And there's Randy Johnson standing on the mound.
And I'm like, well, I'm going to die.
And that's how I died.
["The Dollar is Heroin"]
The dollar is heroin.
Because you've injected it,
and once you inject the heroin,
you need more and more and more and more and more.
And then it gets to a point where,
if you stop using the heroin, you're going to die.
Elizabeth Warren doesn't want people
to be able to memorize 12 words
or have bits fly across the internet like,
hmm, wonder why.
The dollar isn't money.
The dollar, you could maybe say is currency,
but the dollar is a debt instrument.
You can't own a whole dollar.
The value of your dollar that you have in your wallet
is contingent upon the fact of more and more people,
corporations, and governments getting into more and more
debt forever.
What happens when that debt is due?
They don't have the money.
Nobody has the money.
It's like, if you have a credit card bill
and you have no money, you get another credit card,
and you pay that credit card.
It's all debt.
It's all leverage, right?
So it's like, there is no money in the scenario.
It's all debt.
If you suppress the expansion of dollars,
you're going to go into a deflationary collapse.
In order to keep this orderly and things
from collapsing overnight, you have
to keep printing more and more and more dollars.
There's no choice.
And every central bank in the world knows this.
They all know this.
I'm knowing this hiding.
If I talk about the dollar or deflation,
no one's hiding the ball.
This is not conspiracy theory.
It's all there.
This is not rocket science.
Where does it come from?
Do you just print it?
We print it digitally.
So we, as a central bank, we have the ability
to create money digitally.
When you understand that they have no choice, again,
let's make this very simple.
Supply and demand.
The more you increase the supply of something,
the less it's going to be worth.
Flooding the system with money.
Yes, exactly.
They have to keep increasing the supply of dollars.
There's no choice.
And there's no end to your ability to do that.
There is no end to our ability to do that.
The other thing about Bitcoin is it's not going to stop.
It's just not going to stop.
The wind is at our back, and it's a drumbeat.
People don't understand how their car works.
They still use their car because they don't have a choice.
You don't have a choice.
I love you all.
You're going to have to figure out Bitcoin.
It's not going away.
You can tune out of this conversation.
And three years later, the drumbeat is still
going to be going on.
And my day, I didn't have any money or any internet.
All I had were dirt and rocks, and I had to catch up
with Johnson, and it was hard.
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plubs.
My name is Walker, and this is The Bitcoin Podcast.
The Bitcoin time chain is 856355, and the value of one Bitcoin
is still one Bitcoin.
I hope you enjoyed that special little intro,
and it felt fitting for today's guest on this Bitcoin Talk
episode of The Bitcoin Podcast.
That guest is actor, producer, writer,
and a bunch of other stuff, Joel Heyman, which is also
just a sweet last name.
Joel is probably best known for his work
with rooster teeth productions, where they basically
pioneered the idea of web series in America,
long before YouTube even existed.
Joel is a fascinating guy who I've known as a Twitter
or ex-friend for some time, and he also happens
to be a hardcore Bitcoiner.
He's an Austrian buff and a general monetary policy
aficionado.
He's also just fucking hilarious.
I was extremely stoked to get Joel on the show,
because according to him, for the past 15 years,
people have asked him to do podcasts on finance,
or economics, or Bitcoin, but he has resisted until today.
And our conversation was an absolute fucking blast.
I highly recommend you follow Joel on X via the link
in the show notes.
He is a great follow.
And if you're on Noster, I've also linked his end pub
there as well.
Feel free to bully him so he starts using Noster more.
I sure enjoyed the hell out of making this episode
with Joel, and I know that you are going to love
listening to it.
Before we dive in, do me a favor and subscribe
to the Bitcoin podcast wherever you're listening
or watching, and check out my sponsor, Bitbox,
in the show notes, or go directly to bitbox.swiss
slash walker, and use the promo code walker for 5% off
the fully open source Bitcoin only Bitbox O2 hardware wallet.
You can also grab links to protect your digital life
from sim swap attacks using a Fani and cloaked wireless.
I am a one man shows.
When you use my partner links,
it genuinely helps me keep this show running.
And I truly appreciate it.
If you'd rather watch this show than listen,
head to the show notes for links to watch on YouTube,
Rumble, and Noster via highlighter.
But if you are like me, and you prefer to just listen
to your podcast while doing something else,
then I highly recommend you check out fountain.fm.
Not only can you send Bitcoin to your favorite podcasters
to give value for value, but you can earn Bitcoin
just for listening to this and other podcasts.
Finally, if you are a Bitcoin only company interested
in sponsoring another fucking Bitcoin podcast,
hit me up on social media or through the website,
Bitcoinpodcast.net.
Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk
with Joel Heyman.
I learned from Peter McCormick,
who's probably the most prolific Bitcoin podcaster.
I had him on and interviewed him kind of podcasting
about podcasting very meta.
And he was like, you got to do the pre-roll, man.
You just got to record everything.
You never know what you're going to get.
That's true.
OK, I'll listen to you.
But yeah, so I cut you off in the middle just
to hit that record button.
Now I feel guilty about it.
But you were just saying you've been in this business
a while.
Well, the thing is, so is that I've
had requests over the years to do podcasts, my own podcast,
or other people's podcasts.
And I've resisted it greatly.
One of it, just because my schedule just
had been impossible is the first thing.
I just haven't been able to fit in.
The other thing is there's nothing
worse than listening to a celebrity talk
like economics or politics.
I'm not that I'm a celebrity.
I'm like a D plus celebrity or whatever.
But nobody wants to hear that.
Maybe like C minus though.
Like probably C minus.
I'd get you.
Whatever it is.
A passing grade.
Nobody needs to hear it.
So it's like, I don't want to be that guy.
But I have been looking at stuff for a while.
I am old.
I remember the 70s.
Like I remember inflation.
I remember Jimmy Carter.
I remember US debt denominated in Swiss Franks
because people didn't trust the dollar.
That was Volcker.
We started at Volcker.
We went from 70s to the 80s.
We went from Volcker to Greenspan.
And just rates kept dropping.
That was when stocks became a thing.
Because that's when the credit expansion started.
I remember the G5 trying to devalue the dollar.
And then that causing the crash of 1987.
And that was exasperated by a portfolio insurance.
And that is when the Greenspan put started.
It was in the late 80s.
And I remember that.
There's three themes we have for this podcast, sir.
I've wrote it down.
Ready?
It's savings, adoption, heroin.
These are our three.
We're going to get back to these topics.
So we went from 87.
We had the crash of 87.
The Greenspan put.
You're going to start noticing pattern.
We went from the 80s to the 90s.
We blew up a Nasdaq bubble because interest rates kept
falling.
The Nasdaq bubble popped.
And we had a central bank response to cut.
That started with the Asian Contagion in 1998.
There was a hedge fund called Long Term Capital Management.
And when that thing blew up, that spread to Russia and Mexico
that blew up the ruble and the peso.
And again, I remember the morning.
I remember the morning.
I remember 10 in the morning watching
CNBC where it's like, hey, we're going to have an emergency
rate cut because of long term capital management.
Again, it's the same pattern.
You have a bubble, bubble burst, central bank intervention.
So we went from the Nasdaq bubble.
And then we didn't take the pain.
And then we blew up a housing bubble.
And the early odds.
And so I remember all of this.
And I certainly understand the pattern.
And the Greenspan put.
And we went from Volcker to Greenspan to Bernanke to Yellen.
And the Greenspan put is still with us and very much alive
because it has to be.
So I've been investing the whole time.
Like I remember the 80s.
I was poor.
I was poor as hell.
My dad was in the army.
I've been moving around my whole life.
I finally landed in Texas.
I went to the University of Texas.
And then I made the decision where it's like, hey,
I'm going to go be an actor, which is basically
the same statement as saying, hey,
I'm going to go be poor for a living.
And I was.
I was very, very poor.
But I went to Los Angeles with $2,000.
And my first year in Los Angeles, I made $12,000.
And but back then it was easier, right?
Because I didn't have a cell phone bill.
I didn't have an internet bill.
You didn't.
It wasn't illegal to not have car insurance.
You didn't have to have car insurance.
Food was cheaper.
It was easier to be poor back then, right?
So I could do it.
And I was poor for a long time.
But no matter how poor I was, I realized
I had to have savings because I had to have investment,
because I had to have hope, right?
So no matter how bad it was, I saved the entire time.
I invested the entire time.
It's like I saved all those checks from being a kid
during your birthday.
I lost 80% of it in the NASDAQ bubble.
I didn't have much money.
So it was like, yeah, not the end of the world or whatever.
But so I was a poor starving actor.
And in 2003, some friends of mine from college,
we decided to start a website.
It was called Rooster Teeth.
It was a production company.
And we started with a web series.
And the web series was called Red vs. Blue.
It's the longest running web series of all time.
Went almost about 20 years or something like that.
So I remember 2003 was before Twitter.
It was before YouTube.
It was before social media.
And we had a social component on our website.
So I was doing social media in 2003, 2004, 2005.
And I was extremely lucky to be associated
with some incredibly talented people,
like the people at Rooster Teeth were great, great people,
incredibly talented, hardworking, industrious.
And they all brought different things to the table.
And so I really benefited from that.
But the offshoot of this, and I can work this into Bitcoin,
believe it or not, because it's before Bitcoin's existence,
is that I was very ground up.
So it's like, I have had every experience in entertainment
where I've been the lowest guy in the totem pole,
and I've been the highest guy in the totem pole,
and I've been everything in between.
So it's funny because from 2003 to 2008,
I would go around the world, and I go around the country,
and I go to different conventions.
I go to comic book conventions.
I did hundreds.
I did like 100 conventions.
Jesus.
Yeah, I was internet famous at the time
before internet famous was a thing.
And it was very strange.
It was like, if you go to these conventions,
it's really funny.
I need to drink water real quick.
Yeah, do it, do it.
If you go to these conventions, if you go to Comic-Con,
they have these big stars.
These big stars, they have a certain experience
where you're the headliner.
And they fly you in, and you go in,
and you sign autographs for two hours, and you're done.
But we had a production company.
We were selling stuff.
So we're selling t-shirts, and we're selling DVDs.
So I'm sitting at that table from the beginning of the day
to the end of the day, every day,
and we're selling goods.
We're signing the entire time.
We're signing autographs the entire time.
I signed thousands, and thousands, and thousands,
and thousands of autographs all over the place.
But the science here to this is that I got to meet people.
I got to meet a lot of people, and they treated me great.
We had just the greatest fans in the world.
And I have this sickness of finance in me,
and I've had it the whole time,
and so I'd had these conversations.
And I was a gold bug, right?
Okay.
And I remember trying to explain gold to people,
and they would have absolutely no idea
of what I was talking about.
People absolutely, positively,
did not understand gold.
And I was in a weird position where it's like,
I'm an entertainer, so they like me,
so they're gonna endure me.
They're gonna tolerate me.
They're gonna be nice about it.
Again, it's like nobody wants to hear this stuff
from an entertainer, so whatever.
But it's like, I had the experience of meeting
thousands, and thousands, and thousands of people.
It was a great experience.
And I talked to people at work,
and I talked to, like nobody understood
what the hell I was talking about.
If I talked about gold, people were like,
why are you speaking Japanese to me?
They absolutely had no understanding of it.
So 2008 happens, and we get that collapse.
You know, my older brother's in finance.
And so he kind of understood it.
And I understood it to the point where I was gonna buy a house,
but I didn't understand the depth of it,
and I didn't understand it was really a Eurodollar problem.
It was a really big problem,
but it's the same problem that has been going on since 87,
right?
It's the same issue.
So that happened.
And like,
similar to what I was talking about,
I was a libertarian, I was Austrian,
I was a gold bug.
So, and I was on Twitter, I was in 2008.
And so I used to follow Max Kaiser, right?
He used to follow me when he was on his own account.
And so we used to follow each other,
I would watch his show.
And I think it was around 2010,
and he's like, hey, look at this Bitcoin thing.
I'm like, hmm, what is this?
And I went and looked at it,
and I instantly understood it.
I instantly understood,
this was the slide roundabout way.
This was it, I absolutely understood it.
I say I understood it, but I didn't understand it.
Why didn't I understand it?
Because two reasons.
One, governments are definitely gonna ban this thing.
I did a podcast somewhere around there
where I was talking about,
listening to myself on a podcast,
talking about Bitcoin back then,
and he's like, Joel, shut up, shut up.
I said at the time, I said, I get the ideology,
but there's no way a government's gonna allow this
to happen.
The second thing was,
people do not understand gold at all.
So how am I gonna explain Bitcoin to them?
There's just no way.
So I was like, I'm not touching this.
I'm not touching this.
So I think, so, Jesus, Walker,
I can't tell you, I made a wallet.
I have the laptop.
I made a wallet.
Bitcoin was trading at like a dollar or $10.
I don't remember, I think I'm mentally blocking it out
at this point.
I created a wallet, I did all this trouble.
I was at work, we were gonna have a meeting.
I'm on my laptop, and I was like,
well, I will buy $1,000,
and I'll get a thousand of these Bitcoin things,
whatever, and I'm entering my credit card information
into this, and I'm like, nah, and I didn't do it.
And a couple of years passed.
And I'm on Twitter, and somebody said on Twitter,
you know, this Bitcoin thing,
it trades kinda cleanly.
I think it was Peter Brandt.
He goes, it trades kinda cleanly.
There's no CEO, there's no earnings report,
there's no central bank intervention.
It trades really cleanly.
It's really supply to man.
I'm like, hey, you know, I think he's right.
And so I'm like, yeah, I think I'm going to speculate on this.
I think it was like $200 at that time.
So I took a sliver of money, still a gold bug.
I took a sliver of money, and I'm going to speculate
on this thing, and I did, and I speculated on it,
and it wasn't much money, and I bought it,
and it went up, and it went up, and it went up,
and it went up, and I'm like, wow, this is great.
And then it went down, and it went down,
and it went down, and it went down, and it went, well,
that was nice, I have to lock in these profits.
I have to lock in these profits.
So I did it slowly.
It's slowly over, maybe it's going to zero after, you know.
Oh yeah, yeah, I thought, well, that was fun, too.
I sold it all, and I made a little bit of profit,
and I thought that was fun.
Yeah, and so then, a bunch of things started happening.
I'm always looking, I'm always poking and prodding.
There was somebody who created a cryptocurrency
that was a cryptocurrency, and it was backed by gold.
I'm like, hmm, it's a cryptocurrency backed by gold.
That's interesting.
So I started researching that,
and it's like, I got the blockchain,
so I spent all this time understanding
the blockchain part of it,
and I became more or less satisfied.
I thought, okay, this makes sense.
You get down to the very bottom of it,
and it goes, and all this blockchain technology
refers to the LBMA price of gold.
And it hit me there.
Why would we build the system of rules
just to refer to the LBMA price of gold?
I trusted the blockchain side,
I don't trust the LBMA side.
There's three things that we eventually need to talk about.
Yeah.
Why people don't understand Bitcoin?
The dollar, Bitcoin, and gold.
They're three different things.
They're just three different system of rules, right?
Being in gold was painful.
It was incredibly painful.
We know gold is manipulated.
Why do we know gold is manipulated?
Because they pled guilty to manipulating
the price of gold, and they admitted to it.
They said, we are guilty, but that's not gonna stop them.
So it's like, after a while,
and again, we'll talk about why gold doesn't work
because of the system of rules.
But it's like, at that point,
I'm like, why are we going to all this trouble
where it's like, I trust the blockchain,
but I don't trust the LBMA price.
And that was sort of the first like,
the other thing was other people
started saying things out loud
that I was thinking to myself.
And there was a bunch of names.
And we can get into some of the stuff later
about like Bitcoin versus everything else.
And I probably have some different takes on all this stuff.
I have some different takes on MNT and all this stuff.
It was because Ralph Paul.
And he started saying,
this thing doesn't have any counterparty risk.
And the whole time I was thinking,
this thing doesn't have any counterparty.
He started articulating what I was thinking.
And at that time,
you know, it's funny because it's like,
if I say to people, I'm on a web series,
like a web series is like, what the fuck does that mean?
It's like we were, it's like a web series
and it was based on a video game using Machinima,
blah, blah, blah, blah, but it's like,
I also did like,
I also directed and produced like 260
national television commercials.
I did like 95% of all the GameStop commercials.
So if you ever saw a GameStop commercial.
I just saw that recently.
And I was like, holy shit,
that's a, that's a,
that's a fuckload of GameStop commercials.
Yeah.
We did a lot of that.
Like people have no idea the amount of stuff
that we did at that company.
You know, it's funny because it's like in 2013,
like again, we were started before YouTube, right?
And when YouTube came about,
it was a big debate in the company
as to whether or not we should even put our stuff
on YouTube because we're giving RP to somebody else.
Wasn't even known by Google back then or whatever.
So we're like, well, let's not put our stuff on YouTube.
And so we waited years.
And eventually when we did put our stuff on YouTube,
it was only a little amount,
but I think it got to be about 2013.
And in 2013, we got to a billion views on YouTube.
A billion. Jesus.
And then in 2014, we did another billion.
So it took us like, I don't know,
many years to get to one billion
and one year to get to two billion.
There was a bail.
This is basically like the monetary supply.
Like it's basically like the supply of money.
Like just like a billion for a while.
And I mean, except like,
you just add a few zeros to it, right?
And then you basically got the money supplied.
Oh boy. Tracking, yeah.
Oh boy.
If only we could maintain that.
But so like, I came into some moneyish things
and I was poor for a very long time.
I slept on a mattress on the floor
and I went from poor to being not so poor.
I still slept on a mattress on the floor,
but I did hit a point
and I want to be a little bit careful about,
you know, the timing of some of this or whatever.
But like I did say, you know,
I'm putting 80% of my net worth into this thing.
It reaches threshold with me
where it's like, I'm gonna put 80% of my net worth in
and I did and that was good.
So where the hell were we?
I'm basically just talking to the timeline.
So I invested in that and basically,
yeah, I guess that's the end of that story.
And I've kind of basically,
I mean, like the reason why people come on these podcasts
and they go, you know, this is not investment advice.
It's because, and none of this is investment advice,
it's because, you know, the listener needs to understand,
am I a saver?
Am I investor?
Am I a speculator?
Right?
Which, or am I a combination of these three things?
And nobody can tell the audience member what they are.
Right?
I'm all three.
Like I'm a saver, I'm an investor and I'm a speculator.
I speculate.
So but it's like a mass majority of his Bitcoin, right?
But I'll still, I'll still delete the 10% at the top.
You know?
So I mean, basically that's kind,
I think that's kind of the story.
I think that's my history.
I think.
And it's, yeah, I mean, funny,
Twitter has been so unbelievably interesting
because at the end of the housing bubble,
we went from a housing bubble to now we're in a bond bubble,
right?
And it's the same thing where it's like interest rates
were falling and falling and falling.
You know, and again, I think it was around 2014
where we had negative interest rates
where it's like people don't understand
how absolutely unfriking believable
negative interest rates are.
Like there's a chart that somebody posted
of like interest rates going back to the time of Jesus
because they have those records
where it's like the interest rate money is like 15%.
And then like a couple hundred years ago,
they have records for the Bank of England.
And so you still have that history going back hundreds
of years and it's like you could just see like,
you know, it would negative, you know, and it's like,
you know, it's like we have to, I have to stop
and we have to say to ourselves
when we're having this conversation,
who is the audience, right?
So it's like you have this podcast
and it's like, who is the audience of this podcast?
So it's like, if your audience is like Bitcoiners,
I'm not really saying anything
that they don't already know, right?
There's no real value in anything that I'm adding.
If it's-
Debatable, debatable.
Well, but the game from, you know,
the thing is, is again, anytime in my life
where I'm trying to talk to people about finance,
they are not interested.
And I totally understand.
I totally understand.
So it's like, you know, know your audience,
but it's like, I do, you know, so who,
I don't know what the audience will want from this,
but the point is, you know, it's like,
you have to know your audience.
So it's like, I need to desperately
try and craft this conversation
to make it as practical and basic as possible.
Like for somebody who doesn't know anything about Bitcoin,
and this should be the goal,
like Michael Saylor since joining Spades has added
a tremendous amount of value.
The thing that I think they added the most,
and maybe this is new to me,
is like a cheerful and constructive thing,
because I am not cheerful and I am not constructive.
I am a penny ass, and I'm awful human being,
and smell bad, but it's like,
I've been having this conversation for a long time,
and I have even convinced people to get into Bitcoin.
I've convinced a lot of people to get into Bitcoin,
and this is a whole other conversation
where it's like adoption, right?
So it's like, I need to do the best job that I can.
Like if I'm talking about like government-denominated debt,
and people have no idea what I'm talking about.
If I say the word interest rates, people are out.
People are out.
And the main problem that people,
why people don't understand Bitcoin,
is because it doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Everything is contextual.
Everything is contextual, right?
So it's like they're only understanding of Bitcoin,
like you can look at the cross-rate of the dollar to Bitcoin,
you can say, look, it's up 10 million X from the beginning.
You know, the free market is saying something
that's not, that's the only context that you can give it.
So you got to give it more context than that.
And like that has been my struggle anymore, Walter, sorry.
No, you're good.
What I would say is, first of all,
you've just made this intro incredibly easy
because my first question was gonna be,
who are you and how did you get here today?
And you gave me the, how did you get here today?
But can you give me the, who are you also?
How do you describe yourself?
Walter, I've been asking myself who I am.
Well, I have no freaking idea who I am.
I really don't know.
That's too complicated of a question for me.
I, like, I was, you know, it's like I'm like,
I've been in production most of my life.
I've done like every form of production.
Like I've been a PA, I've been an extra,
you know, I've been a stand-in, I've been an actor,
I've been executive producer, I've been a writer,
I've been a director, I've done,
I've held a lot of different hats.
I'm very confused, Walter.
And being poor has taught me to save.
And like this is, this is the whole thing.
It's like, when I'm talking Bitcoin to people, it's like,
I'm trying to say, I mean, I could be wrong.
I don't think I'm wrong, but it's like, I really am.
We're trying to save people.
And the people who, the most important,
the most, the most interesting thing to me about Bitcoin
is the top of the funnel.
It is the people who know nothing about Bitcoin.
That to me is the most interesting part of Bitcoin
because in them is like the greatest change.
And, you know, the other thing about Bitcoin
is like, it just, it doesn't, it's not gonna stop.
Right.
It's just not gonna stop.
Like the windows that are back and it's a drumbeat
that's just gonna keep on.
The thing is I have to be careful
because it's like, I only have certain amount of things
that I can talk about.
I mean, I don't want to blow it all out the window,
but it's like, so I mean, it's adoption, right?
The windows that are back,
and no matter what happened,
like people don't understand how their car works.
They still use their car because they don't have a choice.
You don't have a choice.
I love you all.
You're gonna have to figure out Bitcoin.
It's not going away.
You can tune out of this conversation.
And three years later, it's still,
the drumbeat is still gonna be going on.
And again, it's like I've had conversations with people
talking to them into Bitcoin.
And it's like, when you talk to people,
like you are not gonna go from like,
I know nothing about Bitcoin to, I'm invested,
it's a process.
I am a pan in the ass asshole.
And unfortunately, the thing that's gonna pull people
into Bitcoin more than anything else,
like Lynn Alden's a genius.
And she said something.
She said, don't tell people to buy Bitcoin,
teach them about Bitcoin, right?
Teach them to learn.
So that is the key.
It's like, don't buy Bitcoin, learn Bitcoin.
And even if it's like, I'm buying GE stock,
don't buy GE stock, understand what you hold.
Because when you understand what you hold,
when the storm comes, you will have conviction, right?
You have got to have, like, and again,
I don't know of any other asset
in which I can have a higher conviction.
So it's like, it just doesn't matter,
but like these conversations with people,
you know, it's like, I spent years with this guy
talking Bitcoin.
And again, the thing that pulled them in,
which is the worst possible thing,
it's like when Bitcoin hit 3000 the last time,
I was just gonna start, I really like him.
So I was just gonna start beating on him.
And I'm like, ah, Bitcoin just crossed 3000.
Ah, Bitcoin crossed 4000.
Bitcoin crossed 5000, 10,000, 15,000.
Every day, like I just keep bugging him.
I just keep bugging him, just keep bugging him.
And, but the problem is, again,
this is the worst possible way to bring somebody in.
Because finally, like 42,000, he's like, all right,
I will buy the Bitcoin at 42,000.
And again, that's the problem,
because what you do is you suck them into the top
because people will not buy at the bottom,
they'll buy at the top,
and then they gotta go through the pain of the cycle.
Right?
And so, and again, you know, he goes, look,
I bought Bitcoin, look here, look on my phone,
it's on Robinhood, it's like, you didn't buy Bitcoin.
At least Robinhood started letting you withdraw.
Like they did, they did start allowing withdraws from there.
At least there was that,
because for a while that was purely like just
fully paper Bitcoin, right?
But at least you can withdraw now to their credit.
I don't know if they keep that open forever, but yeah.
It's a process, you know, for the people, right?
It's a process where they're not gonna go to zero
to 60 in two seconds.
Like, and so it's like, you know, at least if they,
you know, he's on his way, you know,
it's like the Bitcoin ETFs, you know,
it's like Bitcoin is going to get adopted,
how it gets adopted, we don't have a say.
We don't have a say on how it's gonna get adopted.
It's going to get adopted.
It's going to get adopted in an ugly way,
as it's like, you just came from Nashville,
and it's like, you know,
I don't think Donald Trump understands Bitcoin at all.
But it doesn't matter, he doesn't have to understand Bitcoin.
All he has to understand is just get out of the way.
Just get out of the way.
Like we don't need, like, it can be a treasure,
it doesn't matter.
Like we just need people to get out of the way,
because even if he doesn't get out of the way,
it's still, it's all about rate of change of adoption.
That's it, right?
So it's like, I would just like to live long enough
to see it, you know, go where, you know,
it's just, let's just like,
let's make this as quick as possible, you know,
and let's keep this orderly, you know,
but that's like the dollar.
We're gonna have to talk about the dollar.
We're gonna have to start this conversation
to try to teach people how this works.
Because this is gonna be long.
Yeah, yeah, but quick aside,
you're jiggling a little bit on the monitor, which is fine.
But if it's, yeah, because I love the,
I love gesticulations and I love pounding the desk,
but if you can pound the desk slightly to the side of it,
just, you know, I know I'm gonna real stick in the mud here.
I know, I know.
You should have told me it really is terrible.
We have been getting a lot of earthquakes.
That's must have been what it was.
But you know, I will just so you know, Joel,
this is a safe space for rants.
This is a safe space for tangents,
like a real safe space, not a bullshit safe space,
like where everyone's feelings are respected,
but rants are respected here.
You know, it's funny because it's a-
I will never stop the middle of a rant ever.
It just, it goes against my principles.
Yeah, I can't do it.
It's funny because you went from Lawrence LaParre to me,
which is like your audience is in for big disappointment.
I had, I had-
I had-
You're a great guest and you have me.
And Obi-Nosu in the middle.
No, but I wanted to talk to you for a while, Joel,
because this is one of those beautiful things
about the internet.
Where like I found, I think Carla was following you first,
she's like, like this guy's like hilarious.
Like he used to, Carla loves media production.
She's far more skilled at it than I am.
But so she was like, new of you and your kind of like career
from that.
And she's like, you gotta follow this guy.
And I followed you and I was like, oh, yeah,
I like this guy's vibe, you know?
And so one thing leads to another.
And I start a podcast and I'm like,
I want to have you on here.
Well, this is-
This is why I agree to be on your podcast
is because of the videos you make.
And I'm like, well, I feel like,
you feel kinsmanship with anyone who's like
producing content like that.
You do a great job at it.
Cause it's like funny and it's ads value, you know?
And that's great.
That's, you know, I just cursed for 15 years.
I appreciate that.
Carla was the, I was really just the pretty face
or the ugly face depending on the skit.
But she was the one doing all of the actual like,
you know, final cut action, you know,
buy your computer just like moving closer and closer
to the screen.
You guys are so good.
So good.
You guys are just so great.
She's been on sabbatical, you know,
since our son arrived,
but she's been itching to get back into it a little bit.
Well, you're just gonna have to go ahead
and just ban the cast.
Yeah, well, exactly.
I mean, the kid doesn't even pay rent.
So he may as well start, you know,
contributing a little bit on the content creation front.
Like, you know,
He could represent interest rates.
Oh, there we go.
There we go.
Cause he's small.
Cause he's little.
But no, so, okay.
So you mentioned a couple of things that I think like,
is actually, you've basically, this is great.
I mean, you're very easy to interview
cause you basically just structured the interview for me,
which is fantastic.
And you mentioned, you know,
talking about the idea of savings, right?
And why that's actually important.
And as far as audience for this,
I named this podcast quote, the Bitcoin podcast
and bought as many domains
that said Bitcoin podcast is possible
so that I could try to be a top of the funnel search result
for folks that are getting into Bitcoin.
And so I, while there are a lot of hardcore Bitcoiners
who are deep down the rabbit hole who listened to this,
I know that there are also folks that come in.
Like I will send certain episodes to my friends
who are still, you know, learning about Bitcoin
or who, you know, be like, I just,
I just talked to this person.
I think you'd really, you know,
think you'd really like them.
Why don't you check this episode out?
Maybe this will just give you a little more perspective.
So, because I agree with you,
that top of the funnel is so important.
That's what we tried to do with our content creation
is, you know, because not everybody wants to listen to
as much as I do, a like four hour Michael Saylor dissertation.
Like I find that fascinating.
You find that fascinating.
The average person, their attention span is like this.
Like it is minuscule.
It's, it is tiny.
And you gotta hook them.
It's like the tipping point, right?
Where it's like advertising.
It's like advertising.
It's like the thing that's in your peripheral vision.
It's the thing you can't see it's in your peripheral vision.
Eventually you're like, I got to look at this thing
at the peripheral, that's the battle.
The battle is just look at this thing.
That's the battle.
And that's like the tipping point is just,
it's just look at the, it's complicated.
You know, because it's like the dollar.
Right. Right.
Well, okay. So here's the thing.
Maybe this is a good place to start is,
and I know we've already started,
but this is a good place to start with our starting again.
When I think that a lot of the, let's say angst, nihilism,
general, just like malaise that people have
in the world today is because they see all of the problems
around them, right?
They see all these different problems.
And they say, wow, this rightly so.
They say like, this is fucked.
But the problem is that they don't have a solution
they can see.
All they can see are the problems and they don't actually,
they see the end result of the problems.
They don't even see the root problem,
which makes it even more difficult.
So it's kind of like, I see all these shitty things happening.
I've been told that there are political causes to this,
that there are, that I should hate this other group of people
because it's actually their fault.
All these different things,
they don't ever get back to the root of the problem.
And when politicians propose solutions to the quote problems,
they're band-aids, they're superficial.
They're just something to put on there to say,
yep, look, I did something.
Please vote for me again.
Please donate to me again.
Let me be in charge
because the other guy will literally end democracy
as we know it, et cetera, et cetera.
We've all heard the lines.
But so in my mind, what I see is like to distill that down,
that the big problem for most folks
is they don't understand the problem,
which is our money is fundamentally fucked.
And then even if they understand that,
because there are a lot of people,
I think people are waking up to that a little more.
I think even though our inflation here in the United States
is not nearly as bad as other places in the world,
people are feeling the pain
because price inflation is something that you see
when every time you fill up your gas tank,
every time you go to the grocery store,
it's right in front of you, you can't ignore it.
And so then they at least start asking the right questions.
Okay, why do we have all this?
Why are prices going up?
But even if they get there,
even if they're somebody who's like a gold bug,
who has not, Larry LaParte speaking of him,
he has done a great job of bridging that gold bug
to Bitcoin or Gap as you have as well.
But a lot of people, even if they understand, okay,
yeah, the dollar is a Ponzi scheme
created by a cartel of private bankers,
they still may not see that there is a solution to this
and a very viable solution that has been around now
for 15 years, which is Bitcoin.
And the fact that they can't see that solution
tends to lead people towards doom and gloom and nihilism.
And like, what's the point of all this?
It's all just fucked.
So maybe a good place for us to start is just, okay,
as somebody you have been on this earth more years than I have,
you know, I'm still,
I like to think of myself as still a relatively young
spring chicken, but you know, I'm getting on there in years.
Oh, just you wait.
Everything hurts on me, Walker.
Man, I like tweaked my back.
I felt, this is actually the first time
I've like started to feel old and I'm not even old,
but I like tweaked my back,
trying to get the car seat out of the car.
And I was like, wow, I've never like tweaked my back
like this before unless I was like playing sports
and it was like an actual reason for tweaking.
I was just like at the wrong angle,
trying to lever the car seat out.
Like, okay, I digress.
It was just like, wow.
Like in the 1980s, I did like,
I did the freestyle BMX thing, which was like injury, injury,
broken, I broke all my toes.
I broke my ankle, I broke everything.
And then, but like you're young,
so it's like six months, so you're like, I'm fine.
And then you turn 50 and like,
oh, I remember every single injury I ever had.
I feel all of them at all at once.
Yeah, but yeah, so I digress
and see I told them I'm at a long tange.
It's too hair.
No, the thing is, is that like the conversation
that you're having, like for the listener,
like somebody who doesn't understand,
there's two things, it's like self sacrifice and risk.
So like when you go from the dollar to something else,
it's like there's a perception of risk.
And there's also self sacrifice where it's like,
dude, I don't even have money.
And you expect me to like, now I gotta go into Bitcoin?
I don't have money to invest in Bitcoin.
And it's like, you can't afford not to.
Like you gotta get rid of stuff and save on Bitcoin.
And again, that's like the whole adoption thing
where there's a bunch of rules
after you've made that decision that we'll have to get into.
But it's like, I wanna just try and be as practical
about this as possible.
Yeah, yeah.
Let's talk about, there's gonna be a struggle for me.
But it's like, let's talk about the dollar, right?
The dollar is not a thing, right?
The dollar is the byproduct of a system.
The dollar is in a thing, the dollar is a process, right?
And that process can go one of two ways.
Either way, the dollar is trying to destroy the dollar.
So in other words, you can print out a dollar
and you can take that dollar and you put it under your mattress
and like, no one can steal from me,
no, they can still steal from you
because you put the dollar under your mattress
and four years later, as like four years ago,
you've had 25% inflation.
So if you took those dollars four years ago
and you put them in your mattress,
25% of that was stolen from you.
Well, what's the difference between currency and money?
The difference between currency and money
is that money retains its value over time.
Currency loses its value over time.
What is the dollar?
Where do dollars come from?
Like in 2014, 70% of non-primary dealership
and dealership loan creation is where dollars came from.
Now it's 2024, so now like 80 to 95%, what am I saying?
So dollars come, when you go to the bank
and you take a loan, dollars spring into existence.
If you default or you pay off the loan,
those dollars disappear.
How does fractural reserve banking work, right?
You get your paycheck, you take your dollars,
you put it into the bank,
they have a 10% reserve requirement,
which means they're not your dollars legally anymore,
but we'll forget that.
They take, they hold 10% and then they loan out
the other 90% and then those dollars go to another bank
where then they take 10% and they loan out the other 9%.
And then that, and it's turtles all the way down.
So it's like leverage.
The dollar is leverage.
What backs the dollar?
It's like people have the idea that taxes,
pay for our government, taxes do not pay for our government.
What backs the dollar?
The bond market backs the dollar.
What's the bond market?
It's people giving our government money,
borrowing money for a return, right?
The dollar isn't money, the dollar,
you could maybe say is currency,
but the dollar is a debt instrument.
You can't own a whole dollar.
The value of your dollar that you have in your wallet
is contingent upon the fact of more and more people,
corporations and governments getting into more and more debt
forever.
Now, what happens when that debt is due?
They don't have the money.
Nobody has the money.
It's like if you have a credit card bill
and you have no money, you get another credit card
and you pay that credit card.
It's all debt.
It's all leverage, right?
So it's like there is no money in this scenario.
It's all debt.
Man, my voice is so dry.
You're okay.
No, I think you're bringing up an amazing point
because people tend to think of,
they think of dollars as literally pieces of,
literally these pieces of paper and they're like,
it's money, right?
I can buy stuff with it.
But this system is literally just debt.
You remove all the debt in the system,
there are no dollars.
It's all debt creation.
I think that they think that it's a piece of paper
but the government backs it.
So it's fine.
And then they have recency bias
where it's like well, last 10 years have been fine.
So the next 10 years will be fine.
You know, it's like once you give someone a framework
of this debt process and they said there's two ways
that this can go, I think where people are also running
into confusion, the reason why they don't understand
why this context is significant is that you have
to understand what happens in a deflationary collapse.
Right?
So like the Great Depression was a deflationary collapse.
2008 was a deflationary collapse.
Right?
And it's like you have to understand what happens
in a deflationary collapse.
So in other words, since the entire system
is a bunch of nodes that don't have the money,
they're all relying on other nodes to give them
this process is that when a node goes down,
it's like, oh, our business has collapsed.
All that money that they were gonna pay to other people
is gone.
And then now this node's like, oh, I don't have,
then now the marginal differences,
I don't have the money, boof, it disappears.
And deflation spreads like wildfire.
And in a deflationary collapse, there is a tipping point
and nobody knows where that tipping point is,
but there's a tipping point where once you've reached
that tipping point, the entire system collapses.
Like you saw this play out in 2007, 2008,
where it's like, we need to get liquidity going,
we need to get liquidity going,
because it's like they understood that it's like,
they got, well, what does that mean?
People don't understand, right?
Where it's like, if you have your money at the bank
and your bank goes under, people are like,
whatever, there's an FDIC,
and they don't understand that like FDIC pays for
point zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero,
like the FDIC doesn't have the money,
but even if the FDIC did have the money,
like what does this process gonna look like?
So you like 2008, right?
You go through deflationary collapse,
like Bear Stearns fails,
and the people of the government are like, oh,
Stearns collapse, okay, well,
they're just like, whatever, whatever, whatever,
and eventually like, none of the politicians understand it,
but like Hank Paulson, who was the Goldman Sachs CEO,
before, he understands it.
Like there's like, like he was in the hallways
throwing up, right?
Cause he understood the problem, right?
And so it's like, he understands the problem.
So it's like, at some point,
he's gotta convince the politicians,
and he's gotta have this conversation where it's like,
yeah, the banking system is worth like,
you know, 18 gazillion dollars.
So I need 18 gazillion dollars,
and we're like, oh, okay, you need 18 gazillion dollars.
And so they gotta have a conversation,
and it's like, okay, well, let's go to Congress.
And so we go to Congress, it's like, yeah, guys,
we need 18 gazillion dollars to bail out everyone.
And the politicians are like,
you need 18 gazillion dollars to,
meanwhile, the bond market and the currency markets
are watching this and like, the differential of time
that it takes from like this deflationary collapse,
it's spreading like wildfire.
Well, they're like, well, you don't know,
and is it gonna hit that tipping point?
There's a tipping point where there's no going back, right?
So it's like, eventually they're like,
okay, 18 gazillion dollars.
So let's say that they now write a check to 18 gazillion
dollars, and it's like two months later,
and like, hey everyone, no problem,
we'll just put everything back the way it was, it's fine.
Well, all these nodes and all those associations
are not the same anymore.
So it's like, the bond market is watching this,
the currency market, at some point,
there's people watching this going,
well, they're just gonna like print 18 gazillion dollars.
Like what is, you know, you talk about the Catillion effect,
you talked about the Catillion effect on the last one.
What is the Catillion effect?
The Catillion effect is a hot chocolate, okay?
So it's like, you have chocolate powder,
you put the chocolate powder in the glass,
that chocolate powder represents the actual value
in an economy.
Now that can change, right?
There's like, someone creates a bridge,
someone creates an algorithm,
so it's a certain amount of value,
maybe it's changing, but it's not changing
to the denominator.
What's a denominator?
It's the water.
So we're gonna take this value,
and we're gonna denominator by water,
and we're gonna dilute it.
That's fine, it's a certain set.
But what's a Catillion effect?
The people closest to the hot chocolate
take a drink of the hot chocolate, like, ah, chocolatey,
and now I'm going to add a cup of water,
and then they pass it to the next person.
The next person goes, ah, not quite as chocolatey,
and so like every person has to pour a cup of water
into the top, eventually you get to the end,
the last person in the line, they're like,
well, this is just water.
So it's like that value of the hot chocolate
is denominated in the water,
that you keep increasing the water,
the water's a dollar, right?
So what am I saying with this whole deflationary thing?
Like, will you understand the systems leveraged?
You understand the deflationary collapse.
Like, people don't understand,
like, well, we need to balance the budget.
That's not the way it works.
There is no balancing the budget.
We crossed the Rubicon in 2008.
The dollar is binary, it's a one or a zero.
We have to increase it.
The national debt doubles about every seven years.
That's not for no reason.
It has to.
You must keep devaluing dollars
because if you don't, you will get a deflationary collapse.
What is the dollar backed by?
It's backed by debt.
Debt must expand.
Debt and credit are the same thing.
It must expand, it must expand, it must expand.
If you go sideways, there's no sideways.
It collapses.
So somewhere in that, it can like expand this much
or it can expand.
Now listen, these are giant systems, right?
So this stuff can go for years and years and years.
You can have some deflation over a year or two
or whatever, but you better not eff around too much.
You must keep increasing the dollar.
I was a libertarian.
Back when Ross Pro was like, we have to balance the budget
or we're gonna be completely fucked
and our children are gonna be angry.
I was like, yeah, if you run a household,
you understand that.
That's Austrian economy.
In 2008, it's over now.
There's no going back.
There's no balancing the budget.
We have to keep this orderly.
If you suppress the expansion of dollars,
you're gonna go into a deflationary collapse.
So in order to keep this orderly
and things from collapsing overnight,
you have to keep printing more and more and more dollars.
There's no choice.
And every central bank in the world knows this.
They all know this.
This is not, no one is hiding.
If I talk about the dollar or deflation,
no one's hiding the bulb.
This is not conspiracy theory.
It's all there.
This is not rocket science.
So when you understand that they have no choice,
again, let's make this very simple.
Supply and demand.
The more you increase the supply of something,
the less it's gonna be worth.
So they have to keep increasing the supply of dollars.
There's no choice.
So that's the dollar.
Right?
So I think that provides some, there's no choice.
So it's like, now there's Bitcoin.
Right?
Now you understand the dollar.
Now there's Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is different than everything else.
Bitcoin is indeed different from everything else
because you can actually own your Bitcoin
if you hold the keys.
Plus no one can print more Bitcoin out of thin air
like they can with the dollar, every other fiat currency
and every single other shit coin out there on the market.
So you better keep that Bitcoin safe.
And the best way to do that is to go to bitbox.swiss
slash walker and use the promo code walker
for 5% off the fully open source Bitcoin only
Bitbox O2 hardware wallet.
Then get your Bitcoin off the exchange
and into your own self-custody.
You may have seen people talking about this dark,
skippy attack lately on X,
which is basically a way for a malicious signing device
to leak your private keys, which is quite scary.
But luckily, Bitbox is one of the only two wallets
to actually address this vulnerability.
So you are in luck.
Plus the Bitbox O2 is just easy as hell to use.
And that's the same whether you're brand new to Bitcoin,
it's your very first hardware wallet
or you are a seasoned psychopath
and it's like you're 69th.
And again, it is fully open source.
You can head to their GitHub
and you can verify that for yourself.
There's no need to trust me or to trust Bitbox.
When you go to bitbox.swiss slash walker
and use the promo code Walker,
not only do you get 5% off,
but you also help support this fucking podcast.
So thank you.
I want to provide some context for this.
Like I'm gonna say some things that people aren't gonna like.
Right?
It's like I'm here for it.
OK, so like 90% 98% of the of the of the crypto market
is garbage.
It is scams.
But I'm not I'm not.
I don't know what Bitcoin Maximus means.
I understand that Bitcoin is different than everything else.
Bitcoin is different than the dollar.
It's different than Ethereum.
It's different. It's different than everything else.
Now, just because Bitcoin exists,
doesn't mean that Amazon stock doesn't exist.
Like we go to Bitcoin hyper, you know, hyper.
Bitcoinization.
The hyper big.
See, therefore, you got.
I got you.
We can go into that.
There's still going to be investment.
If we go into a hard money economy,
there will still be investment.
Right.
So it's like just because Bitcoin exists,
doesn't mean Amazon doesn't.
Right.
I think the problem is that we're all facing is that
it's a battle for the normies, right, where it's like,
you know, we're all battling for the normies.
And so it's like the normie and I, you know,
again, my frustrated process of like Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin.
It's like, hey, Joe, I bought some dough.
She's like, no.
Now, don't buy dough.
So it's like because they think that it's
cryptocurrency is it's the same thing.
It is not.
Right. Cryptocurrencies are divided.
Every single company is like you have a technology sector.
Every company in the S&P 500 is a technology company.
A ketchup company is a technology company,
a company that produces yogurt back when they they were able
to homogenize the same thing.
It's all technology.
Every company is a technology company.
So.
Ethereum and Bitcoin are completely different.
Right.
I'm not against Ethereum.
I'm not against Solana.
You just need to understand that.
Bitcoin is at least money.
It's digital property.
It's at least digital property.
It's money.
There is nothing else that is money.
There is nothing else is money.
Ethereum is a currency.
It's a smart utility.
Solana is a smart utility.
Bitcoin is proof of work.
Ethereum is proof of stake.
Totally different rate.
So.
So we can get into that conversation later,
but let's talk about Bitcoin.
Why is Bitcoin different?
Right.
What backs the dollar?
Debt backs the dollar.
The ever expanding.
It must expand.
Bitcoin, there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin.
That is the monetary policy.
The monetary policy is set.
It's not going to change.
Nothing else is like that.
I get a little frustrated because I'm not the smartest guy
in the world, but it's like I remember the block size wars.
And I understood perfectly because it can.
Like I get frustrated with people who come to Bitcoin
through technology and don't understand economics
because I don't think that some of them understand what they have.
They do not understand what they have.
There is nothing like Bitcoin.
There is no other cryptocurrency and there will never ever be
anything that is like Bitcoin because people think it's a technology.
That's not it.
Right.
It's like what backs Bitcoin?
Proof of work, math, energy, hardware, the network.
Right.
This is this is a massive difference.
Right.
And the monetary policy won't change.
You do not get a Bitcoin out of thin air.
You have got to.
You got to buy a hardware miner, you know, and you got to solve
some math equations.
You got to pay for the energy.
It's but it doesn't come out anywhere.
If you want to do that, that's fine.
Go to exchange is a free market price for it.
You can buy it.
I've never been going.
I've just bought it.
And that can't change.
Right.
So it's like I hope I'm serving.
Like if you think of like if you think of like crypto technology, right,
it's like if your bank has like a way to protect your money
and your bank account using cryptography, right, it's all software based.
Right.
So it's like, but it can it can be defeated.
Bitcoin is different because it's the crypt at this cryptography,
but it's also the hardware.
If you think about the microchips in your bank, you running this cryptography,
Bitcoin is a macro chip, which I'm stealing from Jason Lowry.
It's a macro chip.
It's one massive giant ship.
It is the biggest computer processing chip on the face of the planet.
Back when I didn't want to do Bitcoin because I thought the government could stop it.
They could have stopped it.
So I was like, governments can stop this.
There's something called a 51% attack, right?
Which is what you need is you need 51% processing power over the network
in order to defeat the network.
And then you can split the chain.
Now, even if you split the chain, there's still some defense there.
But it's like back then it was possible.
Now it's not possible.
You're not going to find a sword.
I'm sorry, it's just not possible.
I have to think about this for a second.
Well, yeah, as you were saying, I think that just one thing to add on there
is that what I love about the, even at that time,
like let's say back in Bitcoin's earlier years and its quote, infancy,
the fascinating thing to me about the game theory of Bitcoin
is that even at that time, let's say the government,
the United States, for example, were to acquire 51% of the hash power
and try, OK, we've got it, guys.
We've got 51% of the hash power.
This attack to maintain this 51% of the hash power
costs us real-world energy.
So there is a cost associated with that,
even if we're just printing dollars to fund this.
There are downstream, second and third order effects of that.
But OK, we've got this hash power.
Now, wait a minute.
Do we really want to reorg the blockchain
and somehow destroy the value of Bitcoin?
Well, no, actually, we've got all this hash power.
What if we just mine the Bitcoin?
Because that's actually worth more to us than, you know,
so hold on, guys, maybe we'll just keep this going.
Maybe we don't want this thing to stop,
because we are literally just mining the hardest money
and scarcest money that humanity has ever discovered.
And that's always like, I love that part of it.
It's brilliant. You're absolutely right.
And it's like, I try not to go too far down the path,
because I'm trying to read this as simple as possible.
I don't even know that I am making this as simple as possible.
Joel, I think you are.
I think you are.
And I've got to say, again, you are a pleasure to interview
here, because you've structured this better than I had going
into it.
And so I like it.
I've been thinking about this a long time.
I want to make this point.
Yeah, do it.
So it's like, why is Bitcoin different than everything else?
Right?
So it's like, it's open source software.
Right?
So you can take Bitcoin's code, and you can literally copy it.
And you can call it Walkercoin.
And you can even have enough followers where it's like,
hey, guys, this is exactly Bitcoin.
It's exactly the same thing as Bitcoin.
I just copied the code.
It's Walkercoin.
Same rules.
And let's say people even actually start to follow you.
Right?
We're like, I like this Walkercoin.
They start to pile on.
The reason why you can only do this once with Bitcoin
is because now people see what Bitcoin is and can be.
And now you will get a 51% attack,
where it's like, with Bitcoin, that is not going to happen.
Right?
Bitcoin was one time.
Bitcoin is like this weird thing because it's
a system of rules.
It's a voluntary system of rules.
It's like math.
Right?
But it's like math that is reinforced in the real world.
It's the only thing that crosses from the theoretical idea
of morality into real world rules.
It's like you have religion.
You have law.
Religion is like, don't break the rules.
You can still break the rules.
What are they going to use to enforce it?
Well, we have people and we'll beat you.
Same thing with law or everything else.
Right?
So it's like everything else has rules,
but the rules can be broken.
Bitcoin, the rules can't be broken.
That's a huge fucking deal.
Like this is the first time ever where the rules can't be broken.
Like it's like people, like it's like,
what's the difference between barter and money?
It's like, if I ask people, hey, do you want to use barter?
Do you want to use money?
Well, let's use money.
Well, it's a better idea.
Right?
And so it's like the differential from barter to money,
from like currency to action.
We've never had money before.
We've had currency.
Let's talk about gold, right?
What?
Like, because if the whole time you're thinking,
well, like gold is money, what gold was the best thing
that we had before money?
Why does gold not work?
And we have like 5,000 years of this.
And I used to be a gold bug.
The problem with how much gold is it for nox?
You'll never know.
Debatable.
You'll never know.
You'll never know how much gold is sitting under like the New
York Fed at JPMorgan Goldman Sachs.
How much gold is there?
You can kind of find some paperwork
that you can kind of figure that out.
You can kind of figure out how much gold is under there.
And you can even go take a tour and see the gold.
Hey, there's the gold.
You can see it like they have in there's the Goldman Sachs
fall.
That gold is never leaving that vault.
Now, and they can hold up a gold bar and go, see, it's here.
Then you ask the question, well, how many people
own that bar of gold?
Oh, 45 different people own this bar of gold.
So it's rehypothecated.
It's fiat.
Because nobody's getting that fucking gold out of there.
Because gold is physical, because gold is physical,
it has to be stored and centralized.
And the people who centralized the gold are human beings.
And because they're human beings,
you cannot fucking trust them.
Well, how do we know this?
We have 5,000 years of history of people doing this.
You go back to Rome, it's like, well, what did Rome do?
Well, they debased the gold.
I mean, it's endless, right?
So it's like, gold's fiat.
Or in its use, it's fiat.
In the way that it is actually used as money,
it ends up transitioning to fiat.
In itself, it's just a fucking chunk of metal, right?
It's a chunk of metal that you have no idea what the supply is.
You have no idea what the supply is.
No.
And the mechanism to price it is broken.
You can have a physical gold coin in your hand.
And in a deflationary collapse, you will win.
If you have a physical piece of gold in your hand
during deflationary collapse or Bitcoin on a self-hosted wallet
or even physical dollars during a deflationary collapse,
you win, right?
In a deflationary collapse, the price of Bitcoin will collapse.
The price of Bitcoin in dollars will collapse, but you win.
Why?
Because everything else is going to collapse more, right?
So that car that used to cost $50,000
is going to fall more than the Bitcoin, the gold, or the dollar,
right?
And a deflationary collapse.
Like, that's the reason why gold and Bitcoin, like,
I said there's two processes, right?
The dollar either ends in hyperinflation or deflationary collapse.
There's no other way.
Those are the rules of the dollar.
I didn't write it.
Bitcoin's not killing the dollar.
The dollar's killing the dollar.
Like, we don't know the timing.
I mean, I'm not saying that, like, I really genuinely do think
that I don't think we're going into hyperinflation anytime soon.
I really don't.
I think we've got plenty of time.
But like, you know, get Bitcoin now and, you know, you're
make some money.
Like, no one can tell you the amount of Bitcoin to own,
but zero is the wrong amount, right?
Get off, like, pump something out of it.
Do it, quote.
Get off of zero.
So again, that's the thing.
What am I, what am I miss there?
Like, am I, like, I'm trying to think, like, what questions
am I going to get?
Like.
I think that one of the things that people, like, when I, OK,
let's say, I know a lot of guys, like, just, like,
from college, or my dear friends, and a lot of them
work in, like, high level corporate finance and do very well.
And so, like, we're structuring this right now to, like,
let's say a more Western, quote, Western, you know,
whatever audience, people that probably have some sort
of disposable income, or at least could have the ability
to cut certain things out of their current budget
that they really don't need, that they can then
use that excess purchasing power to acquire Bitcoin.
Like, they have the choice to make.
We're not talking about people who are living in, you know,
hand to mouth that truly don't have the choice to make,
that are actually using Bitcoin in more medium exchange.
So just to set that, to set that bar there.
But I think that the big, the pushback that I see a lot when
I talk to my friends is, like, OK, like, I get it.
Even if they, you know, they get the, OK, yeah, there's only
going to be $21 million, neat.
First of all, I think that absolute scarcity is really,
really hard for people to understand, because there's
nothing that the only thing that you can compare that to is
maybe your time, maybe your time, because, but, like,
that's, it's hard to understand.
Here's the thing, right?
Human beings, in our reality, it's kind of a game of
quantifying facts, right?
Like, what is the thing that I can do to quantify something?
Like, a million people have used, like, the dollar as a ruler,
that it doesn't work, because the ruler keeps changing, right?
And so it's a game of, like, how do I quantify things the most
accurately?
There's no other way to quantify something more accurately
than Bitcoin.
Like, at the core of all of this is truth, right?
Like, at the core of all of this is truth.
Like, I have a pinned tweet on my Twitter that I've had there
for years and years and years about a guy, a brilliant guy who
deals with volatility, and basically what he's saying in
that tweet is, you must seek truth.
If you don't seek truth and you're blind to something,
that thing that you think is okay that you're blind to will
fucking destroy you if you don't pay attention to it.
Like, you must keep recalculating truth.
I mean, this is like, like, this is what human beings do,
right?
It's like, what is your brain?
Like, I used to think that your brain was a thing that made
meaning.
That's wrong.
Your brain is not a thing that makes meaning.
Your brain is the thing that detects meaning.
Well, how do I know that?
Because your iPhone works, right?
It's like the concept of math.
Hey, it fucking works.
My phone works.
Like, that's using math.
If the math didn't work, your iPhone's not going to work.
If you build a company making phones where you're like,
man, I'm just going to use whatever math I want.
It's not going to work, right?
So it's like at the core of it, it's truth.
And you must keep searching for truth.
And Bitcoin is that unrelenting tool that will help you see truth.
Oh, my God, it is unbelievable how Bitcoin manifests itself.
We've been in some threads together where we have seen
some money managers, people that handle other people's money,
not understand divisibility.
People that handles other people's money and it's like,
they don't know how math or fractions work and they handle other.
Like you're on the internet tweeting and people can read what you're tweeting.
Like they go, well, the supply of Bitcoin is infinite
because it's really divisible.
It's like the tweet that you had with the fish.
Oh, you got to repeat that tweet.
Yeah, OK, so for anybody listening that's not familiar with the context
with Joel and I are discussing, there have been several folks on Twitter.
The platform formerly known as Twitter, now known as X,
that have made the claim that Bitcoin is not in fact scarce
because it can be each Bitcoin is divided into 100 million Satoshis.
And actually, if we're really, if we're going to get technical,
Bitcoin doesn't exist, only Satoshis exist and do Satoshis even exist?
Or but OK, we won't get into that.
But let's just say, for the sake of their argument, they're saying,
well, Bitcoin doesn't, it's not scarce.
You can divide it into 100 million Satoshis and you could divide those even more.
And like the analogy I use is like, oh, OK, you give a man a fish
and he'll eat for a day.
But if you cut a fish into a million, you know, an infinite piece,
as he'll eat for infinite days, which is obviously not true.
Anyone with a brain knows this.
But this is just like this is fractured.
You can you can use a pizza.
That was a brilliant tweet.
It blows my mind.
You're right.
We're talking about in one of these cases, we're talking about a person
who literally sells a six hundred and ninety nine dollar like stock trading
money management course.
And it's like six hundred and ninety nine dollars like a month or a year.
There has been a bunch of people.
It's been a bunch of people falling into that trap.
It's like they fall into that trap.
I'm going to keep talking about fish.
Yeah. Yeah. Like it's OK.
I got the tweet ready.
What are you going to say?
If you're a critical thinker and you're searching for truth and this person,
like they have made, you know, minus 10 percent this year and they're trying.
And like there's like you're gone.
You're gone.
So I think I think that's actually a really important point, Joel,
is that this idea that so many people come and look at Bitcoin
and and they're bringing their their baggage with them.
They're not looking at it with an open mind to say.
And this goes for people who are incredibly well off, who are, you know,
money money managers, the infinite fish or pizza ladies or men,
infinite pizza men, too.
Let's, you know, it goes both ways with the sexes here.
And it goes for people that are just trying to get by in their day to day life,
right, that are just that are just scraping by, trying to make rent,
trying to make their mortgage payment, trying to, you know, take care of their kids.
It goes for people all up and down the spectrum.
And it's this idea that you're bringing your you bring your baggage in with you
and you take all these preconceived notions.
Like it's that quote.
I forget who said it, but like Bitcoin is everything you don't understand about money
combined with everything you don't understand about computer science, like,
et cetera, et cetera.
And it's so true.
You have to go in humble.
If you're listening to this right now, you've stumbled across Joel and I
going, going at it here and you're like, what, what the fuck are these, these,
you know, Bitcoin psychopaths talking about?
I encourage you to approach this with a really open mind.
Listen, you're very humble because that is the only way you're going to come to
understand even a little bit.
The thing is that questions are good.
Yes.
Like I promise you.
Yes.
Like I've spent a decade and a half questioning Bitcoin and no,
even it's not Bitcoin, if it's a Walmart, if I, if I'm invested in Walmart,
I am looking for every anti-Walmart narrative I can find.
Yeah.
If you're invested in something, you have better be looking at people who are
arguing the other side.
You have to.
And I've been looking and looking and looking.
I just have not, like the two best arguments, I mean, I don't want to say them.
The two best arguments I've heard, the two best arguments I've heard against
Bitcoin and again, guys, if like, if you're, I'm new to Bitcoin, I've been here
for five minutes, let me tell you what's wrong.
If you have questions, ask the questions, learn, learn, learn, learn,
last, believe me, no matter question you have, it has been answered.
But I'll tell you, the two counter arguments I've heard the Bitcoin are
the best are central banks could reverse policy and adopt the gold standard.
Now, that wouldn't be as good as Bitcoin.
They could, but people are muscle memory and like already worshiped the central
banks and so they'll just go with it.
You know, but like central banks are not going to do that.
No, they're not going to do that.
It already like it already failed and it failed for a reason, right?
They couldn't sustain it.
Well, they are not.
The thing is that what the big political thing that people don't understand
is with the current system, it's like they get to steal money forever.
They get to steal value.
If the system works, as long as people keep using the system, like if you want
to rob someone, you want to do it where you're robbing them forever and they don't know.
Like that's how to steal from people.
It's the ultimate con.
It's the best way.
Like they don't understand they're being stolen from.
You know, it's frustrating.
Like you see all the people who are like, I don't, I can't ever afford a house.
Like I'm not going to have money for food.
It's, you know, it's depressing.
You know, but the drumbeat is going to keep going, right?
And so it's like as they as they keep coming up, we need to just be here beating drum and, you know,
whatever gateway we can get them to turn their head.
You know, it's like I follow like a lot of street artists who just like put Bitcoin stuff down.
I like that just because it's just like it's not it's still here, guys.
It's still here at some point.
Once people start looking at it, once they actually look at it, they're going to go that it's over.
Right. And it's like there is going to be definitely a tipping point because it's like to the point
where like you can't afford to not look at it and that will happen.
And it's like the adoption with money managers and the Basel accounting rule changes and what
Sailor's doing and like look at the conversations we're having now.
There is going to be a tipping point and it will be better if you're in before the tipping point.
Right.
You know, it's if you're in before the chasm is crossed, right?
If you're looking at that, you know, that adoption curve and there's the, you know, the there's the chasm in between,
you know, the early adopters, like we still have not crossed that chasm yet.
I do not think like we're still before.
Yeah. Well, and you know, we are way before.
Yeah. Well, you mentioned something, something earlier that I hold on.
Now I need to remember it.
You mentioned a lot of things.
So now I'm trying to I love it.
I love it though.
No, it was around adoption.
Oh, I think it was just you were talking about Trump and specifically this idea that like, okay, whatever you you think of Trump,
whatever.
And I think you and I are both in agreement here that he he said buzzwords, right?
I don't you watch the you watch the his speech, right?
Yeah.
First of all, I think the guy's hilarious.
I think he's a natural born stand up comic.
Like it's it's incredible to watch him perform.
He knows how to play a movie.
I have no feelings about him.
I do too.
And I trust a campaign promise about as much as I trust the US dollar.
So let me just put that out there.
But what your point earlier was was it doesn't matter if he understands it.
It matters that he's just talking about it.
And I agree with that.
And I think that's that idea of the shift in the Overton window, right?
The shift in what is actually publicly acceptable discourse in a in an election.
I mean, that that's wild.
Like that we have Malty, we've got Robert F.
Kennedy, Jr., who I think does actually have a much better grasp actually.
He has an heard him speak off the cuff like no teleprompter.
And and he actually knows like he knows his monetary history like none other.
It's wild.
But even Trump speaking of a teleprompter saying the buzzwords that everyone wants to hear.
It's great.
It's everything is good for Bitcoin, right?
And this idea that you.
OK, you can't at a certain point, you can't ignore it.
And I think the one for me when I see what saw Trump speaking at the Bitcoin conference,
it's like the most important thing about him going and speaking there is that
that just made it impossible, made Bitcoin impossible to ignore for a shitload of people
who could really use Bitcoin in their life.
And I'm not talking about it.
Yeah.
OK, the a lot for the big money managers.
That moment actually already happened.
It happened when Black Rock said, yeah, we're that we're
cool with this now.
It happened when Larry Fink was going on CNBC and saying, yep, actually, you know, like,
like that was what.
But that was the moment for them.
But for the average, the average person like that wasn't the moment for them.
They they they weren't watching Larry Fink on CNBC.
They weren't on Bitcoin Twitter.
They they are just living their life trying to get by.
But maybe they watch every single Trump speech that he makes.
And they did pay attention this time.
And to me, that's the that's the cool thing is that that
that maybe just moved the needle a lot for a huge swath of people
who really could benefit from Bitcoin.
A incredible amount.
And I that's that's very that's a hopeful thing for me.
Regardless of what happens in the election, you know, absolutely.
I mean, again, any catalyst that is just like look over here, like just turn your head.
Like just get some to look.
That could be that could be the tipping point.
You know, it's so funny because it's just sort of like for whatever reason.
It's like you look at like the debate of like whether East was the security
or not a security and we went on for years.
Like is he secure?
Like and you look at the Howie test is he the security is he not a security
years and years.
It's like, well, it checks all these boxes on the Howie test.
So it is security, you know, but it's like if everybody who's running
he dies, he still exists.
So maybe it's not security debate, debate, debate, debate, debate, debate.
And what happened?
Well, somebody just picked up the phone and was like, yeah, it's just a proof.
The ETF.
It was a political decision, right?
So it's just sort of like, again, like that conversation is, you know,
and again, like, you know, Bitcoin's going to pull in a lot of other stuff.
And it's like, I'm not against other stuff.
Like I'm not against smart contracts.
I'm not against like technology.
You know, it just none of it is like Bitcoin.
It's none of its money.
Like it's all currency and technology.
Like there's another, there's another conversation.
It's a little more complex, which I didn't even want to get into.
But like I've been like, again, like I've been hammering this thing.
Like again, when you go back to the block wars, where it was like the size of the block
and it's like these technology guys didn't understand what they had where it was like,
they're trying to take money and turn it into a currency.
It's like, can we do not if you fuck up Bitcoin and turn it into a currency, we're fucked.
Yeah.
Right.
But there's another, there's another conversation with this where the technology
of Bitcoin like currency versus money, like there's a thing in the white paper, right?
Where it's like peer to peer, right?
And that's a, like we talk a lot of us, we come from libertarian sides.
We tend to talk about the like the stealing through the central banks, but there's another layer
to it, right?
Where it's like, if you're using a peer to peer, like if I want to go buy a hat, like
I'm it's like, I'm going to give cash to the guy who's making a hat.
Like all my money goes to the guy making the hat.
But if I use my Visa card, all of a sudden we got your bank and like the, hey guys,
what are you doing?
Can I take a piece of this?
You know, it's like we have all these private companies trying to take a piece.
So, but and storing all that data forever and then using it to sell you more stuff.
But we don't, yeah, I digress again.
No, no, but it's like, I think people understand that instantly.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
But it's like, there's a couple of issues with like, you know, money can act as a currency.
Like Bitcoin can act as a currency.
Money can act as currency, but currency can't act as money.
Right.
So, you know, if we get to Bitcoin hyperorganization, it will act as a currency, but there's a
couple of issues with that.
You know, the Bitcoin scalability, I don't think is there yet.
And it's like, I think it will come.
Right.
The layer two stuff will come.
So that will come.
But it's like, again, in terms of the, this is almost why I didn't want to talk about it
because it's like I was trying to make this conversation.
It's simple as possible.
I'm going to make this conversation as simple as possible.
And if people get lost in the currency side of it, they won't understand the money.
And it's like, they don't need.
So it's like, if we're trying to help adoption, it's like Monero, right?
Like Monero is a cryptocurrency that's like private, right?
Like, which is like, probably a great thing.
But it's like, because it's private, that's going to create a massive headwind for it.
Yeah.
That's going to create a massive headwind for it.
And like the currency thing at the state of adoption that we're at right now, like, I don't know that we, I think, like, I think it's good that it has it, but it's like, I don't know that we need to hammer that.
Well, so I think we need to focus on the money side.
So I do want to get into that with you, but in the interest of, because I think you've set the stage really well in terms of the dollar and Bitcoin and Bitcoin being very unique.
And if it's cool with you, I would love to, because another thing you wanted to talk about was just the idea of savings.
Let's talk about maybe that just a little bit more and then we'll circle right back to this.
Can I get a glass of water?
Yeah, man.
Again, this is, come on.
I'll be right back.
Come on.
I'm not a totalitarian here.
You're a slave driver.
Yeah, come on.
I'm doing my, just doing my best here, trying to make another fucking Bitcoin podcast.
You hear it?
Oh yeah, I can still hear you.
Yeah.
Who knows?
No, I'm already, I've been having a good time.
This is, this has been fantastic.
But okay, so what I do want to get into layers because I actually like just having dug into a lot of the stuff that's happening right now on lightning, on, on Fetiment with Federated E-cash.
I like, there's a lot of really cool shit happening there.
And I want to, I do want to talk about some of that and like trade-offs with that and other cryptocurrencies that claim to do these things in the base chain.
But, but first.
I'm too dumb, Walker.
No, no, but it's okay.
I'm too dumb to have that conversation.
This is the part where you ended out the entire thing.
No, no, I won't do it.
I won't do it.
But first, I want to talk about the idea of savings because you brought this up right away.
So we've, I think you have very, done a very nice job of diagnosing the issue with the dollar, right?
We are talking about.
How is savings not a human right?
Well, well, then we get into the idea of natural rights.
Now that's, that's a whole, it's a whole nother rabbit hole.
But let's, okay, so the dollar is a system that is ultimately based on debt.
It is controlled centrally.
It is, they, you've also identified that they have to keep printing these currency.
And of course they're not literally printing there.
You know, it's, they're on their keyboard.
They're just adding some zeros to it.
And they have to do that because the interest expense on the debt that they have issued is now what it's like bigger than the military budget now at this point.
Like, we just crossed that bridge, right?
Recently, like it's, it's insane.
I mean, it's a deeper issue than that, but yes.
Right, right.
But the point is that to, to the only way to deal with this is to inflate away that debt is to like, to simplify it a lot for anyone listening.
Then we talked about Bitcoin and how Bitcoin is actually backed by proof of work.
It is backed by real world energy and some people I'm sure will debate the finer points.
Well, it's not backed by energy.
It's not okay.
But just again, to simplify things, you have to do work in the real world in order to discover these Bitcoins, right?
You, that you have to do it.
And there's only going to be 21 million and it isn't, it is asymptotically approaching 21 million.
It'll actually never get there because every four years, the number of new Bitcoin issued per block is cut in half.
So if you remember from your math days, guys, when you have an asymptoted approaches a line, but it never quite touches it.
It just gets, if, because if you get halfway closer to something, you can never get all the way there.
I don't think the human brain can understand exponential functions.
So can they understand that?
That one, I think is easier to understand than exponential.
But, but, but now, so at on a personal level, I was, I was not great at saving.
I had like a, I had a very like well-paying corporate job, like working for a, you know, one of the massive consulting firms got paid really well,
but was just dog shit at saving and was not like a good, you know, a good investor to the point where I was really digging into things
and doing due diligence and trying, you know, it's just like, oh, somebody told me about this.
Well, but like I was really horseshit at savings.
But the whole idea of savings didn't even seem that important to me because I was like, well, I've got my company stock that I've got and they'll match it.
And like that's going to, that's going to go up.
And like, I don't really need to worry about like savings.
You know, it's, you know, it's so funny right here, as you can see the age difference between us.
And that's good though.
We're bridging the gap here.
We're, you know, bringing the age groups together.
You're like, you're like 19, I think.
Like, I am a hundred and nineteen.
Perfect. Perfect.
But no, what I was going to say is it was not until Bitcoin that I understood both why saving is important,
and I also had a way to save that made sense to me because just putting dollars in the bank as we, or literally taking cash out of the bank and putting it under your mattress as you identified earlier,
you are still being stolen from that is not, you are not maintaining your purchasing power if you are in cash.
Now it can be nice to have a cash position.
It's like, with sort of,
Or if you have a place to be class.
Right. Right.
So the, or so, you know, okay, Bitcoin takes a nice, nice dip like, and you can, and you can scoop up some cheap stats.
But I realized it was not until I started going down that Bitcoin rabbit hole that I realized, oh, saving is something different than what I've been taught.
First of all, it's so much more important than I at first realized.
And now I actually have a way to save that makes sense.
I just take my, my currency and I convert it into hard money because I can still just easily go to any exchange and they will sell me Bitcoin in exchange for my dollars.
And I just put that away.
And I do a little bit at a time.
I'm not, you know, I didn't come in here with, with, again, I told you, it was a shitty saver.
I wasn't coming in with like, yeah, but I got, you know, 50 million in capital to deploy.
No, dear God, like just a little, you know, whatever is left over from every paycheck, that's, that's going into Bitcoin.
Right. And that made sense to me.
And I think that the reason a lot of people don't save is because even if they don't understand the technical details of why the money is broken,
they understand that something's broken.
And that's why so many people just put their money into indexes, right?
It's just like, okay, just S&P 500, that's going to get me this return a year.
And, but really all that's doing is basically just tracking the rate of monetary growth, right?
Or the supply of money.
And they probably don't even necessarily know that part of it, but it's like, hey, it's, you know, numbers going up at a steady pace and it's reliable.
But like that didn't even make sense to me that much because that's just like, that's treading water that's barely, that's keeping your mouth just above the water.
So you're still breathing, you're still kind of swimming and flailing, but you're not dying yet.
But if you're keeping your money all in cash and people in countries that have experienced hyperinflation or structural adjustments overnight, they know this very well, you know.
I have to articulate this in a different way.
Yeah.
I have to like, like say this.
A lot of this is process of like getting rid of stuff, right?
It's like process of elimination.
Process of elimination, right?
Where it's just sort of like, you know, where can I, where can I put my money, right?
Where it's like, and again, we talked about it is it's saving, is it investment, is it speculation, right?
Like when we say, hey, there was a 25% inflation rate.
You know, if you're in the stock market and you have a company that is made 5% over the last four years, you lost money, right?
So it's like, you have to subtract.
So you can do the process of elimination.
Okay, what can I buy?
Right?
What is it?
What used to be the bedrock of the financial system, right?
Where it's like US triple rated bonds that yield 3%.
But the name of the game of financial repression, the game that central banks are playing with you is that they have to get that inflation above that.
Like they have to get it.
So it's like, okay, I'm going to put my money and this thing that yields like 3%.
Like there's a term in investing where it's like the, the brass ring of investing is risk free, risk free reward.
And where like bonds are the opposite of that where it's like, it's all risk and no reward.
Like you're guaranteed to lose.
It's just a matter of how much.
So it's like, where can you put your money?
Right?
And this is, this is like, like this is why I went back to the 80s.
This is why I said the thing at the very beginning, the Greenspan put and the credit expansion, right?
We went from like the 70s to the 80s where the credit expansion really took root.
Why we were the reserve currency of the world and we incrementally had the most capitalistic system in the world.
And we already had the infrastructure from Brentwoods to, you know, it's like,
and by the way, like we went off the gold standard before 71, the banks made that call in the late 60s, which is like,
people didn't know that.
It was just official in 71 when, when, when they, they started to call our bluff, you know, Charles DeGaulle, haven't, yeah.
I got to say two things.
One, it's like, you got to the process of elimination of like, where can I come up, put my money in a car?
No, that's not going to work.
Can I put my house?
We were just running from the government.
Can I put my money in bonds?
Nope, you're going to lose.
Can you put your money in stocks?
Maybe you can win.
If you're, if you're good at this, if you're, if you're a speculator, you can, but most people can't.
Like, like I follow a lot of people in the investment world and I follow, you know, it's like this war between
the coiners and everyone else.
And it's like, I don't even know if I want to get into this, but it's just sort of like, maybe I won't get into this.
But it's like process of elimination.
Where can you, I mean, like if you're listening to this, think through it yourself.
You want to go to oil?
Do you want to go to uranium?
Do like, it's either you're going to spec, I'm going to go to this company.
Well, but companies are not as like great as you, as you think they are.
They don't last as long as you think they are.
And if you do, I'm going to buy Apple.
Okay.
Well, what's the PE of Apple?
What's the PE like?
It's like, in the late nineties, why do we, like people don't even understand PE ratios.
Like in the late nineties, why did we know that it was, it was a bubble?
It's because like Oracle was trading at 80 times earnings, right?
Like what's the average of earnings is like 15, 20.
It's like, so it's like, you're going to have to buy a stock that's unbelievably expensive.
Now again, you, you brought this up.
It's like people subconsciously understand that they don't have a choice.
So it's like muscle memory where it's like, I'm just going to put my money in the market.
I'm just going to put my money in the market.
And if you divide the returns of the, of the equity market by the Fed balance sheet almost
over like since 2008, you're, you get, you're broken even.
You know what I mean?
And it's like, and again, everyone keeps denominating everything in dollars at any time.
Anyone shows you a chart of anything, denominated in dollars.
It's like, well, what would, how much value did the dollar lose during that time?
Right.
You know, it's like, so it's process allimation.
And I think that's such an important point.
And this goes back to the idea of the measuring stick, right?
The dollar is a really dog shit measuring stick because you don't know how long it is.
You don't know really, you don't know what the units on that stick are.
You don't know how long it is.
Like you, yeah, you can, you can look at certain metrics for it.
Like you could, you could look at money expansion and have some idea of it, but it's regardless.
It's not a static measuring stick.
It's not a static denominator to your hot chocolate.
It's like, it's like, it's like the unemployment rate doesn't measure unemployed people.
Right.
Well, let's say how the unemployment works, right?
You lose your job.
You are unemployed.
After six months, you don't find a job.
You're still unemployed.
According to the government, you're no longer unemployed.
Yeah.
Well, that's because you got to look at labor force with this patient.
Well, and this is the problem with government metrics in general.
Like if you're, if you think that inflation, if you're listening to this and this is not to judge you,
but if you think that CPI is measuring inflation, you, you are, you are wrong.
CPI is an ever changing basket of goods.
And of course, one can make the argument.
Yes.
Of course that basket of goods should change.
Consumer preferences change.
But this is a cooked metric by the state.
And the 1990s, that was like the demographic top of the United States of America and like under a lot of metrics,
something they called, they, something they introduced called hedonics.
And hedonics is basically like, we're going to make a subjective call on what this thing costs.
Right.
So there's a website that like, again, a mold.
So like there's a website back in the day called shadow stats and shadow stats.
What they did is they ran like the pre-hidonic numbers of inflation.
Like they ran it the way it used to be.
And it's like, oh, look, inflation is way higher than what they're saying.
Right.
So it's like, again, the reported number of inflation, is it accurate?
No.
Well, and, and see, you know, the problem with you, Joel, is that you spark so many other rabbit holes in me that I want to,
that I want to go down.
Like the idea of when we talk about, when politicians talk about inflation, quote, inflation,
they're not actually talking about inflation.
They're talking about prices rising as a result of the inflation of the monetary base.
But then, you know, a lot of people looking, you know, like, that's just some kooky Austrian shit.
Like that's, that's not real.
Like, and so that, that's a whole another rabbit hole.
And to, to wrap up this, this idea of savings.
And I think that idea of process of elimination is a really good exercise for people to go through to basically say, OK,
consider Bitcoin amidst all the other things that you can invest in.
And the purpose of investing is to be able to grow your purchasing power over time.
But nobody really wants money.
Right.
We don't, we don't actually want money.
Money is a tool to be able to get the things that we want.
That's what we want.
And if that money is good money, sound money, then the longer that we hold that money,
we should be able to purchase more of the things or higher quality of the things that we want in the future than we can right now.
Delaying gratification should have its benefits.
You know, MMT years may go a different route, but that's a whole another rabbit hole.
But I'm going to give you the case for MMT.
Well, yeah, give this case for MMT.
OK.
Here's the case for MMT.
We go into a deflationary environment.
We go into a massively deflationary environment.
OK.
Then AI happens and it starts like five, six years from now, just starts eating everybody's jobs and we have deflation.
Maybe that's the case for MMT.
OK.
Well, so that's a, yeah.
I'm not, like, I don't think that that's a good idea.
Like I'm against MMT.
Like, but if you're listening to this podcast, you got and like everybody's on our side probably, but it's like, what's the counter argument?
Maybe that's a counter.
Well, and I think that's a, that's a fair point.
Actually, this is something that I think Jeff Booth has done a great job of talking about.
Just this idea that like he blows my mind.
Also talk about cheerful and constructive.
You know, he's one of those people who really embodies that.
I try to live up to that.
I almost always fall short.
So shout out to Jeff.
You know, the problem with the Bitcoin space, Walker, is that it is infested with massively high IQ people.
So it's like, you've got Jeff Booth.
Like you have these people who are like freaking, like so freaking smart.
Like Jeff Booth is like 12 steps ahead, like every time.
So it's like, it's like, I listen to him and like, well, I'm never going to appear on a podcast because I cannot articulate what this guy is saying.
Like so precisely, he wrote a book, Price of Tomorrow, it's really short.
It's awesome.
And basically he's just describing, like, you don't understand how insidious the system is because at the core of the actual economy and actual reality, it's deflationary.
Like because of technology, because of demographics, because of the debt itself.
It's deflationary, but it's like, you have this central bank layer over it.
Like that's another thing I'm saying.
Well, the dollars apply has to keep expanding because as it gets more and more deflationary at the core, they had to print more and more money to fight that deflation because if they lose that deflation, the banking system and every company collapse collapses.
Right.
So it's like, yeah.
So this is my point was Jeff's, you know, his thesis basically, as you described is, okay, technology is naturally deflationary one.
So everything should be getting cheaper and you can very easily know this.
You look at manufacturing assembly line right now versus 100 years ago.
It is exponentially more efficient.
Dude, they had.
It's insane.
Right.
They had a meeting.
You're going to love this.
They had a meeting in the 70s talking about how we're going to run out of oil.
And it's like, because again, it's like, if you have the bear case on a stock, you can quantify things very easily.
So they did the math of like, well, how much oil are we consuming?
How much bubble we're going to run out of oil?
And it's like what they didn't understand is like, you know, we're going to invent the catalytic converter and all of a sudden we're going to get like 12 times the energy out of the same.
Like we're going to get like 40 times the amount of food out of the square foot of land.
And you know, it's like they didn't understand any of this stuff, like we're going to discover oil in places that we didn't think we could get to before.
So it's like a lot of the people that are arguing like inflation through natural market.
Horses aren't understanding technology.
Correct.
And that's the thing is, okay, so we get back to this idea of do they have to keep printing.
And the answer is basically, yes, they need to keep printing because if they allow technology to take its natural course, like tomorrow, the Fed just decide every central bank in the world just says, okay, hands off, we're just leaving everything just the way we're just not going to do anything, right?
We're just going to let them, well, then prices are going to go down.
Like prices will go down, but they cannot do this.
They cannot do this because again, as you correctly identified earlier, our system is based on debt.
Debt has to continually be serviced. And the only way to do that and actually have the wheels keep turning is to keep debasing the currency.
The other option that Jeff will also talk about is you reset it.
You either have a debt jubilee, which is unlikely, or more likely and which has happened many, many, many times throughout history is you go to war.
And you go to war and you use that as the way that you enter into this reset period.
That's not the great reset, but that is a pretty damn good reset when it comes to clearing the pieces off the table and starting fresh.
But those are your options.
Yeah, there's a book that Jim Rickards wrote in 2010 called Currency Wars.
Basically, currency wars lead to trade wars lead to kinetic wars. And what's a currency war?
A currency war is central banks competing against one another to try and create more inflation.
It's a race to create more inflation because this whole conversation, we're talking about something real.
We're talking about the cross-rape between the dollar and Bitcoin, which is more real versus the cross-rape between the dollar and the yen.
But what that is is a competition of central banks trying to fight each other, but only one can do it because everything's in context.
Oh, I had something so smart to say and I forgot what it was.
It'll come back to you in the fullness of time. It'll come back to you.
There's a documentary called Princes of the End, which is a long documentary where it's basically towards the end, you have this centralization that occurs,
where it's like oftentimes the treasury and the central bank will start to merge.
And you can also see this where it's like global central banks will start to merge, right?
Where it's like the association between the Bank of Japan and the Bank of America, they're starting to merge.
They're going to throw you swap lines.
It's just sort of like, I try to keep these conversations as simple as possible where we talk about like,
even if you understand interest rates, like the cost of money and how they will lower interest rates to create inflation.
It's like, guys, like there's a treasury general account. There's a way that they issue bonds.
There's like the reverse repo facility. There are a lot of freaking things that they can do.
So it's complicated. But like, again, oh, God, I was going to tie this in. I'm lost.
Yeah, that's okay.
They're like, I got Jeff Booth on.
You know, he's actually coming on next week, as a matter of fact, right?
So you got Lawrence Appard, me, and then Jeff Booth.
Yeah, well, Lin Alden was thrown in there too.
But you know, I think you're in a perfect place in this position because no, I'm a normal stupid person.
I'm a normal stupid person too. Most people are normal stupid people, right?
Our funny videos are funnier than their funner heroes.
Yeah, it's true. It's true.
Lin Alden is like transcendently a genius.
Yeah, she's next level.
She's like my like, I follow like 2,600 and it's all market. She's like number two.
Yeah, she's brilliant.
Yeah, it is a treat to drink from the fire hose of her knowledge, let's say.
And it is, yeah, I wish that I could organize my own thoughts and have a fraction of that kind of brain power.
She's, and then, you know, this is the other thing for folks.
It's like one of the things that gives me so much hope in just Bitcoin and the future to come is that some of these smartest people that I have ever met in my life are so fully invested.
And I don't mean invested monetarily, but that also, but invested intellectually in Bitcoin.
I hate it.
But it's amazing too. Like it gives me so much hope you see all these incredible people working on this, working around it, whether that be funding through VC work, through actual development work, whatever it is.
Like there is a reason that people of a certain intellectual curiosity naturally flock to Bitcoin.
And I think it goes back to what you said earlier about truth, right, because the curious, intelligent mind searches for truth.
My Carlos, Carlos dad escaped communism.
If you don't, it will be disaster.
Yeah, but he, Carlos that always says to me, and this is coming from a guy literally was a communist defector.
Like, and he always says like, do be to ergo, cajito, cajito, ergo, zoom.
I doubt therefore I think I think therefore I am if you are not doubting and asking questions, then you are not actually thinking because if you're if you're not asking questions, if you're not doubting,
That is a process of thinking that is what yeah, that is that is the process of thinking is asking questions either to yourself or externally.
But that's how you find out what the truth is.
And so now again, we digress again, but I think the digressions and tangents are the spice of life.
The spice melange, you know, but okay, so do you think have we have we covered the the case for why the dollar is fucked and they made up just, I mean, kind of insane system.
And have we also covered why Bitcoin is something that through process of elimination, the thinking man or woman can find their way to naturally because it when you do enough process of elimination, you realize it's the only thing left.
Do you think is there anything else we want to add to that?
You know, again, like it's all a process of like if we can just get people to start thinking about it, you know, maybe I said something wrong.
Yeah, I say stuff all the time.
No, but it's like check it, look at it like everybody check it.
That's the thing about the Internet is like, everybody's checking each other looking at it.
It's a conversation that doesn't end.
It's a it's like, it's a more decentralized, you know, it's just a conversation that doesn't end and that's good.
That's a good thing, right? So it's like, I'm sure I'm sure I get things I get things wrong all the time.
I get things wrong all the time.
But it's like and again, like the dollar thing, it's kind of a concept.
It's like you got it.
It's like you got to like think about it and think about it.
And, you know, I don't know, like people just need to think about it.
And if there's holes, if there's something, you know, that's wrong, bring it up.
Yeah.
You know, like I said before, it's like what's the counterargument to like Bitcoin? Will they go on a gold standard or like somebody uploads a picture of porn on the Bitcoin chain?
Oh, no.
Porn on the Bitcoin.
That's.
Oh, no.
Clearly, we would shut down the Internet immediately if there was porn on there.
So, I mean, obviously.
It's so funny that if you know nothing about Bitcoin, like it's just sort of like Bitcoin, it's just made up thing.
It's just made up thing.
It's fine.
We're over here doing our made up thing and also the government's like, oh, you do your made up thing.
It's like, oh, wait, you're making money at your made up thing.
Okay.
We'll give us some of the money of your made up thing.
And then like Elizabeth Warren is like, wait a minute, you are trying to memorize 12 words.
How dare you.
You cannot memorize.
How dare you.
At some point, there's a neutral party in the middle who's looking at this, who doesn't understand the dollar, who doesn't understand Bitcoin.
And they got to be thinking themselves, well, Elizabeth Warren doesn't want people to be able to memorize 12 words or have bits like.
Cross the internet like, hmm, hmm, wonder why.
Yeah.
So if you do, you have, you have a couple more minutes still.
You're, yes, but I'm very stupid.
So I don't know if I've anything smart to say.
Well, that you've, you've said a lot that I really, I appreciate.
And I want to, if, well, here, go ahead.
If you had, if you had something there.
Well, no, I mean, that's the thing, like it's just like getting like, it's just like getting people to think.
Yeah.
You know, where it's like, hopefully if we're just like, you're saying stuff, I'm like, oh, and, and, you know, it's, we're both going, oh, oh, like, maybe that's a good thing.
No, I, so, so I wanted to, this is just, it's a little bit of a different, different angle here.
But you were mentioning earlier, just like different layers of Bitcoin.
And we don't even have to get into technicals of these.
I actually was curious about, are you, are you on Noster yet or Noster?
I am on Noster.
Like, you know, I joined it a while ago.
I don't, I don't use it like at all, but I'm on there.
You know, I've kept a very low profile other than my Twitter account.
It's funny because it's like, I feel like I, I follow so many people in the space.
I feel like I have, you know, relationships with them.
And I feel like I've never met, you know, it's funny.
I feel like, with a client for like 15 years, I never met him, you know, and it's just, so it's like, I feel like I have all these relationships through the internet.
I, like, I love all these people, you know, but I've tend to lurk.
I lurk, lurking is cool.
Like, I literally, I lurked on Bitcoin, Twitter, Carl and I both did until one day, like in, it wasn't, it was like 2021 and this was after that first big, you know, crash.
And we were like, man, everybody's so sad, like, and so mopey.
Like we, this is like when we started just making stupid videos, because we're like, we got to bring a little bit of levity in here.
We got to bring some laughs in here.
But the reason I was asking about NoSter is because I think that this is like, and I'm going to, I'm going to now, now that I know you already have an end pub and an end sec, you know, your username and password, but in the cryptographically signed kind of way, I'm going to start poking you to use it more.
Because this is a, and this is something that when I talked to Lynn, she described this in a really beautiful way that NoSter is basically like a, it adds a discovery ability, like a social discovery ability to Bitcoin wallets.
So if it's, it basically turns Bitcoin wallets into a much better Venmo.
And like that, and that's, that's just literally on the payment side, but then on the-
People have no idea what a big deal this is.
It's huge.
And the reason I ask you about this is because you were somebody, you were literally, you guys were hosting your own content on the internet.
You were like one of the, if not the longest running web series.
In Korea, they call them web tunes, right?
But you guys were, what's the term for you?
It's makin, what is it?
Machinima.
Yeah, which for anyone that doesn't know is you're using like, you're using a video game basically to then create a story around it.
You're using a real time 3D rendering engines to tell a story.
Which is, which is awesome.
And like, but when you guys were doing this, you were doing, like you were hosting that yourselves.
You were running on your website. This was pre-YouTube.
Like if I wrote a book about everything that had happened, no one would believe me.
It's just so many totally completely bananas things that have happened.
You know, it's funny because it's like, I'm so old that I've, there was no internet and then was web one, which was read.
And then web two, which was read right.
And thus was born comment sections where people can yell at you and tell you what a terrible person you are.
And we had that or whatever.
Now we're going to web three, which is ownership, which is like, I just need one freaking password for all this stuff.
See one freaking pat.
And web three has become such a bastardized word too, because of the crypto space.
Yeah, I know like Dorsey is the jump to web five, right?
Like you're just, just fuck it.
It's a subjective term kind of, which is not good.
But, but, but you're, yeah, I appreciate the way in which you're using it, which would be the non bastardized way.
But the reason I bring up no story because to me, this is like this idea of how the internet was kind of supposed to be.
And this, because all it is, is a protocol.
And it's a protocol that's being used for social media right now because it's like build what you know and build what you're familiar with,
build what's going to bring users onto this protocol, which is social media.
People want to be social.
People like most people are pro social, even if they are heavily introverted, they can find a way to be pro social online.
It's built into us.
And that's a beautiful thing.
Yeah, it's a natural evolutionary mechanism for us to can, you know, propagate our species, right?
And again, the reason I bring this up is because as somebody who was so early in the content creation side of things on the, on the internet,
again, like pre YouTube, which is just like for most folks, like that, that, you know, if you talk to like a Gen Z person, they're like,
what do you mean, like pre YouTube?
Like what is like, so like how long ago?
Like, was that like 1950?
I don't know.
I'm probably not giving Gen Z enough credit.
Maybe they know, maybe they know things better than I think, but like,
I was wearing a Thrasher magazine t-shirt.
People like, what's a magazine?
What is that?
Like an E-Zine.
Do they even, I don't know if they even use that kind of terminology anymore either.
It's just a, people don't even say blog anymore.
You notice that it's like blog is like not really like a, oh, that's just like, it's my sub stack or it's my medium.
It's like nobody, nobody's hosting their own blogs anymore.
It's funny with different generations pick up on.
Yeah.
But, and I don't even know if I had a point with where I was going with this,
but I'm going to poke you to use Noster or Noster.
I'm probably like, I'm probably not going to go on to Noster until Lin Olin follows me on there.
I'm going to, okay.
No pressure.
Uh, I will.
No, no, no.
I'm going to, no, no, no, now you put that out there.
I'm going to, I'm going to tag him and be like, Joel said he's not going to start using it.
I made a mistake.
I made a mistake because like a long time ago she posted like something brilliant and I posted,
I love you and people took that the wrong way and it's like, like,
and people like, you're not supposed to love people.
I don't know.
And so it's like, oh, I hope I didn't cause a problem.
I think, but she's smart is what I was saying.
Well, no.
And I think if, if people can't understand the nuance of a comment like that, then, you know, just,
well, I cause trouble.
I cause trouble.
That's good.
That's just a good place for that.
With everything going on the UK right now, like, I, like, I see this in like a quote,
Western country and grant, you know, like all of these censorship laws that they've had on the books for a while that
they're now really going to start enforcing.
Like, did you see this stuff?
I was just seeing this day about if you retweet something, so it's not even you publishing this, but if you retweet something,
repost it on whatever platform you're using and it goes against or it can be deemed to go against their laws.
There's a huge amount of subjectivity.
You, you can get in trouble with the law.
Like you can be arrested.
Like this is insane.
Look, like look, this is nuts.
This is so horrifically bad that you really have to break this down into like two pieces.
Right.
There's the people who realize this is horrifically bad, maybe three pieces.
Then there's like people who are like, well, it's just going to be used in that instance where it's like,
if you remember the trucker thing up in Canada, like some good came from that because people were like,
hey, this is not like people will pick up on it.
So maybe there's ying and yang where people realize this is going to get it will get abused.
Right.
If you haven't figured this out yet, it will absolutely positively get abused beyond what you can possibly imagine.
This is a third category of people who are like, yeah, I'm for it.
Like if there's a person who's for it, that is such a long conversation you have to have with them.
Yeah.
You know, that's going to be a hard, like that's a whole, that's a hard conversation to have.
Yeah.
You know, so I don't, I'm not equipped to have it.
You know, it's a, it's a painful conversation to have to where it's like, okay, that person is engaging in like really basic first order thinking.
They're just like, well, this is bad and I don't like it.
So it shouldn't be like, and then you've got to be like, oh, okay, wow, we've got a long road.
It's like, it's like, you know, look at history.
Like it's like just, I mean, look, look at history, like if like all the concepts that we've talked about today where it's like to have to devalue, look at history.
Yeah.
Like it look at how many like no, there, I don't even want to talk about how many, you know, the statistics of like somebody tried to do the statistics of how many failed fiat currencies there had been.
And they got all the way through the letter A and they got halfway through the letter B and that was 5000 currencies.
And they're like, well, I'm done.
You know, that's the history of the world.
Right.
And again, like if you can't figure out what we're saying, look at history.
Well, and that's, that's the thing that I think is really important to understand is that oftentimes when you find yourself in periods of intense social unrest, there was actually, let's call it some monetary unrest that
preceded that, that maybe you just weren't aware of.
Like you look at as a prime example, like the French Revolution, it's like, well, why did they start guillotining people?
Well, it's because they were systematically devaluing the French asignin, like over and over and over again.
Like again, in the search of like trying to quantify things as much as possible, that was something like, I've looked at things acutely, but like a long time ago.
And so it's like the conclusion of that, of the French Revolution was once you get to 10% of the population starving, they revolt.
Like what they start doing the math and they go, well, I'm going to die if I don't do something.
And that's when that happens.
Now it's like different now because like technology, like, you know, hopefully will keep people fed longer.
You know, so I don't know, you know, it's just, but again, like, like, again, it's so complicated because people get stuck on the manifestation of politics.
And it's like, this is why we're talking about economics because like economics is in front of all this.
Like again, currency wars lead to trade wars lead to kinetic wars.
And it's like, like, or the fourth turning, right?
Like you have these demographic things.
So it's like, there's these patterns, these cycles that you can look at.
And it's like, well, this is, you know, people get caught up in their own time and like, you know, the solution to everything is you've got to go deeper.
Yeah.
No matter how deep you're going, you got to go a little deeper.
And like the other problem with this is like there's a base assumption on our part that if we have a conversation about this, it will help relieve it to some extent.
And it may not at all.
Because some of these cycles, these cycles are just going to play out.
I mean, it's, I think it's great to talk about.
I think it's great for people to talk about and try and wrestle with and figure out.
But it's, you know, again, part of it is just sort of like, here's the cycle, the cycle is going to play out.
How do I position myself?
You know, you try and reason with people as best you can.
It's a complicated world.
It is.
And it's like, to the point of like, yeah, maybe there's nothing you can do about this cycle playing out and it may be playing out in a slightly different time scale.
Because we've made such advances in technology that we've been able to hide so much of the underlying rot in the system.
So much of it has been able to be obfuscated because technology has improved so much.
And that just makes the amount that you can steal from people greater because they're not going to realize it because you're, you know, you're stealing from a negative point.
It's naturally deflation or you're stealing from that point.
So just to get up to zero, you've already stolen some, but then you steal up to, you know, whatever, 2%.
You know, the perfect inflation number that all central banks have agreed on, which is just the ideal amount of theft that you can get away with not causing riots and stirs.
The reason for this, like it's funny, if you listen to a lot of conversations, people are like, how do they get to 2%?
There actually is a reason.
I can't remember what it was.
I think it's like, because 2% is like a tenth of a percent of world.
I can't remember this.
Like, if you listen to 90% of libertarian podcasts, like they will say what this 2% is arbitrary, there is not that it justifies the reason, but there is a reason.
And I can't remember what it has to do with something.
Let's see, this is why you got to have Jeff Booth on.
I know, I'm not, I'm actually very curious.
I'm wondering if Chad GPT knows the answer.
Oh, well, I bet it doesn't.
It's going to be like, why don't you check Wikipedia?
Yeah, yeah, that's a great idea.
Let's see.
So Chad GPT says, the 2% inflation target is standard used by many central banks, including the Federal Reserve in the United States and the European Central Bank.
This target has its roots in economic theory and historical context.
Here's a brief overview.
Okay, 1970s inflation crisis.
No, it's a fact.
1980s disinflation, the 2% target emergence.
Okay, New Zealand's example in 1989, New Zealand was the first country to formally adopt an explicit inflation target initially aiming for a range of 0 to 2%.
The move was part of a broader shift toward greater transparency and accountability in monetary policy.
Wasn't that nice?
Adoption by other central banks following New Zealand, other central banks began adopting inflation targets.
The Reserve Bank of Australia, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England were among the early adopters.
Each selecting targets is one to three range.
No, there's a big problem with all this, right?
Where it's just sort of like, again, it is so easy for people to get sucked into the wrong direction of how the world is presented to you versus how it really works.
You know, it's like for as long as I've been following this, there's always been like a guy, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal.
Now, I think it's...
I don't remember his name, Jim.
It starts with a T.
But he's like a reporter at the Wall Street Journal.
And basically his job is he gets...
The Fed comes to him and goes, hey, float this story.
Like, float...
This is tradition that's been going on since the 80s, right?
And it's a tribaloon, right?
Where it's just sort of like, put this out, just let's see how the market responds to it, right?
Now, you're not going to find this on Wikipedia, but this is how the world works, right?
Where there's a lot of subtleties.
It's like, the Fed's not political.
Well, yeah, the Fed is political.
Like, the Fed's mandate is price stability.
Well, look at a chart of the dollars at stable prices.
But it says on Wikipedia, it's priceability.
It says it right there.
But the prices are not at stable.
So it's just sort of like, and some people aren't going to understand any of this stuff.
And so it's like, you got to drill down on everything.
You know?
I mean, it's like, this is why you got to critically think.
Not that I am helping that process.
I think so.
You know, I think if there's one thing folks can take away from this discussion today,
it's that you first of all question everything that we've just said.
And if you think we're full of shit, do your best to disprove it, because that's what you should do.
Like, you shouldn't take everything that people say at complete face value and assume it to be the gospel truth.
Like, you should search for the truth yourself.
But doing your own research is apparently that might be like its own conspiracy theory.
So I don't know if you want to go down that road.
You got to be careful.
What were three themes for this podcast?
Three themes for this podcast were savings, adoption and heroin.
So we can't really...
How do we get to the heroin?
Wait, did we get to the heroin?
That's dollar.
The dollar is heroin.
Okay.
Like, the dollar is heroin because you've injected it and then once you inject the heroin, you need more and more and more and more and more.
And then it gets to a point where if you stop using the heroin, you're going to die.
Right?
So it's like now we have to keep using the heroin and then it gets to a point where you're going to die either way.
You know, debt credit, the dollar, it's heroin.
I have one last story for you.
Let's do it.
We should wrap this up because people aren't going to know what.
People, this is very long.
If you've made it this far though, thank you for sticking around.
I have one last story.
Let's hear it.
This is how poor I was.
I had a call from my agent.
This is a long time ago.
This is the 90s.
I was very poor.
I had a call from my agent on a Friday and they go, hey, look, it says on your resume that you were a baseball player.
I lied on my resume because I was poor.
And this is what you're supposed to do if you're an actor.
You lie on your resume.
So I'm like, baseball player.
Like, oh, so you were a baseball player?
Where were you a baseball player?
You know, in college?
And I went, oh, okay, we're going to put you on hold for a second.
So they put me on hold and I'm on hold for like seven minutes.
And after seven minutes, they pick up the phone and they go, okay, so you are catching Randy Johnson on Monday.
For all those people who don't know what who Randy Johnson is, he was that like six foot nine, seven times.
I young winning like baseball pitcher who was like like pitch 98 miles per hour.
He was still in his career.
Like this is during the night.
It was with the Diamondbacks.
I picture.
Yeah.
So I'm like, well, I'm going to die.
So I go to some batting cages, right?
And the fastest batting cage I can find it goes 85 miles per hour.
So I go to this batting cage at 85 miles per hour.
The ball goes, bang, like it hits us at you because 85 miles per hour, bang, bang.
I'm like, wow, I'm going to die.
So I'm looking at the whole weekend.
I'm like trying to probably go into the batting cages.
I'm like, oh, I'm going to die.
So I show up on set on Monday.
And they take one look at me and they go, who are you?
And I go, I'm your catcher.
And they go, oh, okay.
And I'm like, okay.
And I'm like, well, why don't you follow us over to the prop tent?
I'm like, okay.
So I go over to the prop tent and the prop guy is like, oh, so you're the catcher.
And I'm like, yes.
And he goes, so you caught in college.
I'm like, yes.
He goes, where'd you go to college again?
Yeah.
I went to the University of Texas.
So he's like, oh, so you are the catcher at the University of Texas.
I'm like, yes.
And then proceed to give me a bunch of diamond backs, costume stuff.
That's all way too big for me.
It's all way too big for me.
I'm not a catcher.
I have bad knees.
I'm not a good baseball player.
So like, okay, we'll follow.
Sometimes you go on sets of it on a million sets.
You go there and you like sit around for six hours.
You know, we're not this time.
They're like, okay, follow us.
And they take me to the baseball diamond and there's ready Johnson.
Standing on the mound.
I'm like, well, I'm going to die.
And they go, okay, let's do it.
And they put me right in there and I sit over home plate.
And they got a batter right there and the batter's right over me.
And I'm sitting there and looking.
There's ready Johnson's things that she made.
And he begins his lineup.
If you ever see the video of like the guy who pitches and it like hits a pigeon.
And it's like a lightning bolt exploding a pillow.
That's ready Johnson.
So there he is.
Now I'm looking at him.
He's looking at me.
He's doing his windup.
And then they call cut in the middle of his windup.
And then the ball goes about 10 million miles that way away from me.
And now Randy Johnson is pissed.
Now he's pissed.
He goes, never call time out or cut in the middle of my windup again.
And I'm like, I'm going to die.
So they give him back the ball and I'm like there and like everything says it.
And he pitches the ball and I catch the ball right on the palm of my hand.
And I think I broke every bone.
Oh my God.
In my hand.
But I can't show pain because I need this job.
So I go back to throw the baseball back to Randy Johnson and I reach back and I go in the ball.
Then my hand hits the helmet and the mask goes that way and the helmet goes that way.
The ball goes that way.
And that's how I died.
The end.
I want to give you a story.
Also, did you, you must have broken a couple of bones in your hand if you palm that thing.
Like I was, I hope it was a decent catcher's mitt at least.
I played baseball for many years.
So I brought my own mitt because I knew a guy who was a catcher.
So I brought it in.
But it was terrible.
And it's a, I never saw the episode.
It was a TV show on Disney called The Jersey.
I actually wound up working that show again and then like another dude like Baroque is no.
We were playing ice hockey.
But like, I mean, it's just ridiculous.
So I died and, but I live long enough to get through this pot.
I just want to say a stupid story because I know there's any entertainment.
I thought so.
That's, that's, I mean, to be able to catch a ball from Randy Johnson and anybody who's, I guess, like, maybe Gen Z doesn't know who Randy Johnson is, but I'm pretty sure like the majority of millennials.
And anyone above that does, which is like, that's pretty fucking badass.
I'm not going to lie.
In my day, we didn't have, I didn't have any money or any internet.
All I had were dirt and rocks and had to catch that.
You're dancing and it was hard.
This is, you know, I could not imagine a better note to end on Joe.
This was, this was a treat.
I appreciate your time.
Where do you want to, where do you want to send people?
I want to send people, I want to send people away from me.
I'm too bad.
I'm like, I'm linking you in the show.
I'm just, I'm just on Twitter.
You know, I have a, I have a small, I have a, I have a, I have a, I'm on a TV show.
It's, it's a top rated TV show on Fox right now.
It's a small reoccurring role.
I'm only in episode seven and 12 this year, but it's like, it's like, I'm a little level actor.
So it's like, I got my name on the same call sheet.
It's like Rob Lowe.
So it's like, hey, that's cool.
Yeah.
So I just have like a small reoccurring part on that, you know, the one bad thing about Bitcoin.
Is that it can put you into a position where maybe you don't have to work.
So I kind of, I don't know if I'm retired, like, or not retired or like doing, I don't know what I'm doing, but um, you know, be on that win that airs, and then I'm on Twitter.
Sorry.
I apologize to everyone out there.
I'm on Twitter.
Yeah.
You, no, I think you're a great follow.
You, you everything you'll get back into kind of the early days of, I mean, now that wouldn't
call them web series.
series, but like you ever think you'll get back into that kind of content creation?
You know, the environment was so different now, like then, like because then it was like,
it's funny because we were once voted the most masculine website on the internet. We had like
a 90 percent, like back, the demographics of the internet back then, it was mostly male and nerds,
right? And so what, so what happened was it's, it's so funny, the demographic really shifted over
the years where it went from male, masculine nerds and to like, by the end it was mostly female.
And I think that was like a function of the whole internet, where I think it just changed, you know,
where it's like the social media. And again, that's a, that's a story of adoption. And again,
it's like, this is why I brought a lot of that stuff up about the website and adoption, where it's like,
you know, again, it's like, I remember driving across the desert from Texas, going to LA and
listening to people buying URLs back in the 90s and like people are buying your own, like, why,
what's that? Like that was, that was Michael Saylor. Michael Saylor was buying URLs. And like,
I had to go through, right, but it's like, nobody understood back then, right? Where it's like,
the URLs or it's like, the whole argument back then was no one's going to put their credit card
number on the internet. That's crazy. And it just sort of like, this is kind of where we are with
Bitcoin, where again, it's just sort of like, people don't understand the adoption curves. And
it's like, you know, it's uncomfortable and it's weird and it's different, but it's like, like the
internet, it's not going away. It's not going away. And it's like, so it's just like adoption cycles
are funny. You know, and we're seeing it, you know, we're seeing it like literally week to week,
like a year ago, what was the narrative and now and what's the narrative now? And like, the narrative
now is like, well, if the US government doesn't have a, like listen to the conversation you have,
talking about having a reserve, like they're talking about having a reserve assets, like listen
to the conversation we're having. Okay, maybe they won't, maybe they won't have them, but that's
better than like, they're talking about it though, you know, that's better than making it illegal.
You know, it's like yelling my biggest enemy on the, on the, you know, I disagree with her
on everything, but she was standing on the steps of the treasury going, Satoshi's innovation is real.
Right. And so it's, it's, it's happening. And the mistake I made, you know, again, was like not
understanding early adoption, you know, and we're still early. So it's like, if someone's out there
and it's like, this is a little uncomfortable, like that means you're still early. That's good.
That's opportunity, right? Yeah. I love it. Yeah. All right. I don't, I don't, I hope this didn't
suck. Man, I love it. I appreciate, you know, Bitcoin is scarce, but Bitcoin podcasts are
abundant. So thank you for sharing that scarce time. You're on another fucking Bitcoin podcast,
of which there are many. But yeah, this was, this was a treat. I appreciate your time,
sincerely. And I'm, I'm, I'm gonna force you to come back on here and I'm going to badger you to
do it on Noster, just so you know. No, I'm going to lurk, lurking. I appreciate that so much. I
mean, maybe, maybe, I don't know. You know, once I can afford an island, and you know, maybe we'll
know from. All right. It's an island date. Walker, thank you so much. I so sincerely appreciate it.
And thanks for everyone listening. I hope about something I said made sense.
There was a lot of sense or should I say there was a lot of sats made today.
Sats. That was a bad joke. Okay, we're, we're cutting it now.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin talk episode of the Bitcoin podcast. If you are a Bitcoin only
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