What Bitcoin Did - THE CASE FOR BITCOIN w/ Joe Bryan

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

Joe Bryan is a Bitcoin educator and the creator of What’s the Problem? In this episode, we discuss why our current system is rigged, how the hidden theft of inflation quietly corrodes everything from quality of life to trust in society, and why the “big red button” — the ability to print money — sits at the heart of so many global crises including the breakdown of family structures, mental health crises, and broken incentives all stem from the same monetary flaw. We also get into how this knowledge spreads, why people sense the system is broken even if they can’t articulate why, and why Bitcoin offers a hopeful, practical alternative. FOLLOW: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny Joe Bryan: https://x.com/satmojoe & https://x.com/SatsVsFiat THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: IREN: https://www.iren.com/ RIVER: https://river.com/wbd CASA: https://casa.io/ LEDGER: https://www.ledger.com/ ANCHORWATCH: https://www.anchorwatch.com/

This whole thing is not an us versus them issue within society. It's an everyone versus the central bank. A system which is dying. And people realize it's dying. And you have an escape route into something that nobody can print. People use the escape route. It's lining up here to be the greatest trade ever. And it's a one-way trade.

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Visit iron.com to learn more, which is ir-e-n-com. Does it feel more natural for you now? It's getting there. Like it's still, I don't feel like, it depends on the conversation, I think. Like there's some conversation that feel really chill and like very normal.

There are somewhere I still feel the pressure. Like I just did one with Brent Johnson. That's interesting. Well, because it's like, so the Brent Johnson one was a perfect example because I think he's great. Do you know, Brent? He's a Santiago Capital guy.

I've never met him, but obviously I know. you know of it. Yeah, yeah. So he, like, I wanted to go through the dollar milkshake thing, because I think right now that's really relevant. And in that, I knew I was going to have to talk to him about Bitcoin. And he's, like, quite brutal on Twitter. And so I was like, and I know he doesn't particularly like Bitcoin. Like, he doesn't hate it, but he doesn't care much about it. So I was like, oh, we're going to have to, like, have a bit back and forth. You were waiting to get punched in the face. But it turned out he was just a lovely guy. I really liked him. And it's funny because sometimes people online can be very different. Oh, totally.

Or you assume it's very different. Totally. But I did have to like try and pick him up on some of his points he'd made because he did a debate with safety in a while ago. And obviously safety did amazing in that debate and kind of push back on a lot of those arguments as well. But I didn't want to have him on the show and not mentioned some of those things. So that I felt a little bit nervous about because I was like, is he just going to be a savage to me and like, mean me. Whether it's a, whether it's a safe space interview or not. Exactly. But it turns out he was just really nice and he kind of conceded some of the points where maybe I think sometimes some of the points he makes are intentionally triggering to make a point rather than something

he actually believes like he was comparing Bitcoin to Nvidia I was like you know they're not the same thing but you know as soon as you post it he's going to get a lot of a lot of traction yeah exactly yeah yeah but how are you doing Joe yeah I'm doing well I'm glad we can find we've been talking about making this show for a while but I'm glad we waited to do in person but this is this is great and we Have we started? We've started. We're on.

I think we've started. We've started. Oh, apologies. Have I ruined it by, by, presumably we edit this. No, this is all going to be in. Your red face, embarrassed that we started. I'm sorry. But yeah, yeah, things are good.

Good. Things are good. You know, it's been three months since I released that video. Yeah. And, I mean, it feels like years at this at this point. Your life has changed. a bit? Oh, it has. It has and for the, just for the better. I've just got to meet so many people and, you know, had interactions with, you know, countless bitcoins from around the world.

It's, I couldn't have asked for anymore because, you know, the most important thing is it's helping people. Totally. And I saw you even, you went to Miami repping your Chico t-shirt. I'm glad you noticed that. And now you're opening with the keynote this year now. I'm so excited about that. And thank you for the, thank you for the invite. Well, I think it's like the perfect introduction to the day. So for anyone listening that's not already seen Joe's video, go and watch it.

But you did a video called What's the Problem? And it kind of outlined everything without saying Bitcoin too much, which I think is a really good way of kind of like getting people off guard and starting that conversation. But you've told me this story before, but I want you to tell again, like, where did this presentation come from? Yeah. So I would not consider myself necessarily a creative person. I built businesses in the past and had to be creative in terms of structuring things or thinking about ideas and value extraction, but not necessarily from a production perspective. But I was invited by a friend and who's also an entrepreneur to a weekend away with 15 of his friends from his life. You know, he thought, you know, it's not often I guess. everyone together i'll invite all these people we'll go for a weekend he lives in portugal and some of these people know each other but most of them don't because they're from various points in his life yeah but they all share that sort of same entrepreneurial spirit but he said to

everyone please can you bring something just for half an hour to talk about and if we all bring something then we can structure a good weekend around it we'll all learn learn some new things make some friends and and whatever so i just want to talk about bitcoin but i didn't know anybody else who was going and therefore I couldn't assume any knowledge. And it was for the very first time I was forced to actually articulate something. Whereas when you're prepping these shows, you've been doing this for years, you're thinking in advance about how to try and tease something out someone. You're doing a lot of structured thinking in order to produce a show.

Most of us never have to actually go from what's in here to something, you know, on paper. Yeah. And so that process was, It was fun, but it was challenging. And over the course of two or three weeks, I just created this story. Because because I couldn't assume anything about the people there, about their existing knowledge, I had to strip it right back and say, well, if I've only got 30 minutes, I'm not going to be able to explain Bitcoin someone in 30 minutes, but I don't know where they're starting from. So if I just adjust my target to be after 30 minutes, I want you to want to learn about Bitcoin,

then that's a far more achievable, achievable target. And therefore I also don't need to really mention Bitcoin at all. And when I produced the presentation, it obviously wasn't a video. It was just the slides I do in the video to the people there. And they didn't know in advance this was about Bitcoin. It was just titled, What's the Problem? Which is also very nice because everyone's guards us down because they're like, well, what is this problem that you're talking about?

And as you're going through, you know, it was very early in the weekend. And I hadn't, I hadn't really had much of a conversation with most people. And so you hadn't, and I deliberately not mentioned the word Bitcoin. You didn't want to put them off too early. Well, I didn't want to spoil the surprise. Yeah. And you know how hard it is to go through like half a day and not mention Bitcoin when you're with new people? Half an hour.

Yes. Yeah, very challenging. So I, you know, I kept, I kept stump. But then as always doing it, you could see. certain people in the audience just sort of like the penny would drop at some point like some word or some phrase and they could see where this was going and then you did put satoche in there well i did put satoche in there was this little bit of a giveaway but it's still more obvious to everybody yeah and then just the the reception from that presentation was you know i thought it was good

but it just told me like it it accessed something for a large proportion of that other people watching. I was like, this is something which is valuable. And then they encouraged me, you should share this with other people. So I went away and produced a video. And it's a great video. Oh, thank you for saying that. It's, you know, when you produce something that's going to live on the internet forever, having been like many Bitcoiners, just happy to sit in the background. Mm-hmm. You know, I'm not not by nature somebody who wants to be on the state. And I just thought if I'm going, well, I'll put that aside for this week. But when you are that way inclined, so my first hurdle was, well, I need to put something out which I'm not going to be embarrassed about.

Because it's going to be there forever. And so, you know, I found a local production company. I've never done anything like this before. I didn't even have a script. I just went and sort of just ad-lived into the camera several times. and then we tried to stick it together after which was a nightmare because both credits are saying something completely different um but it turned out it turned out okay and then you know i had a small group of people in in the uk who had spoken to before um and you know there was

some initial support but it was like firing it into the void and then you know it sort of caught caught fire and has sort of evolved with a life of its own, I guess, up to this point. Yeah, it's huge. It's nearly 200,000 views, I think, which is amazing. Yeah, but that's just on YouTube. Yeah. YouTube's not the top of the funnel. It was on X and then, so there's no way to track on X, but it's probably a million, maybe.

And then when people share it, it's either on X or it's on YouTube. So it's just, I mean, I'm just constantly blown away. Right, to be honest. I just, I wanted enough people to watch it that I wasn't embarrassed. Well, you've done that. I didn't expect it to really strike a chord with people in the way it has and just the best thing. It seems to have had such a positive impact on people. So many messages. I've shared it with my family and my friends and now they're interested.

They want to learn. It's like just just getting that, exposing the chink in the armor. Well, I think you like, earlier you said the assume knowledge. I think that's a really key thing. And I've had some feedback on the show, partially from my sister, who was like, I want to listen, but it's like, it's too far beyond where I am. So with this show, I want it to be the kind of show that, like the video, can be shared with friends, family, like, this is a starting point. So let's keep it really sort of high level. Okay.

And I think we should start with the obvious question of what is the problem. But I think everyone knows there is a problem. Like I think people, even if they don't understand why, they see that. things are getting more expensive the world's getting more divisive like there's so many things that are happening but putting your finger on the what the actual root cause of that is very difficult um so let's start with what what is the problem well the problem is there's a big red button where the people who control the button can create as much money as they like and that is that is the problem it is an it's an abstraction of what actually happens but essentially it's just that somebody has

preferential access to create something that everyone else works for and that is the root of everything yeah absolutely everything and you're right people do people innately know something isn't right they know they just they can just they can just they can just feel it they see it they sense it the world seems a crazy place and it seems to be getting crazier but it's deteriorating yes everything around us is corroding whether it's It's the quality of things, whether it's your interactions with people, whether it's people's outlooks, whether it's explicit prices, whether it's architecture, the quality of art, the quality of music. Like, it's just everything is deteriorating. And it's incessant.

But it's not a lockstep change from one day to the next. And so it's like the boiling frog. Yeah. The water's heating up, but it's never heating up fast enough in our corner of the world to trigger, you know, massive upheaval. You don't have protests in the street because it's just so gradual. If someone's stealing from you at single digit percentages, you know, it's just that gradual deterioration. It's not like someone coming and putting a gun in your face and taking 90% of your way. wealth. That will happen over time. Yeah. It's just do it very gradually. So I want to get really

basic here because I want this to be very, very accessible. What do you mean people are stealing from you? Right. So everybody goes to work and expends their economic energy. You go to, you go out and do a day's work and you get paid. Now forget about whatever the currency is, but let's just say in the UK, you earn pounds. The amount that you get paid represents your economic energy being expended and then you have that economic energy and then you need to be able to to decide what to do with that you may want to spend some of it today on food or housing but probably want to save some of that for the future save it for tomorrow and that's effectively your like economic battery this is money being a proxy for time yes yeah you've expended your energy and focus and time

to do something for somebody else and you are compensated in money in pounds now you keep that today in a year's time that economic battery will have been drained the amount that you will be able to buy in a year's time is much less than today and that should not be the case it's a it's a secondary tax on the amount of money you've paid but the question is where does that come from and we live now in a world and we have lived in a world that has for so long had a big red button that the decay of this economic battery over time, the loss of your purchasing power is just assumed to be, that's just normal. That's just the way the world works. It's this natural phenomenon. Even worse than that, it's seen as a good thing by some

people. Inflation is a sign of a strong economy. Well, yes, I mean, you are gaslit to think about arbitrary measures yeah GDP etc as being you know the sign of a healthy economy when those things are measured in the in the thing that it being printed yeah so of course it's it should go off over time because you're just printing more of it that's how that doesn't mean it's healthy yeah but when you lose your when your economic battery is decaying it's decaying not because of some natural phenomenon it's decaying because extra money is being printed by somebody else for for free, whereas you had to work for it. And so if you think, if you,

it's helpful to have little analogies, little analogies, but if you were playing, you know, a game of monopoly, for example, and one of the players is the banker and take money out of the bank whenever they want, just by taking that money out of the box, puts it on the table, the money's not in the game, not in the game,

not in the game. but it distorts the game because everyone everyone knows the money is on the table the money is just not in the game the other players they haven't become wealthier but what's happened is the prices of all the houses have been distorted because there's more money in the system so why would you sell your house tomorrow the same price you sold it yesterday when there's a big stack of money it's just now landed on the table more money is in the game and so it dilutes the value of everything when measured in the monopoly money and that applies to asset prices but it applies fundamentally to your savings

if somebody can print free what you have to work for that is wrong that is wrong and in a world where you have finite resources at any given point in time and finite goods and services if more money comes into existence overnight it raises the prices for everybody we all know this this is this is No, that's not a controversial statement. No. That's just logic. And everybody knows that's true. And that's where inflation comes from.

It's the only source of inflation. Because imagine a world, and we get to this in the story, where we have the divergence. Before we do that, I do want to do that story. But I want to, in the video, you outline lots of issues, both on the monetary side and like the societal side. I wrote them down because there's a lot here. Yes. So the cost of living crisis.

Forever Wars, mental health crisis, societal instability, declining birth rates, addiction crisis, political instability, chronic health issues, loss of trust, big government, homelessness, deterioration of the family unit, and wealth inequality. I could have written another 10. That's a lot of things that someone who doesn't understand this might seem very disconnected from each other. Yes. So what before you tell the story, I want you to tell people why all those things that seem very different are actually all caused by the same problem.

Okay. So as humans, we're, we sometimes find it difficult to think about cause and effect compounded over multiple steps. Yeah. And, you know, we look at, it's very hard to look at a sequence of consequences that don't necessarily appear like the overlap and then track them back via one or two steps to a single course. but absolutely all of those things have their primary cause

and there are other secondary causes for some of these of course I'm not saying the big red button is the having access to big red button is the cause of absolutely everything to 100% because we are human we are frail we make mistakes we have vices etc etc so you know it cannot solve everything by removing it but it all stems it all stems from access to the big red button And so in order to explain each of those, you sort of have to go the other way around. You go, okay, well, let's go back to the source.

Let's go back to the source. And what happens when somebody creates extra money for without a proof of work, without having to expend any economic energy? They just create it. What are their knock-on consequences at the first level? And then what do those consequences then mean for the second? can do consequences. So if this, then this, and if that, then this. And by going through that series of thinking, you end up naturally creating this set of, this set of issues that we see

around us today. And, you know, within the story, it just becomes entirely logical. People just agree with it at every stage. It's like, well, obviously, A leads to B and B leads to C. And we have a long list of seats. Yeah. It's almost impossible to go the other way. It's impossible to go the other way around. Because it's like, it's a bit like, it's a bit like Bitcoin, it's a bit like Bitcoin, I guess. It's like, you know, when you're, when you're mining, everyone's expending a lot of energy to find, to find, to win the block.

But then validating the block isn't just super easy. It's much easier one way than it is the other way in understanding these things but you've got to frame it properly to start with and then see the downstream cause and effect to end up with these list of issues. This episode is brought to you by Anchor Watch. The thing that keeps me up at night

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This is their weekly newsletter that drops every Thursday and it covers how authoritarian regimes use money as a tool for control and how people are pushing back against that using privacy tools and of course Bitcoin. It's an amazing newsletter, it's pure signal and you can subscribe for free. free at Financial Freedom Report.org. Okay, so maybe we'll come back to the issues then. So do you want to do the story of Fiatelo and Satoshi? Sure. That you kind of outlined in the video because I thought that was brilliant.

Yeah. So what I've tried to do in the video as well is not mention Bitcoin until right at the end. But when you're listening to the story, you create this skeletal mental framework of understanding the core aspects of Bitcoin and some of the terminology as you go through, without realizing you're actually learning these things. And that starts with the naming of the characters. You have Satoshi on one side. It's like, that's fairly obvious.

But on the other side, you have Fiatelo, which funnily enough, I didn't realize this, but I've had some Italian. Is it a real person? No, no, no, but Fiatelo is slang for bad breath in Italian. Oh, really? Which makes it even funnier. Even funnier.

And so, yeah, so you see, have this, a deserted island where a ship carrying hundreds of smart people effectively capsizes they only get washed up on the shore but they've come from a they've come from an advanced society so they know what they're ultimately going to get back to and then you sort of have to suspend your disbelief and you know they're in rags and things all this desert island but they can create whatever monetary system they want yeah with whatever characteristics and you just don't worry about how that actually happened. But they discuss amongst themselves and they outline what they

consider to be the characteristics of perfect money. There's no point creating just good money. You might also just create the perfect money. And then there's a disagreement. So everyone agrees on the characteristics, but then there's a disagreement. So what are the characteristics? So scarcity, portability, divisibility, acceptability, and censorship resistance and so whenever you look at the list of characteristics for um money people will have different lists yeah because it's not necessarily um hard boundaries between the what you could consider to be the broad definition of a word and so some people will have five some are six some are seven

some will have eight and so i've tried to keep it tied to the real world in these things so people could disagree over one of the words or something like that but the concept is yeah the concept is there but this represents the the sort of intrinsic qualities of bitcoin the way it's the way it's described and so they all agree on these characteristics but but then there's a disagreement and sotoshi says well these these these these are the definition we all agree this is perfect money and if it's perfect money and the character is the characteristics of perfect money and those characteristics are not going to change so we're we should just lock it in you never have to worry about it whereas fiatella goes yeah i know that but

there's there can be an emergency at some point and you know we should have this big red button which of course nobody will ever press it's just there just in case something in case something goes wrong we can press it and make an adjustment i make more money adjust in any way in any way whatsoever like we can change anything any of this any of their characteristics but we won't Obviously we won't. And then the Satoshi, he knows that if somebody has access, someone has some optionality, run the future forward long enough, that optionality will be used. And we see this all around ourselves today in every aspect of life.

Whenever, I mean, predominantly in governments, whenever there is the option to do something, it will get exercised at some point in time because there will always be a justification. over the course of time why that is required. Satoshi realizes this, fear tellers doesn't agree and so they end up building a massive wall down the middle of the island and separate into two, into two separate tribes effectively. But the wall is so big conveniently it cuts off all communication and trade.

So they are two sides of an island operating entirely independently, evolving on their own, on their own pace. So there's some, you know, convenient thinking going on here, but that's the idea. But to start with, they're identical, because they both have, they both have perfect money. And then we get to think about what perfect money means in a free market. And so the video is not just about Bitcoin and free market. It's about Bitcoin and perfect money.

It's about free markets and effectively free market capitalism, which is, you know, it's a great. greatest force for good for good that we've ever known right as a as a mechanism and capitalism is is just what happens when you leave people alone yeah it's like the natural state of the world right it's not he's not even an ism it's just the way things work yeah and then so on both sides of the island you start to see natural evolution of individual decision-making so you know we can if you like me to dig into that a little bit more i can do yeah that's going to it and so in the world today the world that we experience around ourselves it is assumed that prices go up constantly yeah

and that's held out to be a natural the natural state of the world that's driven by the central banks then we can we can dig into that later but combined with that we also see quality deteriorating yes through things like shrink inflation or just products getting worse and costing the same exactly yeah yeah so it's a combination of prices up quality down yeah and we take that as being the normal natural state yeah everyone knows how big a fredo used to be and how big a fredo is now or everyone in england your hands are just bigger you've grown this is maybe they used to say that with the mars bars the mars bars haven't shrunk you've just you just got bigger hands than when you're a child it's like well that's clearly not clearly not the case um but this becomes the default

understanding and these sort of but it's 180 degrees wrong because when you have a free market with perfect money what happens is over time the natural human action is towards greater levels of productivity yeah and that great those greater levels of productivity drive prices down and and quality higher and and you can you can demonstrate that just within like 60 seconds yeah like why this is the case because all these people are on the island and you can take either side because both sides are the same to start with they don't have anything so they're trying just to survive they're you know you're catching your own fish you're building cutting down your own trees to make a fire and you're building your own shelter like some of

those things you would be good at some of those things you would not be good at but you don't have excess of anything because you're just trying to survive but what I have happens over time is that you're a good fisherman, I'm a good woodcutter, you spend your time fishing, I'll tell my time cutting down wood, we'll both catch twice, you know, we'll produce twice as much in half the time, now we have excess and we can trade with each other. Yeah. And so what happens over time is that price is naturally fall. The specialization of the specialization leads to prices falling. And not only that, I'm better at cutting down wood, so I produce a better quality product. I'm not a great fisherman, but I'll try. Well, you're a better fish is a better fisherman

in the story. And so, but prices fall and quality rises. And then over time, you, because people are specialized, they have to trade with each other. Yeah. And so this perfect money becomes the medium of exchange for everybody, and people can accumulate capital savings. And because over time, productivity continues to increase people,

improve your processes, I, you know, you, I can now chop down more trees. I've improved my processes. I've lent you some wood to build a boat. You can now go and catch more fish for everybody. It has a natural long-term reduction of prices, and it increases in quality for everybody. So even the people who are not productive in society, somebody who's ill or old or young is not contributing

from a productive sense, their quality of life goes up. Because their money buys more tomorrow than it does today. Yeah. All they have to do is save. all they have to do is safe, which even that very basic example, which we can all say, yeah, that's the way the world works. Yeah. When you leave people alone is 180 degrees from where we are today. Yeah.

And people just haven't thought about it. So it's like this eye-opening, eye-opening moment. Then the question becomes, well, okay, well, why are we not there? Yeah. And you see it like, so people work their entire lives to be able to retire with dignity and have what they want. And they get to the end of their life and they're like, oh, shit, I'm going to have to go and work in Sainsbury's because my money has deteriorated at a time to the degree that I now can't afford to live the rest of my life with my savings from being productive for 50 years. Yeah.

It's crazy. It is. It is. So, so, I mean, we can dig into why that changes now or we can talk further through the story. I don't know which one you would prefer. But if you have a, if you have a free market there. and you have perfect money, the natural outcome is the lowering of prices,

but once you start to distort either the free market or the money or both, which is where we are today, those productivity gains get stolen over time. So when we look at inflation today and the central bank tells you inflation is 3%, So the inflation is not 3%. They're not lying to you. They're not, well, they're lying to you because we all know inflation's more than 3%.

When you think about when you... Or you have to go shopping and you can very quickly realize it's not 3%. Yeah, it's trusting your experiences, your real world experiences over what somebody is telling you. Yeah. We all know it's more than 3%. Yeah. But let's just say it was 3%. You'd think, well, they're stealing 3%. percent from me by printing this extra money every year. That's wrong. They're stealing way more

than 3% every year because what should be happening is that prices should be declining, not just staying flat. So let's say they should be declining by 3%. They're stealing 6% a year. They're stealing the productivity gains of everybody, everywhere that just would accrue naturally under the money and then stealing an extra 3% on top and you wonder why people feel that the world is deteriorating and they don't know why and there's also a compounding issue there which i'd like you to explain as well well i mean it's it's it's just the compounding in mathematical compounding right over time in a free market you should be you know jeff booth talks about the um costs falling to the cost of production over time.

But the cost ultimately fall forever when measured in the perfect money. Because there's no ceiling for how productive people can become. With new technologies. And so when you flip the script on that and you increase two or three percent a year, two or three percent a year to start, or three percent a year to start with, you know, if the base is 100, it's the price goes up to 103. three, the next year it's going up by more than three. And then more and more than three, and then eventually you just end up with this sort of effectively what looks like an exponential curve.

Yeah. But because it's slow moving, small percentage changes, it doesn't feel like someone's putting a gun in your face. It's never quite enough, never quite enough to trigger people to take, to take, to take, to take, to take, to take. take action. Yeah. They just sort of live with it, especially when people, when the government, when the central bank tells you this is an natural state of the world, or that inflation is because of somebody else. Right. Which is quite often how they frame this. Yeah, don't look at the big red button that we have over in the corner. Yeah. It's that foreign dictator or it's the greedy businessman. Yeah. Which is, which is just totally wrong. Totally wrong. And so from from the,

from the free market where prices are falling quality is going up quality of life raises increases for everybody and then this is this is a beautiful state of the world as where we should be then you have to build the bridge from that state to where we are right now which is a massive 180s like how do you get there how do you get there and you get there through the introduction of government because the introduction of government to this inevitably means for the islanders they run into the government runs into a deficit at some point so within a within any functioning society you have some level of governance and people can say well they should be like close to no government or there should be bigger government and the

government should do X or Y or Z and that sort of outside the the scope of the video and I've tried to keep the video as as politically neutral as possible to appeal to the widest group of people because those things are not central to the cause and everyone has their own opinions on those but however well-run any governance structure is over time it will given the long run of long run of time it will be in deficit at some point so the amount that it's spending in a given point in time will be greater than the amounts receiving and taxes from its, from its citizenry.

And at that point, you then have the divergence on the island, whereas Satoshi sat there thinking, well, how do I, how do I cover this deficit? But so if, like any household, if I'm spending more than I'm receiving, something needs to change. Yeah.

So, bring in more money or spend less. Exactly. Or a combination of the two. Yeah. Right. And so what the extra thing here, which sort of precipitates the decision is that they're both up for re-election. So, Fiatel on one side and Satoshi on the other. And Satoshi doesn't have any choices, but both of those choices when it comes to the citizenry are not going to be popular changes.

You know, if I increase your taxes or I reduce the amount that I'm giving back to you in whatever form, that's not going to make you more likely to vote for me. It's going to make you less. So he ends up losing the election because he hasn't been able to hide the changes from the population but the changes take effect and so he balances he balances the budget which in the long run

helps make the economy stronger because people realize there's no there's no free money just like there's no free money for you at home and no free money for me and my family whereas Fiatello he sees the big red button in the corner And he's like, I really like being in power. I like being in power.

I could just press it. Just once. No one would know. I'd just press it just once. And he presses it. Doesn't have to tell the population. The taxes are going up. Doesn't reduce the government spending.

He gets reelected. And he's like, amazing. Nobody even knows. This is great. I'm not going to press it again. No. It was just that one type thing. And then things start to spiral out of

control. And then this is where we get into in the video you'll see there's, there's always a challenge, like how to, how to make a massive flowcharts seem interesting. Yeah, that's pretty hard. Yeah, it's pretty hard. And I'm very grateful for all the the Bitcoiners who I did one or ones with before producing the video because they gave me feedback and we changed the structure and just to make it. So, So Fiatelo presses the bigger red button. He prints some extra money for the government. Yeah. And just like we talked about before, that money doesn't go to everybody. It just goes into the coffers of coffers of the government. Yeah. And then that has,

when you print money, it has three consequence, three main consequences, which then precipitate everything else. The first is it distorts all the price signals in the market. The second is that increases business input costs. And the third is it leads to asset inflation. I'm going to be annoying because I want this to be like the most successful show that I've done. So can you explain why all three of those steps happen? Yes. Okay. So the distortion of price signals, when we were in the free market, when they were on the island, everyone was trading with each other.

And no one was, and you had perfect money. The only reason the prices would change in any transaction is a function of the demand or supply. if you caught more fish and you brought all those fish back to show the cost of fish would go down yeah right if suddenly everyone wanted to buy a particular type of fish the price of that fish would probably go up yeah right this is just demand and supply it's it's just natural but if somebody can create extra money for free and then they start spending that money in the economy all those price signals all those that looks like extra demand but it's not extra demand is just extra money and the government has has printed the money it's gone into the coffees

of the government for that to reach the rest of the economy it goes from the government to the people connected to the government yeah either providing services or goods to the government and so that looks like extra demand in these these little areas which increases the prices which is then a signal to all the entrepreneurs in the market that there's some sort of supply demand imbalance there is opportunity to make money to switch from what you're doing and focus your economic energy, time, and creativity in these areas because there's more profit to be made. The only reason the price has changed is because they printed the money is not extra demand.

And so entrepreneurs are pulled from productive parts of the economy, making them less productive, less efficient, into those areas that are just distorted by the price yeah and then this price um distortion ripples out to everybody and causes all of these um just distortions everywhere yeah and so it undermines the very basic foundation of any economic decision making for anybody anywhere in the economy especially when you compound this over over time or over it's probably worth there as well explaining why that benefits those like politically connected people and doesn't benefit the everyday person Well, yes, and it sort of links into some of the other areas as well.

Because when the people connected to the government are receiving money first, they get to then make those profits, take those profits and allocate that capital somewhere else in the market. Which leads into the second and third issues that we're going to talk about. it is not necessarily like a binary thing it's not like you get the money you get to use it and then everyone else finds out it's this gradual creep it's the gradual creep but it allows um increased levels of profit margin as well for the for those connected to the government especially over time where society starts to decline and a row and the people supplying the government become more and more important to the government.

And the government starts to protect them and make competition for them harder. Yeah. And so we'll come to this as well. We'll go to this as well. But it's if extra money is being created and you're getting it first, you have an advantage. Yeah. And that's, everyone knows this. It's how do you then take advantage of that?

And it's primarily through asset inflation. through asset inflation. So we've covered this distortion of price signals and that leads to a misallocation of capital, both human and real capital from entrepreneurs and then it undermines the rest of the economy. The second is that business input costs increase. So every, every business has either a human being or some raw material input costs like energy or wood or something like this. Now, when there's more money flowing around in the economy, that's been created for free, these things start to increase in price, as we've seen. And so every single business is then faced with a choice.

If all my input costs are increasing and I produce a good or a service that I was previously selling at X, if the costs have gone up, my profit margin has declined. Yeah. Now, for me to justify spending my time and energy and taking the downside risk associated with running a business, employing people, borrowing money, all of these things, spending my time, I need to make sure I'm making enough of a return to justify that. Because if I can't, I'll close it down. Yeah. I'll go and get a job. I'll get a salary somewhere else. Someone else can take that risk. Now, every business then has one of three choices. If I have to make a

profit margin of why just to justify economically continuing to do this thing, I have to increase my profit margins. How do I do it? It's not me being greedy. It's me just reacting to what I'm forced to changes that were forced upon me from pressing the big red button. And so you have three choices. And this is, you know, we're talking about the Fredos.

So the first one is, well, I could just pass on the price increase directly to the customer. Yeah. I won't change anything about the product. It's the same size. It's the same quality. I'll just pass on the price. So customers not going to like that, but then that is just what it is. It's not my fault.

Mm-hmm. Second one is to say, well, if I increase the price, I'm going to sell less. So I'll keep the price the same and I'll keep the quality the same. I'll just make it smaller. And that's the shrinkflation that we all see around us today. Yeah. And then the third one is, is, well, if my input costs have gone, up, maybe I can find a way to try and reduce them again. And I get to keep the price the same

and the size the same. But you can do that of one of two ways. Easiest way is just to cut back on people involved in the business. So you end up driving unemployment. I'll reduce my level of customer service. It's now impossible to speak to anybody because I need to fire all these people to try and keep my profit margins. But when I fire those people, it creates a problem for the government. Some of the government thinking, well, you can't have all these people unemployed. I've got to support all these people. So there's an extra problem for the government to deal with. And then the worst one is, I think we miss one on the reduced cost, which is also just to make the product worse. Yeah, I've sort of skipped ahead slightly. Okay. But so there we go.

So the, which is the insidious one. Yeah. And this is what, this is like that hidden corrosive. and I can keep the price the same, the size the same, but just make the quality worse. Yeah. And hopefully nobody notices. And this just happens on a compounding basis. And we see this particularly in some sectors where the outcomes, the consequences of those changes

are very observable. Yeah. Which would be like food would be a perfect example. Instead of putting real whole ingredients, whole ingredients and something you just use chemicals to get the same taste or whatever it might be exactly exactly and then what happens is you get a health crisis and so fiatelo starts to see a growth in obesity across the his side of the island because now in the food you don't get the fresh produce anymore you get increased levels of industrialized sludge and you get health

you get obesity crisis you get other health knock on crisis which you know guess what puts me more pressure on the government. Yeah. Government now has to deal with all these unhealthy people, right? And all the secondary consequences. And then the third is asset inflation. So we've talked about the distortion of price signals, business input cost increased, but the third impact of printing money is just asset prices go up.

And we'll go back to the monopoly example. If we were playing monopoly there and I asked to buy one of your houses, as soon as the banker takes the money out, puts it on the table, even though it's not in the game, you'll look at the money. And you go, well, I'm not selling it for 200 pounds. It's now 400 pounds. But nothing's changed. You go, everything's changed.

Everything's changed. I'm not any richer. You're not any richer. In fact, what we see is life becomes more expensive because the cost of goods are going up or the quality is going down. So my quality of life is deteriorating. a lower level of affordability but now asset prices are going up which then is um one of the main drives of wealth inequality or the the apparent wealth inequality that that appears across the island the people who own assets feel like they're getting wealthier yeah because the the monopoly houses

they're becoming more expensive they haven't done any work they haven't become any more productive they've just been monetized by the extra printing of the money both from a dilutive sense and I'll be slightly careful with monetized there in this context so when you print in the extra money there's more fiatelos washing around in the system yeah and therefore if you divide all the fear tellers by the amount of houses there are there's just the number goes up yeah right But on top of that, and this is a slight side rabbit hole from this flowchart, is those assets then also get monetized. So, and for people who wouldn't be familiar with this, take that example again that we talked about earlier where you go and do a day's work. You get paid and you want to store your economic energy.

in a world where someone is printing money and that economic battery is declining fast, you realize you cannot save it. And all of us know this. We know we can't put money in the bank and leave it 10 years and it retained its purchasing power. We know that. That's why everyone becomes an investor.

Exactly. You have to risk it. You have to risk your money just to try and protect your purchasing power. Yeah. And so what happens is people inevitably end up being, directing their money into better forms of stores of value. And in the UK and in certain countries, it becomes over-indexed in houses. And so not only is the price of the house going up

because they're printing more Fiatelos, the price of the house is going up because people are buying more houses and they're taking out more leverage to buy more houses. I was just looking up. There's a quote from Alice in Wonderland. I don't know if you know this. It was in Gigi's book, which is where I saw it.

But there's a line where it says, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. And that's exactly the world we live in right now. You have to do everything possible just to retain your purchasing power, whereas money instead should be something you can save over time. Money should be increasing a purchasing power. Yes. It should be increasing.

Yeah. Not just flat. We've gone full 180, full 180 here. And so what happens is the asset prices go up. which drives when you combine it with reduced affordability of everyday living. So your cost of living is going up. Your cost of housing is going up. And so you end up creating more and more homelessness as well.

But to come to the point around asset inflation, because the houses are going up and because people are using housing as a store of value, as a proxy store of value because they can't rely on the money or the stock market is a proxy store of value because they can't rely on the money these things these assets go up and people start leveraging into the speculative assets as well so it's not just a neutral play it's well if i'm going to buy a house i'm going to take out a big mortgage yeah until you get more and more debt coming into the system more and more speculation growth in speculative assets which puts more leverage across the whole economy and puts the financial system on shakier foundations. And then when you have a system where

the banking system is leveraged, where house prices have gone up, not because they are productive assets, but because somebody's printed money and they've become speculative stores of value, then when people are trying to buy houses because they need somewhere to live, they have to take a lot of risk just to buy the house. And so a family where they're struggling every day from an increased cost of living, they have to take out a big mortgage just to buy a house somewhere to live, which is not a productive asset. And you can't do that on one salary anymore.

So, you know, we see all the time 30, 40 years ago, the perfect one is the Simpsons. When the Simpsons came out, you've got Homer, who I don't think anyone would consider to be a super productive member of society. Yeah. He has a nice house, two kids, car, and he's the one-income family. Yeah. And that was considered normal.

Normal. Normal. There's bonkers today. You can't do that today. Definitely not going to be able to do that in 20 years' time. Yeah. Our kids have got no chance. Absolutely no chance.

But it's because of the money. So what happens is today, Marjor would also have to go out to work. Yeah. They'd be living in a smaller, a smaller house. They'd both be working. They wouldn't have three kids that maybe have one or maybe none because you can't afford to have children. Marge can't afford to be staying at home looking after the children. She'd have to be working.

Therefore, she'd have to have childcare. Which would cost more than the wage. But you can't afford because it's inefficient versus what you receive net after taxes from working. Right. But you also need your salary to pay for the mortgage. So what naturally happens is People wait longer and longer to have kids And then maybe never have kids

Maybe never have kids And if you don't plan for the future If your thinking and planning longer term is undermined Everything changes I think that's a really important point Is the inability to plan for the future Because you don't know what your money is going to be worth

Yeah Yeah It's that you stop investing in yourself You stop thinking about long term sacrifice and we always talk about long-term and short-term time preference here. But if you don't see a future for yourself, if you are not sacrificing anything today for a better tomorrow, it undermines everything.

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I also want to tell you about cheat code. On April the 11th to the 13th, we're going to be going to be. be back in Bedford and we have an amazing lineup of speakers including XPM Liz Truss, Preston Pish, Alex Gladstein, Nat Brunel, James Lavish and so many more. We then have a football day where we'll hopefully see Rail Bedford win the league again. Last year was amazing. This year is going to be better, but tickets will sell out for this. So if you want to come, head over to cheatcode.combe and grab a ticket. And that's the nihilism that is so prevalent now. And I truly believe that is why meme coins exist. It's a pure play on nihilism. Like it's like if you have no future aspirations,

you can't plan for the future, you may as well punt on dog with hat or whatever the fuck. Like, because what else are you going to do? It's like that or nothing. You're eating the same, if you lose everything on it, you're in the same place anyway. Yeah, it's just raw speculation. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's like, it's like gambling as well. It's like the lottery. It's like, why do people play the lottery? Million to one or more. 10 million to one or 100 million to one I might win a million a million pounds I know it's not going to happen but it's the only way I can make that leap to something to something new because work doesn't pay and when it when all of society starts to when different aspects of society

and I'm thinking more generations here start getting severely negatively because of the money printer, you start to see accelerating corrosion in everything. Yeah. We're, you know, I worry for my children, I've got two teenage girls, I worry what's going to happen in 10 years' time. They're not going to be able to have a job,

have a family, have somewhere to live. You have to end up making choices, and you have to have to be able to have a job, to sacrifice what you shouldn't have to sacrifice. And it's all because of the money printer. It just distorts everything. And it's these second and third order consequences that people recognize in their own lives.

They recognize these decisions, the tradeoffs they're having to make. Look, it's unusual now to have children in your 20s. Very, very. It's bonkers. It's bonkers. People put it off and put it off and put it off and now it's late 30s or even 40s and you wonder why we have fewer children

people struggle to have children because it's not it's not the timing that we were evolutionary supposed to be having children but again it's a it's a function of the money that you wouldn't think you wouldn't look at that and go well you obviously it's the money yeah like you've got to go back to the start and think about a then b then c then d okay now i understand why that is the case and and when you have somebody controls the big red button who realizes they have exorbitant benefit of owning and having the only access to the big red button they tend not to explain the consequences to the population it's much easier to say it's because of this or it's because of that or it's the red team or it's the blue team and so

If we just bomb the Middle East, it'll be all right. I mean, pretty, pretty much. Yeah. Pretty much. And, you know, there is, you know, as much as we like this flowchap, there's a second flowchat in there, which touches on those sorts of things. And, you know, having access to the money printer allows you to do things you would never be able to do ordinarily. Yeah. And what happens over time is that, and we'll skip ahead through this over time, as you press that big red button and all these consequences flow downstream and everything gets distorted everyone's individual decision making all of these things get distorted and you get

a population which thinks that inflation is normal is the natural state of the world it allows you infinite access to just continue the same game but because society begins to corrode and some people do have critical thinking ability and they start to piece things together say well this isn't right something is wrong here, you begin to have a society which becomes more politically unstable, especially when it comes to information sharing. Because you and I having this conversation here, we realize something is wrong. And the people listening also realize something is wrong. And if they didn't before, they hopefully do now.

Well, they'll definitely have realized something's wrong. And that's why I really wanted to make sure this show is super beginner-friendly because I want people to understand what that thing is. And like you say, understanding the second and third order consequences of money printing isn't straightforward. Like you really do have to do the thinking on this, which is why I think this presentation is so good. Yeah. And so maybe if I skip ahead a little bit. So we've got to break down the nuclear family declining of birth rates. But then what happens when you have the declining of the birth rates?

Is the pension system collapses. So you have the government, I keep switching between feet. Tillo and the real world because this is effectively just the real world. But when you have a social security system where people have paid in over a long period of time, a proportion of their salary that goes to the government, instead of being necessarily set aside, it just goes into the big pot and is spent on everything else and it just accrues a big liability that the government will have to pay at some point in time. Yeah. The bill hasn't come due. It means that you, a bill, have a series of buildup of expectations.

for a population. So when people have paid into a system for 30 or 40 years, they expect to be able to retire at a certain age and have a certain quality of life. And then that age keeps getting pushed back and push back and push back. Of course it does. And the reason it does is because the population demographics change. When you corrove the money, when you inflate the assets,

when you undermine the population's affordability, they have to make choices and they choose to have fewer children yeah and you've got less good worker bees propping up the system and you have low fewer people coming through who don't own the assets yeah have less optimism optimism for the future because there is no path to ever owning assets to ever having children to ever having a family so they don't focus on the future they don't focus on um sacrificing today for long-term good they they start to think about well i'll go on that holiday I'll go and live my best life. I'll go and post some photos at Instagram

rather than thinking about long-term contributions. And so the equation doesn't work anymore. So I'm going to pay all this money to all these people who are retiring and there's not enough people coming through and they're not contributing enough to keep the Ponzi scheme going. And you're like, something has to give.

And it has to give either. Well, I push back the retirement age for people. So now it's not. 65, it's 70, whatever. And I don't think we'll ever get to retire, just to be clear. Or we might because of Bitcoin, but... I've lost all mine. I don't know about you.

Yeah, yeah. But see, push back the retirement age, or you undermine the quality of the effective purchasing power of what you promised to deliver. Meaning you print the money, and they get the same denominated amount of money, but it buys them far less. Yeah. So if I promise to pay you a thousand pounds a year or a hundred, let's say a thousand pound a month, I would say as part of some sort of pension, then if I double the amount of money supply between now and then I still get to pay you a thousand pound a month. That's a great deal for me. Yeah. You buy half the amount, but I can now say I delivered on. I delivered on the promise. Yeah. Even though I've printed more money. And that is really what is going to happen. It's what happens. It's what's happening. And what's happening. And what. What's happening. And what. will happen and so retirement age would get pushed back the money will be printed you'll be

paid up nominally and then you also get taxed on it yeah and it's the only way it's the only way and so you get the demographics decline we've talked about the people who can't people who can't see a future in owning assets if you were stuck renting they start to focus more on today not tomorrow because they can't plan for the future people who are worse off you start to see arise in sort of self-destructive behavior, drug addiction, you know, aggressive lifestyles, these sorts of things, which leads to a health crisis. And all of it just leads to a mental health crisis. And all of these things just put more pressure on the government.

And the government has to then spend more money trying to address these things, allocates more capital back into the market, distorted the price signals. And then between the misallocation of capital or the increased leverage, in the banking system something goes wrong and then Vietelho's stuck he's like okay well how do i solve this oh i've got a big red button i'm gonna hit it until my fingers bleed i'll just press the big red button again i'll print some extra money to paper over the cracks and then the cycle repeats yeah and this thing just goes and worse and worse it just goes round and round because once you press it once you've started the ball the ball rolling and he's not prepared to take the medicine

no politicians are prepared to take the medicine and this is this is one of the challenges we have with with governance structure when you have a big red button is that you can always just press it and then hand it off to the next guy yeah and then point the finger at him for for all the issues that you helped contribute to yeah but no one ever takes well i'm saying no one ever It has to get really bad for the population to wake up sufficiently to what is happening, to then want to vote for the pain. There's no politician, as we can see from that original choice between Satoshi and Fiatello, no politician wants to raise taxes and cut spending unless they really have to.

We've seen it here in the UK with austerity, like how politically unpopular is that? Exactly. But it's politically unpopular in large part because people don't realize the problem, the cause and effect chain. Yeah. They don't realize what the issue was. They just see it as the red team versus the blue team. And it's finger pointing and it's, it's, you know, we need to tax the rich or this. It's not a, this whole thing is not an us versus them issue within society.

it's a everyone versus the central bank issue. So this whole thing has been laying out the problem. I know you didn't really talk about Bitcoin very much in the presentation. You kind of just said, come to me if you want to learn about it. But what's the solution? The solution is separation of money and state. It's the only solution. If Fiatello has access to a big red button, he will press it.

There will be a set of circumstances that will either be occur naturally or be engineered for him to press it. And so you can't give anybody that temptation. There is no world where somebody should be able to create for free what you have to work for. And that shouldn't be a controversial statement. I think everybody on a human level should be able to agree with that. And the beauty is now there's a way of opting out of that system with Bitcoin.

And in your story, you talk, about this decline on Fiatela side of the island and the wall starts to deteriorate. Yeah. Do you want to take it from there? Yeah. So a passage of time, the wall starts cracking and for the very first time they can start communicating with each other. And on the Fiatela side of the island, the population is in a situation like we find ourselves today. prices going up quality going down less and less freedom more and more government intervention in every aspect of our lives you know we didn't touch on the second flow chart here was increased regulations effective effective capture of the media

egregious defensive defense spend creation of forever wars all of these things that we see around us today, they're all happening on the Fiatelho side. So Fiatelho side of the island is basically just today. The wall cracks and they get to see through to the other side where prices are falling and qualities going up. And where the Satoshi side of the island, the population retains their purchasing power over time. And so they look at their money and they've got these Fiatosos that's losing 7% a year in purchasing power 10% year. And they look across the wall and these fiatelos are going up in purchasing power 3% a year. Well hang on, fiatelosso's got access to pick for a button.

You can just print more whenever he wants. And Satoshi doesn't. I don't want these fears. I don't want these fears. Why would I want to save in these fiatelos? Of course I wouldn't want the fear tellers. So the people start selling their fiatelos to buy Satoshis. And then what happens?

The price, the effective exchange. between the two begins to collapse. Nobody wants the Fiatelos and the Sattoshi's become more valuable. Fiatelho starts to see a drain in the capital from his side of the island to Sotoshi. But that's money and its people because the most productive people, the most mobile people, see the other side of the wall like Eastern West Berlin. When he's to West Berlin, when the wall comes down, which side of the war do I really want to be on? And so he sees this exodus of people selling Fiatelho's device,

but also losing the most productive people in society, which exacerbates the issue zero already has. And so he has to just hit the big red button again. So he prints more money, prints more money, but there's a leak in the system. Printing money doesn't solve it. makes it leak out the system faster. So he has to change something else.

And he changes the censorship resistant nature of the money. So instead of people being able to transact with each other freely and hold the money themselves, he says, right, now you've got to all put it in the banks. And the banks will look after you and will protect your money. Keep you safe. Always keep you safe. Always keep you safe.

Stop funding. Make sure people aren't funding terrorists or to prevent money laundering or fraud or any of these things, to keep you safe. And now everyone's forced to put the fear tellers in the bank, and now the banking sector becomes very tight. Whenever you want to make, whenever the people on the feateller side want to make a transaction, buy anything, the bank then has to effectively approve it.

They want to buy X, the bank says yes or no. Y, yes or no. They want to buy Satoshi's, sorry, declined. he puts capital controls either explicit and says you can't buy fiatale can't buy sotoshis or implicit and he calls the banks up and says no one's allowed to buy sotoshes or you're only allowed to buy x amount of sotashis periodically if you jump through lots of hoops which is happening everywhere happening here in england happening in australia exactly exactly and again this is just exactly what we see today we see today when you have a system which is dying and people realize it's dying

and you have an escape route into something that nobody can print people use the escape route it's like what le guard said you know if there's a if there's a if there's an exit from the system people will use it you people wouldn't need to exit the system if the system was working. Yeah. And so they try and block the exits. This is exactly what's happening. Exactly what's happening.

And from there, he changes the censorship-resistant nature of it. And so he's corrupted the ability to print money. And he can print as much as he wants. And he's prevented people from exiting the system. So they're trapped using Fyatello's. Which means over time, there's only a handful of possible outcomes. And all of them are very negative for the population. And so the first one is he'll end up just stealing all the money

because he can just print as much as he wants and your share of the pie gets smaller and smaller and smaller. You'll end up having more Fiatelos. But those Fiatelos won't buy anything. And then you end up with sustained inflation, bordering on hyperinflation. Yeah. You'll have asset seizures.

Now that all the Fiatos are in the bank, at some point, he'll reflect and say, well, this course is unsustainable. We're in a bad situation. I cannot balance the books because of the pension crisis, because of whatever, because of that foreign war or that foreign dictator, we're in some crisis, but we're all in it together. And now that all the money's in the banking system,

I'm going to take half of everyone's fear tellows for the government, for the greater good. right to balance the books but temporarily so there'll be asset seizures and that may sound far-fetched but we see this all the time lots of countries have had this in the past the u.s had this they probably they wouldn't termin an asset seizure but when you make gold illegal and you force everybody to hand it in and then you devalue the gold that's that's asset seizure and that this was 40 years in the u.s you just don't talk about it these days from the 30s to the 70s or you had cyprus in 2013 where they just bailed the population in.

This happens and will happen. That's when everyone in the population just took a haircut. If you had over 100,000 euros in the bank, you lost 45% overnight to the government. And that's why they now just keep all the money under the mattress. But even keeping the money under the mattress is hard. Because some countries it's harder than others. The US is slightly better on this.

But you think about in the UK, every time we have a new monarch, we get new paper. you put money under the mattress yeah it might be good for 10 years 15 years and then what do you do yeah you've got to go and take it back to the bank and ask for new notes like there's no way there's no way to be outside the banking system

so what do you do if you buy gold okay then see what you keep your gold at home what if you've got a bit too much gold then you're worried that someone's going to break in okay so what do you do I need to put some security around this gold I'm not a security expert so what do you do

do you think oh come put it in a gold vault we'll put all our gold together in a gold vault somebody will protect it it'll cost us it's fine the bank have safety deposit boxes yeah well you can do that as well but then but you're still giving it back to the bank is the point you're giving a piece of paper yeah piece of paper says you won't gold don't gold anymore all it takes is another um 1930s order from the u.s to confiscate all the gold and it's gone yeah you don't own it you don't own it so what do you do you oh well it takes is another um buy some property okay I'll buy the property but then there's council tax stuck to the ground the government if you say something the government doesn't like you do something the government

doesn't like or the government says uh because we're all in it together if you own a second home you now have to give that to the government you have no protection against that whatsoever yeah no protection so it's not really yours plus they can change the rules in america you have to pay a property taxes every year despite having already bought the house on top of, you know, cancel tax and these sorts of things. You don't really own it. You don't really own it. You can't protect it. And so you go through this chain of thinking. It's like, well, where do you end up? What is it you can actually own? It's Bitcoin. It's the only thing. It's the only thing you can actually own. You can take ownership yourself. Nobody can take it off.

you unless you choose to give it to them. No one can prove you still have access to it. Mm-hmm. You can send it to anybody in the world, wherever, without anyone's permission, anybody can send it to you. And you can move at the speed of light. You can carry it in your head.

It's the only thing you can own. And so when the system is dying, people start exploring these routes of trying to store their value and escape the system. None of the other things escape the system. the gold and the gold vault will get seized. The properties will get taxed and then seized. Everything, even the stock market,

you own a promise on a promise on a promise. You don't even know. Those shares may not have even settled. They're in a different institution. Like it's a total mess. It's a total mess, but it's stacked on promises. And again, it's you own it with the permission of the government, with the permission of your stock broker,

with the permission of your, every layer in the chain. you don't really own it. The only thing you can actually own is Bitcoin. And so when you start to realize what's happening with the system, you go down this chain of thinking, there's only one outcome. And everybody's going to get there. It's you've got to own Bitcoin.

You are not wealthy if you require permission. And everything requires permission, apart from Bitcoin. And you can see that the world is starting to wake up to this. Is the world waking up to it slower than you imagined? That's a very hard question to answer because it's very, it's very subjective, but I would say no, because it feels like we've catapulted to a new position in the last, since November, in the US. we're at this point in time where a sufficient number of people in positions of or decision making have started to put two and two together and this is being driven from the US and I would draw

massive distinction here between the US and the UK and Europe totally totally completely where the US realizes the current path is unsustainable, but they're in the best seat possible, and they can force. Because they have the biggest of the big red buttons. Well, for multiple reasons, they have the master big red button. Yeah.

Because we have a US dollar-centric financial system. And the US dollar is the reserve currency. but they've shot themselves in the foot. What do you mean with Russia? Yeah. When you have, and we're digressing now. That's okay. We can digress.

Yeah. When you have a world where the dollar is the center of the universe, and people use that as a store of value against their own currencies instead of gold or as well as gold. And then you undermine the quality of that store of value. you've shot yourself in the film. If people cannot rely on their ability to use that at any point in time because you invalidate it

when you don't like what they do, it means people won't want to hold it anymore. Totally. And we've seen central banks around the world start stacking way more gold because they're worried about sanctions. And so is the US now, to bring it back to your story,

is that like the equivalent of Fiatello seeing things go wrong, and then looking to bring Satoshi's into it. Yeah, that's a very good question. So when you're thinking about the four outcomes there, we talked about inflation, hyperinflation, we talked about asset seizures. The third one is political extremism.

Yeah. And I talk about communism here because the people who have access to the big red button don't explain to the population where the inflation came from. Yeah. Right. They point at the businessman or inequality.

You know, they put people like Gary Stevenson on there. He's definitely a s-i-up. All over media to try and inject, try and distract people from what the actual cause is. Yeah. Or you have war, which resets everything. It's one of those four options. Like, they're the only options on the table unless you make an active decision to work with Satoshi. It's take your pick of those four.

And different countries are at different stages there. And the UK and Europe are drifting dangerously close to the communism peace, socialism, communism. The only way out is to work with Satoshi. And that's the direction the US are going in. But people, I don't think people have put two and two together on the global stage yet. And I'll add a bit more context, a bit more context to this. So with the US, firstly, Bitcoin is the last election in the US is the first election where Bitcoin, brackets, crypto has been a major talking point. And just like you can't fight Bitcoin, you can't fight Bitcoin politically because it's such an asymmetric risk reward.

Like you had, the Democrats go with their anti-crypto army does not win you any votes. You do not have probably more than a handful of people who are a one-issue voter anti-Bitcoin. Bitcoiners tend to be a single-issue. Single-issue voter. So if you come out and say, I'm pro-Bitcoin or I'm anti-Bitcoin, you win 100% the votes. You win this big section of votes, you don't win anything. Yeah. Because it's that in combination with a bunch of other stuff.

So from a risk-reward perspective, it was stupidity from the Democrats. Forget what they were doing for the last four years. We're trying to kill it by the banking system and all these things. But that's set the stage now for how you run elections in the future. For every other country, you're either pro-Bitcoin or you're going to lose votes. And if you're pro-Bitcoin, you've got this one issue. votes are set, which is ever growing, ever wealthier, will fund you, will help you win more votes. It's such a no-brainer. So what does that then mean? It means if you want to get elected,

you've got to be pro-bitcoin. Just the US with the cycles has gone first. The US is now in this prime position where it's already the center of the financial system. It gets to set the rules for what the next version of this looks like. And against that, it already has the biggest amount of Bitcoin of any country in the world. Apart for maybe China. Well, we don't necessarily know about China, but it's neck and neck. Yeah. It's neck and neck and neck and neck.

But, you know, we've seen the tables and it's slightly above, but who knows? But they're so far above everybody else. Yeah. And then if you, if you recognize Bitcoin for what it is, it's the only thing you can own. It is what is going to demonetize housing, real estate. All of these other assets. which have asset classes, which have become a store of value.

Yeah. As we talked about because of the money printer, not because they're productive assets, they will be demonetized into Bitcoin over time. And if you are already number one and you get to set the rules for the next stage, it becomes very clear what you do. And within the US administration, surrounding the US administration,

there are a lot of bitcoins, a lot of very smart people. They're very smart business people and a lot of Bitcoin And with Trump coming out and having given the order for the strategic reserve, you know, the market sold off a little bit. And I don't talk about price because it's, it's, it's going to zero. But the market took that sort of, there's a rally into it and then prop is a little bit disappointed. But I think they've got it wrong because I think some of the, the negative sentiment was because it didn't say we're going to start buying now or we're buying X amount. But the wording is amazing because the wording it says, and I haven't got it in front

to me, I'm going to paraphrase it. It's, I'm going to permission the Treasury Secretary to pursue strategies to accumulate Bitcoin as long as it doesn't cost the taxpayer any money and it's budget neutral. Yep. Which means that's effectively a blank check if you do it right. And so you have that, you have that come out and then. Well, Larry's dulcet tone of snoring in the background. It's been a long journey for Larry.

And then you have this wording which effectively gives you a blank check. you then have a position where you are already number one you are the home of capitalism freedom you have the biggest u.s corporate entity the biggest corporate entity globally that owns bitcoin two and a half times the amount the government owns is a u.s corporation yeah you have the perfect backdrop here to squeeze the rest of the world and to cement your position for the next 100, 200, however many hundred years with Bitcoin. And so you have Senator Loomis' bill,

which is a million Bitcoin over five years. You had the Bitcoin Policy Institute presentation day just a couple of weeks ago, where you had Saylor, Michael Saylor come on. with Senator Loomis next to him and talk about how important Bitcoin is. He talks about the path of using Bitcoin to defase the national debt. As we talked about, it's the only way, it's the only way out. Otherwise, you have to use the money printer and destroy everything.

You can defuse the national debt in dollar terms just by buying this one million Bitcoin. But you already own. you already own 1% of all the Bitcoin supply anyway. So by doing that, it's going to drive the price up. Nobody will then be able to surpass you. He then goes to talk about Bitcoin being a national security issue. Because the US cannot afford not to be number one here. You already are the central financial system.

You cannot give anybody any route to usurping you. So even if you don't believe that Bitcoin, is going to be the pristine cholesterol that underpins the entire financial system into the future. You can't take the risk that it might be. Yeah. You can't take the risk that China might get there, especially when you're forcing all the other countries to find payments technology that is beyond your reach, which is Bitcoin. You're forcing them to Bitcoin, which means you have to move first. You have to be number one, even if you're not convinced about it.

It's a national security issue for you. And it's national security issue for everybody. And so you own 1% the supply. You're going to buy a million. It's a national security issue. You have an order which says you can buy as much you want as long as it's budget neutral. And then you have Andrew Hone step up. He's brilliant.

He's fantastic. Step up after Sailor with the 10 minute. Bitcoin bonds. Bitcoin bonds thought experiment. And for those who haven't seen it, it is, I would recommend watching the 10 minutes because it's superb. But the essence is Bitcoin is a route to solve the national debt in the US. And you can do that through the issue of 10-year bonds of 2 trillion, where 10% of that

goes to Bitcoin. So 200 billion for Bitcoin. By issuing two trillion of debt, you issue it at 1% yield, not 4.5% yield. And you think, well, why would anyone buy debt of the US make a print as much they want at 1% or 4.5%? It's because 10% of it goes to Bitcoin. And by buying that debt, you get the full participation of Bitcoin growth over those 10 years up to 4.5% of percent compounded for your equivalent coupon of the debt and then any price appreciation above that you share it with the US government yeah and so if the US issued this they would cut their debt service costs by over 75 percent that's crazy yeah which would save 500 billion they've only spent 200 billion on the Bitcoin so when I look at that wording

We can buy Bitcoin if it doesn't cost the taxpayer any money and it's budget neutral. Okay, so we'll issue these bonds for 10 years. That gives us $200 billion of buying power on top of Senator Loomis's million, on top of the Bitcoin we already own. And by doing that, we save $300 billion. Checks wording. Oh, we can buy Bitcoin with that as well. Seems like a no-brainer.

It seems like a no-brainer. And so if you think about Bitcoin price where it is now, and you say you could spend that amount of money on Bitcoin, that would buy about 7 million Bitcoin. It won't. It won't. But it gives you the sense of stacking, stacking of ammunition here that the US is lining up to pull the trigger. And it's this, the lining couple of ducks, right, they're already number one. And if you pull the trigger on this, you force the rest of the world to follow you. Because you can't buy a million Bitcoin without dramatically impacting the price.

And that million Bitcoin is not seven million Bitcoin. Yeah. Right. And the more the price goes up, the more, if you issue those bonds, the more value you're accruing to recapitalize the US, the faster you clear the national debt. And at the same time, you're forcing all your competitors to follow suit and buy the asset you're already number one in.

It's lining up here to be the greatest trade ever, and it's a one-way trade. And the rest of the world is fast asleep. So maybe this is, well, the rest of the world is fast asleep. And like the UK have quite a lot of Bitcoin. I think they have over 60,000 Bitcoin. I'm terrified that they're going to completely fuck this up. Same. Same. You know, there's a small group of us in the UK

who are trying to keep trying to knock on doors and windows and trying to wake people up. There is through sheer look, the UK is positioned here in a way where we actually might be all right as long as we don't do something silly. Like Germany. Like Germany. We're going to sell all our Bitcoin. and pour it into the big black hole, big black socialist black hole. Yeah. That's the, I say that's the first risk.

The second risk is I'm not convinced we have the keys. Oh, interesting. So, that would be an incredible fuck up. It would, but I wouldn't put it past us. Yeah. But this should be, this should be a national security issue. Yeah. For every country in the world right now because, you know,

With the financial upheaval that we've seen over the last few days with changes in the tariffs, the global order is changing. Oh, it's changing so fast. And if you zoom out and you just look at the pieces that are getting lined up on the board, there's a very clear bet. There's a path here for the US to cement its leadership

and leave everybody else in the dust. And if this is not being discussed in the halls of power, in the UK and further afield, then somebody has massively dropped the ball. I'm pretty sure it's not being talked about. Yeah. Not being talked about. And interestingly enough, like one of the,

one of the really nice things about the video, putting the video out is that lots of people have been in touch. And I got to have lots of conversations. Quite often people who want to learn about Bitcoin. Yeah. Because then they have a frame of reference and have like, okay, I understand what this thing is. I understand why it's important,

but I don't understand what it is. Yeah, like, can you help and just talk to us about it? So I was in, I won't mention any names. So I was invited to a European city last couple of weeks ago from a by a small group of people who are from various European countries, ex-politics and security services and things like. People who think about the bigger picture to talk about big. And I went there and I laid this out to them as we're talking about it, talking about it now,

helping to understand you really have these three corners of adoption and one is the individuals and the individuals they consider, you know, Bitcoin is it's, Bitcoin fixes everything. It's not just money, it fixes everything. That is where you get to as the individual. And for the companies, you know, individuals run companies and those companies, you know, it's not necessarily Bitcoin fixes everything. It's Bitcoin is digital gold. It's the scarcest asset.

Everyone's going to buy it. And we can drive a lot of shareholder value by engaging with this early and in size, which is what, you know, what strategy are, strategy are doing. And then the third one is countries and individuals run countries

and companies influence countries. And so you've got these three sides of the triangle that are adopting Bitcoin at different rates. But you've leapt from a situation of bottom-up adoption through like this, a jump to one company here, one company there, jumped right to the top of the pyramid by capturing the US government. Yeah. The US administration. By doing so, if they... Everyone has to pay attention now. Everybody has to pay attention, but more than that, it cements Bitcoin if they do their bitbonds

or if they incorporate Bitcoin at all into an actual national strategic reserve in terms of acquiring. It's already there, but Bitbonds would be their checkmate move here. It would cement Bitcoin as being American. and therefore if at any point in the future for someone to be anti-Bitcoin would be anti-American. I don't know if I love that. No, but from a US, from a US politics perspective, US politics, if your debt is linked to Bitcoin. Yeah. As a politician, you cannot be going out and talking badly about Bitcoin because you're undermining the national debt and you are being anti-American.

But more than that, the aspect of Bitcoin, Bitcoins that I didn't mention was Andrew Hoeyn, a proposal that this be bought by American families have you made tax-free. Yes. Which is the icing on the cake because... Then you're against the average American as well. What, you're anti-American and your anti-family. Yeah. That's not going to work.

Yeah. So you've cemented the US, legitimized Bitcoin as the next major asset in the US. Yeah. You've legitimized it for the entire nation. And you've effectively cemented in the triangle now. And it forces everybody else to react. So we've sort of crossed that, crossed, crossing that Rubicon here with Bitcoin adoption where you could go from the gradually, gradually to the suddenly.

Because everybody is forced, especially in a world where the financial system and the monetary order is already in upheaval. Yeah. And somebody has the wild card that they can put on the table at any point in time and change the rules. completely that's where we are and so trying to you know give these europeists that broader context to be like you guys need to learn about bitcoin you need to learn about it now right because otherwise you're going to get hit in the face with this um there is just such a massive gulf between where europe where uk is and where it needs to be um well keep doing that work We're going to have to end it there.

I've massively appreciated it. I've got to wake Larry up and do it. No, snoring. But I really appreciate that. I think the video is amazing. I think the show is amazing. I'm looking forward to hearing how you're going to distill this into 18 minutes at cheat code.

Yeah, I've still yet to figure that out. So we'll see how that goes. But that was brilliant. Thank you. Where do you want to send anyone before we close? Oh, well, I would say go to sats versus fiat. dot com the I would say it just take 30 seconds yeah of course thank you to all the bitcoins around the world who have got in touch and volunteered and helped us take

the video and make it into a set of materials that is open to absolutely everybody so at sats versus fiat.com we have all the slides all the speaker notes the transcript in about 25 languages amazing all done by volunteers around the world the YouTube video has 40 plus native language translation subtitles available so even if the materials the slides aren't available you can watch a video in your native subtitles and we've released now four or five remakes of the video in native languages love that so it's there in Spanish German French Polish and Slovak and we've lots of motivated bitcoins from different different corners of the world and

And so the videos are all on the same YouTube channel, same handle at Satts versus Fiat. It's the same video, someone speaking French and all the slides in French. So you can share it with your family and friends everywhere. The idea being if everybody sees this video, everybody understands the problem. Everyone has it explains to them. Connect the dots. We can get everyone to the starting line. And once you're at the starting line, we know where you ultimately end up.

Yeah. And so hopefully it's a tool. for every bitcoins is just the first thing they can send to people and then once you once they once your friends has watched this they'll say can you send me something else and then you send them anyone who's Portuguese listening reach out to Joe absolutely we've got another four or five languages in in flight for the video and Portuguese is one of them but please reach out because the more volunteers they have we have the quicker we can make this happen amazing thank you Joe well thank you for having me Danny it's it's a it's a

another thing to have checked off my list to be on what Bitcoin did. So thank you ever so much. No, thank you.