Hello, everybody. My name is Daniel Prince, and I'm the host of the Once Bitten podcast.
This is a podcast focused on Bitcoin. It's my mission to interview as many people as I can
around the different aspects of Bitcoin and help people understand exactly what Bitcoin could mean
for them and for their families and for their future. I hope you enjoy the show. Thank you so
much for listening. Hello everybody and welcome to this episode of the Once Bitten podcast,
episode number 600. We got there, we've hit another benchmark. Thank you for all of you
out there that listen and for everybody that's come on the show. Today's guest is a new one,
Kudzai Kutukwa, who is an absolute prolific writer. He's got a briefly.social, he's dropping
bombs over on Nostra he's definitely one to watch for the next few years because his thoughts and
the way he can get his thoughts across on paper is absolutely brilliant there's no video version
to this one Kudzai is uh remaining out of the limelight for now he's letting his writing do the
work so we just have audio only today and uh while the writing speaks for itself and uh so does Kudzai
He's great to have on board.
Thank you for leaning into the space, sir.
And please go and support him with your zaps over on NOSTA.
Read his articles.
The link will be in the show notes.
And yeah, thanks for coming on, brother.
Episode 600.
Shout out, as always, to Orange Pill App, which is now Club Orange.
Please go and meet some new people.
There's 20,000 members.
They've crossed that threshold.
20,000 Bitcoiners on the app looking to connect with you.
You've got to go find your people, human beings, and like to get together and meet in real life.
So get over to the link in the show notes.
Bitbox, please self-custody your Bitcoin.
There is so much at stake.
If you are leaving your Bitcoin on an exchange, please take it off.
Exchanges get hacked or they get subpoenaed.
This has happened before.
This is not hyperbolic bullshit.
I'm not trying to scare you into doing something.
You can do your own research, but people have lost their Bitcoin because they didn't self-custody it.
So if you're leaving it on the exchange, it's not in your control.
So please go and study self-custody.
Bitbox.swiss forward slash Bitten.
Use the code Bitten for 5% off.
New shout out for Hoddle Solo, who's putting together a weekly newsletter.
It's a what's on guide for UK Bitcoiners.
And it's coming at you from the Bitcoin Events UK platform, which he has curated over the last few years.
And it's a weekly of what's on.
It highlights the real meetups, the real people, real adoption, all that's happening on the ground.
And it's a new issue every Sunday morning.
Just subscribe to the link in the show notes and get all of that information delivered into your inbox.
There's no excuse now if you're a UK Bitcoiner to be lonely.
No chance.
You've got Club Orange and you've also got the weekly What's On guide.
My First Bitcoin.
Big shout out to My First Bitcoin.
If you've listened to the last episode with James Dewar, who had with him two school teachers
from a secondary school in the UK, love to see this initiative.
And I know people have already started reaching out to James.
and I think it's definitely worth your time to go back and listen to that
and to find out the work he's been doing in conjunction with my first Bitcoin.
And a shout out to Relay.
Relay have been part of this show for just over five years, I think.
They were one of the first sponsors, Julian Linegar, Adam and the team over there.
Thank you for everything you've done.
This is going to be one of the last shout outs for Relay.
they're going to be focusing marketing spend elsewhere and i wish them all the very best
with everything going forward it's been incredible to be part of their journey thank you for all of
the support to the whole team over at relay what you've done is absolutely amazing you can download
the app relay r-e-l-a-i.ch forward slash biton and start stacking your sets today they have the
wallet built in they have the high net worth individual option for you they have relay private
they can help you and your bitcoin business to uh excuse me your business onto a bitcoin standard
uh it's been great working with you guys thank you and all the very best hope to see you
in btc prague i hope to see all of you in btc prague that's going to be in june and don't forget
we've got btc island in dublin coming up towards the back end of may and then in september health
sinky like i said bitcoiners need to meet each other when you meet each other something magical
happens you feel you feel some kind of emotional connection it's impossible to describe and i'm not
the only person that's ever like come across this woo woo if you want to say um it happens to us all
there's something so magical when you get that positive energy into a space and everybody
looking forward with hope into the future.
So get to Dublin, get to Prague, get to Helsinki,
and get a 10% discount whilst you're doing that.
You can use the code BITN.
The links are in the show notes.
Appreciate you all listening.
I hope you enjoy this one with Kudzai,
and here's to the next 600 shows.
Kudzai, we are recording.
Great to have you on the show.
Nice to meet you.
Thank you very much, Daniel.
It's a pleasure to be here.
And I want to give a shout out to Aza, who connected us.
She put you on my radar.
And she said, one of the most interesting people out there in Bitcoin,
writing some of the best articles.
And you've been prolifically writing on NOSTA too,
where it's all getting dropped over on NOSTA.
So you're a full-on down-the-rabbit-hole NOSTA,
as we like to call ourselves, I suppose.
and using that medium to spread your word.
So, yeah, let's start at the beginning.
Bitcoin, Bitcoin journey, I suppose.
You know, what are you happy to share about yourself?
You know, like your background, perhaps your educational path,
your career path, and then finding Bitcoin.
No, I'll be more than happy to.
So my Bitcoin journey, like everyone's, it has a lot of twists and turns to it.
My background in terms of education, it's marketing and management.
And currently I work with what we call smallhold or small-scale farmers in the more financial inclusion space,
as well as helping them with tools that assist them with better sustainable farming methods, etc.
So kind of how I then circled back to Bitcoin.
Once upon a time, a couple of years back, I used to live in Zimbabwe.
And this was at a time when hyperinflation and all of those things were kicking off,
you know like printing 10 trillion dollar notes and all of that other stuff so i lived through
that where you kind of see a currency collapse in real time and you're seeing inflation ravaging
prices changing on the hour every hour and during that time obviously the most um the exit for most
people was to whenever you would earn if you would earn your money in local currency it was to then
immediately convert it either to US dollars or pounds or euros or whatever it is that you could
get your hands on as a way of trying to preserve your purchasing power. And so that sort of,
this is like pre-2008. And then by the time the financial crisis hit, the situation,
they were so bad that we didn't even feel the financial crisis. You were literally just reading
about it that oh this is what's happening because kind of things were kind of in a much worse off
position economically speaking um so now i had those two kind of experiences which on one hand
i was plugged into what was happening in the global markets and i'm you know somewhat interested
in that and at the same time i'm living through this experience where you're actually seeing a
currency collapse in real time. Then after, you know, the whole crisis subsided and everything,
that's when I think at that time I started getting attracted more to precious metals because
I had also seen that even the hard currencies like the US dollar and everything through the
financial crisis were not as invincible as we thought they were. And therefore there was
a need for something else that you could use as a store of value or as an inflation hedge
or that you could use to just preserve your wealth and purchasing power.
From then on, I fell down that rabbit hole and started to be a collector of sorts of
all kinds of, you know, precious metals, particularly gold and silver.
But then from that trajectory, I think around about 2011, 2012-ish there,
that's when I stumbled upon the Bitcoin white paper. I don't even remember how it happened,
but I think it was just one of those days where you're lazy scrolling online. And then
I stumbled upon the Bitcoin white paper, read it. It didn't really make much sense to me at the time.
But the one thing I took away like from my initial reading was this is a plan or this is a layout of an alternative currency through which it not controlled by the state it outside of the system but at the same time it works over the internet and you can
transmit it peer-to-peer so that idea really appealed to me even though there were parts about
it that i didn't understand at the time and just kept and there wasn't really much material anyway
during that period, as opposed to now where you're spoiled for choice with podcasts and books and so
forth. I dug and found what I could and talked to whoever I could to try and, you know, really like
get a good grip on what this was about. And I think it took me about a couple of months. Then
in 2013, that's when I started to say, okay, fine, I think I'm ready to start getting into Bitcoin
a little bit, bit by bit, and see what this is just in case things blow up or, you know, as an
alternative. So with time, went through the 2017 bull cycle and, you know, the subsequent cliff
hanger that came off after that. And throughout that whole period, I just kept learning more and
educating myself more and just observing even what was happening on the global stage as well.
So it became clearer with time that fiat currencies are doomed. And there was a lot of unlearning as
well that I had to do in terms of, you know, how you would have been educated to think about money
and the monetary system. And then now to reverse that to actually then start going deeper down into
like other alternative rabbit holes.
Now, this was almost the same period
that I discovered Austrian economics
or when I was first discovering that
it was more from a precious metals lens
where the answer to all the problems
that the Austrians had identified or listed was
we need probably a monetary system that is gold-based, or if that's not going to happen
anytime soon, then eventually we need to switch, at least as individuals, to start to use precious
metals as currency. And then it took a while now to then marry that theory, and then with Bitcoin,
that came later after I eventually read the Bitcoin standard, and the rest is history,
as they say. Professionally, one of the things as well I mentioned was in the crop insurance space
because you're working with small farmers. There was this drive, I think it started,
let's say around 2012, 13 there, where the idea was where financial inclusion became even, I think,
one of the UN SDGs where it was sort of incorporated into that. I'm not too sure about
the timeframe in terms of that, but I know it was around about that same period when financial
inclusion became like a big talking point across many circles and particularly on the continent of
Africa. And that then motivated me or one of the things that given everything I'd been through to
then start to look at, say, okay, maybe let's come up with a product, crop insurance product
that will target small-scale farmers because at the end of the day, they're the most vulnerable
to natural disasters. But at the same time, the current crop insurance product that were being
offered on the market, they were not what you would say affordable for them. So the initial
approach to that was one where you're approaching it mostly as a business slash technology problem.
where you're looking at it and saying, let's try and solve this by creating a better, cheaper product that would utilize stuff like mobile money and all these other things to try and smash down all those barriers to entry that are resulting in a lot of these people being financially excluded.
because without crop insurance, it becomes very difficult for you to then access things like
credit if you need it to expand your farming activities and all of those other things.
So that was how we were approaching it initially. And we kept running into roadblocks where
you're trying to build a product, let's say maybe an app-based solution, which was the initial idea
at the time. Then you realize you need banking APIs, you need to link to the local banks and so
forth and for every transaction or call api call that you're doing you're being charged and then
when you add up all those expenses it would put you in a position where you realize that you know
maybe we can't actually do this in a cheaper way to sort of bring down the cost of this thing
because at the time you're being kept like in the fiat system this is around uh 2014 26 between
2014 to 2016, 17 there.
So it was like a journey where you're running around in circles where you're thinking the
solution is fintech to come up with some cool fintech solution to try and solve this problem.
But ultimately, you always come back to the same answer, which is it's not just the tech
layer on top that you're dealing with.
It's actually the base layer, which is fiat, which is credit based because it's credit
based.
and there is no final settlement when transactions happen,
therefore all of that is priced in.
And because it's priced in, initially,
it just excludes certain people out by definition.
So these were some of the, in a nutshell,
things that on one hand, from a professional standpoint,
I came face-to-face with how the fiat system doesn't work for everyone.
and also um i've lived through currency collapse i've seen that and how bad things can get and also
you know personal study and curiosity i've always been curious about the markets i've always loved
investing and trading so these are kind of the things that brought me to this point where
you look at everything else you try every other solution and you always come back to realize that
Bitcoin is the answer to solving most,
if not all of these monetary problems that the world is facing. Yeah.
So in a nutshell, that was kind of my Bitcoin journey.
Amazing. So just to come back to that,
that day that you're living in Zimbabwe and the hundred
trillion dollar note shows up. I mean, like,
I just can't even begin to imagine what goes through a person's mind.
At that point, had you all kind of realized this is just confetti in our hands,
that this is monopoly money?
Because as you said, prices, it's so hard for people to grasp, even for myself.
I've not lived through that.
And you're saying prices are changing on the hour?
Absolutely. And this is the thing, right? When you haven't gone through an experience like that, it's very easy to see Bitcoin differently as maybe just a store of value or an alternative investment.
But in that instance, Daniel, you look at your bank account, it got to a point where you're at the ATM, you're looking at your bank account. There's so many zeros that you can't even count them.
and over in the black
you had
what was the limit
I think at one point you could
they had then
what you call the central bank
had placed limits in terms of how much
cash you could withdraw per day
so because there were those limits
they were trying
it was a bid to try and control
the inflation and to try
and tame
the
idea that or the the the whole system behind people trying to flee to a stronger currency
so by the time you're holding i think it really clicked for me that this is confetti
when we hit by the time we had a hundred thousand dollar note it was obvious that
this train is just going to keep going and going and going and going so by the time we even got to
the $100 trillion note, it wasn't even a surprise where you're not even shocked because some of the
prices you're paying for things, the only way it would make sense is if you're paying in dollars.
Otherwise, if you wanted to pay local currency, you had to bring bags and bags and bags of money.
And I remember during that period, people that were selling money counters, they made quite a
killing because now you needed them. And almost everyone who had, no matter what size of business
you were running. You needed a money counter since people would bring you bricks and bricks
of money if they wanted to buy anything. So by the time you're doing all of that,
you can't even begin to calculate anything or to have any sort of planning because your time
window for planning is one hour. If you don't buy what you need to buy within the hour, or at least
at the very latest within the day, you know, tomorrow, that same thing, the price would have
changed. And whatever money that you had, or that you had planned to use at that point is not going
to be enough. So you need to top it up somehow. And this is happening at a point in time where,
you know even things from let say the employment sector of things and jobs where it wasn looking good in that arena as well so yeah by the time you get to that point where you have that note
you already know this is confetti this is this is just
losing value by the day so your immediate reaction is the moment you get it
you immediately find somebody who can sell you dollars or you buy something that you know
what were the kind of things that people were buying obviously if you need food or clothing
if you had a desperate need for something but if if you know right okay what i'm holding is going
to be worth less uh yes next hour and by the end of the day what were the kind of goods that people
were just flocking to to buy because they knew that would hold some kind of purchasing power
you would buy anything daniel anything that you knew you could liquidate um there were even
some companies what they would do is they would buy bricks because they knew the bricks
if you buy a brick today it's worth 50 cents per brick tomorrow it's 60 cents equivalent per brick
and tomorrow it's another price and another price.
So whatever it is, you could get your hands on,
which you knew maybe there's reasonable demand for that.
If you had access, say, for example, to foodstuffs
that you knew, I can liquidate this quite easily,
that's what you parked your money into.
So the shorter your timeframe in terms of
when you would need to use or liquidate the money,
the more you had to buy something that was more liquid.
But the easiest choice for a lot of people was just to convert it to US dollars or pounds or whatever other foreign currency you could get your hands on.
That was the most easiest thing to do.
But if you had a longer time on Amazon...
My other question was what other foreign currencies were at play there?
Sorry?
You've hit my other question.
What other foreign currencies were being sought after?
Yes.
So the main one obviously was the dollar.
and you had pounds and you had euros and then the south african rat it was mainly those ones
those were the foreign currencies of choice there and also because you had a lot of people that had
um left the country and were now living working in other countries they'll then send back
biorementators and all of this a lot of the um mostly dollars and some who in the uk would send
back pounds and all of that other stuff so there was like a what you would call a parallel market
it's not like you were going to the bank to buy it no you had to it was like a network it was
peer-to-peer basically so yes even on the street we started to see peer-to-peer forex trading
was it it's trying to i'm trying to put myself in your shoes so did people just adapt to it
slowly and it become the new way of life or was there a lot of fear was there a lot of panic
how did it all kind of play out it was a slow burn because it it didn't happen like immediately
like that so this was a process that happened slowly over time where so eventually i mean you
look at it like today you have a $500 note. Then six months down the line or a year from that,
you have a $1,000 note. And then it keeps going like that slowly. And then towards the end,
round about maybe 2006, seven, eight. So by the time you got to that point,
and because this economic meltdown had already started happening a couple of years before
it it's like a slow burn a slow cook kind of like that analogy of the frog in the
boiling water that the frog doesn't immediately jump out as opposed to if we throw it into water
that's already hot and that was kind of how people started adjusting and yes there was a lot of fear
because now if you're a family man,
you're thinking, how am I going to send my kids to school
because the school fees is changing.
You know, you would be asked in the middle of the term,
you would get a letter from the school saying,
hey, you need to top up
because what you paid at the beginning of the term
is not going to last through or carry through.
So here's an additional bill for you
that you need to top up your children's school fees.
And then over and above that,
you are having to deal with all the other costs of living or sorry, living expenses and so on and so
forth. So definitely there was a lot of fear. There was a lot of uncertainty. And then coupled
with that, you also don't have job security because companies are shutting down because of,
you know, the unsustainable economic environment and so on and so forth. So you're not even sure
if tomorrow you have a job, if you're like formally employed and everything. So now you
also had to think about what can I do on the side as a way of just trying to keep bread on the table.
So definitely it was a very hyper stressful environment, full of uncertainty, full of fear.
And it was something that you're adjusting to on a day-to-day basis. And there is no manual that
you can look at to say, or, you know, past experiences that you can draw upon to say,
how is this of course you had weimar republic but that's like you know way back when and the
conditions and situations for that were different so yeah in a nutshell that was kind of the
situation you can't there is no planning that you're doing um in that scenario where you're
planning even a week in advance you can't you have to plan for today and then next day and the next
day and the next day. And that's how you're sort of trying to make things happen. Unless, of course,
if you were fortunate enough to be working in an international organization or a bank that was
going to pay you, let's say, in dollars or in some other foreign currency, then you didn't have that
problem. You were sorted. But for the general population, that wasn't the story.
So now in Zimbabwe, did I still have their own national currency or does everybody just use the
us dollar now um i think now they have a currency but it's mostly they also use dollar so it's like
the local unit alongside the dollar so i guess that's where that's probably what is helping
bring some sort of stability as you know some of the economic issues that were present during
you know that 2008 period some of them have since been resolved so there is some gradual return to
normalcy but it's it's going to take a bit of time up until everything gets to normal but
as you know with fiat the problem is if you are issuing a weaker currency
it still puts you at the back foot because eventually if your currency is backed up by
dollar reserves you are still not going to be in a place where you outperform the dollar and
whatever's happening to the dollar will have knock-on effects so it's definitely something
that's going to take a bit of time to rectify along those lines but as all fiat currencies
collapse who knows if ever that will get rectified it's crazy so like that that particular note the
hundred trillion dollar note the zimbabwe dollar note uh that that gets handed around at conferences
you know as bookmarks for example yeah or as little keepsakes it's insane
and i'm a nation of trillion and quadrillionaires
i've just checked um there's no way to value it it's only valued as a collectible now so it's not
like you could even even turn up in that wouldn't even be accepted now anywhere i'm assuming for
any goods or services no no no now it's no longer legal tender right but it's such a mockery as in
at that point in time by the time by the time they issued a hundred trillion dollar note bread
was like 10 trillion or something crazy like that and i love the fact those numbers i mean
On the back of the note, they've got a bull or a water buffalo,
and a waterfall, Victoria Falls.
It's so fitting that they should have a waterfall.
It's absolutely...
Absolutely.
I couldn't agree more.
Oh, my goodness.
Yeah, but that was a crazy time.
So that brings to your article,
which I think is a brilliant article
because you challenge one of the narratives,
one of the humanitarian narratives
that just kind of gets hand-waved around
and bandied around in all of the Bitcoin kind of parlance.
Oh, well, Bitcoin is a way to bank the unbanked.
And you saying yo guys no we got to figure out how to unbank the banks Absolutely And you know when I was writing that article I was drawing upon all these experiences to say for example like what you nailed on the head when you
talking about this is something that in humanitarian circles, they talked about.
And when I was working on that crop insurance thing, that was also the theme that, oh, what
you're doing is financial inclusion you're trying to bank the unbanked and then you know they'll
throw around the stats so there are 1.9 billion unbanked people around the world and so on and so
forth and because these people don't have access to financial services or rather they don't have
access the way they would frame it was they don't have access to bank accounts so because they don't
have access to a bank account for whatever reason they would list a whole litany of reasons some of
which, you know, a legit reason.
Then they would say, oh, they can't access 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
But when you really think about it,
it brings you to a point where you realize that, yes, people need to transact.
People need to be able to buy and sell and trade and do this.
But that is not something that can't be done,
especially now in a Bitcoin world.
You don't need a bank account to do that.
Of course, yes, we know there's still a lot of improvements or a lot of things that still need to be built out in Bitcoin.
But the point is, when you have a bank account, number one, you have to KYC, right?
Not only do you have to KYC, you also have to, you're kind of handing the bank permission or rather authority over your money.
So if they decide to freeze your account for whatever reason, they can do it.
If they decide to deny you, let's say you want to withdraw some money or a certain amount, if it's above whatever limit that has been set, depending on the jurisdiction you're living in, you can't access it.
You'll need permission.
You need to speak to the manager and so on and so forth.
And it's up to the manager's discretion and all of that.
So when you look at what Bitcoin was designed to do, it was designed to eliminate trusted third parties and to become a form of electronic cash where it still allows you to transact digitally and so on and so forth, peer-to-peer.
but at the same time you're doing so without any intermediary now when you understand that value
proposition it then puts you in a place of if i can just secure my own money by myself in my wallet
if i have control over my keys and if i can transact and send my bitcoin peer-to-peer
then what on earth do i need a bank for
then that starts to open up you know a different um thought process where you start to then look at
and then see that actually the whole banking system is actually also working in tandem
with this idea that all your transactions have to be monitored all your um apart from the monitoring
We also need to know who you are.
You have to expose your identity every time you need to transact.
Every transaction has to be attached to an ID or a passport, some way, somewhat, and zero financial privacy.
And if we think you're doing something shady, we can just decide to freeze your account.
And then there are all of these other, and we've got countless stories that we can discuss and talk about,
where whether we want to talk about Wikileaks
or many other organizations that at one point
eventually then got taken out of the financial system
where every other bank or financial institution says,
hey, we do not want to work with you.
We do not want to bank your money
or we do not want to process any transactions
that are associated with whatever it is you're doing.
You're not doing anything illegal or anything immoral.
You're just a company or an organization
that is out of favor with the powers that be.
As a result, one of the first things they do
is they financially choke you to death.
So this is the problem with the banking system
that it has ceased to become a service,
but it has become more like an albatross
that is hanging around our necks.
And this is also the mechanism
through which money is created.
So all of these things,
yeah, that was kind of my thought process
to actually say, no,
This is not about trying to bank the unbanked. This is actually for those that didn't have access to financial services, they now have. But for those even in first world countries or developed countries as they're so-called, they can now start to think about things differently from a sovereignty perspective to say, do I really want a bank to have control over my money, what I do with it?
or do I want to be able to transact as a free person peer-to-peer?
So that was kind of the thought process.
Based on all of these experiences wrapped up in one.
This notion of first world or developed countries
is such a stupid, weird way
that we've been gaslit into looking at these things.
It's just disgusting when you think about it.
And if you to explain to an alien lands tomorrow and you're like, yes, so in the first world or so-called developed nations, what you do is you go to work for as many hours a day as you possibly can.
And you're rewarded in the currency that that jurisdiction demands that you use as a medium of exchange.
You don't have any choice from birth.
and when you're working, you just give over your bank account details to your employer who deposits
the money there on your behalf for your convenience. So you never actually see or touch the money
and then that money just de facto becomes the bank's money. So the medium of exchange that
you're giving up your time, energy and skills for is actually the bank's all along. And if you want
it you're gonna have to go begging hands and knees if you want more than they're willing to give you
and if you do something that they don't deem legal in any or like slightly you know i don't know
egregious they're gonna shut you down yes and that's what you wrote about in your other essay
um exit is the only solution uh the and you talk about um scott ritter who was uh debatled yes
yes and that was also kind of a it was it's following and building on kind of the same
thread in the sense that um like you articulated this perfectly to say you go to work and as part
of your rewards you're told okay this is how much you're going to be paid but before you even
get to touch some money you have already been taxed so the man takes his cut before you do
and then you are left with uh whatever they will call it a net and then over and above that as you
spend it and do all of these other things you are being taxed and monitored and surveilled and all
of this so it's like especially now with the advent of all these digital mechanisms of
transacting within the fiat system it's like everything lives a digital footprint through
which you can be tracked and traced and over and above that it then creates for someone who maybe
wants to build some sort of personality profile on you they can build it without your consent
just by analyzing all these places where you're spending your money and how you're spending it
et cetera, et cetera. And like you rightly put, you then have to, oh, now I need to buy a house.
Now you have to get a bond. And when you go and apply for a bond,
the idea is, oh, the bank has some money sitting somewhere that they're transferring to my account
when we all know that's not how it works. But that's actually, you know, the process of money
creation. So coming back to that other article in terms of what happened to Scott Ritter,
He got debanked. No explanation. He just got a letter from the bank saying, listen, we are terminating our relationship with you, etc., etc.
His response to that was to try and appeal to the CEO of the bank and director of the FBI and some congressmen to try and rectify the situation.
Now, I looked at that and I something didn't just sit right with me about that situation to say, wake up and smell the coffee.
Even if this plan works where you're appealing to these people to get on for you to get on their good side so that they can let you back in.
Can't you see that the fact that they can do this and the fact that they have done this means they're going to do it again and again and again.
And until you get to a point where, because you're a journalist and you're touching some of the controversial areas, that becomes a situation where you'll be forced to self-censor as a way of trying to keep the bank account open or as a way of trying to make sure that you're able to transact and all of these other things.
Now, if this was not a world in which Bitcoin existed,
then fine, maybe we could make a case for
let's play nice with the system.
But now in a world where you have Bitcoin,
you have options.
You don't need to be submissive
or begging and asking for permission.
Granted, there is a steep learning curve, right?
But at the end of the day,
How much do you value your freedom?
If you know that for you to maintain your journalistic integrity, there are certain things you have to report on.
There are certain things you have to talk about, which puts you in the crosshairs of certain people who are powerful, who can decide to choke you by shutting down your bank account.
So how are you being smart by trying to appeal to that system,
that same system that put a boot on your face
and proves to you that if you don't submit or comply with it,
this is what's going to happen.
So that logic and that way of thinking or doing things
doesn't really translate for me to say,
you can see what's happening.
You already have evidence.
You're already being checked out on the outside like a leper.
So now what are you going to do about it to rectify the situation?
And then this ties into even how, thanks mainly to the education system and how we are taught to relate to the world, that whenever there's a problem, someone somewhere has to come and solve it.
Oh, we need to get the roads fixed or whatever.
Let's elect somebody to come in and deal with this problem.
and then that happens but then this person becomes captured by special interests and so on and so
forth and then the solution is oh let's vote for somebody else let's vote hard and let's do this
and let's do that whereas you're dealing with things it's it's it's a mentality where you don't
want to just take the bull by the horns and just figure out another way that doesn't require you
to depend on a system that is designed to choke you.
This is really my thing, or that's really the core message
I was just trying to put across to say,
look, the fiat system, the way it's designed,
it's by definition inflationary.
So when central bankers are talking about inflation targeting
and all of this, it's all a farce in the sense that
this thing is just going to create more dollars
or more euros or more pounds every single day
no matter what they're talking about in terms of trying to curb or bring rain in inflation so why
would you then want to reason or appeal to that system which over time is designed to steal away
your purchasing power to steal away the value of your time and to gradually bring it to a place of
poverty. I don't see how that's a rational, large conclusion, a way of thinking or doing things.
But again, it comes back to how a lot of us have been educated and part of the education we received
tells you to trust the system, to trust the powers that be, that the system, whilst it's not perfect,
it's the best we got. So yes, stay in it. Anything else, alternative that shows up like Bitcoin,
oh no that's a scam money comes from the government even this idea of you know legal tender
some people somewhere are the ones that determine what money is and what money is not which again
it's a nonsensical idea but these are some of the ideas running our modern world today
yeah you nailed it the system is not broken it's working perfectly as designed it's tickety-boo
it's not missed the beat of the drum it's purring it's um exactly and again what i just don't want
to brush over like the what you said about people taking out a mortgage for their house for example
you know this is a perfect example that i've used in presentations that i've given about how
You walk into that bank, like you cross that that yielded line that you're allowed into the bank to go and speak to the bank manager or the mortgage broker or whoever it is that you're going to go begging cap in hand to.
because the house that you want to buy is completely out of reach,
but you've saved up over a 10 to 15-year career maybe at this point.
You've saved up 50 or 75,000 pounds or dollars or euros,
choose your currency or whatever freaking central bank cartel you like.
The rest of the money is just deposited by the bank into your account.
It doesn't come off their books or anything. It's literally written into the ledger that is part of the money creation process. And this is happening every single second of every single day. And it's not just mortgages. It's the car on finance.
My wife the other day, like a letter come through from the bank saying, do you understand car leasing?
You could be driving a brand new car.
It's just a little bit like renting.
They are courting people into debt.
It's despicable.
And this money comes from absolutely nowhere.
And then, just to top off the icing on the cake, they charge you interest on it.
This is usury.
Imagine that.
It's so vile and criminal and disgusting and inhumane.
But that's what we have in the first world country, guys.
And the crazy thing about it is you can describe these,
like exactly how you put it, that entire scenario to a person and say,
look, the money that you're paying interest on did not exist in the first place.
When you came in with your deposit and you said, okay, they tell you you need to put 10% down the safest for a house, 10%, 20%, whatever the case is, you bring that 20% down, you have already participated in this money creation process.
But not in the sense that they took other people's savings and credited those to your account.
No, it just becomes like, what can we say, collateral to say, yes, this person probably does have the mechanisms or the means to repay this phantom money that we're now going to create and charge them interest on.
And here's the kicker.
You are paying it over a 20, 30-year period.
And that's probably, depending on when you take out that mortgage,
probably that's in the majority of your productive working years.
And then you really get to own this property,
which you're still paying property taxes on, by the way.
All the way now, maybe in your 50s and 60s.
Of course, it depends on when you started.
But like you said, it's a very diabolical system.
And you can explain it to a person and they will look at you and say, no, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.
This is just what it is.
That's just a system.
Or worse, which I've experienced many times, where they'll say, no, you're wrong.
That's not how it works.
And then they'll tell you whatever fairy tale they've been told in the education system that, no, they're saving somewhere.
And then these savings are transferred.
This is why the bank has to check you and make sure you're able to repay and so on and so forth.
But they don't understand the bigger picture that this is actually a system of control.
It has got nothing to do with, oh, these loans have come out from that pocket or anything.
But yes, you're right.
It's just a way of keeping you in debt where you're just, you know, like the WEF said, you'll own nothing and be happy.
So you're renting everything.
you're leasing your car and before you know it people will be leasing houses because they can't
afford to buy them due to inflation and so on and so forth and it's going to extend all the way to
furniture i mean we already started seeing that trend way back when with cell phones where you're
given a payment plan and you just have to pay every month this and this it's very rare that you get to
really own it if they say you own it yeah you have to really pay a high price and all of these are the
things that gradually get you into that debt trap.
Yeah, it's endless, absolutely endless.
And so by doing that, you are unwittingly adding to the inflation,
you're unwittingly debasing the purchasing power of every other person around
to uh because as that credit just gets um as that debt in the system just gets more and more and more
at some stage they will have to print uh this is what the whole debt ceiling argument in the u.s
comes around every like two or four years whatever it is they'll have to print x amount of dollars
into actual physical dollars into existence to close that gap uh and there already is not enough
money actual physical currency in the world to cover all of the the debt obligations so you just
that ah but when when people say very easily it just rolls off the tongue oh it's a debt-based
debt-based ponzi scheme without actually thinking about and breaking down those four words so it's
like debt-based guys debt-based right it's not you know it's not gold-backed it's debt-based so
the asset at the bottom of this whole thing, holding up this whole thing is debt.
Yes.
Who is indebted to who?
That's the name of the game.
So everyone is just pushing across IOUs and we call it money, when in actual fact, it's
a debt instrument that we are just using to settle and make transactions in the interim.
And this is where now when you like what you saying when you start to really think about the implications of it to say what does this actually mean What it means therefore is everyone or a sizable amount of the population
has to be in debt for the system to work.
So they have to keep pumping out the credit
because if that stops, the whole thing collapses.
But at the same time, the more they do that,
the more that becomes unsustainable too
because things will get to a point where none of that money can't be repaid
and then we are forced to do like a hard reset,
which, yeah, I would say is probably around the corner.
Again, people are going to be thinking, well, that's great.
I'll just get a letter saying I don't owe the money back on my mortgage.
So that's all fine.
Let's do the hard reset thing.
uh yeah but you see you know you know what what they don't understand is i'll give you an example
of something coming back to um to zimbabwe for a little bit so we got to a point where like you
know the hundred trillions and so on and so forth right and then things just crashed they just
decided, you know what, they're suspending trading on the stock market until further notice.
And then they came out after the whole suspension and said, okay, we are now dollarizing the economy.
And all the bank balances were immediately converted to dollars. And then they came up,
they had a different exchange rate that they used, which was different from what it had been
officially. So imagine you had, let's say, I don't know, 200 trillion, whatever it is,
maybe at the time it was the equivalent of about $20. But when they revalued it and reset,
it then became maybe 10 cents or $2. So you have this whole, you know, wipe out of things,
because now we have reset, we're coming back to, we're now using a different currency. So we have
to reprice and revalue everything.
Yes, for those that were fortunate enough
maybe to have had mortgages or whatever
before the whole thing collapsed,
obviously, yes, you're able to pay it
for pennies on the dollar.
But that's not everyone's story.
Everyone else.
Now, imagine you had your pension,
which was priced,
hyperinflation aside,
your pension is priced in the previous currency.
And then when they revalued it, it meant that whatever pension you had probably got considerably shrunk, which is what happened to most people.
So, again, I've seen a reset in what it does and how it actually works in practice, which is different from a lot of people who think about this in theoretical terms.
there are winners and losers obviously but at the back of it most people will be losers because
you're already on the back foot you're already dealing with inflation
and whatever money that was in the bank that again you couldn't withdraw all of it because of with
limitations that were put on it now is revalued repriced and then you're even told actually we
are phasing out this currency in the meantime again that's what happened everything was
converted officially dollarite and for a while that was the system that was going so even when
you get to a point where that reset comes it's going to be very painful and it's probably more
painful than people can grasp or imagine because it won't it won't be in anyone's or at least in
the majority of people's favor of course the ones who own the money printer they're not going to be
affected. But for those that are not close to the money printer in any way, shape or form,
definitely that will hit hard. More so now when you then get like a CBDC being now the replacement
of the system that is outgoing, that's where things will probably get even more crazy.
it's it's interesting timing because uh in the uk there is a guy who started a new party
and people are getting caught up in this idea that oh this time this time like you said we'll
just vote harder get this guy and he's saying all the right things obviously he's saying
nationalistic stuff populist stuff he's saying socialist stuff let's tap you know we need to
uh cut taxes and we got you know and then he comes up and says and we have to pay off the
national debt i've got a way of paying off the national debt and it's like whoa hang on
to how are we paying it to whom do you owe that debt and why is it national like you know
i'd like to take i'd like to buy a 10 bedroom house and go into debt and then call that part
of the national debt and have, you know, everybody else pay off my mortgage for me that, you know,
these governments that enter into these debt instruments with the central bank, because it's
the central bank that, you know, ultimately prints the money by buying the government bonds.
And then we are the ones left to pay via our tax dollars. But this is what I try and explain to
people if the central bank can print whether it's u.s dollars or pounds or euros whenever they want
for themselves and their their little club of mates why would they ever want it back they can
have it whenever they want so what is it they truly want what do they truly want if you have
an infinite amount of something in the first place you don't need any tom dick or harry coming back
and said oh hey here by the way here's some more of that stuff like yeah okay loads of that um how
about some natural resources bro do you have any of that do you have any uh gold tin copper iron
ore do you have any lithium do you have any uh cobalt do you have any you know natural flowing
rivers do you have any forests do you have any uh oil in the ground that that's the shit we really
want that's what we're pushing people into depth for and people just miss that
yes absolutely because of that again like words are important excuse me like what she said national
debt how is it national was i present when these people were filling out the loan applications to
whoever did i give my consent was i consulted so how is it national how am i part of this equation
and so on and so forth.
And it then gets to a point where,
because these words are just thrown around
and people never stop to ask, for the most part,
what does this mean and why are we?
There's this notion of the social contract
that now that you have this government in charge,
it's like there's a collective social contract,
which I don't remember signing.
I don't know how that makes it a contract.
But anyway, the social contract through which, because it's a social contract, you're expected to do your bid, pay your taxes, and contribute money to the part to pay off this national debt.
But at the same time, we all know the money creation process is primarily the drive of that national debt.
And that's not going away.
So how are we paying it off in the first place?
If the same mechanism that created the debt in the first place is still intact, how in the world are we saying we are paying it off?
it doesn't really make any sense but these are like you said talking points that
as long as you're hitting the right bullet points during a campaign season or whatever
there's definitely going to be some people that will rally and get behind that unfortunately
yeah it's anyway all right the collapse has already happened
could say uh this is uh yes this leads us perfectly into the other piece that we wanted to
discuss today uh and again you posit that um people are thinking oh this is all gonna happen
in 10 to 20 30 years time and you know we have to prepare but you're like no man like this is this
happened decades ago like it's here living in the collapse that's it and that was also drawing on
my previous experiences to say you know a lot of these things they do not happen like cataclysmically
they happen gradually where it's one policy decision in this direction another policy
decision in that direction and so on and so forth. And you can see where all of these things are
leading to. So if I, let me just come to the Bitcoin community for a bit. Whenever there are
discussions, or at least the discussions I've had or been privileged to listen to,
where hyper-Bitcoinization is being discussed, it's discussed as an event, not as a process.
So it's like something that's going to happen when the dollar collapses or when this happens and that other event happens and when all these things converge, then suddenly everyone is going to come to their senses and say, ah, actually, Bitcoin is, we have Bitcoin, so why don't we just switch over to Bitcoin?
But when you have understood or at least studied a bit of history, you know human nature doesn't really work like that.
it works in a sense where, like you saw what happened in 2008,
everything kind of sort of collapsed.
What was the reaction or the response to it?
Let's print more. Let's save the banks.
Let's save all these too big to fail firms.
There wasn any step back to say actually what went wrong Why are we in this position How do we actually fix the problem no it was more of the band solutions which again pushed the problem even further and accelerated it
and made the problem much bigger than it was to begin with therefore you know that there's going
to be some type of event coming similar to that but it'll be bigger maybe it'll be a sovereign
debt crisis maybe it will be a currency crisis who knows because a lot of these things especially
now with wars blowing up all over the place it could be anything at any time so the question is
how do you actually think about this idea of hyper-bikinization are you waiting for an event
or do you start at your level to say of let's say if i'm if my monthly spend is the
equivalent of $1,000, as an example, what percentage of that am I going to be using Bitcoin
mostly to buy things as a medium of exchange so that you're not waiting for some central banker
or government official to tell you that, oh, now we can use it as legal tender, but you're already
getting off of that system slowly and surely. You're weaning yourself off of it. And even better
if you're earning or at least also structuring things in such a way that your income is
denominated in Bitcoin and then you're earning it, you're spending it.
So by the time you then have this cataclysmic event, if it happens, let's say during our
lifetime, then yeah, you're sorted because you've already divorced yourself from the
system.
But if we're going to wait and say, okay, we'll wait for hyper-bequinization up until
then I'll just, you know, just pack my sad somewhere and huddle and huddle, huddle, huddle
endlessly.
We don't know how many more years we have of this fiat system, because at every turn,
there's always going to be some wise guy who's going to figure out a way.
Of course, it'll get to an end, but where they just try to figure out a way to extend
the life of the system.
It happened in 71. We saw it in 2008. And you saw it again during COVID when the lockdowns happened and everyone was, when the repo market started to seize up, I think that was around about 2019. And they just flooded money into the system.
So where you, where in rationally you would look at that and say, oh, the collapse is here.
That event is definitely, definitely going to bring about, you know, the collapse.
But you'll just see the system throw some other wrench or some other trick.
Not to say that it then stops the inevitable, but it can delay it.
So at the end of the day, if you start to think about it, that because all the wrong decisions have already been made.
where you can see that eventually this is where things are headed.
The smart move isn't to wait for an event,
but at least to start to set up processes
where you remove yourself from the system
to a point where when that happens,
when this dishonest system eventually collapse,
whenever that will be, it doesn't affect you.
If that doesn't happen during your lifetime,
still it's fine because you would have been using
the hardest money on the planet.
And at the end of the day, as inflation ravages and kicks in, your cost of living is actually going down if you are spending on earning in SAT.
You're able to plan out your things properly.
Your time preference is low and sit correctly.
and even as an individual if you're working or you have a business it then puts you in a position
where you can even plan multi-generationally or the for the longevity of that business whereas
right now on a fiat standard there is no guarantee because yes like we're describing earlier you're
sucked in you've got all kinds of debts and loans that are on the book and then when the repricing
happens or when you have an event like COVID and if someone decides, oh, your business is non-essential,
let's shut it down. And then you shut it down. It becomes one of those situations,
just like we saw during COVID where a lot of businesses that did shut down never came back
eventually. So it's really a new framework that I was just using to really, well, not exactly new,
but I think a rational framework to really look at it and say,
if all the wrong decisions have already been made,
and if they keep being made,
then why are we waiting for a specific event
as if it's going to be like a dog whistle or a signal to tell you,
okay, now it's good for you to,
or for hyper-bricornization,
because the people on the other side of the table
already have plans of,
once the system collapses,
this is what we're going to bring in.
so if we are then at a place where you're saying to yourself we're waiting for hyperpeconization
and they already have another system to replace the outgoing one how is that going to really pan
out so it's a again taking the bulls by the horns and not just leaving things to fate to just say
let's just start where we are with what we have and then build up from there and then you already
have a fully functional parallel system to a point that even if this thing keeps chugging and going
and limping on, why would you want to be part of a system that is stealing your time and your
purchasing power in the first place? When you can build something better and be part of something
that actually takes you further and where you can actually enjoy the fruits of your labor in a much
more structured way where no central banker is stealing from you and you're not being beaten down
by inflation and all these other things and you get to transact with whoever whenever i think that's
a fair deal yeah mate it's um i don't know you the the way that you describe it in your writing
where did you get that skill from
well I guess from talking to myself and reading a lot
listening to podcasts like yours where there are a lot of interesting people and then
you know you start to connect the dots that way obviously with some of these things you
there are some things that you'll probably feel on a fundamental level and then you have to
just translate that to words so that you can because one of my thing is particularly what
got me writing in the first place it was this idea of i want to help other people see the world in
this way who may have not had the privilege of experiencing what i experienced or going through
some of the stuff that i've gone through or have the background that i have but at least grant them
the benefit of the wisdom that came out of all of that, where in a few couple of minutes,
you can just have a read, whether you agree with it or not, at least it'll give you kind of a
different lens and perspective to look at things from. So that's really the goal there to just,
because there are two ways of doing, you know, education and orange pilling, as it's commonly
called, where you can just tell people this is how Bitcoin works, this is how you use it.
And that's great and definitely important for a lot of people.
But you then have a group of people where they're now in Bitcoin.
They sort of understand the fundamentals.
Then what?
How do you then sort of keep them in that framework or at least in that place where
you're thinking as a sovereign individual, as somebody that at the end of the day, for
those that want freedom, right?
Of course, some are looking for number go up.
But if what you're looking for is being divorced from this system and building something different
and having a different sort of life, then this is perhaps part of why I write and try
to put some of these perspectives in front of people to just, you know, ignite something or
inspire different thought or a different way of thinking, whether or not they agree with the full
content of what I would have put across, but at least it'll get you to sit back and say, huh,
I never thought about this that way, or I never looked at this in that manner.
so the the last piece that um you've got up here uh is titled the network always wins and you've
got two parts there yes and it's interesting how you approach this because just by reading the title
the network always wins uh most people would think oh right yeah okay so it's going to be
plain sailing for Bitcoin.
Obviously, Bitcoin has been under constant attack
since the minute that, well, not the minute it launched
because obviously there's only a very few small amount
of people like the cypherpunks that even knew existed.
But the minute it captured some kind of fiat
mainstream attention, it would have been under attack.
Through these Epstein file leaks, we're getting an insight
as to how early these type of people were onto it and looking at it.
And do you want to actually kind of go through your thinking here?
Because obviously, you know, you're talking about,
well, if we look at the fiat network, right?
The fiat network always wins.
Like always Yeah So yeah I think you know when the whole Epstein saga dropped
and even before it dropped, one thing was always clear,
that the system was always going to protect itself, right?
And even from the time, if you wind the clock back to when 2019,
when the news came out that he had, quote, unquote, committed suicide,
it then became clear that whether he did really commit suicide or that was staged, whatever the case is,
that by removing him from the chessboard, it then removes a lot of unnecessary baggage that the powers that be did not want to deal with.
So what you'll see there is, and even now with the quote-unquote release that happened, where you know, okay, this is not really everything.
But this is enough to pacify the masses who are clamoring and calling out for their release.
So at the end of the day, it then gets to a point where even the way the release happened, it was very coordinated.
You had a lot of things that were redacted and so on and so forth.
And there was a whole mess behind it.
Thankfully, there were a lot of other investigative journalists that have done great work on this to sort of shed light on it.
So there were a lot of other things that you could sort of piece together if you had been paying attention.
But the point I was driving at is this is not just one person.
This is a network of individuals that are moving, that are coordinating because their interests are aligned.
So as a result, whether they have personal differences or not, whether they agree with each other on everything or not,
the point is at the end of the day, they have this mechanism through which they coordinate,
whether it's pandemics from against some of the stuff that was released where he was talking about
we could actually make a lot of money out of this or it's just a scenario where you're looking at it
from um how even the fiat system works that if we go back to 2008 all the banks were almost belly up
and then the bailouts came for wall street there were no bailouts for main street all they got were
foreclosures. So that's how the system always protects itself because it operates as a network.
It doesn't operate independently as independent nodes, as it were. And Bitcoin as a network is
kind of the same way that when you look at it, at least the architecture of it, it was designed
in such a way that you don't have one group of people having some power over another it's sort of
like balanced out perfectly and over and above that the decentralized nature of it means that
whilst you have individuals from different parts of the world their incentive the incentives and
their interests are always aligned because of how the incentive structure of the whole network is
designed. So as a result, despite whatever attacks have come so far, it has been able to withstand
them. But the fiat network, given that it's not just a decentralized type network, it's very much
centralized, and it's very much about controlling power and resources and all of this. And it also
has different branches and different nodes that enable it to remain what it is. So my idea or the
thought process behind that was trying to just put out the perspective of that whilst yes we have
this decentralized system the network that has been built but this is just layer one and this
is layer one in the sense that now that you have taken the transaction part of it or the money
exchange or value exchange part of it outside of the control let's say of central bankers and you
have created something that can create or at least have money or value transmitted peer-to-peer
and that can you know um where the mining process brings out like a lot of uh there is a limit to
there's a 21 million limit but it's through the mining process not through money printing that we
have um new bitcoins coming into the ecosystem up until that 21 million limit is reached so as a
result, I was basically saying, there is more to this than just this network. This is when
something like NOSTA then comes in on top of that, where again, it's borrowing the same principles
and borrowing the same idea and creating this decentralized network where now, in addition to
communicating and in addition to owning your own identity, you are now also able to transmit
and transact value via NOSTER.
So you now have two networks, and there are more definitely
that will come and some that are there,
where these networks then enable other alternative,
you can say, services and products and businesses
that are outside or, let me say, in that parallel structure
to exist and to operate.
So now from that perspective, that's where I was really coming from. And that's the idea I was trying to really hit on. These things, some of them, they need to be thought about from a network perspective, because what you're dealing with on the fiat side, it's not an individual. It's not Christine Lagarde or Jerome Powell or any of these people. These are just the faces that we are seeing today.
and tomorrow there'll be other faces that are going to come and represent those systems.
But this thing operates as a network.
And if this thing is going to be defeated, it also has to come up against another network
or other networks that are designed to make this obsolete.
Without that, it's very easy to squash an individual here, squash an individual there.
and that is perhaps part of why i'm excited or what excites me about the decentralized
architecture of bitcoin as well as nostr in that because there's no central choke point
no one can then shut this thing down or shut this company down or whatever if you remember what
happened to that other project that facebook was trying to do a couple of years back i think it
was some sort of stable coin it was very easy for congress to just issue um uh what did they
a directive to just say no you can't do that and that was the end of that it's not so much about
whether you agree with zuckerberg or not but the point is when you have something centralized
and that is tied to a specific jurisdiction when that jurisdiction gets hostile they can just shut
you down bitcoin the china uh you remember when the whole chinese mining saga happened and a lot of
the hash rate went down the network still kept going on yes the hash rate was less than before
but it's self-adjusted so that's how at least now if we're going to think about it these are
some of the ways i think make sense when we are building whether businesses with the product
or when we're building on top of these pre-existing networks
like Bitcoin and Nostra and whatever else is going to come out.
So I even highlighted a couple of examples of the differences
of how some product services networks remained resilient
and why some went away.
Napster is an interesting, I don't know if I put that in there,
but I remember when I was writing, it was there in my draft,
I don't know if it made it to the final cut.
But I looked at the whole thing.
You remember when music was going digital
and Napster started the whole file sharing craze back in America
and it was very easy for the record companies
to just unite one voice before long Napster were out of business.
But Pirate Bay, on the other hand,
there wasn't any centralized choke point.
So whenever there was an order or whatever to take court order to take this down here, it would pop up there.
Take it down over here, it would pop up there.
And to this day, it still exists.
It's resilient like that.
And this is how I think, particularly for people that are interested in preserving their freedom and their sovereignty,
these are the tools and systems we need at the end of the day,
because what's coming against you is a coordinated network that comprises of BIS, the Federal Reserve,
the ECB, the Bank of England, and their other corporate partners, Big Tech, Google, Facebook, you name it.
How do you then defeat that entire machine as a small business owner, doing your thing in the side,
operating independently? It's very difficult to resist once the weight of that full entire
where a thing comes down on you, just like we saw during COVID.
That it was just like...
And that was another perfect example of how a network operates,
where it was in tandem when the lockdowns were announced.
It was like globally, everything was just in sync, right?
Because this thing had been wargamed, event 201,
and all these other things.
So now when the moment came to act,
everyone else was shocked, but they were not,
Because the messaging, everything had been tailored, had been pre-planned, had been re-heard.
Right.
Yes, there were many mistakes that were made.
But ultimately, I would say when you start to look at what they're doing on the other side,
that should also then inform how we build
and the kind of things we build
and how we are thinking about them.
Yeah.
Yeah, brilliant, mate.
Well, we'll end it here.
I'll ask you the final question.
Where can people find your writing?
Is it best just to follow you on Noster
or get over to your briefly.social?
Currently on Noster
and I have a substack,
but I publish on Noster first
and eventually it will be Noster only.
Okay.
But substack is,
it's basically now at least to try
and have some sort of presence
where I don't just preach to the choir.
There could be one or two other people
on the outskirts who at this point
may not be on Noster.
So I do have a substack.
It's called Exit the Matrix.
And that's where I publish my writing
as well as on Noster primarily.
that those are the only two outlets i have at the moment okay i'll put the link in the show notes and
i'll link to your uh nostal end pub and anywhere anywhere else that you're happy for me to uh to
point uh the the good plebs uh who have listened so thank you very much for coming on but i can't
let you go without asking you if you had one last orange pill left to give to somebody who would you
give it to and why? Oh, that's an interesting question. I would give it to Christine Lagarde.
Not because, and the reason why specifically her,
it's just a way of saying look at the end of the day this is
this is the currency of the future no matter what digital euro or anything else that you're cooking
up this is the orange pill that you need and it's about time you got on the train
and whether or not you'll eventually use the orange pill is irrelevant but
that's if i had one last orange pill to give that's the person i would give it to
excellent well thank you so much for coming on mate and thanks again to Aza for getting us in touch will you be doing any conferences or anything like that have you got any plans in
store where you might be able to meet up in real life with people or are you
happy to stay low and as anonymous as possible
not at the moment but definitely eventually I I do plan on doing conferences probably
in the next couple of months or maybe sometime next year.
Currently, I'm working on a book project,
which I hope to complete before the end of the year,
or at least in the next couple of months.
And I think after that, I will be having a lot more free time
to mix and mingle at some of the conferences.
But for now, I'll be writing and working on that in the meantime.
yeah okay well i look forward to that dropping and reading that and once that's all done perhaps
we'll get you back on early next year and go through the book and uh and everything that's
happened my goodness we've got a lot to unfold in 2026 for bitcoin uh so it's going to be an
interesting ride this year and uh yeah looking forward to to reading the book and um getting in
getting back inside your thoughts.
So, yeah, thank you for
absolutely. Thank you for
stepping up and
everything you're doing to educate
people, you know, not just about
Bitcoin, but about the wider system.
And I'm sure
your writing is going to be resonating
and helping people
come to, you know,
it's going to be part of their own
rabbit hole journey.
And that's important.
More material.
yes no thank you so much for having me Daniel I appreciate the time and yes hopefully um my
writing can help a lot of people along down along their Bitcoin journey to just arrive at the same
conclusion that we've all arrived at and even beyond that so yes that's the goal actually
absolutely all right have a great afternoon thank you for your time today
same to you thank you very much see you bye-bye
There you go guys, thank you so much for listening.
Thanks again Kudzai for coming on Lots to chew over on that conversation The national debt part of that i hope that hitting home don be gaslit into believing you owe the money back to the central
bankers that your government just willy-nilly borrowed from right this is the the the sickest
part of the whole smoke and mirrors hand-waving game that we've been completely coerced into
being a part of get over read his work support him however you can zap him share his articles
do whatever it is that you can do in your power reach out to him congratulate him I don't know
what it is we've just got to try and help these people that are leaning into the space in any way
shape or form that they can in order to help people understand what bitcoin is what is actually
going on under their noses macroeconomics keynesian economics exposing the whole sham
of fiat currencies and why and how we can all you know live in a much better existence
if we can start just opting out of using their money
and start using a sounder form of money
that is available to everybody across the whole world
and a global currency without borders.
I mean, this is what we're building here.
Rome wasn't built in a day, as they say,
and this is going to be one step at a time
and it's going to be a lot of grassroots efforts.
It has been ever since it started.
So yeah, let's keep the work rate high.
Like I said at the beginning,
if you want to find out what's going on around the UK in particular,
there's a weekly What's On Guide for UK Bitcoiners
brought to you from the Bitcoin Events UK team,
which is basically HODL solo.
That's highlighting real meetups, real people,
and real adoption that's happening on the ground.
And you will get that every Sunday morning.
So you can plan your week around your Bitcoin events
or simply head over to Club Orange and start your own meetup list your own meetup or find one or find your nearest Bitcoiners Just had a friend of mine recently move to the south of the UK He only going to
be in town for like three or four months at the absolute most with his family as they're doing
their world traveling trip as you can learn about how we did as well by checking out a copy of my
book Choose Life and he's just spun up a local meetup while he's there and already met two or
three people within the area that are like oh my god this is amazing I can't believe we got a meetup
in our little town in our little village be that guy be that guy be that guy to just start something
and inspires people to come along and meet strangers in a pub and just like the good old days
where you would sit down in a pub over a pint and discuss the the state of the world and where we're
heading if we can move to a bitcoin standard and what can we what can we do to to to forward this
message uh there's a new podcast out uh that's been started by a couple of lads from our local
meetup orange pill order you got three teenage lads talking about bitcoin interviewing people
from all over the world so go and check that out too and um and lean in however you can uh
And finally, last shout out, as always, to the show sponsors.
I said at the beginning, Relay are going to be, it's the last show for Relay.
Thank you very much.
R-E-L-A-I.ch forward slash bits and download the app today.
Start stacking your sats.
If you are unsure of where to start buying Bitcoin, ask another Bitcoiner, you know,
someone you meet, preferably in real life, an event or a conference.
and start doing your own research.
There are different exchanges and different apps that you can use,
but then always please self-custody.
So you can get over to bitbox.swiss forward slash bitten.
And if you want to up your education or help in any way with education of Bitcoin,
go check out my first Bitcoin.
Get to a conference.
We've got Bitcoin Dublin in May and Prague in June, Helsinki in September,
all offering you a discount using the code bitten.
All these links are in the show notes.
There's more links in the show notes as well to other goods and services from other Bitcoin companies.
Thank you so much, everybody, for listening.
I really appreciate you.
I'll catch you on the next show.