printing, and then you're going to the grocery store and shit's getting real bad for you. And you're living paycheck to paycheck, and you're constantly stressed about it,

you're not putting those two and two together, right? Same thing with this. World's on fire, one large war at risk after another. Well, if you don't see the connection to Bitcoin, then how do you put those things together? And that's what's happening at the highest level. But at a micro level,

at a micro level, people are. Right? Like, people right now are buying Bitcoin and having the light bulb go off because four years ago, they heard somebody talking about, for the first time, about, you know, Rush getting cut off of Swift and, you know, Bitcoin's the answer to that. And now they see this piece from Ray Dalio talking about a, you know, world becoming disordered. And they're like, yeah, he's right, but it's not gold. It's Bitcoin. And they're putting their chips on the table.

And then Bitcoin will bottom at a higher place than it did before because more people will figure it out. And so that doesn't mean for some technical reason that Bitcoin, you know, I'm not saying that it already has bottomed. I'm just saying that the trend of that higher highs, higher lows, doesn't matter if, you know, in 2022 that it went through its prior high, then, you know, that went far through its higher highs, and that's a function of more people figuring it out. But two things can be true at the same time. More people are figuring it out. That's creating higher levels of equilibrium and higher highs. Very few people actually understand what's going on.

You know what the evidence of it is? There is 700,000 Bitcoin that's sitting in strategy, and there's 700,000 Bitcoin that are sitting in, in ibit if you actually understood what's going and i'm not saying you know an investment in strategy or an investment in ibit is a bad thing like the companies themselves are not bad nothing bad with them but if you're not self-cussing bitcoin or if you don't realize like say say ibit like you could just have your bitcoin a coin base you have you have less counterparty risk than you do if it's sitting in ibit you

you took the convenience of buying it, probably because you're trading it. Like those two vehicles, I bit more than strategy, are indicators of lack of knowledge. Not like they're good products, they're good companies, but like you could have your Bitcoin in River. You could have your Bitcoin in Unchained. You could have your Bitcoin in a cold card. You could have your Bitcoin in strike. You'd be better off. Right.

And everything's good for Bitcoin, though. But I'm just saying there's a lot of people that bought Bitcoin. And from my vantage point, hosting meetups and going to conferences and talking to people that are interested in people reaching out, we never had a wave of adoption. Like, there was never a fervor of individuals that were rushing in that were like chasing price. like that didn't happen. So to think that like, you know, cycles are not dead. Human psychology is the same.

It's just fooled by randomness. You know, my explanation for this where our prices are is, you know, reportedly according to Galaxy, they helped somebody sell 80,000 Bitcoin. And that was the local top. And if you have a bunch of people that have bought the ETF, that don't have a lot of knowledge, primary knowledge, about Bitcoin, about the real reason to own it or speculate in it, they sell it. You know, like, it starts to go down. It's easy to buy Bitcoin when it's going up.

Because when it goes up, psychologically reinforces it, you made a good decision. But if you're still sitting there with limited knowledge and it starts to go down, your first instinct is like buy a little bit more. And then when it goes down further, you start to panic and then you sell. You know, we saw the example of the Wisconsin state pension. They bought Bitcoin when it was like about 60,000, and they bought 10 basis points. Michael Saylor has this great quote, which is, if you understand Bitcoin,

there's no chance that you only own 1%. Okay? Well, the Wisconsin State pension bought a tenth of that. Okay? And then when it went up to 100, they sold it. They rebalanced their portfolios. Like, and they bought Ibit.

Did they actually ever understand Bitcoin? You know, like I myself, I was championing, hey, you know, Wisconsin State pension buys Bitcoin. It's great. They didn't understand it, you know. But then you have other markers that are, they're very positive ones like, um, steak and shake, right? Like, they get it. You know, like not, I don't know where they hold their Bitcoin. Don't really care. They don't own Ida, at least not to my knowledge. Um, but I also know just the fact that they're accepting it as money. They're, they're not converting what they receive. They're buying Bitcoin on a primary basis, they're working with fold to, you know, have a bonus for employees. They're leaning full in to Bitcoin. And they're attributing their leaning into Bitcoin to their same still stores growing fast, far faster than any of their peers. It's not the only thing that's driving it,

but they themselves are directing it. You can look at it and say, those people figured it out sometime in the last four years. And they probably own a lot less Bitcoin than like when the Wisconsin State pension bought it. I think they bought like $160 million. Like, They had more Bitcoin than stake and shake. Stake and shake gets it, and they're just going to stay humble and stack sets. And more and more people that exist like stake and shake, I'm not talking about businesses adopting as payments. I'm talking about people really getting it.

Those are stacking. And Bitcoin will fine floors at a ratio relative to the number of people that actually get it. And then it's like it's still going to be volatile because no like the way I would describe is no more than one in 100 people know what's going on. How could something not be crazy volatile if only one out of 100 people get it? And one out of one out 100 is high. It's less than one in a hundred. You know, fewer than one in a hundred companies in a S&P 500 own Bitcoin, like in a direct way. At least like if they own shares in black,

You know, I'm not talking about the idea. Like they own shares in some company that owns Bitcoin. Like that's not exposure. Like Tesla owns Bitcoin. Square. Block. Yeah. Block owns Bitcoin.

I don't think there's another S&P 500 company. So if five companies owning Bitcoin would be 1%. Right. Yeah. then we're not there. But also, if people just check their local, you know,

their company that they work for, their family members, people don't get it. You know, so it's like, it's just fine. Like, people just have to learn.

It's like, if it were easy to see Bitcoin, more people would see it. And that into SAFE's point of, like, the price being the ultimate arbiter is Bitcoin goes up over time because more people do. More people figure it out.

And that's all that matters. It's just like, as so long as more people are figuring it out, not less, then Bitcoin goes up over time. If it ever started going down for long periods of time and consistently, you know, hitting lower lows and not making higher highs, that would be a signal that people who had previously figured it out, thought that there was something broken about it.

And that's not that like what we're seeing today, nothing is signaling that. There's a lot of negative energy in the world of Bitcoin, but it's like more people are figuring it out, not less, bottom line. Yeah. One of the like anecdotal piece of evidence that people are starting to take this more seriously, not necessarily understand it, but at least take it more seriously, is like every time we've had a price crash in the past, like people who know what I do, when you tell them or the,

when they ask you about the price. There's almost like a smirk in there, you know, they kind of want to say the Ponzi's going to zero. But this time, the interesting thing is like, I go to a boxing gym pretty much every day, and people ask me about Bitcoin, ask me about the price and things like that. And this time, the reaction has been very different.

It's been maybe now's a good time to look into it. Maybe now's a good time to buy it. And I think that that sort of skepticism around Bitcoin generally is going away. Yeah, like there are still obviously people that want to dunk like, I don't know the guy, but Keith McCullough and, you know, Bloomberg talking heads and Peter Schiff, like, it's going to zero. Like, there are fewer than, fewer of them each time because most people look at it and be like, I'm not going to do that again. I got embarrassed the last time that I did that, you know, the majority of even the Bitcoin haters are getting wise to Bitcoin's rise and fall. But like to the point, like, I'm experiencing the same thing.

Like, I'm not yet experiencing just like, you know, person after person, like, being like, how do I do this? But when I'm talking to people, despite the fact of Bitcoin being here, it's like, how do I get set up? Not, like, ribbing, you know, of course, like, it's not zero. But an example, like, to give another piece of the psychology, I went and bought groceries at the local grocer that got enabled by Square here in Austin. And I bought with, I paid with Bitcoin. And the person working behind the counter was like, oh, that's cool. That's the first time I've been here when someone's bought in Bitcoin. Like, she knew that they accepted it.

But she made a comment along the lines of like, I just feel like I missed it. I'm too late. You know, and I'm sitting there just buying groceries and I don't want to like turn into a full orange pill, right, on the spot. I was like, look, you're not, you know, like, we're super early, you know, and I gave her my like, literal 30 seconds. I was like, the whole idea is that they keep printing more dollars. That's why food is getting more expensive. And the whole idea around Bitcoin is that it can't be printed.

There's a lot of noise. I work on Bitcoin, but just Bitcoin, you know, like that level of conversation. I was like, you're not, you're not to, you know, you didn't miss it. You should, you know, go online and read. something about it, you know, but she was interested, right? Like, it wasn't the price is crashing and is it going to zero. It was like, I hear it 68,000, I feel like I missed it, which is also a natural side of the psychology. And then over time, people just get over that. But it's usually not, like, the people that are activating right now are the people that had the inclination

the last time, but didn't. And then we're probably reinforced. when it went down to 16,000, but then when it went up to 125, they were like, shit, I made a mistake. And now as it's coming down, they're like, okay, like, I don't need to make the same mistake. And that's just what happens. Like, that's human, you know,

combination of human psychology and following signal being price. Yeah, the thing that I always say when people ask me if they've missed it is like, I thought I'd missed it in 2016, 2017. And like, that's going to continue to happen. Just lastly on this point of like you brought up before that Bitcoin being used as money as being like a really important part of this. Why do you think that is? Because there's a lot of people out there that think of Bitcoin as sort of just a store of value and don't necessarily see it as the medium of exchange.

And obviously like store of value is going to come first and sort of has come first. But why is moving to being an actual currency so important? So it so the incentives of it will dictate that. it will be used as currency. Imagine there's 100 people, and imagine one of them is saving in Bitcoin, using my, no more than 1 in 100 people understand Bitcoin.

And I recognize that more than 1% have some exposure to Bitcoin at this point. It's not as high as people quoted when they say 40% of Americans around Bitcoin. It's probably something like, somewhere between 3 and 5% have some material exposure to it, but the percentage of people that actually understand, like Harvard sold some Bitcoin and bought more Ethereum.

They own Bitcoin, they don't get it, right? But let's just assume that one out of 100 people understands Bitcoin and the 99 others are Fiat, right? How do you have a trading economy with, only one out of 100 understanding Bitcoin. Even if you put it to 8 billion people

and go down to 80 million, right? Which that's where I say, there's not 80 million people in the world that really understand Bitcoin. But even though, like, if that's across the world, then what is the likelihood of a business and somebody understanding Bitcoin

in the same place and the one that understands is a business and they've invested in the infrastructure and you come to their store. It's just the density is the biggest uphill battle. People first understanding why Bitcoin stores value, starting to store value, having some Bitcoin in wallet, they show up to a business.

Oh, they accept Bitcoin. Let me try this. But go out to a world where 100% of people have figured out why Bitcoin stores value. Well, who is holding the bag of the bag of, the fiat currency. If a hundred out of a hundred all have figured out Bitcoin, let's not say 100, but say 90%, you know, or 80%, then the overlaps of like, oh, you're a person that runs a business that understands Bitcoin, you're an individual, by and large, every individual that's

walking through your store also understands Bitcoin and has Bitcoin. What would be the reason for if they wanted Bitcoin to force somebody to pay them in Fiat to then convert it into Bitcoin? It's just the incentives of like, hey, everyone's storing value in Bitcoin is that nobody else is holding currencies that are shitty and lose their value. And then it's like, well, just give me, you know, in return for my goods and services, just give me that money that's easily exchangeable over the internet. Thank you. Now, why it's so important that it evolves that way is because if it didn't, if 100 out of 100 people were holding Bitcoin, but they were. weren't transacting in it. The only rational explanation for that is because by some fiat decree, someone said you can't do it. It's illegal. Now, there's also a reason why a banning

of transactions with Bitcoin would fail because of a global geopolitical prisoners dilemma. Somebody like El Salvador is a great example of it, where it's like if one defects, which there's a maximum incentive to defect from some sort of concerted effort to prevent Bitcoin from being used as payments, that the only reason why it wouldn't is because Bitcoin was too centralized to be able to prevent some sort of legal decree preventing it from being successful. And if it was, it's not just that that is a problem, it's that if Bitcoin was to centralized to allow for what otherwise should have happened by the natural economic incentives, then some outside force is setting the rules in some form of fashion.

And if that's the case, then could the United States government say, oh, we're going to, you know, you miners run this software that says there are going to be $22 million. And then it becomes a fiat currency. So, like, the natural incentives will dictate it. And I do agree, like, you first have to understand why Bitcoin will store value to own any Bitcoin at all. It's by and large, in most at least develop world places, easiest just to buy a little Bitcoin with Fiat. Once you figure that out, you start to figure out, oh, no, I need to have even more of this. Beyond there, if you're a business owner, you say, yep, like, open me up, just start paying me in this.

if you have it, please. And that's just a process, right? That's a process of adoption. But as an end state, if it doesn't get to the point where people are actively just paying businesses is because of centralization. And centralization is the greatest long-term risk to Bitcoin, if it weren't to continue to get more decentralized.

But naturally, again, as more people buy it, as more large competing interests, This is more, and this is where I, like, I'm sympathetic to you. Like, I watched your interview with Michael Saylor. And by the way, there won't be a lot of Bitcoin treasury companies, so they'll congregate for fundamental reasons because, you know, if they are, freaking, but that's aside, just saying. But, you know, in the case of, like, you know, even though I say you're probably lower

on the education scale if you're owning Ibit, I think Ibit existing is good for Bitcoin, right? You know, you could look at the People's Bank of China and be like, people's Bank of China bad. But like, if they bought Bitcoin, good for Bitcoin. You know, that's the way the world's going. Every government's going to own Bitcoin. The larger the players are that are involved, the larger the competing interests,

the greater that, you know, you could look at that and say like, Bitcoin's becoming more centralized because 600,000 or 700,000 Bitcoin are an Ibit. But if you try to get 2 million prices higher, more people are figuring it out. Ibit has now opened up the ability to take Bitcoin in kind rather than just have, you know, not everyone can show up to BlackRock and do that. But like Morgan Stanley can or anybody that's a, whatever they call certain kind of participants can, that there's a natural inclination to take direct ownership over it. And the more large interests that come in, the more decentralized against.

It's like if Ibit comes in, well, Vanguard is going to have to get involved. If the United States government gets involved, then China is going to get involved, and Russia is going to get involved. And more competing interests, harder it is to change Bitcoin. And so that's why it's like, you know, the path, the risk of centralization, but everything about the incentives, even with large participants involved,

drives decentralization. The larger the Bitcoin gets, the more decentralized it gets, the more companies that emerged to build wallace, the more companies emerged to build custody infrastructure, the more companies emerge to work on payments. It all flows,

like everything is downstream from adoption of that, that thing clicking that is, uh, Bitcoin is actually, money, might trade like a tech stock, but it's money, it's volatile because people don't really understand it yet and they're figuring out their way. And, you know, while price is the ultimate arbiter, I also do think, like, on the payment side, like someone like Square turning on Bitcoin payments is huge for everybody working on Bitcoin payments because it also will be

in education for a lot of people that, like, a lot of people that might not have heard about ZAPRI, but who are products better for, it creates an opportunity for us. But, It also reinforces the store of value because some people are saying, they're saying, like, but you can't use Bitcoin for anything. And then when they see that Square is incorporating it for payments, they're like, ah, light bulb off. Like, I'm not, I am, but some, you know, explaining somebody else's psychology, like, I might not be going and paying for these eggs and Bitcoin, but somebody can. Like, somebody's paying this coffee shop for a big company. It's possible. and that that's the end game

and understanding that that is the end game seeing that Bitcoin's being used as money will unlock Bitcoin as money for more people in my mind that will go down for a period of time they're still going to need to read a book, listen to podcast and then connect it to someone like Square

doing this that's turning on payments but there's just only so many people that are going to be able to opt into Bitcoin without seeing that. That seeing it actually used as money is the closing of the mental loop of what this thing actually is. For certain people, they will be able to read a book and say, like, ah, I can see the path forward of why everyone adopts this and why in the future everyone's going to accept it as

money. Others need to see it happen, and then everything else that they heard about Bitcoin fall into place. And for some people, it might be that. Other people might be Russia and Swift you know other people it might be ray dollio's disorder you know rapid disorder and then it's like well what's the next domino to fall in the geopolitical landscape you know maybe somebody else merges and actually buys bitcoin you know so um i think it all like it it all compounds but it's like you know and it is ordered of like store value and payments the payments is the end game and payments being developed right now also accelerates people's ability to look at Bitcoin and connect it to money and start buying it to then later be spending.

I love it, man. I can hear the family in the background. We've got some wholesome kid noises going on. I'll let you get back to them. But before we close out, where can you send anyone, Mike, to find out more about your book or is that probably anything you're doing? Yeah. So if somebody's not, you know, if Bitcoin is not yet clicking, but maybe this opened up some avenues to understand, like definitely read my book, go to, so it's only on the same out.

It's the best looking Bitcoin book. Like, you killed it on the cover. Thanks. I spent a lot of time. The artist, proof of paint on Twitter, or on X. If you need a piece of Bitcoin art, go check him out. He's amazing. But yeah, if you don't, if you don't, you know, if Bitcoin's just starting to click, go read a book, go find a reliable place to buy Bitcoin and start sack and sacks. But if you already understand Bitcoin, then I highly encourage you if you run a business or are a key person in a business to make the push to open it up as a form of payment. people can look us up at zaprite.com, Z-A-P-R-I-T-E, all one word, Z-P-R-R-I-T-E.

If we're not the right solution for you, we'll put you in the direction of the people who are. We're all on the same path, working on the same mission. So check us out at zapright.com. And then also news on the book about the audio book is in the process of being released. So it's been submitted to the different platforms. I was sitting on that for a good dip in price. Just really, I was, you know, dragging my ass. But that's now final.

I read it myself. Marty read the forward. Will Cole read the intro and outro. And so I'm excited to finally get that out. So there's a lot of people these days that apparently don't read books anymore, but we'll listen to audio. And so in short order, it should be both available on safe site, but then across platforms as well.

the on hit book. Awesome. As a someone who runs a company using Zach Bright is the best solution. Also, we've been using it for the tickets on for cheat code. And it's so much easier than doing it, the ad hoc way that we did it before. Check out Zappright. Awesome. Thank you, Parker. This has been great. Appreciate you, Danny.