Strategy was the demand side of the Bitcoin story for five or six years.
It was the Saylor era.
And now vulnerabilities in the strategy have been exposed.
Hedge funds are after them.
Right? They've got, what, 600 and something thousand Bitcoin.
OK, so let's choke this company so that they've got to cough up some of that Bitcoin, which they're now doing.
Do you think Saylor's been a net positive for Bitcoin?
He has said a couple of things that go against the ethos of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is going through kind of like reverse archaeology.
It got to the Wall Street pocket of money.
Anyone in that band of financialization went through the exact same learning curve as everyone in the previous ages of Bitcoin.
So the suit coiners essentially recreated the ICO market.
I do a lot of the AI policy in El Salvador.
And the AI community is way more cypherpunk than a lot of the Bitcoin community.
What do you think is going to be the most misunderstood part of what has happened in El Salvador?
The idea where El Salvador has gone through the fourth turning and is the first country in the world to start up into the first turning.
Max and Stacey, Stacey and Max, it's good to have you guys here.
it's been been a little while since we've seen each other in the flesh i feel like the last time
was el salvador but now i'm not now i'm not actually sure that the years are running together
for me now and time moves strangely in bitcoin uh in the bitcoin universe i think but it's good
to see you guys yes it's good to see you too and i'm not sure where we saw each other but
you know it was definitely at a bitcoin conference i could probably guarantee you that i think it was
Backstage in Nashville or Vegas?
That sounds right.
Wouldn't have been Vegas.
We got nixed from the MC slots for Vegas.
No hard feelings whatsoever.
I think they wanted perhaps somebody a little bit less inflammatory.
Who can say?
But no hard feelings whatsoever.
Honestly, emceeing is so much darn work that it's nice to be just an attendee
or a speaker.
Like it's a, it's a welcome change, but yeah, it's, we were just talking backstage.
Carl and I have, the first time we went to El Salvador was 2022.
We actually, we had a, saw you guys while we were there.
I remember had a, had a lovely dinner.
Archie was there as well when he was still a full nim.
Yeah.
Just good times.
It's wild that that's been four years.
Cause last time we went back to El Salvador was, I guess it was start of last year.
We weren't able to go this year.
And even just after a couple of years, it's amazing to me how much changed.
Like you could already feel it when we were there in 2022.
You could feel that there was something happening.
And then going back there again a few years later, and we've been there three times now,
two were in the same first year, months apart, because we apparently couldn't stay away.
But it's kind of incredible.
And it's one of the things I want to focus on with you guys a bit today,
because it seems that in so much of the world, there's a lot of nihilism.
There's a lot of despair.
There's a dearth of hope.
And it seems like El Salvador sort of has those things in plentiful supply right now.
And maybe just as like a starting point,
because I think there's a lot of misunderstandings about what's happening in El Salvador,
what has been happening, what will be happening.
It's kind of like when the history books are written, so to speak,
What do you think is going to be the most misunderstood part of what has happened in El Salvador?
Well, just first of all, as we were talking briefly before air, the idea where El Salvador has gone through the fourth turning and is the first country in the world to start up into the first turning is true.
It's palpable. We've been talking about this for a couple of years.
You know, El Salvador had 40 years of bad times and that civil war, gang war.
And then the president, McKellie, arrives in 2019 and strongmen create good times.
So that's important to note.
And now El Salvador has become the shining city on the hill.
It's become the beacon of freedom.
It's taken the place of countries, let's say, like the United States,
that were the go-to country for people seeking freedom and free speech and opportunity.
That country is now El Salvador.
And so we're seeing it in the migration.
We're seeing it in the GDP, which is now exploding higher.
We're seeing it in culture.
All kinds of cultural phenomenon are happening where the generation Bukele,
which have been the beneficiary of the education programs that Stacy has architected,
like Kubo Plus and Kubo AI and others.
Now they're second, third generation years in these programs.
And the students are now teaching the new coterie of the new students.
So it has a compounding effect. And so this generation in El Salvador is wildly hopeful, wildly optimistic. And that message is being broadcast all over the world, right?
The history of the world is but the biography of great men. Right?
Amen.
And that is what you're seeing right now. El Salvador is in the headlines because of President Bukele. El Salvador would not be in the headlines as it were today were it not for President Bukele.
It was the only headlines that had ever made before President Bukele was for massive corruption, massive violence.
When you met us in El Salvador four years ago, it was before the war against the gangs had started, I think.
And I'm sure after maybe or like, yeah, it was very, very soon.
I think it was literally just after he had made some of the initial moves, which was fresh.
It was very fresh.
But nevertheless, when you came to El Salvador four years ago or even three years ago, if you had Googled El Salvador.
Well, it would have been very scary.
The Google results were don't go.
Basically, it's the most dangerous place on Earth.
Homicide capital of the world.
You know, horrible things.
Now, you know, go Google it like you don't see that anymore. Right. Like you see a country transformed by President Bukele. So that's the fourth turning. I mean, of course, coming out of the fourth turning into the first turning is great men is like that's when they appear. Right. Right. When they're needed.
that cometh the hour cometh the man like all these great men always arrive when the world when
humans need them and that's partly because um you know it's the hard times that create the strong men
and the strong men are arrived to create the good times so he comes out of you know he was born into
a civil war in El Salvador, followed by the gang war, you know, the gang occupation.
So those hard times in El Salvador for 40 years, which is about one of these cycles, right?
They created a strong man. And, you know, it wasn't those hard times, his parents,
His wisdom taught to him by his parents and his own character, you know, made him a great man of history.
I think, you know, 500 years from now, they'll still speak his name.
It is wild because exactly what you mentioned in terms of like searching for just whatever you could find about El Salvador before we went.
Like we did that and we had like friends and family asking us, like, are you guys sure you should be going there?
like yeah and we were like no no it was and this was still early in this like right on the heels of
in making these initial moves but we were like no no it was the murder capital of the world but it's
okay now like there's a new guy you know there's a new a new sheriff in town so to speak and he's
he's run this incredible campaign to actually get the gang you know call it crazy like enforce the
law like you know you know i mean like this wild concept where you put violent criminals behind
bars which is apparently and like this is the crazy contrast that i think anybody who is paying
attention sees right now it's like okay there are plenty of people who may have issues with
bukele for whatever reason i don't know if they're always the most well thought out probably some
plenty of legitimate you know uh legitimate grievances too i'm not here to you know whatever
My point being, I don't know how you can look at what has happened in El Salvador.
And then contrast that to what is happening in most other places in the so-called developed world where the law is not being enforced, where violent criminals are allowed to return to the streets to commit violent crimes again and again and again.
I mean, how many cases of this in America have we seen just recently where it's like, oh, yeah, this was his 67th arrest.
And you're like, why was he on the street?
What are you talking about?
This is insane. Like we know that a very small percentage of the population commits a disproportionate amount of the violent crime.
When you put those people away and deal with them and enforce the law, that problem just like magically goes away.
But apparently this is like somehow an unpalatable thing for a lot of folks in the, again, so-called developed world to admit.
And it's like, why is that?
How have we gotten to the point where it's a controversial thing to say violent criminals should go to jail and the law should be enforced?
How can we have gotten to a place in society where that is the case?
Well, look, I mean, you talk about following the law.
The reason why crime-ridden cities in America are the way that they are is because the people there are following the law.
And the law allows for recidivism.
It allows for these repeat offenders to go in and out of the system.
The courts are not effective. And there's constant lobbying by certain elements in the political class who seem to favor a society that is functioning under the rubric of total chaos.
chaos. And in El Salvador, it was the president's decision to understand that El Salvador was
essentially a failed state. Every single institution in the country had failed. The court
system, the judicial system, the police, the press, it was all one big failure, except for,
I guess you could say, the military was still in pretty good shape. So he took it upon himself to
exercise and go after not just picking a few criminals here and there. He decided to eliminate
the entire gang class, the entire 80,000 gang members in the country who were terrorizing the
population and had taken over the entire country. And in so doing, unleashed an unbelievable
rebirth and renaissance by getting rid of this gangocracy that was essentially ruling the country.
And he did so very strategically. I'm sure the story will come out how he was able to eradicate
the gangs by very savvy and strategic methodologies. And it's a fascinating story.
And so that's part of what we're talking about here is that there's got to be a will of the people and the political class to eradicate themselves from an overlord, violent criminal class that's ruling.
Yeah. Yeah. So I am going to go further into that point that you've just made there. But first, I want to tell all the people out in Nostra watching this that the truth is, I believe that Walker has a filter on this because I see he looks super tan and we look super white.
So I don't know what's up.
I spend a lot of time in my garden I spend a lot of time in my garden Yeah we working even though we live right near the equator Right now we actually in North Carolina So you know we not we not in El Salvador at the moment
That's why I have to wear my El Salvador cap to remember where I come from.
But the what Max is also pointing out there is ties into what you were talking about, the nihilism,
because when plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society,
over the course of time, they create for themselves a legal system that justifies it
and a moral code that glorifies it.
Now, that is Frédéric Bastiat, the great French statesman,
who wrote in that essay, The Law, and argued that the only purpose for our government,
the only legitimate reason for a government is to protect life, liberty, and property.
Now, so a government exists only legitimately to protect life, liberty, and property because each
human has the right to life, liberty, and property. In the U.S. Constitution, we said
pursuit of happiness instead of property. There's a long story behind that, how they're kind of the
same thing. Now, think of that nihilism that has undermined society for the past 40, 50 years.
Well, 50 years, let's say since the beginning of the U.S. dollar system, all fiat system.
It is, they've created for ourselves like a moral code that glorifies the plunder that's going on.
by the government without doing any of the basic function that the only one purpose for the
government is to, for the people collectively, as your human rights, you gather together as a society
to protect yourselves, your life, liberty, and property from bad guys. That's the one thing
that the government no longer does in many areas of the country, in many cities in particular.
Um, so they're, they've totally abdicated your, the one reason for their existence, the one legitimate reason for their existence.
And the nihilism is part of that process of over the course of time, they have created this legal system that justifies it and a moral code that glorifies it.
Where the glorification comes through these sort of woke mindsets, these woke ideas.
This, you know, you sometimes you'll see on the news, like somebody who's just had everything stolen, their house burned down by some like vagrant, like shooting up heroin or fentanyl outside.
And then they burn down their home and they're like, I'm OK with this because, you know, they were somehow a minority group or like they were transgender.
And I'm OK with this.
I don't want him to be punished or her or whatever the person is.
And you're like, OK, wait, like this is the actual system of of the glorification of the
plunder.
Right.
Because you've literally just been plundered and you're glorifying it.
You're like, well, that was pretty cool.
Right.
I don't want to stop it.
And you're like, wait, this is all messed up.
But I think it's a it's just a process.
It started 54 years ago in 1971, but probably earlier than that.
They just want you to have no hope, right?
There's no hope to fix it because it's so profitable for the plunderers.
And so, like, let's not fix it.
Let's make sure that nobody fixes it.
And part of that process of glorification is how they instill the nihilism.
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Yeah. And, you know, the irony is, and this is pointed out by the president often, is that during the period, let's say during the gang wars where they became the capital of the world and innocent civilians and people were being ritualized.
holistically tortured and burned, you know, and babies were, you know, I don't want to go in the
details. It's too horrific. But where were the human rights groups? You know, where was the
outcry? Who spoke up for these people? We didn't hear a peep from anybody. So then President
Bukele comes along and says, you know, we have to protect the human rights of our citizens
first. They're the ones who should be the beneficiary of human rights protection.
And so he went after the criminals and the murderers.
And then we finally heard from the human rights groups.
I mean, it was so obvious.
It was literally, have you ever seen that film Idiocracy?
Like this guy comes back 50 years in the future and he's like becomes a president because he's like figures out, oh, you don't use Gatorade on the lawn.
Let's just use water.
And people like, wow, you're so smart.
I didn't know how to do that.
And it's just like we've become at that point where it's total idiocracy after 50 years of celebrating the plunder and glorifying it that we're like, oh, my God, how did the murder rate fall?
And you're like, dudes, I just like I put the murderers in prison.
Like it's not difficult.
Right.
So the human rights groups were completely invisible until the president went after the gang gangsters.
And then suddenly they appeared on mass saying, oh, we need to protect the human rights of the murderers.
But they were nowhere to be found during the period when the murdering was taking place.
So that's a glorification of murder.
You know, from the World Bank, there was a report when the president began his war on
the gangs that said, like, you have to be careful because the gangs account for more
than 25% of the economy of El Salvador.
And if you get rid of them, your economy will shrink by 25%.
And the president rightfully told him to buzz off.
He accepted that there might be or could be a drawdown in GDP.
Miraculously, there was no real drawdown in GDP.
They managed to grow even through COVID and even through the gang war.
The economy did continue to expand.
And now with the gang war and the COVID behind them, you see the GDP expanding by 4%, 5%.
Soon it's going to be over 10%.
This really is Singapore of the West.
This is the new really miracle economy story and it's taking shape right now.
It's really starting to boom.
in El Salvador. It's crazy, too. This reminds me, the President Bukele shared that chart and I was
gave it a quote tweet and he was nice enough to retweet that, which was a nice day. You know,
it happened on Father's Day, too. It was a nice little father. And Elon Musk also tweeted you.
What a wild 24 hours for social media for me. That was pretty nuts. But he tweeted out this
chart that was, you know, murder rate versus incarceration rate in El Salvador from 2000 to
2024. And it's like, shockingly, the incarceration rate goes up and the murder rate goes down almost
to zero. And, and it was in response to somebody, you know, 1% of people account for 63% of all
violent crimes, uh, you know, 0.2% of people ever commit, uh, murders. 67% of all murders are
committed by people with prior arrests. So it's like, and he said to it, you know, this, it's a
pretty, you know, very simple concept really, but this is the kind of the larger like point that
really does make you a bit, I'm not a nihilistic person. I'm a very optimistic person. I'm very
optimistic because of the things that I know, the things that pay attention to people that I
am privileged enough to talk to, but you can see why a lot of people will drift into nihilism
because they see that, look, we've got, we have these really obvious problems.
It seems like to any logical thinking person that there's pretty obvious solutions that everyone
knows. But for some reason, talking about those solutions makes you a bigot or a racist or a
xenophobe or insert whatever conspiracy theorist, conspiracy theorist. Yep. You know, only to be
today's conspiracy theory is six months from now's news or whatever it is. You know, it's just it's
it really does kind of feel like the idiocracy moment, though, Stacey, as you said, where
this is all just it just feels so stupid. Like, just fix the problem. Do your one job. Do your
one job, protect people from the plunders, enforce the law. And that's it. Like, but,
but that's just a bridge too far, apparently. And, you know, part of that whole nihilism,
of course, is that this is by design. They, they, the, you know, the people who benefit the most
from the plunder, whether they're the contillionaires next to the money printer or in the
seats of power in in dc or like the deep state who knows where they live um you know there is
part of that design that's well documented about modern art right right like to how
like they don't even like they train you to even disrespect beauty right any anything like nothing
can save you from the despair that they are the only way out, right? Like there's no hope,
no beauty no peace Everything is a hamster wheel of despair is what they want you to believe and want you to feel
There's no God. Yeah. Right. And there's no faith. And it's Maoism, essentially. Right. It's socialism. It's communism. It's authoritarianism.
And in El Salvador, the president has a 94% popularity and is rising
So it's their country and the people are overwhelmingly happy about what's going on there
And if some liberal types in the United States or what have you are unhappy about it
It's not really their business, it's not their fight to fight
The people of El Salvador are voting for the president and they'll vote for him overwhelmingly in the next election.
And at a 94 percent, soon to be 95 percent popularity rating, that means that many of the family members of the gang members who are now in prison are for the president.
Right. It's like their own families are supporting them.
I mean, that nobody why would anyone support this group internally in the country after 20 years of a torture terror campaign?
And so the amount of hand-wringing and pearl-clutching that goes on by folks that haven't been there and don't understand the dynamics is comically misplaced.
It's just absurd.
You know, people need to go there and get their boots on the ground and see what's happening to really understand that this really is Renaissance 2.0.
This is the first country out of the fourth turning into the first turning.
This is the shining city on a hill.
it's interesting too you know you brought up like this what we see now is very much like
malice socialist communist like and so you know quote socialism or democratic socialism as they
like to brand it in the in the u.s now like we we all this is just a transitional phase to communism
right and communism has killed 100 million plus people in the past century but apparently
it's still you know it's still a politically palatable thing to say that like proudly
proclaim you're a communist i mean many you know university professors and like people
held in high regard, highly regarded people,
can just comfortably come out and say you're a communist,
which is crazy to me because, again, it's a murderous ideology
based on theft, based on the destruction of society
and destruction of personal property.
But somehow it's okay to just come out and say that,
yeah, but this is what we want.
Aren't you empathetic?
Aren't you morally superior like us?
Because that's what a lot of it comes down to.
But I'm curious because you look at El Salvador
and what Bukele is doing,
he is doing a lot for the citizens, like not just cleaning up the gangs, but like in terms of the
public works projects, all the different things, the things that like the socialists and the commies
claim that only socialism or communism can do, but he's doing it without that. So how is that
possible? Can you explain it to the commies out there? Well, there's a quote he always says
something along the lines of there's the money is enough if nobody steals it. So that's the thing
about communists and socialists. It's they drive, they have huge salaries. All those NGOs have
massive salaries. If they receive a billion a year from George Soros, about, say, of the billion,
maybe 50 million might make it to the people they're helping because the rest gets plundered
by them and salaries and cars and drivers and houses and all this sort of stuff. Right. So
that's why there's money to do things in El Salvador, because he's not taking it. There are
no NGOs. We're doing it ourselves. We're fixing our country ourself. Right. We don't need the
people who have, you know, million dollar salaries to dispense the money so that they feel great
about themselves. And then they use that as a part of their resume to then become a senator or
something like that or whatever. So I think that's the simple answer is that the money is enough when
nobody steals it. So that's his basic philosophy about governance and building infrastructure,
is that there's plenty of money there. And there always has been. It's just that it had been stolen
for so many years, partly because of the nihilism of the ruling class as well in El Salvador before
President Bukele is like, I mean, all the NGOs were stealing most of the stuff. Right. And so why
not them? Right. Because like none of it was going to be allowed to get down to the ground anyway. So
they might as well steal whatever is left. And that's what they did. They just stole whatever
was left that, you know, the NGO class had not first stolen. So I think, again, like over the
course of time, these sort of systems, these moral codes develop to justify and glorify what they're
doing. And the NGO class is a perfect example of glorifying their own plunder. They glorify it.
That like we're so amazing. Like I feel so amazing for like, well, the AOC photo of her like crying
in front of this like, you know, the border wall. That's that's the sort of, you know, propaganda.
Yeah, you know, the president just, you know, celebrated the completion of this brand new hospital. It's the finest hospital probably in all of Central America, for sure, possibly in Latin America.
and it was done entirely from the existing budget
that was a line item in the budget for hospital
that was on the books for a while.
The previous governments had talked about
doing something with this hospital for 20 years.
They never did.
It's an historic building.
He restored the architecture.
He restored the building.
He expanded the building.
He brought in, you know,
40 or 50 or 80 kidney dialysis machines.
It's got an incredibly array of modern hospital equipment
and he did it all on budget and under time.
And he's done it with now, you know, stadiums, with convention centers.
Hydroplants, the dams.
He's redone the center, historical center of San Salvador.
So it's become a beacon.
People come here.
It's like Times Square of Central America.
You could get a million, two million people visiting there during a holy holiday week or something like that.
And they're out dancing in the streets.
The Salvadorans are literally dancing in the streets at night at three o'clock in the morning.
The library is open 24 hours a day.
They're in front of the library, which is lit up brilliantly and beautifully dancing with guys on the street playing saxophone or what have you.
And they're literally like – it's like Liberation Day post-World War II where people were celebrating and happy and dancing in the streets.
It's like that in El Salvador and San Salvador every day.
I can't wait to go back again.
Also, mainly for the Papusas, of course.
And Bitcoin Historico.
Bitcoin Historico.com.
Everybody should come check it out. Speaking of Central Historico, we're in the center in the revitalized National Palace, which just only opened like a month before our first inaugural Bitcoin Historico.
And so come see us. We have a whole like go to the website and you'll see all the amazing speakers that we'll have there.
It's an OG conference experience, an OG Bitcoin conference experience before all the ICOs, before all the Bitcoin treasury companies, before all that stuff.
what we talked about, all the first principles, all the, you know, self-custody, owning Bitcoin,
holding Bitcoin, not exposure to Bitcoin. So this is the sort of conference you'll find
in Bitcoin country at BitcoinHistorica.com. Yeah, I think of President McKellie and a lot
like Steve Jobs, you know, like Steve Jobs when he did his annual meeting.
I have my Steve Jobs outfit on. Yeah, there you go.
Right. And, you know, he'd give the new iPhone pitch and or the new product pitch. And then he'd
say at the end, oh, and just one more thing, you know, and he whip out the iPhone or something
miraculous. The president is this type of mindset where he just doesn't want to improve people's
lives. He's not satisfied with making the country stand out in Central America. He literally wants
to blow people's minds like a Steve Jobs. You know, it's like Steve Jobs meets John F. Kennedy,
on the political side.
And you put those two elements together
and you end up with somebody
who's got the capabilities,
who's got the charisma,
who's got the intelligence,
who's got the support,
who attracts talent.
Well, that's like when you mentioned
John F. Kennedy,
it's like the Apollo program, right?
Like he treats everything
like an Apollo program
and that we're in this as a nation together
and never let anyone tell you
that El Salvador is too small
to be big, to be great.
where El Salvador is going is to the place we want to be. And, you know, and you approach every
single task you do as you rebuild El Salvador with the same sort of passion and same sort of
desire for excellence, whether it's a pedestrian bridge, a huge like bridge for the cars over a
big giant gorge, or it's, you know, the dam, the hydro dam, or a big, huge project like the
metro cable that we're just putting in. We just put the first tower in for the metro cable that
they're going to build over the next year and a half. So he does everything with that sort of
passion. Every single thing he does is done with passion. So you see that in the results in El
Salvador. And you felt it in just those early days, as you pointed out, that there was the first
days of the new El Salvador, right? Like once the plunderers were taken out of the equation,
i.e. the corrupt politicians first and the gang members next.
So once they were all out and then the corrupt money and the corrupt money mindset, the fiat mindset brought in Bitcoin country mindset.
So then we were ready to build a new country.
And you saw the results were very fast, very early on.
And Walker, you and Carla must come to El Salvador, come to Bitcoin Historico and see for yourself like the changes that have happened in the past three years since you've been there.
Yeah.
We cannot wait to come back.
Max, can you move your mic just a touch closer? I had a nice listener.
How's that?
That's perfect.
Shout out to Gwydian in the Noster Chat, who is looking at the audio levels very closely.
Okay, thanks. Thanks for that tip.
But, you know, the president also has an aesthetic.
You know, he believes in the public should be, the public spaces should be more beautiful than the private spaces.
like he's not interested in individuals aggregating great wealth as much as he is in the public spaces
generating awe and beauty and inspiring people and that's something you don't find like ancient
greece or ancient uh rome let's say we don't build like really beautiful things anymore right
like it's just kind of like a trend where it's like you know from brutalism onward basically it's
like everything just feels kind of brutalist and devoid of any like emotion or do any things don't
inspire you right what is the old buildings the old beautiful buildings where you say look at the
stonework look at what they did by hand how like look at the the toil that went into this thing
it's like it's not just the product of it but it's the fact that the people actually built it
and wanted to build it it's both of those things that duality and like that's there's a dearth of
that these days. Well, that's that nihilism, the absence of hope and the absence of joy and beauty.
And so they want you to sneer at those who want excellence, those who strive for beauty,
those who want those things. Those are the most mocked people. Like Elon Musk is constantly
mocked. And what is it? All he does is like he strives to like get to the get to Mars,
get to the moon, do like amazing, extraordinary things, like massive ideas. Right. And people
just mock him, right? So that's a control mechanism to try to keep the ordinary person
from wanting much, from wanting better things, from wanting beauty, from wanting low time
preference, for peace, joy, family, love, all the important things. Instead, you have a world of
incels and transgenders and fentanyl abuse and zombie people on the streets of Philadelphia and
stuff like that. Like this is, this is, that's not, none of that is beautiful at all, right?
It's not beautiful. It's funny you brought up Elon, because I was, I was actually just thinking
right before you said that you were reading my mind clearly that it, that it seems to be a very
similar reaction that you see with people who really go after Bukele and people who really go
after Elon. Yes. It's almost, I don't, I don't know if it's, I'm sure everybody has their very
legitimate reasons sure But what I see is it seems to be this attempt like these are two men who you can say what you want about them but they are proving that really incredible
revolutionary things are possible. And that it's okay for us to, to have nice things and to strive
for something more like to Elon. It's like, he's trying to take us to the stars. And it's like,
why do men climb mountains? Why do we want to go to the stars? Because we must, right? Because we
We need things to believe in. We need things to be able to show our children, show the next generation, say, look what these people, look what they did. Isn't that amazing?
Greatness.
Isn't that truly great?
Yeah. Well, make America great again. Remember, that was President Trump's campaign motto on the first in 2016.
So make America great again. And what did it that sparked like this wave of total insanity in the United States because you cannot make America great again. How dare you? That's ridiculous. That's clownish. That's buffoonish. Like, don't don't aspire to anything greater than what we have. Instead, become transgender. Instead, become fentanyl addicts. Instead, become like all of this degradation of public life.
Uh, that's the word that sparked the insanity. We were on a four year long, well, actually like
eight year long nightmare, a national nightmare inspired by that, by the word great. They didn't
want America to be great. Just uttering those words caused them to lose their minds. That Trump
derangement syndrome was really about greatness, derangement syndrome. They didn't want the people
to want to be great. It's wild too, because the same people who would say like, well, you know,
they would counter that by saying, well, America's already great are the same people who'd be like,
but America's actually the worst. It's the most racist and it's the most, you know, whatever.
It's the absolute, it's the bottom of the barrel. It's terrible. For some reason, everybody still
is trying to come to America. And, you know, America has given me the platform to actually
say these things freely, unlike a lot of other countries, but no, it's the worst, but also,
So, well, it's still great, but like the mental gymnastics required to take issue with that stuff.
It's not a place, it's a state of mind.
So you're never great.
You always need to be greater and better.
Like every single day, you never get to that point, right?
Like there's no there, there.
So it's about a state of mind.
Just like Bitcoin is a state of mind.
It's a mindset, it's a vibe, it's a way of being, a way of living.
And so it's not like an absolute thing. Great is like a word that we understand as how we want to feel and how we want to feel better. We want to feel like to enjoy beauty and enjoy the innovation and creation and the things that we can invent, like the things God gave us and explore the world and explore the stars.
and behold this with awe, all these things around us that were given to us by God, humanity,
our invention, all these things. So like all those things are the opposite of what they try to seek
to control you with through nihilism. They would rather you not have any awe about anything. They
want you to sneer. They want you to mock. They want you to troll. They want you to just have
total cynicism and despair. Yeah, America is an idea, and that idea is about freedom. And so it's
an attempt, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights is an attempt to codify a governing body that would
ensure maximum freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of expression, et cetera, for the widest
poor portion of the population. And so over the last few decades, the cynicism has creeped in.
And so the curtailment of those freedoms has crept in, principally freedom of speech.
One of the great things about Elon that people recognize now is that his acquisition of X,
now X, formerly Twitter, was really saving free speech. That's something a founding father of
of the America would have done, you know, like free speech is essential. And he guaranteed that
it was alive by making that purchase. And El Salvador, that's, I think that that idea that's
embodied in the documentation, the documents, the founding documents of America, you can find that
in El Salvador. And that's why it's so many people who go there are find that breathing the fresh air
of freedom, you know, and so many people who visit, they end up moving there. And that's really
on the cutting edge. That's really the place now where you will have a find most of freedom
there. And so this is what El Salvador has taken the place of the United States in a lot of ways.
And it's relative small size is turned into an advantage. The incredibly dynamic president
running the country is a once in 500 year type leader. And it's all falling down to the bottom
line because there's layers and layers of corruption have been removed.
Layers and layers of gangs are gone.
So people, when they're working, they know that they're contributing, as Stacey was saying,
to a greater project, which is the greater El Salvador.
And they're happy to do so.
We hold these truths to be self-evident.
All men are created equal, right?
Like you started the show with the so obvious thing, right?
The 1% of the population, they're the murderers.
We'll just lock them up so the people who are not murderers can live freely.
So all these, there's so many truths of human, of all humans, all of humanity.
They all, every baby comes out smiling, filled with love and joy and optimism.
Like you don't, you don't encounter like a miserable,
just filled with despair baby unless you forget to change your diaper for a few hours.
Right. But the fact is, like, we all are born with awe.
Like, that's why people love looking at babies.
Right. They're like, wow, everything is like incredible.
Wow. You have a watch on.
Oh, my God. Wow.
It's like that's the human nature that they try to destroy.
The fact is the idea of America is a universal idea and it's a universal idea that it was expressed by the great man of history, which is who is President Bukele.
when he said something like where El Salvador is going is to the place we want to be.
The same could be said of the U.S., of France, of Italy, of wherever you are.
You, the people, always where you want to be is where you will be.
But it's by design, your design.
You have to make the choices.
You have to do something about it.
And they don't want you to do something about it.
That's why when President Trump or then candidate Donald Trump said,
make America great again, that was that exposed.
Wow.
The panic and fear in the deep state and the ruling.
I mean, they literally came out on camera on the news and told you.
I think it was Chuck Schumer said something like, yeah, the CIA has seven ways to like
to take this guy down.
They're going to come after him.
It's like, why?
Like, just because we're not supposed to be great, we shouldn't want to be great.
Like, who are you?
Yeah, the freedom to be who you are.
Individual sovereignty is certainly a concept well-known in the Bitcoin space.
And it's also now becoming a concept in the AI space as well.
And El Salvador is developing a freedom stack, which includes security, Bitcoin, AI, education.
Health.
Health, right.
Infrastructure, energy.
It's all based, they all work together.
They're all complementary to each other.
And they're all creating a freedom, a sense of freedom that's been, it could exceed the
greatest period in the United States history in terms of how, what it was able to achieve
for individual freedom.
You could see it eclipsed by what's happening in El Salvador, a new high watermark for a
a governance model that encourages individuals in a safe, secure way to pursue their dreams and hopes
and achieve them. I think what we're seeing right now in El Salvador.
I think, Walker, you know, I want to tie a few of the things we've talked about together here,
because I know we're a live stream around Nostra, and there's like five or six people there,
including Matt O'Dell had been there. And I want to bring this back to this notion of
this narrative that we're talking about, because narratives matter and people talking to each other
matter. Bitcoin conferences mattered before all of this like corporatization of it. Why it mattered
was that we were meeting in person and communicating to each other and, you know, building that
confidence of having these crazy ideas. It's that famous classic, the one leader, the guy goes up
dancing crazy, but the important one is the second guy who comes up and dances crazy with him. And
then the whole crowd is dancing crazy. Well, we were dancing crazy, right? And Bitcoin up until
then, like Nostra comes along, Matt O'Dell abandons Bitcoin Twitter, then all the memers
abandoned it. And all we had were the suit coiners. And then we were in a period of like,
remember, well, you probably were not alive then, but there was a period of time when Steve Jobs
was fired from Apple. And why? Because he was a crazy person, right? So they got rid of the
visionary and they installed the suits. The suits were going to like now that this company was a
little bit bigger, that they were going to make it legitimate. And they didn't understand who the
owners, the people using the Apple, the Macintosh were. They didn't understand because they only
understood Wall Street and they understood the numbers and they understood what Wall Street
wanted, right? This is how you make it legitimate. This is how you legitimize Apple. Well, we had the
suit coiners for the same time, and they took over the narrative, just like, you know, what happened
in that period of time. How many years? It was like three, four years when Steve Jobs was fired
from Apple. And then the company almost went bankrupt, of course. And Steve Jobs had to return.
So just like Matt O'Dell, I'm saying Matt O'Dell is like Steve Jobs of the Bitcoin narrative.
He's going to take that one straight to the bank.
No, but like that's important that the right people are part of the conversation.
Removing yourself from the conversation is not a clever way to, you know, change the world.
And I think he agrees with that now.
I just had him on the show actually like last week and he had like a mea call place.
Like, look, I was, I was wrong. I'm, I misjudged this. I thought this was the better path. It was not like I, you know, and, and credit where credit is due for, you know, saying, look, yeah, I made a wrong call. I'm back now. I don't think he can get his original Odell handle back though.
They're trying to charge him like a crazy amount of money for it, which is just kind of like, you know, kind of kind of funny.
Like, it's like, oh, you got to buy your own name back.
But I want to I want to talk about kind of I want to talk about a number of the things that El Salvador is doing on the educational front and with some of these initiatives.
I think that's really interesting in an age where even like in the United States of America, even though we spend a ton on education, even though people say we don't spend much on education, we spend plenty per student.
Again, the problem is it's being stolen by administrators and bureaucrats in between.
Literacy rates are declining in major public schools and major metropolitan areas.
But before we kind of get into that a little bit, I do want to talk about the Bitcoin suit coin dynamic right now.
Because you guys have been obviously in Bitcoin, I mean, for as long as anyone, right?
For a long time.
You were educating people about Bitcoin back on RT back in the day.
You've done so much to Orange Pill, so many people.
I mean, not least of which was, I believe,
coined the term Orange Pill, if I'm not mistaken.
You know, among many, many other things.
Like, you guys have done an incredible service
to so many people by opening up their eyes to Bitcoin.
And I'm curious of in the long arc of now what you've seen,
and Bitcoin's still young, but it's like we've been able,
or folks who have been around as long as you,
have been able to observe some trends, some cycles,
things that change and things that don't.
Where are we at right now?
Like, was this a natural, did we have to come to this point
with the suit coiners, with the Wall Street kind of embracing Bitcoin to a certain extent,
with the ETFs? Because to me, that does seem like a logical step along this path. Of course,
if Bitcoin was successful, corporations, nation states, everyone is going to want Bitcoin.
But I think what you're getting at, you're not discounting that, you're more so saying,
and tell me if I'm putting words in your mouth, that the narrative has become controlled
by that faction. Is that correct?
The narrative is that these, you know, plebs, the memes,
those are not, that Wall Street won't accept these,
that you can't be, that, you know,
that the audience was embarrassing to Wall Street.
And that's the same thing of the people, the early users,
the early adopters of Apple Macintoshes were more creatives, right? They weren't the back office
accounting departments that were using, say, the IBM or something like that, the mainframes.
So they were more of the hacker mindset. Steve Jobs was a hacker. The same thing with Bitcoin.
It was a very hacker mindset. In the early, early days, it was like hackers. It was Julian Assange.
It was the open source. It was the Internet freedom. It was very tied to there was a, remember, the anti-PIPA, SOPA, SOPA, PIPA. There were these acts across Europe and one in the U.S. as well that they were going to sort of like basically start surveilling things online, right? Your freedom online wasn't going to be so obvious, but they defeated it.
But it was very tied to that in the early days, those that more cypher punk mindset.
And then I remember when the first wave of bankers came in with Barry Silbert was one of the earliest ones.
And there was a sort of like the beige khaki suits, you know, pants came in.
And then like, you know, you can't have that sort of person on stage.
It would be Amir Taki. He's crazy.
And then in 2021 at the Miami conference, remember after that, Mike Novogratz said Max Kaiser shouldn't ever be on stage at a Bitcoin conference.
I, Mike Novogratz, I'm legitimate and by Luna, you know, the tattoo removed yet or does he still have it?
Yeah, but he's legitimate. Right. But Max isn't right.
So that sort of narrative came around of like, you shouldn't listen to those people and you should listen to these legitimate people who are close to their respectable, this notion of respectable people.
You know, that's that's that's always been the the the main way to bring about spread mediocrity is right through respectable people.
So middle class thinking. And yeah, so I could see that you and you can see this right now with Bitcoin falling from 120 something down to I guess it went to 58 again. Right. But where are the memers? Like unless you have a good meme, there's always a new meme during the crashes. Right. And it unites the community. It's gallows humor.
and you know I always like during the the worst of the crashes that we've had like those are always
the like nerve-wracking right but it's also when you end up giggling uncontrollably at your computer
why because of a new meme and you're like oh right and you're like I guess we are gonna go
all work at McDonald's or yes the wojack you know crying emoji and all of those things like
those memes came out and they united the community and kept us strong. It was like a way it was
rallying the army, keeping us strong, hold the line, hold the line. But now there isn't any.
There's just some Wall Street guys who are very respectable. Right. And they start talking about
the balance sheet and and how this is going to we're all fine. We're going to be able to meet our
our dividend or stuff like that. And like, where's the community for that? Right. There's no
community. This is a mindset. It's a movement. It's a new way of thinking. It's a paradigm shift.
It's a new epoch. And yet the storyteller has always been there through history to tell the
story, to explain to people where you are. The town crier, the guy in the center of the square
in ancient Rome. Like there's always somebody explaining to the people who they are, where they
are, where they're going, and keep them on the mission. The keeper of the vision, as Steve Jobs
would call it. You need to have somebody who's inspiring the troops that where we're going is
there. It seems far away. We're only like a few steps into the march towards there. But those,
the memers were such an important part of that. And they've been removed or ostracized or exiled
somehow, but they're not there in the community at the moment. And I think that is also by design,
whether intentional or unintentional. And I think once you see the memers back,
once you have a new meme, I think that's going to be the bottom.
So there was one of the more famous suit coiners had a big $100,000, 100,000 Bitcoin party
in Florida, in Miami.
And Stacey noted that the memers were absent.
The memers had not been invited.
So the people who memed Bitcoin 200,000
were being cast aside.
Yeah, the laser eyes to 100,000.
None of them were there.
Right, and guys like Yellow and others
who are really brilliant memers,
you know, they were not there.
And so that was the first indication
that there was a changing of mindset.
And so, but I think of, you know,
Bitcoin is going through kind of like reverse archaeology.
You know, in archaeology, you're digging down,
digging, digging, digging, and you find the past.
And, you know, it goes through the history
and it goes through the Bronze Age
and the Iron Age and the Stone Age.
And you're going progressively back toward primitivism.
With Bitcoin, it's a reverse archaeology
where the coin is drilling through,
essentially layer and layer and layer of finance and money and the concept of money and finance.
And it finds bigger and bigger pockets of money. So the Wall Street is a pocket of money.
And Bitcoin got to the Wall Street pocket of money. And everybody in that milieu, anyone in
that band of financialization went through the exact same learning curve as everyone in the
previous ages of Bitcoin. So the suit coiners essentially recreated the ICO market. You know,
the ICO market was an incredible boom and bust. The staking phase, the NFT phase, the shitcoin
phase or altcoin phase, you know, all these things were the trajectory of Bitcoin, the vector,
it takes it through, you know, everything that anyone's ever thought about what they think they
know about money and includes everyone on the planet and everyone goes to the same learning
curve. So there's no accumulated knowledge. You know, when I saw one of, I mean, I saw,
I saw Michael Saylor at a meeting in El Salvador, you know, his comment to me after I told him,
you know, he was surprised that I'm, you know, 65, 66 years old. And he said, well,
by now you should have accumulated some wisdom right and i i looked at him and i said
hold on my son hold on let's talk again and see where this see where this goes
do you think sailor uh i will say also i i was invited to the 100k party and it was a very nice
party for what it's worth i occasionally meme so there you know and and i've got to say uh
I mean, I think that most of the treasury stuff
has clearly been like a capital incinerator for retail.
Like, that's undeniable.
Strategy I would put in a bit of a different ballpark.
But I'm curious from you guys,
do you think Saylor's been a net positive for Bitcoin
from an adoption perspective?
Like, you know, if you want to reach the, you know,
the majority of capital in the world,
but the majority is still sort of, you know, for better or worse, like it's tied up in the fiat
system, right? Or, you know, it doesn't have to be tied up, but it kind of just is. Like,
is that just a stepping stone, like a meeting people where they are, not where you want them
to be? That was a necessary transitional phase? Or do you think about it differently?
I think the adoption happened one conference at a time, one Bitcoin meetup, one Bitcoin conference
at a time. And as they got bigger and bigger and the incentive model changed of like it became a
big, you know, profit center to even put on conferences. Right. And then then you it becomes
more and more expensive and you get bigger and bigger venues and then you need more and more
crypto companies and they all get a slot on the stage. And then and then you get to the Bitcoin
treasury companies and what the incentive structure for the CEO, these are publicly listed companies
now because they SPAC'd into these, a reverse merge into these existing entities. So now they
have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders and they must go and pump their
stock price. So you have to then, it's just the incentive model. That's from the beginning of the
time in the early Bitcoin conferences, we would talk about the incentive model, right? And the
stock price, if you're a CEO of a publicly listed company, you have to pump your stock price when
you go up on stage and you don't tell people, don't buy my stock price, buy Bitcoin instead.
You're telling them to buy exposure. So you have to come up with a pitch, right? And what you're
giving them exposure to is just one part of Bitcoin. And that is the number go up technology,
which is a great way. That's a great tool for adoption since the beginning of Bitcoin, right?
When it goes on a tear during the four year cycle, you know, it drives memes, it drives
headlines, which drive awareness, which drives adoption. So that is a super amazing part of
Bitcoin, but it's just one small part and probably the least important part for the actual technology
itself, what it means for an individual. It is, I think, the loudest part of it in terms of
communicating to the world, like, hey, get on board and adoption. But so you're offering exposure
just to the price and you're offering exposure in U.S. dollars and fiat to that price, but you're
not offering exposure to individual sovereignty, right? You can't be exposed to individual
sovereignty or either individually, you either have individual sovereignty or you don't. And you
can only have it if you have, if you hold permissionless money, right? So you can't
sell that it's not permissionless money. A stock certificate is not permissionless.
There's a lot of permissions and a lot of regulations around it. So you're like, so
again, so your incentive is to push just that one bit of it, which is number go up. And therefore,
you not talking about the other parts of it which are so important Maybe the number go up is most important for driving adoption in terms of awareness
at least adoption.
But I think holding that mindset of hodling is really important to the long term sustainability
of Bitcoin.
And that only comes with hodling it, right?
So you have to hold it.
You have to have individual sovereignty.
You have to own your own permissionless money in order to become a hodler, become a Bitcoiner.
And so you raise awareness in the price and then it becomes in a...
But then what happens, right?
Because you're just focused.
It's a piece of paper.
It's a stock price exposed to something that's going up.
But hey, then NVIDIA goes up faster and Micron goes up even faster.
And so those are paper that you're going to make more paper gains with those. So why go to this other paper price thing? And so it loses it lose. You see what I'm talking about is like you're pushing people just to focus on the price because that's the thing that you can point to.
but the technology itself,
unless it's being used
by all those individuals
getting exposure to the price,
then it's not being adopted.
Like it would be the same of like
if everybody in the world
didn't own a computer
or go on the internet,
but they had the ETF
of internet companies.
It's like, well,
people actually have to use it.
They actually have to build
the community, build the networks,
build the infrastructure
in order for the internet
to succeed. If you just created an ETF from day one of like a TCP IP, I'm like, let's just like
have an ETF about this. Like, it's like, well, no, you need, you need all that sort of thing to happen
to create the network effect, to make it valuable and, you know, all the other benefits of, of,
of TCP IP besides just like the network value.
Yeah. And the, I mean,
he has said a couple of things that go against really the ethos of Bitcoin,
just to name two things when he was suggesting that self-hodling is overrating
self-custody is overrated,
that having an outside custody is equally as good,
But clearly that's completely wrong and gets away, as Stacey points out.
You know, if you want to separate money from state, if you want to be individually sovereign,
if you want to take the full benefit of everything Bitcoin has to offer,
self-custody is obviously a superior form of custody.
And it's unique as an asset class in that sense that you can self-custody
an unlimited amount of wealth in Bitcoin at virtually no expense.
You can't do that with gold.
You can't do that with housing.
You can't do that with any other asset in the world.
it costs you have insurance, you have to put it someplace that's secure, you have to pay for the
security. And it's very expensive to be wealthy, you know, costs a lot of money to maintain it.
But with Bitcoin, you know, you can have a billion dollars and its cost of protecting it is virtually
nothing. So that's a very unique attribute that you don't get with any other asset class. And he
also mentioned, you know, in, you know, he said, essentially, he, he was inferring that Bitcoin
is not money, right?
He was saying that his securities are money.
But, you know, Bitcoin itself is not money.
And again, that's a blatant disregard
for the ethos and the actual reality
of Bitcoin being perfect money,
the only money,
the predator money,
the apex predator of money, right?
So just on those two points,
you know ideologically he's not aligned with with a with bitcoin well but but the point is that
there's no there's no counterpoint there's no conversation there's less conversation happening
now because everything is financialized in a in a fiat way so the whether it's the conferences or
the podcast is like uh there's the financial incentive is to get paid in the fiat dollars that
that, you know, these people can print, right?
And so there isn't a counterpoint.
Now that Matt O'Dell is back on Bitcoin Twitter
and able to engage and debate,
it's important to have these debates, right?
Like this is what early Bitcoin conferences were about.
There were lots of debates and none of us,
nobody knew what Bitcoin, nobody still, you know,
I think James Lopp is the one that always,
He has an article that he links to all the time is that nobody understands Bitcoin.
Nobody does.
Not one single person does.
So it's still a conversation.
It's an ongoing conversation and it's evolving with us.
And that's like so we need to evolve in the right direction.
Right.
And I think, you know, number go up technology only works for a brief period of time, one cycle.
But if the community and the network does not continue to grow, then that becomes a problem for number go up technology. If it's all hoarded on one balance sheet where everybody gets exposure only to the number go up and not to the actual technology and the freedom money, then that's going to become a problem.
And I think we are seeing that right now because we need a floor, right?
If we need to, who are the new buyers that come in?
Who is the new community?
The community begets the community normally, but the community has disappeared.
The storytellers are the memers.
They're one of the storytellers.
The podcasters are another storyteller.
The speakers on stage at Bitcoin conferences are another part of the storyteller.
So, like, it's all become homogenized very quickly.
And it's like that period of time when Apple was run by a few suits.
The same thing happened then in that same four-year cycle.
They destroyed the company because they did not have a narrative and they didn't know who their audience was.
And they didn't know how to sell the technology, the profound change that a Macintosh was offering.
It was a mindset that they were selling and it was a way of living.
Yeah, I mean, you see the same pattern emerging with private equity.
Private equity takes over established brands and ruins them.
You know, whether it's fast food restaurants get taken over by private equity and they've driven into the ground and destroyed.
They're loaded up with debt and the quality goes down.
They go bankrupt and the bankers made a lot of money and the franchise goes out of business.
And you see that happening all across America.
Most of the products that you own, especially in the supermarket, you remember the brand.
You remember how great they were a couple of years ago.
You buy them and this doesn't taste anything like it did a few years ago.
It's because private equity took over the company, made substitutions on the ingredients and turn it into slop like everything else there on the shelf.
So the brand equity is worth X.
Private equity borrows money to acquire that brand.
They extract them with a huge dividend to themselves and substitute the ingredients and sell an inferior product until it goes bankrupt.
So essentially with strategy, it's similar in that the melting ice cube was an interesting idea.
you're replacing, instead of buying back your own stock, you're just going to replace the cash
on the balance sheet with Bitcoin. But then it became essentially private equity ties in that
they loaded it up with debt, right? So they loaded it up with these debt bearing instruments.
And then what I think was the miscalculation was that once you do that, you're exposing yourself to
the ability of Wall Street to issue its own fake paper, right? Wall Street can issue
an unlimited amount of fake paper at zero cost. And so that's the squeeze that we're seeing
right now between Bitcoin and strategy because the company-
Hedge funds are after them.
Right?
They've got, what, 600 and something thousand Bitcoin.
Okay?
So let's fucking choke this company so that they've got to cough up some of that Bitcoin,
which they're now doing, and then they'll put it into their corporate notes that they
have the ability now to sell Bitcoin, something they said they would never, ever do.
So that's engineered by the hedge funds and the other very large pockets of money that
are able to arbitrage what is an obligation of the company to pay dividends, their ability
to do so, and what's sitting on the balance sheet.
So they're attempting to get the company to choke.
Yeah, that's the thing.
Remember what happened to the United Kingdom when Soros broke the pound, right?
The British pound.
It was because the exchange rate mechanism, they had to like peg it to the franc or something,
the Deutsche Mark, and they figured they could break it because they had enough money that they
knew that the UK would not be willing to pay the amount of money to cover what they could just push
the exchange rate to bleed them dry. And they knew that they would have to stop printing money to do
this. So it's that. It's not they weren't taking any sort of position. They just saw a vulnerability
that they could exploit. And the same thing. So as soon as you do enter Wall Street and as soon as
you do have a paper product upon which they could bet against and tear apart your par or your peg,
like they'll do it. And that's what you're seeing. They do have unlimited amounts of money
because they are able to do all sorts of leverage games through options and derivatives themselves
that they're way faster. And they don't have like shareholders to have to explain this to.
Like the problem with the Bitcoin treasury companies and like all of them will be that they have, you know, they've sold their shareholders on the story of number go up technology and gold 2.0.
And, you know, it's a you think of gold as a safe investment, safe haven and blah, blah, blah.
It's a soft, like gentle pitch.
and in the meantime these sharks like with trillions of dollars of access to you know at
least for a day that's all they need it for is a few hours to just like annihilate your peg or your
par your attempt to be at par and you have to go out there as a ceo and try to explain to your
shareholders oh it's just these hedge fund guys and you know they're doing this and you're like
yeah but i you know i'm is this gonna like are you gonna be able to hold this peg or
to par or whatever, you know, so you are in a game where you are swimming in an ocean with great
white sharks and they might eat you up and maybe they didn't, you know, had nothing against you,
but you kind of looked like a seal. And so they ate you. And, and, you know, they tell you all
the time when somebody gets eaten by a great white shark, it's like, oh, they don't really
like the taste of humans. And it's like, yeah, but they still ate that human. It's like, yeah,
That was a mistake.
It's like, well, that was my entire net worth.
Thank you very much, you know?
Right.
So you can sell Bitcoin short and use the proceeds from that short sale to go attack some company like Strategy, right?
And you can do that.
And, you know, in the U.K., you can rehypothecate an infinite number of times, right?
You're not limited in the number of rehypothecations.
You know, you can sell the same bond in the U.K. a hundred times, a thousand times.
There's no limit to the rehypothecation in the U.K.
In the U.S. there is.
So that's why the U.S. outsources a lot of their banking maneuvers to the U.K.
That's what the U.K. has served that purpose.
And the city of London, of course, is its own country with its own laws and its own governance,
just like the Vatican.
And there's one other city, Washington, D.C.
Those three territories are countries within countries.
The city of London has always been where bankers and hedge funds go to commit what in the United
States would be illegal financial leisure domain.
So those guys are there and they see an opportunity to borrow an infinite amount of money against, let's say, selling Bitcoin short and engaging in all kinds of other flora and fauna in financial engineering and attack what they want to do.
ironically, remember, when the strategy melting ice cube was launched, it was a speculative attack
against the U.S. dollar. Yeah. Right. That we're going to essentially take on the U.S. dollar by
borrowing to buy Bitcoin. OK, that's a simple equation. But once you add this stack of preferreds
with interest bearing obligations, you then become the the victim. You know, the speculative
of attack against is against you.
And I think that's.
But yeah, but that's the point is even from day one, when it's just, you know, the melting
ice cube.
And I think, to be fair, you have to say that SpaceX and Square both have that original
design of a Bitcoin treasury within a company with an operating income and using their revenue to buy Bitcoin or you know their cash on the balance sheet to convert some of it from a melting ice cube to Bitcoin But it is
a stock price and every single stock price is vulnerable to the great white sharks, the predators
in that the ocean of paper in that system. So there's that is a risk that you don't have when
you're holding your own Bitcoin. So as soon as, even if it's an ETF, okay, maybe they have a little
bit easier time, less risk than one of the Bitcoin treasury companies, but there's still a risk
because the hedge funds have unlimited capital and they could attack things through options and,
you know, the futures markets and stuff like that. So you're always going to be, there's whatever,
However much the risk is, there is an added risk.
It might only be small in the case of an ETF versus a Bitcoin treasury company, but there's a risk that you maybe are not being adequately compensated for because you don't understand the risk.
Right.
So the future, the question is, who is going to step in and be the new source of demand?
Yeah.
Okay, so strategy was the demand side of the Bitcoin story for five or six years.
It was the sailor era.
And now the vulnerabilities in the strategy have been exposed.
And so they're not really big on the demand side as they were.
In fact, they're sellers, okay, after saying that they would never sell.
So we have to look for a new source of demand.
So you have the sovereigns, the big sovereigns, potentially in the Middle East.
You have a, there's a dynamic between AI and Bitcoin where it's like, Bitcoin is the floor and AI is the ceiling.
And we know that the AI sector is trading at incredibly, incredible valuations, multi, multi-trillion dollar valuations.
If we see a reversal in that trend, I would believe that a substantial portion of that retracement of capital would end up back in Bitcoin.
because Bitcoin would be the only AI agents, the agentic economy itself, AI agents themselves,
according to Bitcoin Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., when they did the survey,
they prefer Bitcoin. So the robots are buying Bitcoin. The AI prefers Bitcoin.
Yeah, but there's no like, like I do a lot of the AI policy in El Salvador. And so I'm very
exposed to the AI world and community. And the AI community is way more cypherpunk than a lot of
the Bitcoin community at this time.
You see the EAC.
They're like how original cypherpunks
and OG Bitcoiners were, right?
So the vibe, that mindset of Renegade and Cypherpunk
is with the AI community at the moment
because they are inspired by the beauty
and the power of individual sovereignty
of their own locally hosted model, right?
Like they see AI as a path to abundance,
amazing abundance, right?
And that is a liberating mindset.
And that's why they have an infectious community.
It feels really nice.
And actually AI has a lot of really funny memes, right?
That's where you'll find funny memes.
If you find the right AI community on AI Twitter,
you'll see the funny memes.
But Bitcoin has become very middle-class thinking.
It's just it's it's just a number on a Schwab screen, a Fidelity stock portfolio report.
And it's only focused on that number go up technology.
And they forget the rest of the technology and the importance of it.
And again, I'll bring it back to Matt O'Dell.
It's his fault.
I blame him.
OK, let's start a campaign.
Let's make that the meme.
It's Matt's fault.
I'm going to get that on a T-shirt, I think, you know, maybe a hat, too.
Well, it brings it back to El Salvador because El Salvador was very early recognizing AI as a technology of infinite abundance and liberation.
And so and Stacey, as she pointed out, she is involved in much of the policies that are happening in El Salvador with AI.
And so the country has the first AI law, really.
And it also has a statement of a strategy.
National AI Strategy Report.
National AI Strategy Report, which is now being quoted by other countries as they catch up.
So El Salvador, again, is leading the way.
And other countries are catching up to El Salvador.
So it's part of that freedom stack.
Yeah, it's because I saw that same vibe.
Like I could see on my Twitter, you know, stream is that on the timeline, I could see like that same mindset of this, like.
That sort of like we could do anything, you could just do things mindset and the tools like the AI tools available, especially since DeepSeek, when it like drove down the costs of these frontier models for all the models.
But all like all sorts of tools also started to be released from January.
And you know what?
Jack Dorsey also mentioned that he mentioned it in an interview.
He didn't say what it was the cause of it, but he mentioned that January 2025, everything changed.
And if you were following AI or doing anything in AI, you saw it like you felt it.
Something clicked, just like in March 2020 with Bitcoin, when they shut down the global economy and first Bitcoin crashed.
remember like on BitMEX it crashed like 20 something percent one day and then it went up
forever after that right so uh the same something happened in January 2025 and like you got goosebumps
watching it you could see it like suddenly take off and the community was that same like yeehaw
pioneer, cowboy, like cypherpunk, fun, fun, loving, like memeing, like that attitude,
that confidence of like, when you know you can just do things, that gives you a lot of confidence.
And Bitcoiners used to have that. Like we were like, dudes, like we have our own money. And even
on a day that it would crash, like, okay, it's crashed 90% in the past year, 18 months, you'd be
like, dude, I have my own money. And they're like, yeah, dude, you're poor. Like you have Bitcoin,
you're poor. It's down 90%. You're like, I don't care. I have Bitcoin and you don't. And you're
like, oh my God, that attitude of just total confidence. And because you know what you own,
you know what you have, and you know the power that this technology has given you.
And that's what I feel like. I mean, I don't want to blame any one individual. And I'm sure like
best intentions and many people thought they had like found an infinite money glitch and that this
was like somehow unique and just if like if i do this honestly but over the course of time the
incentive model and this incentive structure um breaks down because it a network needs the whole
network right and you need the all the feedback loop that made bitcoin what it is and that includes
These, you know, annoying community who, despite all of the, you know, the elite media sorts and the respectable officials telling them, dudes, you have, you know, fake Internet money.
You are like you have nothing.
You're like, uh-huh, I've got Bitcoin.
And the same thing with these, you know, EAC community.
They're like, no matter how much you mock them, they say they're going to Mars and it's going to be amazing abundance.
And you're like, OK, well, you know, they're convinced.
And you're missing that right now from the new bees being brought.
Like that newbie community is always very important.
Right.
Everybody starts out a newbie in Bitcoin, but there are no where are the new newbies?
Have you ever met a newbie in the past this cycle?
No, there are no newbies.
Right.
They're somebody with a Schwab account, like with a bunch of stocks.
And that's not a Bitcoiner, right?
Yeah.
To bring it back to El Salvador, El Salvador has managed to be in the leader of this whole frontier mindset of AI,
where the whole rules of the game are changing almost on an hourly basis.
but because El Salvador is being led by President Bukele,
who is able to look at the field,
is like, you know, Tom Brady, you know,
I'd use another sports analogy.
You know, I mean, he can pick apart the defense,
you know, find a receiver and, you know,
get that ball to the receiver and get a touchdown
where, you know, President Bukele will look out
over 50, 60, 70 advisors
or people that are coming in with ideas and things
and be able to pick, you know,
Now, this one, this is, you know, and understand which one gives him the biggest bang for his buck.
And you can't print money in El Salvador.
You got to be really strategic.
Got to be really precise.
Got to be laser focused.
And so he really picked up on this AI story and has been able to attract fantastic developments in the AI story as a result.
And that's part of this freedom stack.
And that's very, very attractive.
When you stack all this stuff up and you put it all together, it all is self-reinforcing.
And it attracts more talent.
It attracts capital.
And then your primary job of keeping the country secure and safe from gangsters is being fulfilled.
And it all comes together.
Yeah.
And again, a reminder that if you're buying a piece of paper that gives you exposure to Bitcoin, you're also gaining exposure to Jane Street.
so you know if you don't know who jane street is and you don't know who the other hedge funds are
and the big the predators in the markets then you're you're not understanding what you've
bought exposure to like you're not just buying exposure to number go up technology you're
buying exposure to quite a few other things that are uh very scary didn't didn't didn't
Every time you buy any stock anywhere, you should hear that in your mind and just understand that it could be inflated away or predated away.
How important do you think medium of exchange adoption acceleration is for Bitcoin to achieve what we all know it can and will achieve?
How important do you think that medium of exchange side is both on, you know, merchant adoption wise?
I think one of the most bullish things I saw in the past year was Square turning on Bitcoin acceptance for millions of merchants, like getting that merchant side adoption.
But how crucial do you think that is?
Because it feels like in the, especially in this Bitcoin treasury company era in which we find ourselves, the whole medium of exchange side has just people seem to not want to.
Now, meanwhile, we've got people who are zapping sats to me permissionlessly on Noster as we stream this live.
So shout out to all of you guys.
There are still some people out there who want to use Bitcoin as a medium exchange.
You got to take it a step further.
You got to take it a step further to the circular economy, which, again, we see it in El Salvador.
People that are earning in Bitcoin, saving in Bitcoin and spending in Bitcoin.
So, for example, if the price movement is totally, it becomes invisible.
If you're saving, earning and spending in Bitcoin, the price movement means nothing because you're in the Bitcoin economy.
It's a circular economy.
So that started at Bitcoin Beach, famously, which kicked off the entire Bitcoin phenomenon in El Salvador.
But it's now spread to several other communities all over the country.
And they're popping up everywhere.
So I would imagine at some point they're all going to kind of emerge.
And that's how you really get Bitcoin country.
You really get a Bitcoin economy.
That's people are earning, spending, and saving in Bitcoin.
And that's your medium of exchange, your savings rate, and what you're making as earnings.
and it becomes the standard and it replaces everything else.
I think a little bit.
Yeah, if you're earning Bitcoin, then it's easier to spend it.
But Gresham's law exists.
And if you're earning dollars and you are using those dollars to acquire some, you know,
Bitcoin and hodl it in your own wallet you reluctant to spend it when you have shit money Right Like and I seen that even say with BitcoinHistorico Go to our website BitcoinHistorico and you can buy your ticket for the conference
Now, last year we were offering it was something like 10, 20 percent cheaper to buy Bitcoin, use to pay for your ticket in Bitcoin.
and I thought like okay at one time it used to be very difficult to get Bitcoin and then transfer
and pay instantly or something like that but Cash App exists like you could just go use your Cash App
wallet convert the ticket price from your dollar account to Bitcoin and pay in Bitcoin and get 10%
off nobody wanted to do that nobody would they rather pay 10% more to spend in dollars right
So I don't know where it had to go. Maybe it would be like 50 percent more and people would rather just pay.
You know, that might have been the point if you had a 50 percent discount for them to pay in Bitcoin.
Maybe that would have been enough. But that's what merchants will have to do is it is perfect money.
And so if you the merchant is up to you, it's not just like if you make it equal, if you say here, this cup of coffee is ten dollars,
U.S. dollars, fiat dollars, or $10 worth of Bitcoin, they're going to pay the $10 in fiat cash.
Of course they are. But if you say it's $10 cash, or I really want your Bitcoin, I'll give that same
cup of coffee to you for $5 worth of Bitcoin. So once you start seeing clever people, merchants
becoming clever. That's how it happened with the Florentine, right? The Florin in Florence, right?
So they had the perfect unit of account that was trusted. So if a merchant from Florence traveled
to North Africa to buy in a Medina some, you know, fabrics or spices, the merchant there would be
like, oh, I recognize that. And I know I won't have to waste my time, lose some sales by measuring
it, weighing and checking it out, making sure like I'll just take that here. You're giving me the
perfect money that I the best money available in our ecosystem and our financial system. And I'm
going to give you my best product. Right. So because I want you to return because I know you
have good money. So I want you to return with your good product or purchase my stuff. And so
that's how you attract people. You want to like offer them like I'll give you a discount if you
give me your florin if you give me your bitcoin right so until you see that like it's a mindset
that the merchants have to adopt they're they're they're still in the fiat mindset if they're
saying ten dollars in fiat or ten dollars worth of bitcoin uh you know that i think they're the
ones that are thinking wrong yeah good point i mean there is i think some major retailers are
figuring this all out there's one called sheets yeah which is a like a roadside convenience store
chain. I believe that they're
offering discounts. 50%
discount. Yeah. Seriously.
And it's really good right now
because it's called Sheetz and there's
a new parasite going around giving people
explosive diarrhea. So if you have explosive
diarrhea, stop at Sheetz
and you'll get 50% off
your pepto-bismol. I can't tell
if this is a bit or not. You're
telling me there's explosive diarrhea
and it's called Sheetz?
There is a gas station called
Sheetz. And
And I don't know if it's out where you are up north, but it's definitely on the southern, southeastern U.S.
And it's, you know, some weird people hang out there.
But you know what?
They're offering a 50 percent discount on a lot of stuff if you buy it in Bitcoin.
Yeah, that's just a news story that The New York Post had this afternoon.
This explosive diarrhea is making a huge in New York and other states.
And it just so happens that we were also talking about the sheets.
It's just a coincidence.
If you have the sheets, then stop at sheets.
Pick up your Pepto-Bismol.
You can buy it for 50% off if you pay in Bitcoin.
It's part of the Orange Pill podcast genius coming through.
Coming through into your podcast.
Sorry.
We always go there.
You know, we always go into the toilet humor.
We always manage to be super entertaining.
I'm a fan of it.
Okay, Max and Daisy, I've kept you guys a little bit long,
and I sincerely appreciate you sharing.
Yes, pass our bedtime.
Yes, I know.
Can I ask you one more question that actually Jimmy Song had posted in the Noster chat, which is he said, we know that El Salvador has changed a lot.
But how has El Salvador changed you?
Which I thought was perhaps a nice way to end things on.
Well, it's changed me so much because I see the individual lives transforming.
All of my students at Kubo Plus, Kubo AI, who many of them end up working at Bitcoin office or the ANYA National AI Agency, to be able to just do things and have an impact that will, that, you know, in so many ways, not only, you know, like we are planting seeds that some of them are actually bearing fruit now with my students that I taught four years ago.
Um, and by the way, uh, UNESCO recently just did a report on El Salvador looking at, they studied
El Salvador for about six or seven months. They were on ground and country. And one thing they
found, uh, they were looking at AI readiness for El Salvador. And what they found was, well,
they found Jimmy Song because four years ago, Jimmy Song came to El Salvador and he taught my
first group of students, Bitcoin, uh, the Bitcoin programming course, programming Bitcoin course.
And I called him the Jimmy Song 7 because we only managed to find seven students who were able to pass the quiz he gives to get into the class.
Something like 130 applied.
Only seven got in.
And what the UNESCO report found was that unexpectedly, they said El Salvador is the number one country in all of Latin America for quality of open source contributions.
and they had no idea, they couldn't explain it,
but it was my programs.
It was like, they all have to contribute
to open source projects.
And so they all open like their GitHub
and they all have to contribute.
So in our office motto and our program motto
for Kubo Plus, which is our Bitcoin
and Lightning Devs program is excellence only.
So like the report from UNESCO also found
that the quality of our contributions from El Salvador are three times as high as the average
for the rest of Latin America. So they were totally baffled about what this possibly could be.
But I know that's my flower. Like that's the fruit that I've borne in El Salvador.
And I believe, as Max just said, that President Bukele is a one in 500 year type leader.
And it's amazing. Imagine if you got to be at that table having dinner with Lorenzo the Magnificent and Da Vinci and Machiavelli and, you know, all these amazing Michelangelo, all these like amazing, the Age of Discovery, all these like amazing adventurers and astronomers and architects and like building this renaissance, right?
Imagine being there.
That's what we're at right now.
We're changing the course of history into a new epoch.
And it's fun to be there.
And it's really changed me a lot to appreciate why we are even building.
Why Bitcoin?
Why Bitcoin matters?
And it matters because of the future of humanity.
Max?
it's a tough one to follow nothing to add to that no you do he's the poet he should be able to add
something well i mean um i think that as as a as a production team and as a talent team
you know one of the the roles that i play is the person that's not changing if you you know i'm like
the boomer and i'm i'm like a tough you know i'm like stuck you know to create a dynamic type of
thing. And in El Salvador, what that means is that I've been kind of changing in the way that I
appreciate a few different things. Like, for example, there's the idea that governments and
all governments are worthless, particularly in the U.S. Ronald Reagan is like, during that era,
that government's too big, you can't have government.
Anarcho-capitalism is like, no government, we don't need government.
But in fact, if you go back to the founding fathers
and the creation of Constitution, Bill of Rights, this type of thing,
I mean, the idea of a governance model existing is a reality.
You need a governance model to exist.
And Bitcoin is one of the strictest governance models ever imagined.
And so in El Salvador, you see where a functioning government
can actually offer very sound benefits
to the population that's being governed.
So the social contract, I guess I would say
that the change for me is rethinking
about the social contract.
You know, the social contract between the government bodies
and those being governed,
and how it can manifest in the 21st century,
and how a small country led by a dynamic leader
can create freedom in the way that's being done.
And so to be there and be a part of that,
it's keep an open mind and really try to embrace that
and be like water, like Bruce Lee says, right?
To go with the flow.
And so it's been just a remarkable eyewitness to history.
I think ultimately the bottom line is that this is a chapter in our life and my life where we're actually eyewitnessing an incredibly important piece of history that will be talked about for hundreds of years.
So it's like being right there at the signing of the declaration or being in Kitty Hawk or being at the Apollo lunar launch.
You know, we're actually witnessing and we have a good relationship with folks who are doing all these things to be an eyewitnesses and see it firsthand.
And it has it changes. It changes. I guess what I'm getting at is that the scale of this change as it now impacting the world is enormous.
So it's humbling. Right. It's it's kind of a humbling experience because you you you're seeing something happen that very few people have ever had this kind of experience.
And the profound impact it's having globally is now just being recognized around the world.
And so it's a very hopeful expression of humanity, what can be done, what is possible.
And, you know, Max invented the Coco Max in El Salvador.
And you can come to our restaurant, La Cajita, in Bitcoin Beach and enjoy the Coco Max.
And it really has put El Salvador on the map, this Coco Max drink.
Totally.
It made the big difference.
It took them over the top, the Coco Max.
It is like the Sistine Chapel.
Coco Maxing next time I get there.
Yeah, it's the Sistine Chapel of beverages.
You know, it's the perfect combination of coconut grinded up, coconut meat,
coconut water, volcano coffee.
And we're going to introduce the Coco Max ice cream and Coco Max candy bar.
candy bar will have south salvador chocolate el salvador coffee el salvador coconuts and sugar
cane sugar cane so you get a quadruple hit of el salvador shipped anywhere in the world your local
whole foods you know for seven dollars you can get a coco max choco bar and experience the
quadruple hit of el salvador right there in the aisle seven of your whole foods and be elevated
to this posture of greater consciousness without you know spending more than seven dollars or
leaving the comfort of your local Whole Foods.
And by elevated, he means high as a kite, as with all the
chocolate sugar and coconut.
It's like you're on top of a volcano and you can see infinitely into the Pacific Ocean
and see, you know, where the mermaids dancing in the fluorescence of the bioluminescence
of fish that can generate their own electricity and light are dancing in the Pacific.
And they're all drinking Cocomax.
And you're there witnessing this on top of a volcano.
out and you're thinking to yourself, my God, this is, I am, I am in the presence of a, of a higher
being. And, and, and that, um, that meat turns your soul immortal. You become an immortal. If
you wish to become an immortal, come to El Salvador or go to your local Whole Foods, get a Choco
Coco Max bar, peer out into the Pacific, watch the bioluminescent fish dance with each other
and stack sets.
Yes.
I got to get one of these candy bars.
I mean, wow.
We're going to call it the Matt Odell bar.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, boy.
And then we changed it now.
It became the Coco Choco Max instead.
And remember, somebody needs to create the meme
that it's Matt Odell's fault.
Yeah.
Whoever's out there in the Noster chat right now,
I'll zap 5,000 sats to the best
it's Matt Odell's fault meme.
so yeah tag tag me in it uh this is all his fault oh yeah thanks a lot odell geez thanks a lot dude
that's why we don't have real shit okay this is why we how to say like buy buy bitcoin not that
fake shit yeah there you go well max first of all i can't stop thinking about tripping out on a max
or choco caco max on top of a mountain staring out of the pacific and watching the bioluminescent
fish dance with each other.
Volcano, yes, excuse me.
They're all beautiful.
The mountain is so blase,
so middle class.
One of the most volcanically
concentrated activity
in the world in El Salvador.
It's wild.
And that also,
the whole,
whether it's tokens like Bitcoin
or it's AI tokens
that are being circulated
in the new 21st century economy,
defining the 21st century economy,
they're all converting energy
into money, essentially,
because an AI token is money.
And so is the Bitcoin token. So and then the individual sovereignty and the sovereignty of El Salvador with its geothermal energy capabilities means that we become the AI Bitcoin powerhouse of the 21st century.
And that's one of the objectives because we have an enormous amount of potential geothermal energy, which is the best form of energy.
You know, it transformed the economy of Iceland, for example.
You know, they were able to export aluminum ingots by transforming their geothermal energy through Alcoa, which is a huge corporation there, into aluminum, which they then can export.
So in El Salvador, they can take their geothermal energy, turn it into AI tokens, and then send those tokens around the world, right?
So they're exporting, you're exporting energy.
You're a huge energy exporter because you're exporting AI tokens that were created by geothermal, local geothermal energy.
The same thing with Bitcoin, right?
You're mining for Bitcoin.
So we already have, we are already mining Bitcoin with geothermal energy.
So we're exporting that energy around the world.
And this is, gives us sovereignty.
Again, it's the sovereign stack.
It's the freedom stack.
AI, Bitcoin, education, security.
You put them all together.
You add a Coco Max bar on top of that, you smother it in a, you know, as I mentioned, I mentioned the ice cream.
I'm just laughing because when Max and I, during COVID, we started the Orange Pill podcast and we would live stream.
And then I would be like, OK, it's been an hour.
And I guess that's it.
And Max would finally wake up then and start talking.
And two hours later, I'd be like, OK, I'm trying to say goodbye.
And as soon as you say goodbye is the worst time for Max when the camera, the little light on the camera.
Don't go away.
He's like, don't go out.
Now I know the trick.
Next time I'm just going to be like, okay, that's it.
15 minutes in.
The curtain's closing.
I'm like, okay, we're going to stop this by force majeure of my own lexiconic kind of composition.
If you ever want Max to talk, just say, okay, we're about to wrap up or we're going to cut camera.
and he's going to start talking as much as possible so you can't cut.
Exactly.
I'm going to get my thesaurus out immediately and dive into the splendor.
And remember, this is Matt O'Dell's fault too.
It is.
I'm so glad we have someone to blame now.
I've been looking at it.
I'm going to blame him for everything.
If I stub my toe, it's Matt O'Dell's fault.
If I forget to pay my taxes, it's Matt O'Dell's fault.
Like he is going to get the blame for everything from now on that goes wrong in my life.
And what went wrong in my life for sure in the past four years, everything was good.
All the stuff we did in El Salvador, except for Bitcoin Twitter, it disappeared.
All the memers are gone.
And that's Matt O'Dell's fault.
Yeah.
I blame him.
That's it.
It's like Murphy's law, Saad's law.
It's Matt O'Dell's law.
Yeah.
The O'Dell law.
The O conspiracy No one will remember who he is Adele went away and the memers left Yeah Hmm Thanks a lot Odell Correlation equals causation
I'm sure of this.
Yeah.
We're going to need to make T-shirts.
We're going to need to make maybe it's Matt Odell's fault candy bars as well as a secondary line for you guys on top of the Choco Kako Max bars.
I don't know.
You know what it will be?
The Matt Odell chocolate bar will just be a wrapper and there's nothing in there.
Nothing.
Because it's like that said, buy Bitcoin, not that fake shit.
And look, Matt Odell's fault is that he went away and it's all fake shit.
So we're going to sell fake shit.
It's just going to be cardboard in there.
And it's going to be nothing.
It's not going to be a real thing.
The Matt Odell nothing bar.
It's 100% nothing.
Organic.
The organic Matt Odell nothing bar.
No ingredients whatsoever.
Wow.
Totally organic.
Sustainably sourced because there's nothing there, you know?
Right.
It's 100% oxygen.
$12 a piece.
At least.
Hell yeah.
Fantastic.
Relive the memeless period of internet drudgery with a Matt O'Dell nothing bar available for $12 at Amazon or at Whole Foods.
What's the phrase he uses?
It's fake shit, right?
Like the fake shit bar.
Yeah.
Ooh, the fake shit bar.
There we go.
Yeah.
The fake shit bar all caused by Matt O'Dell.
It's Matt Odell's fault that we all have to eat fake shit bars for the rest of our lives because of him.
He abandoned the Bitcoin Twitter community.
Yep.
I'm not buying the mea culpa.
You know, I think there needs to be more penance.
Okay.
It's just not enough to say, you know.
His penance could be he needs to go on tour to every Bitcoin conference and speak.
And he should come to Bitcoin Historico, come on stage, and we'll, like, flagellate him.
We'll get these, you know.
Flagellate him?
Yeah, what's a word?
Yeah, it'll work.
Sure, flagellation.
We had to go old school.
Yeah.
Yeah, a little cat-of-nine-tails up there, you know, and just give him a-
Like that scene in Game of Thrones.
Shame!
Yeah, shame.
Shame!
That's it!
Shame!
We'll have him walk up on the stage in the National Palace.
Yeah.
Shame!
Right, he's on all fours with a dog collar.
Yeah.
Shame!
This just took a turn.
Shame!
That's it.
Max was doing the OnlyFans version.
This is the OnlyFans version?
Yeah.
You know?
And yeah, we'll sell Matt O'Dell fake shit bars.
Yeah.
I love it.
It's fantastic.
I'm into it.
Okay.
I'm into it.
BitcoinHistorico.com, for those who want to see Matt O'Dell do his shame walk.
Is that correct?
Yes, the walk of shame.
We'll promise that.
We're going to put that on a poster campaign across the Bitcoin Twitter.
and or maybe Nasser now that he abandoned that.
So we're going to, you know, go wherever he's not going to yell at us.
So now that I know he's back on Bitcoin Twitter,
we can't go there and let him know that we're talking about him.
So hopefully nobody tells him because otherwise, you know.
Whatever you do, guys, don't tell Odell about this.
Don't tell Odell.
Definitely don't tell Odell.
His buddy, Marty Bent.
Yeah.
What about that guy?
Marty Bent should have kept him on the straight.
Now, Marty Bent stayed on Bitcoin Twitter.
He was loyal to Bitcoin Twitter.
But apparently he's not very powerful because it all fell apart.
It was Matt O'Dell.
Matt O'Dell was the one that left and everything fell apart.
So, you know, we have fake shit bars because of him.
Thanks a lot for your fake shit bars, O'Dell.
We love you, O'Dell.
We love you.
We're all looking forward to the walk of shame.
But, you know, it's just everyone's got to pay the piper at some point, right?
you know it's just the price of doing business but well i feel like old school i feel like we're
back we're back you've you've given me so much optimism for the future i have relentless optimism
again i haven't had that for five years in bitcoin now i have it i feel it i can i can feel it i can
feel it guys this is a lot of fun now i don't know if i if i start to say like and that's a wrap if
if Max is going to go off again.
Like, I don't even know if I should say the word.
Just turn the camera off.
Just don't.
And we're starting for the first time.
It's interesting, you know,
because you get through all the, you know,
conversation and all the bits you figure you're talking about.
You run through the list.
It's all very engaging.
And then, you know, you start to hallucinate.
You start to oxygen.
It starts getting depleted.
You start to have delusions.
And, you know, to be able to read those,
you know, like skywriting in your own unconscious.
mind and you just blurt it out what you see, you know, out there and it triggers, you know,
the stream of consciousness, which if you've been in Bitcoin for 15 years like we have,
it can, you can cough up a lot of interesting blood and guts and it can be interesting,
you know, because we've seen every single thing. We know everybody, we've seen it all. We've
experienced the entire panoply of disasters and triumphs for 15 fucking years.
and i just want to say speaking of fake ship bars i am convinced that walker has a filter on his
screen to make him look like a hunky tan like a fabio yeah and max and i look like corpses you know you know You got dug up you know It because I ate five Choco Coco Max bars before this
So I'm buzzing.
I'm glowing right now.
I was in the garden sweating
before this and then jumped
right on in here for a moment.
I had to move my sprinkler, guys,
when I got back from running
around before this.
And then, yeah, what can I say?
The glow has persisted.
I feel like I'm in my studio
and it's above the garage.
And so it's probably the least well,
like there's AC in here.
Like it's not Europe, you know,
but boy, it could be colder up here.
I'll just say that.
So that may be part of that.
Oh, it's cold in our house.
We have the AC cranked up.
It's like, it's like,
it's like Arctic conditions in here.
It's nice.
It's the way to do it.
Yeah, it's very hot outside.
You're wearing a turtleneck
just to spite the Europeans.
Like you're just like, yeah,
it's so cold in my house.
I can just wear a turtleneck.
This is actually considered hate speech in Europe.
It could be warmer if I...
This is hate speech.
Oh, my God, we're going to be banned on X.
Oh, my God.
They're going to write to Elon and say that he owes them $5,000 million
for allowing us to spew this hate speech.
Yeah, heat-related reparations, I think.
To make it worse for French people,
we're going to take our Coco Max bar and eat it with ketchup.
oh yeah oh well speaking of that of course happy 250th birthday everybody you know is our 250th
birthday this weekend coming up right so uh max and i are going to celebrate with some uh sparklers
and fireworks in the house so we're going to stay cold right like we have a tall ceiling so we're
just going to light them up and like send off these firecrackers and but it's interesting like
I've been alive 20% of the history of the United States.
Shit.
Or more, right?
That's how I'm on.
66.
I think you just thought.
So 250, 10%, 25, 20, 20, more than 20%.
66, right?
So, you know, my parents were alive for, you know,
almost half the, it's a really young country, but.
It's a young country, for sure.
You really, like, we've participated in something,
called the United States,
which has been an incredible story.
But I think that's where El Salvador
comes back into it.
It's like it's taken the baton
of the best that the U.S. was able to achieve.
And it's now taking it further.
Hey, grab that mask.
I want to show something
from the old school days.
Okay.
This is, we have this
from the early Bitcoin days.
This was.
Yes.
I've got my.
Remember I was telling you
about the old days like this was like more like 2013 or 14 era bitcoin anonymous anon yeah
anonymous uh a good old guy fox yeah um the uh november 5th of november yeah yeah remember
v for vendetta v for vendetta yeah yeah we got a lot of good books here here's uh
yeah those were the days those were the days so we need to bring now that matt odell's back maybe
we might have some new funk return the funk is back it just reminded me of it uh you ever seen
the old greg video from uh from a mighty wind it was a british sitcom back in the day like but i say
back in the day it was like before i was born even but it's like there's a great if you if you guys
want a nice laugh you can probably just search for old greg with two g's and uh and have your
and have yourselves a nice chuckle um while you're lighting off fireworks in the house
what's that what happened to grijage yeah are you saying greg's age yeah i call him grijage
where is that old potato i don't know i don't know see every like matt odell left it's his fault
everybody left with him and if you happen to light your house on fire with those indoor fireworks
guess whose fault that one is too that is totally matt odell's fault right it's matt odell's fault
that I look like a cracker right now
and a corpse.
Because for whatever,
it's his fault.
Like, I don't look like this in real life.
I look way better.
I look almost like Giselle.
Like tan, lithe, and beautiful.
But on this camera,
whatever Walker's doing,
he's just trying to make me look bad.
So he looks better.
I thought this was a blame Odell party,
not a blame Walker party.
No, that's Matt Odell's fault.
Matt Odell gave him that idea.
Look what we have here.
See, this is the Constitution of the United States.
Beautiful.
And this is the Bitcoin white paper, right?
You see?
The two most important documents in history.
Pocket-sized.
Yeah.
The pocket-sized.
Don't go anywhere.
You know, it's Matt O'Dell's fault that Max won't stop talking either.
Like, Max is just like, I might get up and go get some watermelon and turn up the AC.
You know now that I remember the misery of our European friends I might turn the AC down to like 60 degrees just to maybe even 58 Put on like a put on like a down jacket Maybe there we go 58 58 K It has to be 58
No,
we never figured out how to turn this thing on.
I never,
he,
he ripped us off.
I spent $400 on this and I never got it fucking working.
You can never figure it out.
He,
so he sent us another one and we still have it on.
Hello.
And it's his,
that's Matt O'Dell's fault though.
Fuck you,
Sierra.
Hello.
Yeah, he's famous.
Look at that chicken.
You know, Bitcoin chicken.
Oh, man.
He's the most famous economist.
Plucky used to be a central banker.
We should start calling him Matt O'Dell.
That's Matt O'Dell.
That's Matt O'Dell's cousin, Plucky.
Plucky.
Plucky's cousin, Matt O'Dell.
Plucky looks like this because Matt O'Dell.
Yeah, it's not Plucky's fault, that's for sure.
It's fake shit bars.
he ate fake shit and uh that's happened to him so yeah that's our that's that's what's going on
and we've kind of gone stir crazy and mad and we're in this house and uh freezing cold and um
but out of spite for my european friends i'm going to like keep it cold i'm gonna just
get a down jacket and some boots and i'm gonna well i'll tell you a funny story
Uh-oh.
So, you know, Max and Stacey, we met in the south of France in 2003.
Oh, yes.
And that was shortly thereafter.
They had one of these huge heat.
That was 2003.
2003.
They had a heat episode.
Thousands of French people died.
30,000 French people died that summer.
Right.
In 2003.
We had just met.
And so for a date, you know, I took Stacey to a store called Picard, which is a French
store.
they only sell frozen food.
So it's a store that's full of freezers.
Yeah.
Open freezers.
So I said, I'm going to take you to a place you're going to love, this place.
And we went into this Picard and just wandered, you know, for a half hour, 45 minutes to get
some of this cool air, you know, opening up.
It's like, oh, look at this frozen fish.
It's taking in the cool air.
Right.
So that was like the first time a major heat storm hit France in modern times and just
wiped huge people out.
But that didn't inform them that maybe they should improve their air conditioning or get the AC.
That didn't that didn't change.
And look, we were sensible Americans.
And where do we go to the place with the freezers?
Yeah.
Like like.
So we went and got cold.
Right.
So it was actually cold in there.
So I don't know.
I don't know.
Yeah.
But it's all Matt O'Dell's fault.
I mean, pretty much the heat wave is his fault, too, because you could you can make that argument, you know, that.
that it's like that butterfly flap his wings.
And that's what Matt O'Dell did
by abandoning his Twitter handle.
And, you know, that's,
he needs to start thinking about these sort of consequences.
That brief moment in his brain when he said,
you know, I'll just walk away from Twitter.
That was the wings of that particular butterfly
setting in motion the cosmic synchronicity
that resulted in the memes of Bitcoin dying
and gave rise to the suit coiners.
So he was responsible for the very thing he's critical of.
He says, oh, those suit coiners are worthless.
Well, you know what?
They got traction because you left Twitter, right?
So, you know, look in the mirror.
You know, this is what's going on here.
You are the butterfly.
You are the butterfly, Matt.
If we go by the multiverse theory, do you think there's an alternate pathway,
the other side of that butterfly's wings where he didn't leave
and we're actually already hyper-Bitcoinized?
And that is the perfect world.
He coins at $10 million right now.
$10 million. There's total Bitcoin adoption.
Yeah. But that's another
shirt to make. You are the
butterfly, Matt.
You are the butterfly, Matt O'Dell.
Matt O'Dell, butterfly bars.
Next. You know, they're
very, very, very thin pieces
of chocolate. But they're kind of nice.
You know, they're like a little crispy.
Yeah. With a hurricane,
a whirlwind, a tornado at the end.
Yeah. And his little butterfly wings.
That's beautiful, man. I think we should work on that.
Anyway. Oh, I think maybe we're fine.
Really genuinely go.
Okay.
Stacey, I'm kind of, okay.
And ending live stream now.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of The Bitcoin Podcast.
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