it's one of those weeks will fucking insane.
Unfortunately.
Yeah.
It's hard to,
um,
gather the thoughts with,
I mean,
not only the last 24 hours,
I think the last seven days we were just talking before he had record.
Um,
that woman arena was murdered on the bus.
Uh,
we had pretty,
I would define them as catastrophic disclosures about vaccine studies on Capitol Hill.
The Maha hearings earlier, I think they were pretty profound.
And then obviously, less than 24 hours ago, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which really hits close to him.
I didn't realize he was 31.
I knew he was young.
I didn't realize he was that young.
It's incredible, right?
his accomplishments to 31
are
unparalleled.
Yeah.
I'm recording this on 9-11.
It's just weird vibes this week.
I must point out that we've been
talking about doing this for weeks, maybe
over a month. The plan was
just to come in and talk some good old-fashioned
Bitcoin, right? But
obviously we're going to have to mix in some other stuff now.
Yeah.
Nah.
I mean, the Charlie stuff...
I'm sure we'll touch on potential motives,
all that stuff.
But I think just in general,
you're speaking to the profound impact he had as an individual on political
discourse in the United States,
particularly for younger generations.
I mean,
again,
I didn't realize he was 31.
I didn't realize he started turning point USA when he was 18.
So he's been on this grind for 13 years and,
and,
Whether you liked the way he operated or not, I think it's undeniable.
He had an incredible impact on the younger generation, particularly how they viewed politics.
Most importantly, how to engage in political discourse.
I think that was, I mean, obviously the worst part about this is that he was a young father with two children.
I believe his son is two years old.
We'll never know his father, his daughter, a couple years older.
Both lost their father.
But I think the way in which he was assassinated at one of these events, which have become rather famous, where he sets up a tent and engages in Socratic dialogue with people who vehemently disagree with him.
I think that is desperately needed these days and the grace and patience and respect he brought to those conversations is something, even though I didn't agree 100 percent with everything Charlie said over his career, like I really respected the format.
And it's a shame that he was assassinated during one of these events because it's not only an elimination of his life, but an attack on the medium itself, which as Bitcoiners, I think it's pretty close to home because we we attend a lot of these Socratic events, whether it's debates or discussions about the protocol.
and they're very effective in terms of helping people better understand a subject or have tough
conversations about things sure yeah i mean i would start out by just saying like
there's a lot of people that are going to listen to this who actually followed charlie
or like closely and i was not one of those people like i mean i was aware of them i even met him once
uh,
briefly.
Um,
and,
uh,
but I'll probably say some stuff where people are like,
I've listened to a hundred hours of his stuff and I'm not one of those guys.
I didn't,
I didn't listen to a hundred hours of his stuff,
but I'm aware of what he was doing.
I was also surprised how young he was.
Um,
I just assumed,
I don't know,
you know how hard it is to become persuasive.
Yeah.
It's so hard to become persuasive.
And he was,
I mean,
if anything,
like that's kind of what he's famous for.
He was like a super persuasive person.
like unbelievably persuasive person that was like his whole thing was that he could go to these
college campuses and he can engage with young people and you could persuade them you know or
at least like change their mind a little bit you know even if not all the way it was like
that talent like it's something i think about all the time like in work but mostly in like a work
environment like sort of retail persuasion one-on-one teams of software developers stuff
like that not like wholesale persuasion the way he does it which i can't even imagine being good at
that. Um, it was always fun to watch the clips and stuff that would come through because I know
how hard it is to become good at something like that. It's a very difficult thing to do. And to
see someone that was 31, I mean, he was like, like that though. I mean, the last like three,
I'm kind of aware of him post COVID, you know? Um, and, uh, it's an incredible talent, like, um,
it's very rare, like very rare talent to have, especially that young, you know, I think of guys
like Christopher Hitchens and stuff like that.
Like he didn't strike me like that until much more advanced age.
It was like,
you know,
master persuader in that,
in that sense.
Yeah.
No,
I think my exposure to Charlie Kirk is very similar to yours.
I never tuned into his podcast or watched a whole stream of those debates
that he would do,
but picked up the clips and I would watch those.
and yeah then to your point extremely persuasive and yeah the way in which he was assassinated
is just very uh i don't know very jarring and this is just to get two two sort of jugular artery
videos in one week of people dying in terrible ways is it's not good to watch it's not good for
anyone to watch but um yeah i will say like one one you know whatever i have one charlie kirk story
which is this this january i was in dc for the uh inauguration and you know we went to you know
dozens of events and stuff like that but we went to one aptly that is um there's a political uh
the Republican donor, Foster freeze who died, uh, recently, but, uh,
his family still runs this event in DC, um, during the inauguration,
it's at the, I believe it's called the museum of the Bible. Um, and, uh,
so we were going to the museum of the Bible. It's very beautiful building,
great museum, all this, but the event was,
it was an odd collection of characters,
like not the typical inauguration event that you would expect. Uh,
Tucker Carlson was the MC. You kind of expect that. Uh,
The guest of honor was Conor McGregor.
We're already getting into weird pairings.
There's a lot of media, but there weren't that many politicians at an inauguration thing, which is a little bit odd.
And there were a lot of young men there that were there to listen.
And what was really funny is you have Tucker, biggest media personality in the world right now.
You have Conor McGregor, you would imagine for young men, like one of the coolest guys around, you know, UFC fighter champion, all those things. And then in the back, Charlie Kirk wasn't speaking. He was just in the back listening. And when the event, when the stage event was basically over, you know, I went over to talk to him and he was every young person there.
you know you got tucker here you got you got uh you got uh ufc royalty over here everyone's
mobbing him anyone under 30 which is on charlie you know and i didn't i i didn't know that much
about him i found that is like interesting i was like huh you know you got all these like
political celebrities athletes stuff like that and like charlie's the guy that all the 26 year old
guys want to talk to.
Yeah.
Yeah, and it's,
I think the message,
the politics aside,
but I think his sort of life message,
I mean, obviously it was a devout
and very open Christian
and loved God,
loved God,
talked a lot about the Bible,
scripture would,
would basically verbatim
recall lines of scripture
during his debates.
It was extremely impressive, but I think
I would not be surprised
if he was being mobbed
by the
young men in their 20s
because his message was
hopeful in an age of
an age of
I don't want to say despair, but
it's tough times. We know that. That's why we're in
Bitcoin. Well, that's a notable thing.
From what I've seen,
of course, and if someone's watched
hundreds of hours of him and disagrees,
but from what I saw and I see tons of clips,
it's not like I was unexposed.
Um,
is that,
uh,
Charlie was generally like a white pill guy.
He was a positive guy.
Um,
um,
obviously when you're debating,
there are like negative aspects and you have to like,
you know,
when a debate,
but like,
I don't know,
most of the stuff I saw was actually like hopeful,
nice,
respectful,
um,
uh,
biblically oriented.
Um,
yeah,
that's good stuff.
That's a good person.
Yeah.
No, and that's what the young generation needs.
And I'm not in any way trying to compare myself to Charlie Kirk,
but it's the message we try to get here.
I mean, we talk about it a lot.
Like, get married, have kids, and do good things, be a good person,
go to church.
I think it's a simple message that is being well-received by the young men
in the world today because it's the only one that seems to make sense.
And I guess this dovetails into potential motives and all that.
Like, it was just weird how it unfolded.
And I sent a tweet out and I don't know whether I need to amend it, but it's like literally 30 minutes after it happened when it seemed like at that point in time that somebody in the crowd had been arrested for shooting him.
That old man.
And people were saying.
Yeah.
We're like immediately, I think some people were saying like, we know who he is.
We know his name.
It's not the guy or something like that.
Yeah.
That's what I worry about.
Particularly.
I mean, going back to the political climate in the country right now with, I mean, everybody
was already pretty riled up with the, uh, the death of, um, arena or the video.
I mean, she really died last month, but the video was released, was released last week.
political tensions high and then you just throw jet fuel on the the political tension fire
that that is kind of notable i mean like you know when you're talking about motives there's a lot of
things but uh i remember you know we were walking to cooper's uh here in austin texas i hope the
freaks like that uh i'm holding down the fort here um in the in the tftc tftc studio but uh
Parker and John and I were walking down and we were talking about arena.
And one of the things I had told them at that moment was like,
I find it really interesting.
Like how much guys like Charlie Kirk have like sunk into this issue.
I think it's probably the only time I've mentioned Charlie Kirk in a
conversation in months,
you know?
And I was like,
no,
this isn't going away.
And we were talking about the,
the guy who was offering the,
the,
um,
uh,
the money for the murals and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, that, you know, this wasn't
going to go away anytime soon. It was like a galvanizing moment. Um, and, uh, Charlie was a
big part of that, right? Like, I mean, I think that was over the last few days, one of the,
if not the only thing he was really focused on, uh, in his public messaging. Um, and
I'm sure that
when you compare something like
the arena
you know murder
with something like you know George
Floyd's death and like the aftermath of
that and like how people
are galvanizing
on the right a little bit around this is like
you might want to stop that momentum
yeah
yeah that's one thing
well either stop that momentum or I mean
if you're thinking
extreme adversarially and i think there's nefarious actors out there want to accelerate
really drive the country to a powder keg to divide or conquer like that that's what i i think it
became clear to me last night like again going back to the tweet that i wrote um that i sent out
quickly after he was initially shot i think my perspective on what is what happened yesterday
change quickly i mean it seems obvious that this was a very professional operation there's many
people out there saying oh you don't need to be uh and a green beret to to make that shot from 200
yards which may be the case however i think if you think about where he was shot in the jugular
um and the fact that there was sort of a distraction because that guy sort of held
his hands up and said it was me and it wasn't him and yeah and then the um it certainly i mean like
sorry it does it doesn't take a green beret but uh it might like it seems like a pretty
well executed plan uh that in a as we're recording this i don't think the shooter or at least
they've announced that the shooter's been found uh so pulling that off getting away uh
I doesn't seem like an amateur job.
Yeah.
I don't think it's been verified yet,
but I saw Steven Crowder was sharing a screenshot,
apparently of correspondence,
internal correspondence at the ATF where they,
they found a rifle in the woods with,
with the clip and there was,
I believe there's three more bullets left in it and they had Antifa,
like trans stuff written on it which Oh yeah If true not confirmed yet at this point but if that true that screams like like set up
just trying to lean into that,
accelerate the debate.
And there's a lot of talk about civil war in the United States right now.
And I,
that is the last thing we need.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
Count me in on the non-civil war side of things.
yes um very much so um no yeah last thing we need but like i don't know uh yeah you got that
uh i didn't hear the crowder story about antifa whatever that doesn't i mean if you talk if you
talk the way charlie did sorry not the way he talked but about what he talked about yeah there's
going to be a lot of leftists in particular who are furious with you, you know, um, you
know, anything from, you know, his, uh, love of God to, you know, the, uh, you know, sober
understanding on, uh, uh, gender and sex to, uh, to an evolving view on Israel.
it's like
there's a lot of
people that would not like a lot of those things
yeah
and it never really
occurred to me but it made sense
yesterday like he was 31
and if you look at the
corpus of his resume
over the last 13 years like I would not
like
when it was first brought up yesterday when I saw somebody talking about it
I was like, oh yeah, this does make sense.
He could have been president one day if he continued.
Oh sure.
Down this path.
31 year old with master persuasion skills who has a young generation like galvanized politically.
And is a moderate.
It's like.
Yeah.
That was the other surprising thing.
Is it like, you know, I have generally right wing views.
Some would say far right views.
and uh i always found charlie to be pretty plain you know um like he wasn't a far right extremist
or anything very far from it um uh i've i've met uh quite a few more extreme people including you
know when i look in the mirror um so yeah that that side of it is is actually you know you know
that he you know to be persuasive in that way you have to be palpable to palpable to like a lot of
people and he was i mean he was very very popular in a non-extreme way um yeah you know
well obviously we're less than 24 hours out um yeah fog of war uh probably need
time for this to uh to develop before we make any any uh
and he takes on the situation there.
They're well-rounded with enough information,
but yeah,
it's,
it stinks to me.
That's all I'm going to say.
Oh,
it smells terribly.
Yeah.
Look,
I mean,
I got into it last night and I don't want to go too far off on a limb,
but I will say I was a little bit surprised by how Charlie was talking about
Israel in the last few weeks.
Both with Megan Kelly.
I saw the clips from that.
And on his own show,
talking about what funds leftist Marxist ideology
in the United States.
That type of talk gets you in trouble.
It's gotten President's Guild before.
Yes, it has.
Yeah.
It's...
I mean, it's impossible not to talk about.
I mean, it sticks out like a sore thumb.
And the fact that he hadn't always been on that.
Oh, he was one of the biggest Israel defenders for the long time.
Was he Pentecostal?
I'm guessing something like that.
He's a believer in Judeo-Christian values.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Which sounds Pentecostal to me.
Yeah.
Which is the, you know, biblical Israel is modern day Israel sort of.
I believe it's like Pentecostal, Southern Baptist.
Although I don't think he was Southern Baptist, but I don't actually know.
No.
That would be in line with that.
Yeah.
Yeah, and then there was Netanyahu was tweeting about his death before it was officially announced.
Really?
Yeah.
I didn't know that.
Yeah.
I don't follow him.
No, I don't.
We'll see.
We're less than 24 hours in.
All right, we're going to let it go.
We're going to let it develop, but no, it stinks.
No, it stinks like crazy.
I'm sure,
you know,
you'll probably have Whitney on after me or something like that and have a
real discussion on this of someone who actually knows how the world works in
that way.
Yeah.
She is actually supposed to come on hopefully next week.
Oh,
nice.
Pines are tough.
The,
uh,
I guess just to wrap this up because we do have Bitcoin stuff to talk
about.
Sure.
Actually not.
Cause I mean,
whether Charlie,
like what,
like the,
political landscape right now is like it's crazy you have a bunch of like this week is crazy beyond
that like french prime minister uh kicked out essentially god damn it these reactions i'm
sorry i'm listening the apple reactions go on automatically yeah uh french prime minister
kicked out japanese prime minister resigned you have been over overthrowing of an attempted
communist coup in nepal they blew up burnt down their parliament building uh you have
china last week with their military parade meeting with russia india brazil and the
misfit countries if you will uh then you have terone powell and donald trump going out of their
fiscal and monetary side of things here in the u.s getting getting more make more chaotic you had
that bls jobs report revision come out where we have almost there are no new jobs they just lied
about it for it's very funny to see that like that that you know i don't you know that's a lot
of things you just mentioned i don't i don't have takes on no pretty much any of them although i will
say on nepal on nepal though one thing i will say is that like you know uh you know congratulations
to Jack Dorsey, it seems like every time he invents a new product, uh, you know, we had the
Arab spring when Twitter's coming out. Now we got the uprising Nepal and like the bit chat,
you know, uh, usage is, uh, shooting up like crazy there. It's like, he seems to be a, uh,
agent of change himself. Yeah, that is. I mean, have you used bitch yet? I have, I was only using
it on mesh though. So it was just me and my brother, uh, or something like that. Like I
tried it actually at a diner down there and there's one other person they didn't say anything back to
me so uh it what what is amazing to me is that mesh networks actually work now right that's cool
like you know i've been following they're not following but like i was interested in it
you know maybe seven years ago and it just wasn't very good uh but it seems like mesh networks are
really good now yeah and i think the way that jack and cali are building out a bit chat and
incorporate Noster and things like that to expand, not expand the range, but
functionality, like offline, online functionality to
help people communicate from further distances. It is
incredible to see. In fact, in Indonesia
there was another uprising, but Bitschat
went up significantly there as well. People are using it on the ground.
It makes sense, particularly if you're going to protest.
and they're protesting
I think in Nepal specifically I think
the straw that broke the camel's
back was just like basically
blackout on
social media so like alright download
this app we'll communicate via mesh you can't
shut this down. It's pretty cool
yeah
and I don't
know if you remember during the Arab Spring like Twitter
was the thing
at the time it was
it was very I don't know
from an American standpoint
in New York City at the time. It was very exciting
to see how
something like Twitter was being used.
It's just funny to see that
BitChad is now
the Twitter of
12 years ago,
15 years ago.
That's what I'm searching right now.
Did Egypt...
I believe Egypt sued Twitter.
Did they? No, they didn't.
They did not.
The Egyptian government, along with others in the region,
tried to block to restrict access to twitter and facebook sure in late january 2011 yeah 2011
there we go went as far as shutting down nearly all internet and cellular data access nationwide
for several days um the stifle connection yeah i mean it does kind of feel like that i remember
2011 very well i mean that's when i learned about bitcoin and so like you know the arab spring the
Occupy Wall Street stuff,
which I actually think is 2010.
But it's all in that little range.
I don't know.
I'm getting those vibes.
Yeah.
I mean, here in America,
I think in the United States specifically,
it does seem like we've been under a color revolution
for something.
I think COVID, BLM,
like made that very clear.
It seems like the political apparatus.
Remember, you can't spread COVID at BLM events.
No, you can't.
That's the important thing.
You can at church.
You can spread COVID at church, but you cannot spread COVID at a BLM event.
Yeah, you have to be able to express your discontent with.
Or at five-star restaurants in Northern California.
No.
That's fine, too.
French laundry.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, but it seems for a kid and it seems that's the bring this back to Charlie Kirk.
Like it seems like we haven't getting to a critical point of people throwing their hands up and many moderate leftist even sort of coming.
To respect the policies of Trump, particularly tough on crime, because it's like, hey, we live in a society.
We need to enforce the rules and the laws that have been laid out.
We,
and by not doing so for many years,
like you're making places really unsafe where you can have to experience it a
little bit to appreciate it.
Right.
Is like,
you ever seen that meme?
That's a,
it's like the guy laying on the ground and it like,
it's like an out of body experience.
And the caption I saw on that was,
you know,
the libertarian leaving my body every time I smell pot on the street.
Yeah.
That basically sums up my politics at this point in life.
I was a very dedicated libertarian when I lived in New York, 2011, 2012, that time period.
It was also like Bloomberg's New York, and I'm making wisecracks about trying to ban big sodas, taking our choice away from – I don't even drink soda.
But I was also younger.
I was in my 20s, and it's very easy to grow complacent with the rule of law and law and order.
When things are going good, it's very easy to look at that and just say,
well, but there's these minor injustices or these minor inconveniences that maybe we should fix.
And then you're downtown in Austin, you know, 15 years later, and there's literally dozens of criminally insane crackheads running around and you have to think about moving your office. Right. And so like you get that little bit of experience of even just a little bit of chaos, like, you know, you know, oh, we're just not going to arrest people if they steal stuff under 500 bucks. Right.
and um you know i hate to say it but like i think basically every like baptist woman
in 1994 that lived in waco was essentially right about the world in general you know like uh you
know you know gateway drugs and all this stuff it's just like yeah you get a little bit of chaos
and look what happens it doesn't feel good it doesn't feel safe of course they're going to say
oh it's the safest time of it it's like cooking the books you know just like cpi you know the
jobs numbers are fake cpi is fake obviously the crime statistics are fake obviously people who
live in downtown san francisco or even downtown austin where i live know that it's worse than it
used to be you know um clearly that is true um so you introduce just a little bit of that and it's
easy to look at someone like trump who has this you know sort of law and order philosophy um and
even if you're younger and you have those idealistic views you know i was i was in
bloomberg's new york it was it was very contained safe environment i don't even remember seeing
crimes um but these people do they see it every day yeah i'm bringing this back that's my biggest
wary with the assassination of charlie is that we were getting to a point where even people who
are left of center were beginning to say hey this is not like we can't have ukrainian people escaping
wars coming to the united states for safe harbor getting stabbed in the neck on a train uh and
yesterday's events could be used as a divide and conquer like get away from that conversation it's
left first right like if they try to try to frame this as some trans lunatic that killed him
some radical leftist trans uh if that comes out to be um the claim of who killed charlie
clerk i'm gonna be very skeptical um i will as well um
charlie more important than that i think um has the eye of more important people than that i believe yeah yeah and that what i i sent a tweet out last night like i think it a
imperative to show relative restraint particularly in the short term um because i think that's what
they want is some misguided backlash and confrontation um move people in the wrong
direction get them distracted and hit them against each other you know what i think about
the most is if there is a um you know an uptick in uh leftist uh murders uh politically motivated
or otherwise just you know could be general chaos of murders or it could be political assassination
type things if there's an uptick of that on the left i really worry because um imagine the
backlash against the left little norm mcdonald for you there yeah imagine the backlash it wasn't
you know what was his joke that's what i'm really worried about here what was the uh the uh
bill cosby jokes it was uh it was a friend of his says um you know um the worst part about the
bill cosby thing was the hypocrisy and uh i disagree i think it was the raping i find that
most rapists are hypocrites um yeah well i could just do norm jokes this whole time if you want
you know i'm sure i mean but yeah the whole like you know you already see it on msnbc cnn i mean i
don't watch them but i see the clips and stuff like that they're like they're they're already
worried about the backlash you know and it's like the back i mean like you don't want it or anything
but it's like i'm kind of worrying about the the the political leftist assassinations right now
that's kind of what top of mind yeah you know in this moment yeah and that was the other just
disheartening thing and because it is extremely nuanced because there is a radical left that
is reveling in what happened yesterday and these are demonic
soulless people and i do believe there is a radical left that does not want to
engage in dialogue and try to figure things out they want to
brute force their terrible ideas and the rest and we've
seen this throughout history i think a lot of people
been bringing up um the spanish civil war um and franco and
what happened there um with the attempted well the communist
regime there before it was overthrown. I mean, they, they were killing conservative
political opponents in Germany as well. Yeah.
Weird times. Yeah. Uh, you know, in terms of, you know, top of my list, you know, I'm worried
about downtown Austin where I work and the criminally insane that are, um, intentionally
left on the street um because uh you know jose garza likes them to be uh terrorizing people in
the street wouldn't do it if he didn't like it um and uh you know then it's maybe you know uh you
know you know worry for some of my friends uh who are publicly you know out there uh more right-wing
people in a world where those people are being targeted um then like seven things and then maybe
some backlash you know that that's kind of the list of my priorities right now yeah yeah um
yeah it's scary times but that's uh i think part of any of this is these events these tectonic
events is uh they're meant to jar you shock you get you discombobulated and force you to make bad
decisions where i think the best course of action is to really lean in and focus on what to do your
thing and so like us bitcoin like i think yeah a lot of these i'm not gonna say these political
murders will be solved by bitcoin i think we believe that bitcoin can bring about a better
incentive framework that that takes away a lot of the uh the funding mechanisms for
um a lot of the uh terrible stuff that's going on right now yeah i mean i think about that a lot
because it's you have to figure out where to focus your energy and you know for me especially
over the last couple years um because it's very easy to get too cynical i mean i've gone through
modes of that obviously and just like obsessing over black pills and um you know my conspiratorial
mind you know swirling and uh that's where like you know even like stoicism doesn't help me on
that type of stuff i tried it didn't work for me you know um and uh but you know what what seems to
have worked for me is like focusing on family focusing on church focusing on like being
productive and you know doing stuff and i i have thought about this a little bit um is what is it
is it jimmy's book over here uh the thank god for bitcoin yeah oh no fiat ruins everything or like
people say bitcoin fixes everything and sometimes i'll mention that to more casual friends and like
really fiat ruins everything like i don't know what about you know sports i'm like well yeah i
can make the argument that fiat does ruin that and so it does and i don't think i'm over rationalizing
it too much is that um it is a white pill and it is a very rewarding thing to you know you know see
a chaotic world and uh things that are popping up that are not pleasant and take you away from
uh the things that bring you joy and that you should be focusing on to be productive and
and have purpose and things like that because it does it feels very uh good to have this outlet
you know in the bitcoin world where i do believe that the people working on it are working on
something that can fix a lot of a lot of these problems and that fiat does indeed as jimmy says
in his book ruin everything and everything and that's not really too hyperbolic um and uh
yeah so i i do i do feel what you're saying there is being productive working on bitcoin because
i can't even imagine how i would feel productive outside of you know being civically engaged in
local or national politics if i weren't working on bitcoin i don't know what else would would
bring me to like i'm actually doing that i mean i'm sure there are things obviously like you know
you need people you know working in factories and farming and stuff like that i'm not saying
there's no there's obviously a purpose in that but for my psychology it's like it feels very direct
i would say yeah yeah it's like pertains to all that crazy shit going on the country it's been
laid bare in the last eight months like fiat was funding a lot of these insane leftist ngos and
in groups that are basically indoctrinating
college-aid students and injecting this
mind virus into not the masses,
but a portion of the population that has really terrible
worldviews and understanding of reality and how it works.
I think that was exemplified with some of the reactions on TikTok and other
ways. You said you wandered on the blue sky. How terrible was that yesterday?
Doesn't feel good, Marty.
It didn't increase my, you know, love of my neighbor.
I'll put it that way.
So, yeah, that was rough.
But, you know, there's, you know, I don't want to, again, I don't want to fill my head with horrific thoughts and things like that.
But I think it's important to see how people are reacting to, you know, an event of this magnitude.
And, yeah, it was pretty disappointing.
yeah and here we go uh confirmed
by the wall street journal or wall street journals didn't confirm it but is reporting
reporting on an ammunition charlie kirk shooting engraved with transgender anti-fascist ideology
i mean plausible doesn't doesn't seem right to me um i'm sure those people don't like him as well
oh they definitely don't yeah but even engage in civil discourse with them but i think there's
many people could recognize that those people probably did not like charlie kirk and if you're
looking for a patsy to blame something on yeah yeah that would that would be probably choice
number one yeah it's too it's like that's the other thing too which is actually optimistic
silver lining white bullet let's get the propaganda is getting so bad uh and it does
get easier to spot right yeah yeah i'm sure like the vaccine thing earlier this week i'm sure you
saw the bernie sanders um doing a press conference with a bunch of doctors behind him and a sign that
just says vaccines work it's like you're just kind of like brute force this thought that um
any any thought that the vaccines whether it's childhood vaccines or particularly i think it's
very obvious now the COVID vaccines, um, we're not safe and effective and we're actually
detrimental to the health of the people who took them. Um, but like the propaganda, like
it's just getting so bad vaccines work. It's like, you are literally, look, I have seven actors
behind me that say so. Yeah. That's an important thing. Yeah. The performative, uh, the, the,
the perform, you know, it reminds me of, uh, Joe Biden receiving his vaccine on the, on a,
you know, a production set. And it was like a rubber too. I'm pretty sure if I recall correctly.
No, I mean, actually, uh, we, we have a connection on that. It's one of your YouTube
strikes was, um, uh, I had a doctor during COVID. Um, I got COVID. I gave it to everyone in Miami
at one of the, yeah, to you, to all my friends. So like four days after me, all my friends are
getting sick. And I had gone to this doctor who was a rancher in Wyoming slash doctor, great man,
uh, Doc Woods and, uh, my, my, my other neighbor had told me like, Hey, you need to go see him.
He's great. And I was like, dude, I'm fine. You know, like I'll write it out, but I was pretty
sick. I didn't feel good. And so I go in and he's telling me, uh, you know, this is pre months and
many, many months before like Peter McCullough and those guys go on Rogan and like this stuff
becomes a little bit more, uh, known is, uh, uh, Doc Woods had just said like, you know,
you're going to take a monoclonal antibodies,
ivermectin,
um,
you know,
uh,
vitamin D,
all this stuff.
And I was like,
I don't know what any of this is.
Like,
can I just like not do anything and just be okay in five or 10 days?
And he's like,
yeah,
just promise me you don't get the vaccine.
I didn't really have a super strong,
I wasn't going to get it,
but I wasn't like,
like if a doctor had told me I really needed to do that at that time,
maybe I would have done it.
Like,
I don't really know.
I mean,
I'm not like,
I wasn't thinking about it all that much,
to be honest.
and uh he just said all all you have to do is promise me you won't get it and that was like a
big weird moment for me and then uh he went on your show after that because you guys got sick
you guys look at all the horse medicine you could take everyone got better like very very quickly
immediately yeah and so now when you watch uh when you have experiences like that and it's not just
me it was like all of our friends like everyone basically that i talked to in miami got covid
and uh everyone got better everyone and and i found out only later when mccullough goes on rogan
i called woods i was like hey this guy is saying like the exact same thing you told me like four
months ago he's like yeah dude i send him all my data like like i'm i'm doing the mccullough protocol
i was like oh okay okay yeah i don't know how doctors communicate with each other yeah i mean
that was a crazy time because i if i recall doc woods and i didn't even talk about the vaccine
because i don't believe it was i don't think that was really the point i think it was about
treatment right yeah it was about early treatment and censorship of course uh doc was being censored
uh was until very recently um still sort of under that barrage from the i don't know what it's
called wyoming medical board you know whatever he got fired from his hospital you know literally for
giving out ivermectin yeah prescribing it to people didn't have a single death you know he
was treating for the most part like like the most at risk people you know um his age very old um uh
and no one ever died while he was there got fired a few people started dying in the same clinic
i mentioned doc woods on my episode with jessica rose and the fact that our episode got censored
because it's like, it was insane back then that Doc Woods,
at the time we recorded, he was 72.
He's probably well over 75 now.
Humble man, good man, trying to do good by his patients.
Hank, very soft-spoken, kind-hearted gentleman.
And you could tell he had dedicated his life to a small community in Wyoming
for decades and for trusting his gut and trying to treat his patients in the way he thought was
best. He was drawn by the wayside in a sudden it's disgusting. Yeah. Unbelievable. Um, but like
it is, I don't know. I mean, COVID it's very formative. I think for everyone that went through
it as especially, I mean, I'm sure, you know, the kids have a, uh, you know, if you were in school
during that time, I'm sure it's formative in a very different way about, you know, being let down by adults.
Um uh but like as an adult like working during that time it it makes the propaganda easier to spot I think where before where I would have been more skeptical about um early claims of deception and things like that
Um,
now when I see Bernie Sanders with a bunch of actors behind him,
you know,
talking about,
you know,
how awesome vaccines are,
it's a little bit easier to dismiss,
uh,
performative,
uh,
politics and,
uh,
performative,
uh,
pharmaceutical outreach.
Yeah.
Well, I hope this Charlie Kirk thing doesn't stop the momentum that we had earlier this week, because I think that, what was it, the Henry Ford Center study that was brought forth during the hearing, the study that Jessica Rose and Kevin McClernand, who've both been, McHernand, not McClernand, excuse me, both been on this podcast.
I mean they basically prove it's peer review studied it's being replicated they prove that
there's dna fragments and all the fives and vials and sv40 which uh accelerates cancer
there's snake dna in it like it's insane yeah yeah and I mean going back to the leaning into
the vaccines work propaganda it's like are you kidding me it's like and and that's they make it
so binary where it's like you have to believe all vaccines work or you're alone where it's like well
Well, no, like I think there's probably some perverse incentives in the pharmaceutical industry and within the three letter agencies of the government who are creating the mandates.
And I think it's OK to question that.
And we've got a lot of momentum going in that direction.
We have a lot of momentum going in, bringing back the rule of law and making sure the people are safe.
a lot of momentum at the border, a lot of momentum from an economic perspective
in terms of trying to
depoliticize the Fed if you believe it's politicized.
And then you have this happen yesterday.
It's chaos.
They like chaos. Chaos breeds bad decisions.
And we're getting a bunch of wins.
And obviously when this happens, guess what? It was an anti-fascist
transgender. Of course it was. That did it. It's like, oh,
go into Portland and take care of it there.
I mean, yeah, look, I don't, I don't, I don't know anything, but, uh,
what I will say like to your point there is the Overton window has shifted so
much. Like the idea of, you know, I was totally one of these people, you know,
in 2017, like I had a lot of cowardice running through my veins, you know,
going to implicit bias trainings and not saying what I actually thought and,
you know,
stuff like just being a pussy,
you know,
like just being a wimp about this stuff.
I would never end to a certain extent,
like buying into some of the brainwashing,
you know,
some of it's not just like me,
you know,
internalizing it.
And I don't know.
I mean,
like I,
I used to say something,
uh,
about,
uh,
like Bitcoin and censorship,
right.
which is I would talk to people and I still believe this to be true,
but there are other aspects of, you know, I'll say what I used to say.
I used to say, um, you know, one of the reasons, you know,
cold storage with keys that you control is so important, right.
Is the censorship in the world, you know,
being able to say what you want to say without, um, uh, you know,
negative consequences, you know, just freedom of speech type things,
being able to work on what you want to work on,
being able to associate with who you want to associate with, right.
without having your bank account shut down or something like that.
Do you think that's going to get better or worse?
Right.
Unanimous worse.
I agree with that still.
However,
I'm starting to see more glimmers of hope in the last two years than ever
that like this can be avoided because Bitcoin is actually working.
The culture is actually changing.
I still think you have to be extremely vigilant.
Everything I said,
if you're in the UK right now,
you probably feel that darkness more than you ever have,
you know,
right this minute,
the way I was feeling,
you know,
three years ago or so.
Do you think this is going to get better or worse?
And everyone's saying worse,
right?
In the UK,
you're probably right there.
I'm starting to see better.
And I think that guys like Charlie,
I mean,
like there's a whole group of people have like shifted the over Overton window.
There's Bitcoiners that have done it.
There's people in DC and,
you know,
stuff like that that have done it is that I don't think there's nearly as much
cowardice anymore.
I don't think it's as easy to do that.
And so basically, I think we've made a lot of progress,
and we succeeded in the last three years.
Yeah, and not only is the Overton window shifted,
but it is being affected as it pertains to vaccines.
I think people have been making enough noise
and highlighting a lot of doing the hard work to find the data,
to surface it, to talk about it, to make it known.
And then you have something like happened in Florida last week where the Surgeon General comes out and says, hey, it's not within the ethics of the field of medicine to coerce anybody to take anything against their will.
So vaccine mandates in the state of Florida are over.
We're not saying don't get the vaccines, but who are we as the state to coerce you to do so?
That is a massive vibe shift from only two years ago.
have you ever read the original Hippocratic Oath?
It's been a while.
It's been a while,
but yeah,
it's,
uh,
it's a fun one.
It doesn't talk about vaccines.
Yeah.
The do no harm,
you know,
uh,
type thing.
Yeah.
Look,
I hope I'm not falling for like some,
you know,
uh,
Twitter real,
you know,
scam on this,
but like,
I'm pretty sure two of the things in the original Hippocratic Oath are you can also never perform an abortion.
and you cannot assist in suicide.
Really?
Yeah.
It's not in the current one.
Yeah, well, those are forms of murder.
Yes, of course.
Yeah.
Yeah, so it makes sense.
This is injecting people with snake DNA,
but what do I know about snake DNA either?
So maybe it's really good for you.
But then on the Israel front too,
not only was Charlie talking differently
about Israeli influence.
Oh, sure.
In U.S. politics, we had Tucker on stage
with David Sachs and David Steberg two nights ago.
And David Sachs came out and stood up for Tucker.
It was like, Tucker doesn't have an anti-Semitic bone
in his body.
Israel is a government, a state with an intelligence apparatus.
And they do engage in statecraft.
It is okay to be critical of the Israeli government, where for the longest time it's been conflated.
If you critique Israel and its potential influence over the United States, you are an anti-Semite.
Yeah, what a bunch of losers that say stuff like that.
Absolutely insane.
Yeah.
But, you know...
Oh, sorry. Go ahead.
I was going to say, I said it on a podcast.
I went on the Coffee and Mike podcast, but it's like very obviously insane that we have like IPAC and Israel does have very obvious influence over U.S. politicians and policy.
Excuse me.
Ted Cruz convinced me that IPAC is fine, right?
It's not weird.
At all.
It's your senator, sir.
I know, right?
I generally like Ted Cruz.
I thought that was crazy.
Um, it was shocking to hear stated that way.
I don't follow politicians.
Like I, I do, I don't know every position that every politician has.
I've actually talked to Ted Cruz about Bitcoin before and I found him to be very bright,
you know?
And so, you know, and not that everyone agrees with me on most things.
Uh, it was the logic of his, uh, conversation with Tucker on that was seemed very strained.
uh i mean just even the body language of that yeah back and forth was like this is weird yeah
yeah it didn't feel good especially you know someone who i'd had like a couple interactions
with where i was like oh this guy's smart yeah like he seems with it and then i i just didn't
know his views on this stuff and it uh it surprised me to say at least and i found it to be incredibly
unconvincing i've heard i've heard him be persuasive before he was not persuasive there
no yeah and i guess it's a good like good theme they're like over to window shifting on bitcoin
too like i think oh yeah the over went to windows shifted dramatically and maybe this is we got to
find a natural segue to talk about what yeah we do need to talk about but let's do it yeah yeah
i talked to a lot of politicians about bitcoin that's changed a lot yeah well like let's talk
about through the years crazy internet money a bunch of computer nerds uh drug money silk road
degenerate gambler speculators trying to make a quick buck mount gox era
continued 2017 2020 then obviously microstrategy comes out etfs announced
bitcoin strategic reserve executive order we're at this point and people are talking about bitcoin
as a serious reserve asset that should be implemented in everybody's portfolio from
the individual up to the pension the nation state whatever it may be it seems like that's becoming
sort of table stakes now.
It's becoming recognized as table stakes.
If you don't have exposure to Bitcoin, you're an idiot.
But Overton window
still needs some of a bit because it's like, hey, it's just a reserve asset.
It doesn't compete with the dollar. It's good to have.
And we both know
that these monies compete and
ultimately Bitcoin will win out.
And the window is just shifting towards that
slowly but surely.
yeah i mean it bears like repeating some of the things you just said too is that especially for
americans you know i am one and therefore i i have the best perspective of what this has looked
like in america over the years and you know i know it's not particularly hip to you know you know
shill for you know the government and stuff like that but for the most part with some very egregious
exceptions, but for the most part, honestly, it's been nothing but green lights, right? Things are
going our way, you know? Um, and to me, that's one, it's a little bit surprising, but it's also
worth pointing out like, you know, even, you know, the connection to what we talked about before that
Overton window doesn't shift without like brave people, you know, without brave people actually
taking action and doing things and making sure that it goes that way. It doesn't happen by
accident and it's not a coincidence that um things have gone well here i mean heck i'm sitting in
texas what do we have somewhere like five gigawatts mining bitcoin in the state of texas
right now something like that three to five somewhere in there that's 30 in the network
it's nuts that's insane i mean go back seven eight years you know i think it's probably the
first time i was on your podcast you know uh or that's not six years seven years the idea of that
would have been crazy and you would have come up with all these reasons that governments wouldn't
allow that to happen that the local government the state government the federal government would
get in your way and then i'm not saying not to be adversarial thinking like i'm not trying to
you know again it's not cool to you know shill but it has been kind of green lights you know we're
having very advanced talks uh about not whether the united states government should own bitcoin
but how they should procure it and how much,
right.
It's not even really a question of whether they should have it.
Like that's already,
you know,
in the executive order and we have legislation that looks to be very popular,
uh,
working on that exact thing.
So,
um,
honestly,
it's hard to embody my,
you know,
say 2014 self thinking about Bitcoin and,
you know,
where Mount Gox goes down and all this type of stuff,
you know,
happens,
you know,
it's kind of a dark time.
Um,
um,
you know, it's been pretty nice.
It's gone pretty well.
Yeah.
And the, uh, the resistance has not been particularly effective or strong.
Um, the, the, the one I see the most right now that like some people hail is,
you know, uh, is progress on the Bitcoin front that I really disagree with is
the stable coin side of things.
I don't think that that's particularly helpful for Bitcoin.
Um, I think, I think, I don't know.
I'm neutral.
on them i'm like as a bitcoiner as an investor as somebody who would like to see uh incumbents who
have acted what i would deem to be nefariously in the past uh would like to see them uh stumble
like lean into stable coins like go for it i do not care like you're you're totally agree with
you there you're on you're you're focusing on the wrong thing i find it to be a tragic lack of focus
yeah don't interrupt the enemy when they're making mistakes that's that's my perspective
on stable coins and the people um implementing them sure no yeah i mean i get that i think the
way that you particularly the way the u.s is thinking about stable coins is like very funny
to me it where they're like no it just needs to be regulated exactly like a bank you know you know
the issuer,
you know,
it's like,
that's what you're getting at.
It's like,
Oh,
so just like ruin was stable coins are good at like the whole point of
stable coins,
you know,
for,
uh,
getting around capital controls,
you know,
immoral capital controls in many cases.
Um,
uh,
you know,
but,
uh,
it's like,
okay,
well then it's not,
you're just not accomplished.
It's like a tragic lack of focus.
It's like,
you know,
we're doing this exciting stuff over here,
but to your point as it serves as a,
uh,
useful distraction,
like,
sure.
Yeah,
whatever.
it's yeah and it's funny like i think the genius act i mean you probably understand what way better
than i did but it seems like circle was pissed that tether was winning all this business and
crushing them and so they and a couple others who were also not happy with uh tether eating their
lunch went to the government said you need to regulate this it's like okay be careful what you
wish for because if the regulation it's a regulatory mode that you so wish for turns out to
be too restrictive for the end user.
Like you're, you're not going to have a market at the end of the day.
It's like, do you know why people use tether?
It's not like getting rid of them all of a sudden because you have this, this
thing, it's like, you think they're going to give you a license to
spread dollars around the world while jp morgan like twiddles their thumbs over here that they're
not going to be like well why can't we do that you know like they would do it if they were allowed
if they could you know disrupt south korean you know sovereignty and allow you to you know
dollarize that economy and like get money out and then like of course they would do it you know you
think just because you get rid of tether that all of a sudden like you're gonna be the it's so stupid
yeah and it is uh and like this i mean and i don't i'm not saying i would want companies like
this to fail like stripe the collison twins like leaning in it's like how are you guys
how are you guys missing like we're gonna build our own l1 blockchain for payments and stable
coins it's like everyone goes through the ride in their own way right i think we talked about it
but there's one of the i believe it was john collison was on the all in podcast earlier this
year and he still doesn't understand the lightning network and other second layers exist on bitcoin
yeah i don't you know i'm hoping that zap right can like show people that like we've actually we
obviously you know it's sorry i've worked at zap right right and uh we're doing bitcoin payments
and we talk to these companies um i haven't talked to the colson brothers about it um
but um we do talk to stripe and we talk to square and we talk to the fiat processors and we talk to
the big marketplaces and things like that and like what i would say is that like what you're saying
about a lack of knowledge about how bitcoin is different from 2015 you saw this in the mining
space here's a good uh comparison you remember when people first started going out to do like
the flare mining and none of it worked and it kind of poisoned the well for a long time yeah
I was there. And then, and then it started working, but like the people that had been burned
had a really nasty taste in their mouth about it. And they were just kind of stuck in what that
looked like in 2017. But in 2021, it looked very, very different, right? Well, a lot of these
marketplaces, a lot of these businesses, a lot of these payment processors, they were doing Bitcoin
stuff in 2015. They were, you know, uh, Dell was accepting Bitcoin. Microsoft was accepting Bitcoin.
patreon was accepting bitcoin uh uh uh you know uh shopify was announcing you know all these like
different and then it didn't really go anywhere right um and it was clunky and the tools weren't
that good and the wallets weren't that great and the support wasn't that great and then they just
kind of gave up on it right or they just let it sort of die on the vine right and so just like
those off-grid miners had this really bad taste in their mouth, I would say it's a little bit less
than that. They don't feel particularly burned because they didn't invest that much capital into
the whole process, but they do have a negative view of it as being unuseful at the very most.
And so a lot of what we work on at ZapRite is talking to these companies and making them see
that like, hey, a lot's changed in the last, you know, 10, 6, 2 years. When it pertains to the
Lightning Network, its support, its reliability, its, you know, accessibility, its liquidity,
you know, all those things that, or that it exists at all, right? And it's not just
on-chain transactions that take 10 minutes or 30 minutes or 50 minutes to settle. And so,
we're talking to those people all the time.
I think for Stripe and
places like that, they've gone back and forth a lot.
I think right now, they're
seeing this thing that they don't have any previous
negative views on. They're like, okay, we'll give that a shot.
See how it works. Good luck.
It seems like the whole stablecoin landscape
is very confused because it looks like
they're reintroducing the double coincidence of one's problem with their sort of sideload stable
coin. Sure. Probably make sure there's bridges and all these mechanisms, but it just complicates
it adds cost and UX friction that. Yeah. Once you start getting into atomic swaps and all this,
it's like, what are we doing guys? Like, just a really easy thing to do over here. Um, I don't
know. I'm a simple man, Marty, you know, um, I've been building products, you know, on the internet
for a long time here and i try to avoid complication wherever possible yeah well i mean just let's do
a comparison too i think you're in a very unique position as that right sort of being in the middle
of all these companies so you compare stripes strategy as it pertains to bitcoin to somebody
like square which i know you guys have worked closely but you've implemented it into um the
square processor into separate as an option and it seems like their team's pretty engaged in
in bitcoin and like you look at block as a
a parent company of many um subsidiaries that are focused on different niche markets uh square
point of sale for small medium-sized businesses cash app retail consumer app proto now the mining
thing like they seem pretty all in on bitcoin and have taken a long view i believe cash app launched
buy bitcoin at the end of 2017 so right around then yeah yeah yeah going on eight years now and
slowly but surely maturing with bitcoin building out their product suite it's been pretty impressive
to see them do that oh it's unbelievable i know that like there there's attack vectors even from
the bitcoin side on companies like square block cash app um i don't know it looks pretty good to
me. They built unique things. They built different things. It's not exactly what I would have built.
I see it as all good in general. People can buy Bitcoin. People can sell Bitcoin. People can store
Bitcoin. People can transact in Bitcoin. It seems like they're hitting a lot of good notes there.
They're funding Bitcoin development outside of their own company. So no, I'm not cynical about
that. And I do see a strategy that I can only assume is going to pay off very, very well in
the future. Right. I do think that, uh, you know, they do share a fatal flaw with Stripe, which is,
um, that maybe COVID actually helped a little bit, which is, you know, the very San Francisco,
Silicon Valley centric. Right. And, you know, as a broad generalization, um, that, that San Francisco,
Silicon Valley culture never really understood Bitcoin. Obviously there are tons of individuals
and stuff like that, but as a startup culture, as a entrepreneurial culture, as a business
building culture and funding culture, um, never understood Bitcoin. Uh, so I think that that's
even more impressive that square has made the progress that they have given that that's sort
of the root of their business as well. Yeah. I used to visit down there in like 2019 or so I went
to their offices a few times, talk about Bitcoin stuff and there's several wonderful Bitcoiners
there, but it was very clear to me that that was not a company wide thing. That was a top down
mandate um that we are going to do this and uh i think obviously it's been manifested the most on
the cash app side that's where like it's been a good business for them they make money off of it
they you know it's profitable you know all those things but um i i have no reason to believe that
these other things won't i'm most excited honestly about the point of sale um you know it's that right
we built like this like very you know we call it a companion app point of sale just sort of the
you know, calculator screen that you could do on your phone if you also had like a terminal.
But our hope was we just did it for people that just needed a little bit of access there. Our hope
was always that we would either integrate with another point of sale, which we still might do,
or that someone like Square would just do that part of it. And then we'd handle the rest,
you know, over here and e-commerce and business invoicing and, you know, stuff like that.
it's very similar to the decision we just made with uh our latest uh launch on uh ticketing
right was that my original goal was oh we'll just it's very good when you build businesses to have a
lot of naivety or else you'd never build these things and so domain expertise when you're
building something is the most overrated and so i was just like okay we'll go integrate in with
ticket master or event bright or something like that and then i find out that like the whole way
one of the major ways they make money is siphoning off transaction fees from the fiat payment
processes or they're addicted to it and they can't live without it and that you know low low fee
transactions from bitcoin actually is at the heart of their business model and then you look at it
and you're like well an event system is not actually that hard to build and so we build that
right uh on i just wanted to be a checkout company but we're actually becoming more than that
but i'm very glad we don't have to become a point of sale company you know in the square
you know stripe or i guess it's just square world sorry i jumped around quite a bit there but um
you know the point being is that like those companies doing you know stripe is taking a
very different angle than square on this um i think that you know david mark has also has
recently been talking about this with what i think it's what stripe's doing um and just saying like
to take it from a guy who's been there right uh you don't want to do this um and of course
he chose as his
follow-up to Libra being
working on Lightning.
Yeah, and now Spark.
Yeah.
From what I hear, people
are really bullish on Spark.
Yeah, I don't know
enough about it other than
that we are looking at ZapRite
and integrating with it because it is
something that looks like it's going
to be the critical
infrastructure to a lot of the
wallet ecosystem going forward um for a lot of wallets i i know that i like wallet of satoshi
is back in the united states specifically because they're using spark and so um i think that that's
a good thing i don't know what other wallets are using them yet but it does seem like there's
momentum building there pretty sure breeze implemented breeze that's right that is another
one yeah and so that's great for someone like us like you know we don't operate a wallet
we're agnostic to the wallet uh that you choose it's just we we want you we want you to get more
bitcoin right we want whether you're you know you're business invoicing or you're selling
something online or you know you're running an event you know uh the bitcoin park people uh here
in austin and in nashville use uh the ticketing system now if you're going to any of their events
in september or nems in january next next year is like the whole point is just to get you more
Bitcoin. Right. And, um, you know, we look at the wallet ecosystem and we tried to support as much
as we can, uh, to say, you know, come in here, uh, bring your own wallet. We don't ever touch
your money. Um, and so I think spark is actually going to open that up quite a bit. And we, we,
we love seeing stuff like that. It's just more options for merchants, more options for individuals
to get more Bitcoin.
Yeah.
Well, let's dive into the ticketing.
How hard or easy was it to build?
Could it be an event?
Is it an overt event rate, ticket master, competitor?
When we started out doing it,
I always assumed things are going to be way harder than they are.
It's a good mindset to be in when you build software.
but um uh relatively speaking events aren't that complicated um and uh now something like what
ticket master does where their customers more like uh venues where you have seating charts and all
that it gets more complicated there you know getting getting all that information but like
what eventbrite does where it's just you know i'm doing an event i want to issue tickets i want to be
able to you know validate those tickets at a check-in things like that it's pretty simple actually
and of course we already had all the fun
checkout stuff
so we just had to apply what we were already
good at to these events
and what became very clear to us
was that
the integration path was going to be
very very long
we would integrate in a second to any of these systems
when it happens
but then we started actually using
the product that we had built
and I was like oof
this might be better
like this is supposed to be a lightweight and it is in some ways that there's a lot of features that
are missing that you would get in like an event bright that that we are planning on building like say transferring tickets like once you buy them transferring to other people you can technically do it but you have to kind of go out of band in order to do that So I not claiming that feature for feature we matched
necessarily the legacy ticketing system. However, what I would say is that it is surprisingly
functional. It is surprisingly nice. And in a lot of ways, it's already better because of the way
we integrate both fiat and Bitcoin.
It's easy, you know,
Apple Wallet has changed this a little bit on the fiat side,
although most people are still using credit cards online and things like that,
is that just the process of paying in Bitcoin,
there's a lot of friction that gets taken out of the sale,
both as like someone who's buying something,
but for your merchant to actually like close a deal,
to actually get conversions.
If you're doing an event and you have to put in,
what is all the billing information on your credit card and all the stuff, or just show them a QR code and they can zap over the $300 for the event right away.
The actual friction in the checkout process, because Bitcoin is put on the same level as fiat transaction methods, it's really nice and the conversions come through.
so you know going back to your original questions like there are some things that are hard
but for the most part it's not rocket science you know it's it's a crud app right we've we've
built those before but we have great ux great design and more than anything we have a great
checkout process that helps event organizers convert sales yeah and i think if you're trying
to accumulate bitcoin and you have something that is almost that parody with event bright like why
leave sats on the table exactly complicate your path to sats by going fiat only and having to
convert and obviously for those who are unaware of zap right like this is not bitcoin only like
you'll have an event you'll use zap right to sell tickets to that event and people can pay
in bitcoin or fiat yeah i want to get ahead of something because you know we haven't i don't
know if we've ever talked zap right together maybe we have yes we have me and you like on on the show
okay i think all i have in my head is war mode that was so much fun we need to do that again
we do uh these guys have already slipped up uh no i mean i want to get ahead of you know like
we don't have a be-cacher mentality
on any of this stuff.
Obviously, I'm building a product,
and it's a two-sided market, and I'm going to make
both sides of the market a fabulous
experience if you're a payer with Bitcoin
or if you're receiving Bitcoin. But make no
mistake, this is built,
ZapRite exists
for people to stack sats, for people to
accept Bitcoin, for people who want Bitcoin.
And everyone's like, who in their right
mind would pay their hard-earned
sats? It's like, that's not the point.
The point is there are people who want Bitcoin.
It was the motivation when I joined unchained, right?
Was I love the custody model and the feature I had in my head the entire time when I joined
unchained was buy Bitcoin directly to cold storage with keys that you control.
Can I get the unchained vault, you know, and instead of buying over here and then sending
it over, can I just have it go there directly?
Right.
Same thing with ZapRite is that I want more Bitcoin.
And so if I run a business and I'm sending out invoices, I'm realistic.
Maybe most of my transactions are going to happen in fiat.
Fine.
I'm going to accumulate the Bitcoin that I can by putting Bitcoin on the same level as fiat there.
And for most of our customers, most of our customers get actually quite a bit of Bitcoin.
But for some of them, minority of them, they'll be on ZapRite for three months.
They'll get zero Bitcoin transactions.
four months, zero Bitcoin transactions, five months starts coming in, you know,
and then it goes from 1% to 3% to 5% of their sales.
On the event side, I think that there's kind of two things. One is there's a lot of Bitcoin
centric events, uh, organized by people who are motivated to accumulate more Bitcoin.
I want to help them. Those are my people, right? I want to help them get more Bitcoin
and getting bitcoin for events outside of prog the bitcoin prog guys they were so motivated that
they basically built their own you know system that's very very good but it's not extensible
it's not usable for for other event organizers most of those people really do they would prefer
getting bitcoin for the hard work they put on uh doing the meetup or doing the event or doing the
you know whatever they're doing and then you know i look at this and i'm uh you know looking at other
event organizers out there. And a lot of them would, maybe they're not as motivated as the big
conferences that we go to, but they would like some Bitcoin. They would like if 5% of their sales
came in through Bitcoin. These are people doing music festivals and stuff like that. So yeah,
the motivation here is very much, how do we allow these businesses who are motivated to receive
Bitcoin do that? And I mean, without sounding egotistical or anything, it's like, we definitely
have built the best way to do that you definitely have i mean here at tftc if you go to tftcmerch.io
and you buy one of our hats we use that right for checkout pretty confident 90 of the sales
are in bitcoin and we have fiat as an option but to that point on the screen share here
free ad for my favorite soap but i think this is a perfect example if you have a product that's
good enough and you are oh that's right demanding bitcoin and like i love this soap i've been using
it for the last six months and it is now my go-to soap i'm buying a bit every month and you can only
pay in bitcoin and so and you guys have made it so i go i might check out i go to check out
put in the information um i can't do it now because i'm not going to put in my information
but like you click this and it's like i can only pay in bitcoin and this is a product that i have
deemed um so good that if the only way i can get it is paying in bitcoin i'm gonna pay in bitcoin
yeah powered by zapra it's the way things work right the incentive is there because you can't
get the product otherwise we have a few merchants that are like that um and um yeah i mean so it's
it's built for those people right and uh i don't know if any of you out there you know hosting a
meetup and you know doing any of those things or have it have an adventure yourself i i would
encourage you to try it out like i'm i'm pretty excited about this one uh it's a really really
good product and i think of the world in terms of really good products and this one is one of the
one of the better ones out there what is the uh the ux flow like if somebody has an event yeah
we focus more on the ticketing side of it than the event side so if you have an event and you know
as a date and a location and all those things it's there, but it's not,
this isn't like a marketing website builder for your event.
If you are on Squarespace or you're on some other website builder,
you know, especially if you're a conference or something like that is bigger,
you probably have a lot of marketing assets out there.
Now you can use it as a standalone.
It has all the information that someone would need,
but we really focus on the ticketing aspect of creating those tickets.
um you have you know more advanced features like uh you know having a stock or a max order per buy
you have all those sort of familiar things that you would get in a more advanced ticketing system
um and then uh you have this landing page which is basically a muted or smaller amount of
information about the event itself um and then you have you know the list of tickets increment them
buy them and really you know you know what we're really good at is the checkout side right of once
you've determined how many tickets you're going to buy uh going there and being able to buy and
whatever the merchant is allowing you know whether that's credit card and enlightening or that's on
chain and apple pay you know any of those combinations are all there and you get to determine
how uh what order they go in if you add a discount or premium to a certain type of payment
uh, all of that's still there. Everything that, uh, people are, are sort of used to with our
payment links and, and invoices and things like that. Um, and then on the merchant side,
uh, you have three ways to check people in, uh, we have a ticket scanner. It's a secret URL. You
can share that secret URL with, uh, you know, if you have, uh, event, uh, volunteers or anything
like that, that, um, are checking people in, uh, that will scan the tickets, uh, that are delivered
via email. Those tickets, by the way, for your end customer, they can be added to your Google
wallet, your Apple wallet, like any other real ticketing system. So you can scan people in there.
We have another check-in process that's native to the actual web app that you can do as well if you
want to manually check people in without scanning. And then, of course, you can print things out where
we give you a nice list of everyone who's bought tickets and whatever information you've gathered
about them so that you can validate their entry for like a offline backup so there's three ways
to check people in um you can you can undo it there are some features that will come down you
know you know in the future things like transferring tickets things like you know
allowing you know having a more sophisticated understanding of allowing re-entries but for
right now for the vast majority of events out there what you see will get you will get you there
yeah it's beautiful it's a well-baked mvp i'll put it that way it's definitely viable and like
this i think this part is still so cool to me like connect a wallet like cold card being part
of it like the thought that you could have an event like this be a business and the sales let's
say it's a high ticket item you're selling like a thousand dollar ticket it's like boom you can
send it right to cold card and have that in cold storage in your business wallet.
It is one of the things that event organizers struggle with a lot is that when, you know,
you know, with any event, most of your ticket sales happen, the closer you get to the actual
event, right? But you have to put up a lot of capital beforehand to actually build out, you
know, the venue, the, you know, you know, the lodging, you know, all the things that you need
to spend money on. And so when you're also sort of subject to a payment processor that holds your
funds for 30, 60, 90 days before they pay you out, right? Whatever their policy is, or can put a hold
on that fund. Uh, you know, you've heard this before, you know, hold on the funds because of
some, you know, you got tripped up and, and, uh, some, uh, incorrect fraud, automatic mechanism in
their system and your funds are held up is that uh especially for bitcoin uh events is like you
might have uh obligations to nominate it in bitcoin so you're getting this stuff right away
that you can then use towards the event pay your people pay your suppliers pay your uh hard costs
and all that is that getting getting the money directly to you is uh is a huge advantage yeah
it really is and i can attest to that as a business owner accepting both uh bitcoin and fiat
yeah sharing here yeah it's fun stuff yeah i thought it was important to bring up the blog
because just help people visualize it for sure anybody watching on youtube and
if you've ever done it feels very familiar that's one of the things i wanted to make sure is that
like if you're used to if you run an event before you're going to see most of what you need
right there right now and of course you know it's going to get better over time we just launched it
um i believe on monday um so uh well it's a young product it is pretty fully baked
i mean just having apple wallet functionality alone i think that that is what people i mean that
is what i've come to um see as a must-have for events like physically physically getting tickets
these days is uh or even like having to go to the email and find the qr code yeah um yeah that's
like uh so this is the old way of doing it like just being like add it to the wallet yeah it took
our oldest to the uh the phillies game this summer and it was just like boom went to ticket master
had the wallets on my had the tickets on my phone sure it very easy and then the tickets now it like nfc you don even have to do the qr code it just like boop boop yeah right now we still doing QRs even on the Apple Wallet side of things Funny enough is like I go to a lot of sporting events
and stuff like that.
The QR is actually faster for checking in,
which is a nice thing.
You've done it before.
You put your phone up and the guy's like moving it around
and trying to get the NFC thing to work.
NFC is one of those things we do want to still support,
but in our test of lining up people at Pleb Lab
and scanning them in is that the QR reader,
even on the uh the apple wallet much faster actually for getting people in that's interesting
yeah or sorry it's not necessarily as much faster it it works the first time more often yeah well
but shifting gears a little bit but sure really diving into the process of building this product
is something i miss dearly about being um in bitcoin park austin is being around you
in others in the space, particularly as you implement AI into your production flows.
Sure. That's fun.
Let's talk about that because I know you guys have really been leaning into that zap, right?
Yes. Eventually, I'll become a programmer because of it. I'm not quite there yet.
I've done a little programming in my past, but I am decidedly not a programmer. No, I mean,
there are definitely people that have leaned into this more than we have. However, I will say that
like we're pretty motivated we're a small team right so any you know we have two full-time one
part-time uh developers um you know we're a team of you know five six people and so uh on the ai
side of things it definitely helps like like what i've seen from you know people using uh cod clod
code and cursor and uh these models is that like even the difference in the last six months is
is shocking um we've even had you know very close to an entire you know a small well-defined
simple bug that goes into our ticketing system that gets picked up you know by an ai agent that
attempts to fix it and uh puts up a pr that then needs to be reviewed we've had that process go
through on very very small things um uh without human intervention which is pretty wild yeah um
And I know there's people doing more sophisticated stuff out there,
but that's a really exciting thing to see that like someone can put in a bug
into a ticketing system,
then AI agent can pick it up that it can discern what needs to be done to fix
that bug.
It can make a suggestion and create the code and put it up for a review by
human.
And that at least once we've had that happen to where we were like,
all right,
put it live.
That's right.
Yeah.
What was the bug?
I can't remember.
It was,
it was very,
it was,
I don't want to call it trivial,
but it was a,
it was a very easy bug to fix.
Right.
I can't remember exactly what it was,
but it was small in nature.
It wasn't super complicated and we were all surprised.
And then,
but it's easy to extrapolate.
It's what I'm trying to say is like,
that might've been a very trivial,
small thing,
but you know,
I,
you know,
we're both friends with,
you know,
I'm shot at replet and we're seeing,
you know,
the end to end processes that they're working towards.
right is that like you know he just came out with his whole you know uh you know yeah you can get ai
to write this code but there's just there's hundreds of hours that go into like maintaining
it and like you know you know reviewing it and qing it and doing all these things and rewriting
it and refactoring and doing stuff you know that's for building like an entire app but in terms of
like supercharging an individual's productivity.
You know,
we,
I've seen it be.
It is hard.
I don't want to use the wrong word.
It's shocking.
It is shocking.
Walking into that world,
even,
even on the product management side,
writing specs and like coming up with the stuff,
doing really research and stuff like that.
Everything,
the whole production line of software development it is uh it's impactful everywhere and that's
that's what i was going to ask if you had to attempt to quantify like from a manpower perspective
like how many more people do you think you need to hire to get the same results by
if you were to do this without ai i'm going to say this and then i'm going to double check
with Tom and Nate and Nick
who are doing all the programming on our side
to see if I lied to the audience
and I'll tweet if I lied or not.
I would say
they would say
that it's as if we have somewhere between
two to four junior developers
working with us on top of what they do.
Because most of these people are all...
We don't have any junior developers. These are very senior
programmers that work
at ZapRite right now.
My guess is they would say it's somewhere
around two to four junior developers working with us the way we're utilizing ui right uh or ai right
now which is not even its full extent i would also say that you know one of those junior developers
is john mcgill like our ceo like he's getting he's getting a lot of prs in these days you know
and i'm gonna be following suit here like john's uh more capable programmer than i am
uh as a designer but uh i'm getting a little bit jealous now so like even someone like john is
in there with some of the easier tasks
and can use
cursor or cloud code to
get them there all the way.
If we're
trying to quantify that
monetary, let's just say junior developer makes $150
somewhere around there.
You're saving between
$300,000 and $600,000 a year.
More than anything for a company
like ours, it's not even saving money.
We're just getting to do stuff we wouldn't be able to do
otherwise because we didn't have the money to spend that
on that anyway or we didn't want to spend our money that way right and so all of a sudden our
output i mean zap right is not a tiny project it's not a huge project but it's not a tiny project
and what we've been able to accomplish with a very small team is honestly it's just not really
possible you know 10 years ago like you don't build you don't build an application to zap
rights stature with, with four or five people. No, just not a thing. It's so crazy. That's,
that's shocking. It's, it, it fits my personality. So, so much. It's like every time a company gets
big, I want to go start another one, you know? And, uh, knowing that maybe I've stumbled into
a world where, um, the company doesn't have to get big for the product to get big. You know,
uh, that would be very fun for me. Uh, uh, and then we'll see if I just have commitment issues.
and uh well i mean it is i think it's you're a fascinating individual because you've seen both
ends of the spectrum um being very high up at stack overflow for for many years talk about ai
yeah yeah are you willing to tell your uh stack overflow ai story oh i mean yeah i'll say a little
bit about it is that you know one is you know i worked at stack overflow for eight years uh
And all that time I was into Bitcoin, but I was very excited about Stack Overflow. It was an incredibly rewarding business and product to work on. And one of those things where it's like, I could even rationalize how I was helping Bitcoin at the time.
the Bitcoin stack exchange, you know, Peter Woola and Jimmy song and merch and all these guys still
to this day, you know, there's a huge repository of Bitcoin stuff. I helped start the Bitcoin stack
exchange from the inside. That was very fun. Um, and then of course, you know, stack overflow
itself and the, the, the, the aid it was to programmers, you know, it's, it's fun watching.
I like watching all these AI companies getting so psyched on their work, especially when it comes to,
uh, what they're doing in the programming world, because I lived that. Like, I remember when stack
overflow would go down and what Twitter would look like. It's like, well, can't do my job today.
It's like, it was an impactful place to work. It was very fun. Um, and the product was very good,
uh, until the end. Um, and, uh, but there was this moment, like, I don't know, I want to say
it was 2018, 2019, where chatbots, you'd hear a lot about chatbots. And it's the same thing we're
talking about now. It's just the LLMs. But they just weren't very good yet. They're very clunky,
but it was all the buzz in Silicon Valley. And while Stack Overflow wasn't a Silicon Valley
company, we were very attached to that culture, even though we were in New York. And of course,
all of our clients and everything were in Silicon Valley for the most part.
and so chatbots were kind of the rage right and i remember we were working on an integration
with microsoft on visual studio where you could kind of do some of the things you can do now
which are like you could highlight code and then it would you know come up with this chatbot
basically inside visual studio and uh say you know here's why you're having this bug you know
based off of stack overflow data,
you know,
using a neural network that no one knew how it worked or anything like that.
Uh,
that was really,
really fun.
And the pro the only problem with that,
there was unbelievable product,
except it just didn't work.
Like at the UX was great.
And like,
all these things were really cool.
It's just,
you just got wrong answers.
It was like,
and I remember when,
when Joel left and everything,
um,
and we were getting,
you know,
new management and some stuff like that.
It was like, I couldn't help but just, you know, tell all the new guys that came in after Joel,
or really just the new CEO.
It wasn't like a whole management change.
It was really just CEO was just like, yeah, but imagine if it did work.
Wouldn't this be the greatest product?
He was like, no, but it doesn't.
So we're going to focus on this other stuff.
I was like, but it might, you know, and of course, eventually it did work.
And, and stack's not really a part of it, unfortunately.
um or i mean i know they're trying and i don't want to be too gloomy on it but
i think maybe stacks had its day in the sun and uh oh yeah and i would imagine that a lot of these
coding llm specifically probably trained off of a lot of the uh information on stack overflat
of course they did right i mean well that was the other thing is uh it's all creative commons
that was that was the case the whole time we we had tons of knockoff stack overflows
uh,
throughout the years,
especially in China and Russia in particular,
um,
that were,
you know,
just because all of the data was creative commons.
And that was very important to Joel when he started out and like was very
noble thing to do.
Um,
and it was in direct response to,
you know,
stack overflow had a boogeyman that they were trying to unseat,
which was experts exchange where you had to like go pay for answers and all
this stuff.
Um,
but it was,
uh,
you know,
one of the reasons for its success was that it was creative commons.
So people could go in there and, you know, create unimaginable value for the world of programmers, right?
The value, I mean, like the way people would talk about Stack Airflow in 2017, 2018, 2019, it was so crucial to the productivity of the programming workforce.
It was indispensable, right?
In the same way that cursor and cloud code and all these things are becoming indispensable now.
I mean, that was it, right?
and a lot of that value though was created because it was creative commons like people wouldn't have
contributed as much if they knew that we were just going to monetize their answers and and keep it in
this uh walled garden it was about as close as we could get for as a for-profit business of being
like kind of open source uh was open sourcing all the question answer pairs in the voting and all
that type of stuff and some people you know the promise was always if we do a bad job you can take
the data and start up your own thing with all that. Like it's your data. It's not ours.
And, uh, you know, it was both part of its success and part of its demise at the end of the day.
It's because, uh, I don't think anyone broke any laws, uh, or, or any, uh, user agreements or
anything training off of that. Now I do know that they have some form and I'm not privy to what
stacker flow has been doing or their strategy or anything for the past, uh, five years. But, um,
I do know they have some agreements with Google open AI.
I think they're getting paid something,
but I,
I don't think it's,
um,
uh,
I don't,
I don think it is uh correlating with the value that stack gave those uh very That a fascinating time Stack was a very necessary product
As you said, it increased the productivity of the
software engineer workforce massively.
It's like this connective product
company to the AI world.
yeah but you know you know going back to bitcoin bitcoin saved me from becoming a has-been which is
like it would have been very easy i remember i mean part of it's just being in your 20s but i
remember like building in you know the you know you know early 2000s you know when when stacks
coming alive in 2008 um it's like i i would look with contempt on the people like yeah but i built
GeoCities. I'm like, ah, who cares? You know, GeoCities was a huge deal, you know? And now
that has been, except that I get to keep on building really amazing stuff with Bitcoin. So
I don't define my, it wasn't my last chapter. So that's good.
And I know we're running long here. We've had a very robust, meandering conversation about many
different topics. But one thing, just to really lean into the Bitcoin side of things, what you're
building at zap right um one question um that we'll be asking portfolio companies at 1031
um at a retreat this year which i'm fine to open source on the uh on the podcast right now but it's
uh what doesn't exist in the industry right now that zap right probably won't build but you think
should be built that could help you guys? Oh man. Uh, just on the software side, not on the policy
side, because I would change a lot of policy things as well. Um, geez. I mean, I, it's hard
to narrow down only because, you know, anything that money touches that Bitcoin is not predominantly
featured in right now. Um, I think that, you know, Bitcoin will be there. So, um, you know,
on the ZapRite side,
there's all these integrations I want to do,
you know,
like there's all,
you know,
I don't want to rebuild Patreon.
I just want you to be able to use Patreon and accept Bitcoin.
You know,
I don't want to rebuild YouTube.
I just want you to be able to be paid in Bitcoin.
If you're already a content creator over there.
Right.
And so there's,
you know,
we chose to build business invoicing in a very robust way or,
or,
or the ticketing events,
um,
event tickets in a really robust way.
But,
you know,
we're not going to build YouTube and we're not going to build Patreon and we're not going to
build all these places where people that run businesses. Um, so there's kind of two things.
There's one is, uh, you can do what ZapRite's doing and try to integrate with them or just pick
your, your point, or you can go build YouTube. You know, you can do that, uh, in a Bitcoin centric
way. Podcasting is, is a little bit interesting because there's been a lot of podcasting tools.
um you know the you know uh adam curry and stuff like that that have been trying to make sure that
content creators there can um uh can you know accept bitcoin but then there's all like the
ancillary stuff and i know that there are some things that are working on this so i'm not trying
to badmouth any startups that are out there trying to solve these problems um but a lot of the
financial tools around accounting right it's not there yet right like it's still a little bit of a
struggle um there are good products out there uh i would say we're still waiting for those products
to become great or for the existing infrastructure around uh accounting to become great right um
there's you know the treasury management like the castle guys are working on it you know um
there's all sorts of stuff like that there's different ways uh like i like what the anchor
watch guys are doing you know i feel like there's a lot custodies in a lot better shape than it used
to be there's endless ways to play with that problem right um that are suitable to very specific
industries uh types of businesses things like that um i would say that uh
gosh what else have i been thinking about recently um i think that on the you know
other sides like i worry about with ai uh bitcoin miners i don't worry sorry worry is the wrong word
bitcoin miners are going to be fine they're vultures you know they know how to survive
but um they have a lot more competition for power now the i i mean like the ai stuff is
is power hungry and so i would like to see um uh bitcoin companies that are also power producers
actually behind the meter owning power production so there's a lot of products out there and and
things out there i'd like to see but um i know from from our our side of things that
you know we're both gonna we're gonna try to integrate until it's impossible to do so and
then we'll build it ourselves yeah and that's what i was gonna say on the electricity side
the uh and before i get to the electricity side just on that point like the reason we're bringing
this up and at 1031 and just want to see if there's ways that companies in the portfolio
can collaborate and number two just like also to highlight the massive opportunity that exists out
there still so much to build there's so much to build and i you know i'll throw it out there
we we have a talent problem we need more talent coming into bitcoin we just need it and domain
expertise is overrated if as long as you have a positive view of bitcoin um your skill set whether
you're a software developer or salesperson or marketer it's like we really do need those people
working at bitcoin companies yeah and just to tie tie a knot in the bow of your bitcoin mining
point i think here we go this chart highlights like this the miner is going to get if they're
consuming electricity at these rates,
it's not going to be profitable. It's up to
19 cents per kilowatt hour on average
in U.S. cities. You're kidding.
Is that retail pricing?
It's not industrial. Average price electricity per kilowatt hour
in U.S. city average.
But this is
not a good chart for the United States.
and not only... I mean, unless Bitcoin's
a million dollars with the current hash rate,
then it's fine. Yeah, then it's fine.
But I think this is a
bigger problem for the U.S. generally. I think
electricity is the raw input of... Yeah, we
gotta build it. Everything. We gotta
build net gas plants. We gotta
reinstitute our coal plants.
We gotta... I mean, nuclear. I don't
even like talking about nuclear. It's just so
state-captured.
Build natural gas plants. Build coal plants.
Build solar plants. I don't care. Build solar plants.
great yeah no but we i mean we've longed a lot of our conversations have been about cpi and how
it's bunk and it's funny because you get this info from the federal reserve and the source is the bls
which creates the cpi and you just look at this cost per per one hour in cities and it's up 35 40
percent in five years that doesn't seem like what's actually being reported we need more generation
and i wrote about this chart last week because i had a feeling an intuition a knowledge that
electricity prices were going up based off of my monthly payment but i hadn't taken the time to
look at this chart and it's jarring this that's i mean this jump and then this one here it looks
like we're breaking away again uh-huh it's going straight up yeah that's the wrong type of uh up
to the right well i mean well we also have a new entrant into the space that is not price sensitive
no and but they also i mean you know so much more about this and they're burning so much like i
wonder like they're at some point they will become that yeah but it is crazy because as we discussed
here like the productivity of ai is undeniable undeniable like you've seen the videos we've
generated it's like we have a team of three yeah we're generating videos that probably would have
cost tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in a week for $200 of tokens
sure it's insane but with that being said there's a ton of it's just the this sector of the market
is being flooded with money whether or not these companies are actually profitable and burning this
much cash is sustainable I think is yet to be determined yeah I mean
i know that the programming side of it is sustainable because you know if you're paying
a mid-level programmer two hundred thousand dollars a year and you can profitably sell them
an ai agent you know for 300 bucks a month it's like that's a no-brainer you know and uh some of
the other applications for it you know uh i don't know if that'll be profitable but certainly for the
programming world, it's going to be profitable.
And, you know, I'll also say, you know, one of the fun things is, you know,
I know everyone knows you as, you know, Uncle Marty, the podcaster,
but like you're also quite the product guy, you know, like we,
we got to do this a lot together.
And even the stuff we played with really early on,
I remember the Vercel tool VO or V0 that now is just incredible.
Just getting over the one hump of you can't iterate on a previously done image or CSS file.
You had to start over from scratch.
And now that you can actually go from something and not just say, no, try it again, be better here.
It's just like, no, take this bit of it.
Building UIs and building mobile flows and stuff like that, it's crazy.
I mean, we were playing with that like nine months ago, and I was like, eh, it's almost useful.
And now it's great.
And you're able to employ not just in your videos, but you have to set up web stores and you have to do all this other stuff.
I'm sure you're using it there, too.
Yeah, we are.
Yeah.
And I remember I vividly remember you pulling me into the room in the park.
And it was just for wireframing, but it was crazy.
Even then, hell, you were.
Yeah, that was incredible.
And then they had some open source models that we played with.
I'm very bullish on the open source side right now as well.
I watch.
I have some friends.
And I've seen Tony and the Maple AI guys.
exclusively focus on the open source models
in their private AI chats, but also
people running them locally. That's
looking like
something that we didn't get with the first wave of the internet.
You never got private search. It didn't really make sense.
There is a side of the
AI side that is actually exciting and sort of antithetical to the way early
internet companies grew by basically monetizing spying on you.
Right.
And that while a lot of these AI companies are going to spy on you,
no doubt is that you actually have an ultra like a viable alternative here,
which is very exciting.
Yeah.
It's I'm happy where I'm at.
on this very gloomy first half of the conversation but there are things to be optimistic about we have
tools to make the world a better place to make better products to yeah do things never doom
never doom never doom things may be dark go to church have kids yeah yeah if the way charlie
would have wanted you to that was yeah right there yeah wanted here you enjoy your day yeah you too
man. Be passionate. Go to zaprate.com. Check out the ticketing app. If you're a Bitcoin or a
business owner and you're not using zaprate for invoicing, do it. I've been using it for
three years now and it's only gotten better. Our revenue in Bitcoin is going up consistently
as it's just big. I think it's just, I think it's just the thing of marketing,
how many touch points until you get a conversion for us, how many zaprate invoices with the pain
bitcoin option we have to get before people just say i'll pay in bitcoin we've seen that go up
i love hearing that that just makes me so happy yeah but thank you for building it
you're welcome all right peace and love freaks