Latest / To The Moon With The Luna's Podcast / The Financial System Is Breaking… Here’s What Happens to Bitcoin | Mister Lee

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The Financial System Is Breaking… Here’s What Happens to Bitcoin | Mister Lee · To The Moon With The Luna's Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Bitcoin's absolutely compatible with faith.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: And that actually even makes it more exciting.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I've met so many people through Bitcoin.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: Many who have like their faith has almost been like restored.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: Not from Bitcoin.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: But as they're going through this journey of discovery, as they're going through, many have read lots of books that they didn't used to read, and suddenly they find truth and beauty and the reality of the world that God has made, and they're drawn back to the Lord.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: They're drawn back to the Bible.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: They're drawn back to their faith.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think you see people in Bitcoin are always like improving.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: They improve their diets, they improve their health, they improve their habits, they get more healthy.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think faith is just one more part of that kind of rebirth of a person.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I feel like I personally have gone through a rebirth since 2023.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a very different person than I was.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I do attribute it to the Bitcoin journey, but it's it's absolutely been beautiful in my faith as well to be like a real, true money that's just, that's right, uh, that treats my neighbor with respect.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's wonderful.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: That's a beautiful thing.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_04: This episode is brought to you by Microsieve.
• 1:04
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• 1:10
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• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: If your seed phrase is still on paper, it's time to upgrade and take self-custody to the next level.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: Because not your keys, not your coins.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_02: Go to microsey.io and use code Luna L-U-N-A for a discount.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_02: Or check the link in the description below.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome back, everyone, to To the Moon with the Lunas.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: Today we're joined by Mr.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: Lee, a technologist, educator, and Jesus follower with a passion for understanding where money, technology, and the future are headed.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: Mr.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: Lee, thank you for being here.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: Hey Lunas, thanks for having me on.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate it.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_04: This is so awesome.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_04: I'm so fired up.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_04: Just kind of like what we shared in the beginning.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_04: I saw you on uh Vince's podcast, the Bitcoin broadcast, and I see you on my feed.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_04: I'm like, you know, and your nature, you're always in nature as well.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm like, that's how you're speaking my language.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_04: And so I'm like, you know what?
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_04: I need to get this guy.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_04: We need to get this guy on the podcast.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_04: So uh thank you for coming.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_04: We really appreciate it.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, glad to be here.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_02: Well, before we get into Bitcoin, take us back a little bit.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_02: Who are you and what eventually led you down that Bitcoin rabbit hole?
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: I so I I've kind of grown up around technology my my whole life.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I remember taking computers apart, putting them together, that kind of stuff, like in high school, and found my way into information technology out of high school because I wasn't really a good student, but I loved working with tech and I was just fascinated by PCs and the internet.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I used the internet before the World Wide Web came out.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: So that like that probably dates me a little.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: So you can kind of tell how old I am in the 90s.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, but yeah, just kind of grew up in tech and then started to kind of marry that with business.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so grew up in kind of Fortune 500 tech company, manufacturing companies, retail companies, things like that.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: Eventually got an MBA um from a university here in Minnesota and actually came back to do some teaching.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: They brought me back to teach a class on emerging technologies and business, which was super cool.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the aspects of that, and that's kind of leads to my journey, is teaching on several different technologies.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: So Bitcoin blockchain was in there, right?
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: AI, you know, uh quantum computing, all those different kinds of things.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: And the idea was to help business students kind of understand those things at a high level and then how to uh assess kind of you know what technologies might be useful, where are they going, how are they going to impact your your employer or your business, etc.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so the blockchain one I was really interesting.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, okay, I've this was 20, this would have been um end of 2021 when I was invited to come and build this class.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and so I like, okay, I've heard of blockchain, but I wasn't really paying attention.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: I had traded a little bit of Bitcoin and Dogecoin earlier in 2021, but that was kind of the extent of my understanding.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: And and so I started teaching this class, and so I dove deep and kind of understood I shouldn't say deep.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: I started by diving medium deep, like three feet, four feet in, and then immediately got, you know, distracted by lots of different crypto projects and things like that, and spent some time there and lost some money there, et cetera.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: But in 2023, I had a friend that he's a very technical kind of engineer guy, and he created this like crypto course um to kind of go deeper on Bitcoin.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: He called it crypto, but it was really all about Bitcoin.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: He talked about ETH, but all the technology aspects of it were about Bitcoin.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so I remember he gave me this course and I kind of ignored it, started watching it again in the fall of 23, and I was like, wow, this is fascinating.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then I remember sitting on an airplane.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I was flying uh at that time I was flying back and forth between the twin, the mid Midwest and Boston, and I'm like, you know, that Bitcoin thing, I remember last year I was looking at it, it was like 15k, FTX blew up, that thing's like dead, right?
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I pull up my phone and it's like at 20,000 or something.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: I'm making this up, I'm not sure of the price.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: Let's say it was at 20,000, and like within the the course of the flight, it like leaped to like 25,000, 26,000.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, what is this asset?
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what is this thing?
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so I started to get more curious about it.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: And then I said, Well, what is money anyway?
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: Like I started thinking about those kinds of questions.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so I opened up the Apple is back and forth between class and home.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, I opened up the Apple Podcast app and looked for what is money, and Robert Breedlove's podcast came up.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: And he's like, if you're just starting this podcast, go back to episode one and watch the Sailor series where you know they spent like 20 hours kind of going through Bitcoin and kind of Sailor's whole vision of money and all this kind of stuff.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, okay, I'll do that.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, I was totally sucked in, totally orange pilled.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, oh, this is a whole different thing.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: This Bitcoin is like true scarcity.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: This is like never existed before, but it's in I really understood what money was for like the first time in my life.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: I started divesting my crypto holdings and just focusing on Bitcoin.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: And then I learned that the Bitcoin ETFs were coming around the corner, which wasn't yet wasn't yet consensus.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: But those two guys, James Safeart, Eric Balkunis from Bloomberg, were saying, Yeah, this is gonna happen.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I went to my wife and said, We gotta buy Bitcoin, like now.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: I was like panicked.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: This, I think it was at that time, like 35,000.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, this thing's gonna go to 100K, like in a few months.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: We have to buy as much as we can.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know?
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: And she's like, What is this?
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: What is Bitcoin?
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: What's going on?
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: Who are you?
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know?
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so and then sure enough, the ETFs happened, and yeah, we didn't get 100k right away.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: But that really cemented my journey and then made me even more curious to understand money and go way down the rabbit hole, start reading all kinds of books, you know, like broken money, creature from Jekyll Island, the history of the Federal Reserve, et cetera, et cetera.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, it really, really has been a fascinating journey.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it just started with being curious, being curious, yeah, digging in, asking questions.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_02: That's so awesome.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_02: I love that in this story because I think that's was my reaction.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_02: Your wife's same reaction to how you were acting.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: It's the same reaction I had to Anthony when he came home and he was like, Danielle, like this is all just, and I was I mentioned this yesterday.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, he there was light bulbs going off and like firing off in his brain.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_02: And I couldn't keep up with his brain, neither could he actually keep up with his brain.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_02: So he was just going and going and going.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_02: And and it's true.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it's awesome because I think being able to understand something comes from curiosity and being open-minded, right?
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's an important skill that I think we all need to have is just to be more curious.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_02: And the whole premise of Bitcoin is don't trust, verify, and making sure that you're staying in that curiosity spirit.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: Cause I always feel like we're lifelong learners in life, you know, in general, it doesn't have to be in the even in the Bitcoin space.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_02: I'm always learning something new about this life that we're living.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think that's such a funny story.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_02: And it's great because you were just kind of took it bit by bit as it was coming into your life, you know, as you were learning about the crypto space and then really diving into that.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_02: I also feel like being an educator too forces you, and I work in education also, forces you to dive deeper into concepts because how am I supposed to explain something if I don't understand it fully myself, right?
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: That was kind of a a great it was really an excuse.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's so funny.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: So people ask, like, when did you first hear about Bitcoin?
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I know I knew about Bitcoin in like the 2010s.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: I was kind of aware of it, but I didn't know anything about it.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: And then in fact, I didn't even know Bitcoin and blockchain went together.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's how that's and I'm a technologist, like that's terrible, right?
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I remember I was organizing a big event.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: I was working for a big manufacturer, I won't say the name.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: We were kind of organizing different kind of emerging, so I've always been interested in emerging tech.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: There was different emerging technologies happening around the organization, whether it was kind of connected smart manufacturing or it was augmented reality, virtual reality, all those different kinds of things.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I organized a one-day conference bringing all those engineers together and then made it like an open house for people across the technology landscape to come in.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I especially remember one of my co-founders was saying we should have a table on blockchain.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, what is that?
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: If only I just died.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: This is 2017.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: Oops.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my goodness.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my gosh.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: If I'd just been a little more curious then, that would have been great.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: But once I was asked to build this class, then I became a nerd and really dove in deep to understand all the different topics, including blockchain.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, no, I think that's great.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_04: And it's so funny.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_04: A couple of things that kind of popped up right away.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_04: It's like, wow, like if you would have been a little bit more curious in right, and where you would have been like from 2017 to 2023, it sounds like.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_04: And right overall, though, grateful and thankful that you even found Bitcoin because it's there's still a lot of people out there that don't even know what's going on.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_04: And then it's also funny how you're talking about price action, like you're on the plane, and that's how a lot of people get in too, right?
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_04: Like they're just like, what's this thing that's going up and down?
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_04: Because the price action is all over the place.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_04: And speaking about price action right now, are you liking this price action we got going on right now?
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_04: It feels like overnight.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_04: Like we just went from like 62 to like 78, which is super nice.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_04: Um what are your thoughts on this?
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_04: You think we're slowly gonna climb, we're gonna stay here, or are we retracing back down?
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_04: What are your thoughts on this?
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: I have a lot of thoughts on it.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think like many, and I've kind of I guess I'm an amateur technical analyst, right?
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: Kind of, you know, I've got the trading view up here, right?
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like many, I really thought we were going like your show, we're going to the moon last year, right?
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: We were October is coming, it's gonna be great.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: And it was kind of like downtober and like, you know, bare Vember and bare summer.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's kind of like, oh, so I was pretty kind of caught off sides.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, I don't trade Bitcoin at all, but I do play with equities around Bitcoin, like the Bitcoin miners or some of the treasury companies, things like that.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: So some of your viewers might know me from kind of uh MicroStrategy as kind of following that before it was cool.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so that surprised me.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so here we are in the bear.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: But one of the things that you'll notice if you look at the chart, even with a lot of technical analysis, if you just look at the chart from like 2021 to today of Bitcoin, you see this like kind of huge bowl, or what I would call kind of a reaccumulation, basically, and in without getting technical, basically like that drop from the peak of 2021, kind of down to the 22, 22 bear, and then up to 2024.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: And if you remember 2024, it was like, okay, here we go.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then it's like, nope, we're gonna chop rate months, right?
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: And then finally, 2025, we pop and hit our new kind of all-time high at 126K, and then we come back down.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: But if you look at it, like we've never actually had an expansion.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: We've never like every Bitcoin cycle has some kind of blow-off top, right?
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: We kind of you know kind of launch from you know, you know, 15k to you know 69k, right?
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: We have these kind of big moves.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: People say we had that in 2024, 25.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: I would say no.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: I would say no.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: We haven't we have not had expansion since 2021.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: So I think we're overdue.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I was actually expecting a pretty big move this year.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think all the four-year cycle bros are like, nope, gotta wait till October.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: I actually had a tweet, you could probably go go track it down.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, this probably a few months ago.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's probably almost after February, after the February 5th dip to like 60K.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: And that everybody was saying, well, now it's gonna be 40k.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, I asked the question, what if the people calling for 40k Bitcoin this time around?
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: What if those are the 10k bears back in 2022?
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so far, uh, you know, it's always early to call a bottom, right?
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: But so far, that seems to be right.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think we're seeing$40,000 Bitcoin.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think you're far more likely to see six-figure Bitcoin than you are 40,000 Bitcoin.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm very bullish, I'm super constructive on the rest of this year, and actually even next year, I think it's gonna look quite different than the cycle.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's not just like this is different, this time is different.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: Like you just have to look at the chart.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: Like the scariest words in in investing is you know, this time is different.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if you look at the chart, like it is constructively different.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: We again we didn't have expansion, so I'm pretty bullish, and I think that the where Bitcoin could get could surprise people.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, no, that's good.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_04: You're right.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_04: Like when I first got into Bitcoin too, I've never seen that huge blow-off top like it did in the early days.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_04: And now understanding Bitcoin, I'm like, I don't even care if it happens.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_04: I'm like, I already know where this is gonna go eventually with time, but I always wanted to experience that because that's different.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_04: That's different.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_04: 15k to like 69k, or like any just any big blow up top, right?
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_04: Where you're just like chilling one day and you're just like, What is going on here?
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_04: You know.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_04: But also I wanted to talk about too.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_04: I know you mentioned with the Sailor series and ETFs and all that.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_04: I think it's really cool when you go deep dive into Bitcoin and then you saw what was coming, like, oh, there's gonna be ETFs coming, oh, this thing's gonna jump.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_04: Like, I think that's even like more convicting in your journey where you're like, Oh, I saw all this and now it's happening.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_04: When it comes to ETFs, especially right now, what do you think?
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_04: All these institutions, Sailor with all these different financial instruments.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_04: Do you think these vehicles are positive for Bitcoin, or is it a distraction for Bitcoin?
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_04: Because he does not talk about running a node or self-custody.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_04: What is your take on this?
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_04: Like, do you think this is overall really good for Bitcoin or a distraction?
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think it's um Parker Lewis that says all things are good for Bitcoin.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I and I agree with that.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: I also think that there are certain things that are inevitable.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: So if Bitcoin's gonna be what we say it's going to be, if we really think it's going to be the future world reserve asset, right?
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna be right up there alongside gold.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: And everybody knows, well, those that know Bitcoin know it's better than gold in so many different ways.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: I can't transport a billion dollars of gold from here to Japan in 10 minutes, but I can do that with Bitcoin for right now for pennies at the moment, right?
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: So if we think that Bitcoin is going to become this world reserve asset, how would we not expect all of the financialization that is in our world today isn't going to come to Bitcoin?
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was inevitable, right?
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: So let's kind of start from kind of first principle.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: So with the ETF coming in, that wrapper kind of makes it very easy, right, to buy Bitcoin now in a brokerage account, in a Schwab account, a Fidelity account, whatever it is.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: But once you are now in that kind of Wall Street wrapper, you're gonna have a lot of different market participants.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: They're gonna come in, they're gonna hedge, they're gonna do shorts, they're gonna do longs, they're gonna do all kinds of different option strategies.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: I've been kind of looking at this with Claude, kind of trying to track down how Bitcoin was being kind of almost like a ball underwater.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: I was kind of watching how it was kind of pinned between these two levels last week or week before last, before it popped.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, and then I was watching volatility, that which is just kind of how much Bitcoin can go up and down.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: Usually it's a very volatile asset.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: It was like historically low volatility.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's being kind of pinned by Wall Street, by all these market makers and other market participants.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so once that kind of started to get a little bit out of their control, then boom, now they're gonna start buying Bitcoin like crazy.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so um, so those things are going to happen because of the deep financialization that we have in our markets.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: And once we bring this asset, bring Bitcoin into that financial asset world, you're gonna see these things happen.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't want to really talk about it in terms of it being good or bad.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's inevitable.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Hal Finney talked about it way back, you know, in 20, was it 2010 on the talk forums, right?
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: That Bitcoin is is gonna is destined to become like high-powered money.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna be really just transacted between giant entities, between giant banks, and upper upper layers will have to kind of accommodate more of the transactions happening.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that's likely true.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's probably accurate.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so we as Bitcoiners have to say, like, okay, well, what does that mean for us?
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: What does that mean for self-sovereignty?
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: What does that mean for self-custody?
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: What does it mean for the ability to use Bitcoin as money to transact, to do lightning transactions?
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: We buy beef in bulk from a rancher near us.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I've been trying to get her sold on transacting in Bitcoin.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: And we can do that, right?
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: And nothing's gonna stop us from doing that over Lightning, right?
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: But what does that mean when we get to the future where if Bitcoin was worth, let's say, what did Saylor say?
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: You know, eventually$250 trillion market cap or something like that, and eclipses gold, you know, what's it gonna be to do a transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain for you and me, for plebs, right?
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: What's that gonna look like?
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: So I think the higher levels, the higher layers, I should say, not levels, but the higher layers of Bitcoin are gonna be essential.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: Having functioning things like Lightning, like Liquid that can allow us to still transact on the blockchain and treat Bitcoin as money, those things are gonna be essential.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: But Wall Street's gonna be Wall Street.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's not going away.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's not gonna go away.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: More financialization is coming, not less.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then we can talk about the other instruments too as well, if you'd like the perpetuals and the treasury companies.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_04: That's kind of a whole nother animal, but yeah, and and like you said though, I do think that it's not going anywhere.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_04: And this whole theory or this whole like conversation comes up that we're like, can they control Bitcoin?
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_04: When people talk about like AI right now and these vehicles that Michael Saylor have and these treasury companies, I heard this podcast that was talking about where like maybe this is a distraction where like Bitcoin hasn't kind of have a run up because everyone just wants that new hot thing, and that new hot thing is AI.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_04: So, how do I invest in these vehicles, Nvidia, all this other, etc.?
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_04: And so, with that being said, is this kind of like like you said, holding the ball under the water a little bit longer?
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_04: And I think you're right.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_04: I think it is like it's ready to take off.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_04: And with Bitcoin and MicroStrategy and everything, I do think that Bitcoin is gonna take off because it is inevitable.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_04: With all of this being said, talking about price action, so you're on board with spending Bitcoin like right now and not hodling and just waiting for it to go up.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think we should be able to do that.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: I think we should be able to do that, right?
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like like Ben Justman, you know, sells wine through um P and E Lane, right?
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: Great Bitcoiner, awesome guy.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we've transacted in a Bitcoin.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: I've bought wine from him with Bitcoin, kind of a spend and replace type of a thing.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: So I absolutely think that people should be able to do that.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: The majority of my Bitcoin is is to hold, right?
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's not not to, you know, I'm a I'm a hodler in in that sense.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: In terms of like my cold storage Bitcoin, IBIT again is to be traded.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: But but no, I absolutely for self-sovereignty reasons, we should absolutely be able to transact with each other over Bitcoin.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think that was something that when I was just starting, he was always only talking about hodling, right?
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, so we just don't like what is this, where does this go?
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_02: You know, what do you mean?
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: You know, and it was hard for me to really conceptualize what Bitcoin was because he would kept saying it was a money, what we're saving in.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, but what how are we supposed to use it?
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_02: And we are like, are we allowed to use it, or how do we take it out?
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_02: Or, you know, so it was one of those things that now as we've been having more people on our podcast, they've been really educational on sharing.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_02: Like, yeah, we need to actually start this, you know, ecosystem of sharing and exchanging and buying and all of that because I think it'll actually help with more people like me understand that it is something that we can use.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_02: But of course, just like any money, our money, our fiat system, most of the time we want to save because we want to be able to, you know, if there's a rainy day, we have something that we can use and make sure that we're okay.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's not gonna grow or do anything like that in the fiat system, right?
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_02: But in the Bitcoin space, obviously it's way better.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_02: But that was something that was really eye-opening for me as we've been having more conversations.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_02: I know for Anthony too.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it was really helpful to have more conversations like that because there are so many apps and things that are coming out that allow it to be super fast, you know, especially with like you were saying, I'm hoping that you can start using, you know, sats to buy your beef and steaks and all of the things that we have because it's why not?
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_02: You know, let's like be able to do that.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_02: And there's so many people in the space that are really trying to make sure that that's happening in their communities and you know, asking questions.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_02: I know we've been a little bit more intentional about asking those questions, like, hey, do you guys accept Bitcoin?
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_02: And it's funny, you get some crazy looks.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we yeah, Anthony's definitely gotten some crazy looks.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but another question I had uh seen someone ask too is when you see a square, you know, at a business, just say, Oh, awesome, you guys accept Bitcoin, you know, like saying, like, and I was like, that's a really good way to come at someone instead of being like, Do you accept it?
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_02: Because we know you do, you know, we we're that's awesome.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_02: And they're like, what are you talking about?
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: You know, so there's so many great conversational pieces now that we can have with different merchants and things like that, where we can bring Bitcoin to light and at least get the wheels turning for people.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: I do have a point of view on that.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: So I think it is absolutely essential that we be able to transact.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think that is great to ask, ask your butcher, ask your retailer, ask folks if they accept Bitcoin, if they have square.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: I think those are great.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: And and those are really about exercising our sovereignty, right?
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: If you think about in totalitarian regimes, if they have kind of maximum technology in a nineteen eighty four sense, they could say, Hey, you have spent too many carbon credits, you've eaten too much beef.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: You can't spend any more money, right?
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: So if they have like a central bank digital currency or a CBDC, they can tell you when you can spend, how much you can spend, where you can spend your money, et cetera.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I think it's super, super critical that we maintain and exercise our ability to transact with the Bitcoin network over Lightning or other ways in order to protect our sovereignty.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: Now there is a point of view that if we don't transact with Bitcoin, that the project fails.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: And that I don't agree with.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: I still believe that Bitcoin is high-powered money.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think it is the absolute best kind of capital asset that you can imagine.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: And we should be able to transact and we can transact and we should exercise that ability.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't agree necessarily that, hey, if we if we don't, if Bitcoin doesn't become common money replacing fiat day-to-day transactions, I don't agree that that necessarily means the project fails.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: I just don't see that.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_04: With that being said, too, like, so CBDCs, what are your thoughts on this?
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_04: Is this something that's coming?
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_04: Do you think we already have it?
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_04: I know some people say the dollar is kind of somewhat similar to that, but again, where they'll have this control over where, like, hey, oh, you voted for this person.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, hey, you uh you think this way, or hey, you you do things this way, like, hey, or that's enough, but they're like, you're buying too much steak, XYZ.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_04: Like, do you see you see this coming?
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: Our friends across the pond are working very, very hard on this.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: So in Europe, they've been working on this digital euro project for uh many years.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: It has zero product market fit.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, users have no interest in this thing, nobody wants it.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: But they're they're really pushing it quite hard.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, China has had the digital yuan for some years, and of course, their social credit system does create these anxieties about what kind of controls you could put on a populace, um, kind of based on how they behave, and then you can control their money.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: So it's definitely happening in Europe, it's happening in the East.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: Now, in the US, we've been very much against this.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of against our nature to have something that is so controlling.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so you've seen you know, bills get passed saying, you know, anti-CBDC and this and that, and the Federal Reserve has kind of looked at it and then stops looking at it.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: But ask yourself this, right?
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: If you transact, let's say, with, I won't name it, but let's say you transact in a stable coin and the government says, Oh, you're on a no fact list.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, pull that money back and goes to you know the issuer.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: What are they gonna do?
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: They're gonna pull the money back if they want to operate in the United States.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: Kind of seems similar to it.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: Now it's not fully a CBDC in terms of, hey, we're gonna tell you how you can spend your money, where you can spend your money, all of that, but certainly isn't as sovereign as spending SATS over the Lightning Network, where there's absolutely nobody that can control and stop that transaction.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a slippery slope.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: It is that again, this goes back to why we need to be able to continue to exercise our ability to transact on the Bitcoin network because nobody can stop that.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody that's that's the thing about Bitcoin that's so amazing is that no one can stop it, no one can touch it, nobody can censor your transactions, the network is is open, it's permissionless, it's amazing.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so CBDCs are a threat.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think that you will see countries start to roll them out.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: Again, they have zero product market fit, nobody wants them.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: But if they are foisted upon their citizens, then you're gonna start to see those kinds of problems start to arise.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: I think in America we're probably a ways away from that, but I don't think we're immune.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think we're immune.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: I would not be surprised if we did in the next five to ten years see a C B D C in the US.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that's really interesting.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_04: I think it was like last year, right?
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_04: I think across the pond where they were really kind of pushing it hard.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_04: It was last year they were like rolling it out, I think in like the in the fall.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I was gonna say that's a really interesting idea.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_02: I feel like the more that Bitcoin grows, I feel like the countries or the leaders are like, well, how do we control this?
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_02: How do we make sure that people are gonna be able to do what we want them to do?
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_02: And it's all a place of fear, you know.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I always think about this too, with like how Bitcoin is such a hopeful and joyful and not always perfect, but you know, and not everyone, and I and we're human, right?
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_02: People are are still human, right?
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_02: But fiat brings out a whole other side of people, you know, it brings out the greed, it brings out the fear, it brings out all these things.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: And that's something that's really attracted me to Bitcoin.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_02: We've always been really positive people and we have a faith and all of that, and I know you do too.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_02: And it's really something that was attractive to me when Anthony was kind of sharing this because I may not have understood it all, you know, like all the technicality of everything, but I knew that it was a positive thing.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_02: So that's like came from just the people that we've met, even just how Anthony spoke about it or the people that he was interacting with.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_02: It's really important that we kind of keep an eye on that too, because that's something that's really important to me to keep that hopefulness and that's it's always brought it back to fear of in the fiat system.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_02: It's always like everything stems from that.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't know.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_02: I you might have some thoughts on that too, but I just think it's such a a powerful thing to observe is how vastly different, even in the value system of it all, they those two systems are.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: They are very different.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if you think about Bitcoin, I think uh you're absolutely right, Danielle.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's very hopeful.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: I think about Bitcoin almost like a supremely kind of American concept.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: And and what do I mean by that from like a first principles perspective?
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: Like imagine yourself going back to you know the early mid-1700s, right?
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: And you think about the world being basically dominated by the powerful, you know, the wealthy, the elite, the, you know, the you know, landed gentry and all of that kind of thing.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: And imagine a country being born where it's like, no, you have freedom, you have liberty, you have the ability to make a life for yourself and move up from a shopkeeper to running a big business or running a railroad or whatever it it is.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I I acknowledging that you know not not all groups of people, including my own ancestors, had the best go of it throughout, but the I the ideals of America are are supremely hopeful.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: They're all about liberty, they're all about sovereignty.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: And when I think about Bitcoin, it's almost like a digital revolution.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like if we had our revolutionary war in 1776 to break away from the old system and really create a place of true freedom and liberty for anybody who wants it.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: Freedom of the religion, freedom of the ability to operate a business, freedom to transact, freedom to save, to store gold or whatever it was back in in those days, before 1933, when that right was stripped from us, if we want to talk about that, but had true, true freedom and liberty.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: America, you know, 2008, October 31st, 2008, when the Bitcoin white paper came out from Satoshi, it's like here's a new revolution, new freedom for everyone, new liberty for everyone, but it's financial freedom, financial liberty, the ability to store your energy without it being d taken away from you.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: When I read Creature from Jekyll Island all about kind of the history of central banking, I was I mean, first I was kind of shocked, and then second, mad, angry, you know, that that this that this monetary system has been created to, you know, protect certain folks and to kind of help them grow their wealth and their power at the expense of of ordinary people who just want to like provide for their families and go to church on Sunday and run their business on Monday and you know create a great product for their customer.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: And instead they're given, they said, no, you can't hold gold, you know, in 1933 or in 1971, we're gonna t we're gonna sever, you know, the dollar from gold and and watch the the value of the the value of the dollar go through the floor and the value of gold go up, and of course risk assets go up, but asset holders do great, and then ordinary mom and pop, oh why why can't I what this car was five thousand dollars last year, and now what does it cost to buy a new car?
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: $30,000,$40,000.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: My wages haven't gone up that much.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: What's happening?
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so when I read the creature from Jekyll Island, I thought, why have we done this to ourselves?
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: This is this is like the most anti-American concept I can imagine.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we should have free markets.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: We should allow people we should allow price to set the price to be a true signal for people to know, like, hey, my this the value of this asset's going up, I need to do this or that, right?
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I need to store my money in something that can not debase, not lose its value.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: So um yeah, it's it's uh it's learning history is key.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think uh Bitcoin is supremely hopeful, a supremely liberty-based technology and supremely American in that way, um, in terms of American ideals, not like the American government.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that's a beautiful thing.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_01: That's an absolute beautiful thing.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_02: That's one of the best things that we love our country.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's not perfect and it's always feels like it's changing.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_02: But I feel like Bitcoin uh allows for those ideals and those things that we want to have in our in our daily life to be be true, to be something that we can actually accomplish and do.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_02: And I know you have a faith.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_02: I wanted to kind of, you know, if it's okay with you, just kind of see how your faith has kind of guided you along this process of learning more about Bitcoin and sharing this with your family and all of that.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_02: I I I would love to kind of get that perspective from you too.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: I remember when I first started learning about Bitcoin and then AI was kind of coming on to the at that point, I've been pretty much coming onto the scene.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: I started kind of wanting to go through the Bible and understand, you know, money.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: Like how what is I I know that I've heard the phrase that the ideas around money are talked about in the Bible way more than you might think.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you think about how many, how many different you know, parables did Jesus share that were about money.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you think about the the ten talents, you think about the woman putting her two copper coins in who's poor, and it's all the money that she has, and it's kind of teaching about you know what is the value of money, whereas the wealthy kind of were putting in large sums into the offering box.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there's just so many stories about money in the Bible that it's like, okay, clearly God knows a heart of people can be easily captured by this thing.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so there is even the verse that talks about unequal weights and measures are an abomination to the Lord in the Old Testament, right?
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's this idea, I think, with fiat, that it is an unequal weight or measure, that it is kind of this in the ancient world, right?
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's very critical that if I go in and give you X amount of silver to buy some goods, I should know that the silver is what it should be, and it's the weight that it should be, et cetera, et cetera, and that the goods you give me are gonna be the right weights and so on.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so one of the most important things to God, if you read the Old Testament, is justice and righteousness.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so you should treat people in a way that is fair, that is righteous, that is in terms of like I am honoring you as a person as we transact by being honest with you.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_01: But if I'm gonna go to you and say, well, the silver that I'm using is actually kind of melted down, we've added some other metals to it, um, because you know, the king needs to fight this war in Macedonia, and so um, here we go.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna give you the silver.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: And they're gonna say, I don't want that.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: Where's the real silver, right?
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and now all of a sudden you've created this unrighteous situation.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: You've actually like stripped the person of justice that's on the other side of that transaction, and that's exactly why God says that that's that is that's an abomination that makes him angry.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think that you know, proper, real hard money that doesn't uh isn't debased, isn't, isn't kind of phony in a sense, doesn't rob people of their time and energy, is very aligned with, I think our our Christian ethos is very much aligned with the Lord as I read in the Bible.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: And when you falsify things, when you debase things, when you kind of strip truth away, like God is a God of truth.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you have a money that's not really real, you've taken truth out of the equation.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: Now you've kind of given some somebody something they can't really trust.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: That really goes against it.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: So so as I was kind of coming into Bitcoin, I always see so many parallels with my faith and go, oh yeah.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: I I because I was trying to judge, like, okay, is this a is this like a is this an idol?
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_01: Is this something that's gonna be bad for me?
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I was trying to test it and see.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um because some people there are some, I won't name names, but there are some that almost talk about Bitcoin like a deity, um, or Satoshi like a deity.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, no, no, I don't think so.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, I say, no, I think this is actually an opportunity to reclaim truth, reclaim justice, reclaim righteousness.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's really important.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: So uh Bitcoin's absolutely compatible, I feel like, with faith.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: And that actually even makes it more exciting.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_01: And then I've met and I've met so many people through Bitcoin, many who have like their faith has almost been like restored, not from Bitcoin, but as they're going through this journey of discovery, as they're going through many have read lots of books that they didn't used to read, and suddenly they find truth and beauty and the reality of the world that God has made, and they're like, they're drawn back, I think, to the Lord.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_01: They're drawn back to the Bible, they're drawn back to their faith.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think you see people in Bitcoin are always like improving, they improve their diets, they improve their health, they improve their habits, they get more healthy.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I think faith is just one more part of that kind of rebirth of a person.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I feel like I've personally have gone through a rebirth since 2023.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a very different person than I was then.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I do attribute it to the Bitcoin journey, but it's absolutely been beautiful in my faith as well to be like, ah, a real, true money that's just, that's right, uh, that treats my neighbor with respect.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: That's wonderful.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: That's a beautiful thing.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_02: And has your wife kind of gone along in this journey with you also?
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_02: Or has that been interesting?
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_02: I'm always interested to just see how that works as a dynamic of a couple, you know, because it's there's so many hurdles and and you know, trying to figure out like what are you saying right now, you know?
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_02: And and I mean, I have we had we had two, was it two young kids at the time?
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_02: They were babies when you were starting to dive into point.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they were I mean, they're still young, but they're they were like babies.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, I can't comprehend anything that you are saying right now.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_02: I am just trying, I am just trying to get through my day in increments of time.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, just share if you don't mind.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_02: And if you don't feel comfortable, not not a problem either.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, it was definitely, I think, you know, early on, because I had spent I I have an ability and a proclivity to hyperfocus, right?
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I just kind of you know spent hours and hours, you know, hundreds of hours kind of diving down the rabbit hole.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, just going to the Sailor series was probably 20 some odd hours.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, it's on 2x speed, so I'm flying through it.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then reading books and all this stuff.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so then you you you come to your wife like blah blah blah blah blah blah blah and she's like, What?
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_01: What is all of this, right?
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um but you know, over time, you know, kind of you know became supportive, understood, oh okay, so this like this really is a real thing.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's not like this magic internet money that you're I mean, it is magic internet money, but it's not like this phony thing that we're throwing our money into that's gonna like you know, here today, gone tomorrow.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and and she I think she, you know, both of us are pretty libertarian in our kind of views of of the world, so we're very strong views around uh self-sovereignty, liberty, um, so on.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_01: And and the idea I think of hard money is very much compatible with that.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, she was familiar with like gold and silver and the value of those kinds of uh of assets to actually retain their value.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_01: And once I think she understood that you know how much money is being debased, the you know, the CPI, you know, the interest rate that the government tells you is really not, or sorry, inflation rate that the government tells you it's not accurate.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's really the monetary debasement rate, more like seven percent.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: Once you kind of understood some of those things, because of course I talk about it at dinner almost every day until everybody got sick of it.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um it was kind of like, okay, this registers, it makes sense.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_01: You know, but it was it was funny.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: I convinced her to go to a Bitcoin conference, believe it or not.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um she's not like as fanatical as I am, but I mean, you know, she's into it and gets it.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_01: We went to Nashville uh 24 when when Trump came.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_01: I remember we were looking at Bitcoin, I think it was like, I don't know, 69,000 or something.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so she kind of like bought some.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_01: She was like, oh, okay.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_01: We were listening to Trump speak, and she bought some, and then it like, you know, as you as you if you remember, as he talked, like it tanked like 2062 or something like that.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, Welcome to Bitcoin! That's like that's what happens.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_01: It just it just drops and sometimes it rocks, and we don't know.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_04: And you're like in the atmosphere, you're like in this atmosphere, like all Bitcoin, then it just draws.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's like nope.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, this happens at conferences.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_01: But I didn't think it was gonna happen this time.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: So like, welcome to Bitcoin.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: It was awesome.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: She didn't think it was funny, but at the time.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_04: So awesome.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_04: That's such like take this, just take it.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_04: She's like, take it, take it.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_02: She's like, what did I just do?
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_02: But so I mean, hey, if you can handle it when it's low, right?
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_02: You can handle it when it's high.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_02: So I feel like it's more dips, yeah.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_03: She's a hobby.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_02: When it dips.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_02: That's such a funny story.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my gosh.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_02: That's so good.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_04: The um number one, the way that you spoke about like the Bible and like the parallels and how a truth and that was like beautifully said.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_04: Like that, I don't even know if I can like repeat that.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_04: That was like so well said, Michelle, like the way that you kind of dove deep into both of them.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_04: And it's like, it is truth.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_04: Like, and when people hearing this, right, maybe like for the first time, like, what are you talking about?
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_04: Like Jesus and Bible and Bitcoin, and and you have to remember too, it's a tool, it's just a tool.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_04: Anything can be like that idol, right?
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_04: And the fact that you like dove deep into that and how again it has values.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_04: And when we were going, we have our faith as well.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_04: And so it just everything just parallel and was just like, oh man, like this is awesome.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_04: Like, we're already doing this stuff.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_04: This is already good.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_04: This is not something that's gonna be a distraction.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_04: And how you were talking about with uh when you're just so focused and you just go down the rabbit hole, it's so funny because you're you literally like I feel like I disappeared and I come back and I'm just like to everybody, like just like open your eyes, like and throwing up on them.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_04: So I always think it's funny because the dynamic with a couple or in uh whether boyfriend or girlfriend or like a serious relationship and you're married, that dynamic is so important because you're like, how are they gonna respond?
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_04: Right?
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_04: Or are they gonna be totally turned off?
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_04: Are they gonna be like, well, like maybe this, maybe he, this or Lee is going down too deep, you know?
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_04: Or like what does that look like?
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_04: And so I'm I'm always curious, and that's why we did this podcast.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_04: I was like, well, I was always throwing up on Danielle, and I was like, man, you know what would be really cool if like let me just have Mr.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_04: Lee throw up on her, uh Vince throw up on her, you know, like all of these different people.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_02: I promise I want to be here, Mr.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_02: Lee.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_02: I promise I want to be here.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_04: No, it's no, but it it's definitely helped a lot in her learning process because we've had women on here as well, right?
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_04: We've had couples on here as well.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_04: And so everyone just speaks about it differently and has a different thought process on it.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_04: And so it's really helped like her growth.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm like, dude, this is perfect.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_04: Like this perfect.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_04: I love Bitcoin.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_04: I get to talk to Bitcoiners, and then I also get to have people like you share about Bitcoin to my wife.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_04: So it's really cool.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_04: Um, you know, just going along this journey with her.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's hard to get there, right?
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think that the hyper focus is that's just kind of how I process, but it's also like an unlearning, right?
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, her and I have talked about my wife and I've talked about this before, how both of my so we actually met kind of through politics, right?
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: Through, you know, a particular, you know, uh through the Republican Party and stuff like that.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_01: And both of us kind of got disillusioned with politics in general over years and just realized, like, oh, so they're really not coming to save us.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: The other side's not coming to save us.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_01: Neither are coming to save us.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so kind of both of us retreated from from from that in a lot of ways.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so when I discovered Bitcoin, I was like, oh, there's like another way to make your voice heard.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's this idea of voice and exit.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you're staying within the political system, you're like trying to use your voice to like change the world.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_01: And exit is kind of like, well, maybe I don't want to do that.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe I'm just gonna take my ball and my bat and go home.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_01: And that's I don't want to say that Bitcoin is withdrawal from the system.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think so.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, it's kind of like building this alternate system and saying, oh, instead of me trying to change this thing from the inside, I'm just gonna go over here and build, be a part of building this new thing, kind of like what Jeff Booth talks about, right?
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna take my energy from the old system, I'm gonna bring it into this new good and true system.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: And then, as you maybe have heard of like Bitcoin growing by a power law, like networks and like cities and like neighborhoods kind of grow in this way, Bitcoin is just gonna keep growing.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_01: So if people exit the other system and they come here, it's gonna keep getting bigger and bigger.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: And people will keep coming to it.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_01: They'll come to it like myself, my wife.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: Well, they kind of challenge the narrative, they challenge the status quo, they challenge what they've been taught.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_01: There's some unlearning that's kind of painful that you have to go through to say, like, oh, this political system isn't gonna fix my problems, you know, this new job isn't gonna fix my problems, this isn't gonna fix.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's like actually the money's broken.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I'm actually going back to another biblical example.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_01: Am I building on a rock or am I building on sand?
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_01: And they don't realize, and I had to realize, and she realized, and I think many realize, oh, building on the fiat system is like building on sand.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_01: And like Sailor talks about Bitcoin, it's like I'm building on granite.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like, oh yeah, okay.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_01: Now I can now I don't have all of this like entropy and loss that's happening from the fiat system.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_01: I've got I've got I'm building on granite.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_01: I can actually build a pretty tall building on this thing now, yeah.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um but on fiat, it's like what it's kind of like being in Venice.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_01: Like, why is why is my building sinking every year?
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's like you're on water in that case, right?
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um so anyway, I'm kind of rambling a little bit, but what makes a person open to learning about Bitcoin is when you you already kind of challenge the system, you already feel like, you know, there's something not right.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_01: There's it's like the Matrix, right?
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's so many good examples.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_01: The Matrix is such a critical social story.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_01: There's like there's something not Neo can tell there's something not right, but I can't put my finger on it until it's revealed to him.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_01: And at first he rejects it, right?
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_01: Once he's been unplugged, but then eventually he accepts it.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_01: He's like, Oh, okay, that world wasn't actually real.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_01: And this is the real, real world, and it's kind of gritty, it's hard, it's dirty, but it's real, it's human, it's it's it's I can fully be alive here.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's what happens with people on their journey with Bitcoin.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: And just they have to the but they already have to be open to that.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_01: Because if they're like if they're like that scene with the woman with the red red dress, they're not ready.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: They're not ready to be, you know, unplugged, right?
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_04: It's that is so good.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that is so good.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_04: And we were too like we kind of got lost in the sauce too with like around 2020 with COVID and everything, and just getting into like, you know, you just go deep down into politics and also in Bitcoin for our journey as well.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_04: But yeah, we were like, hey man, none of these people, they can't help us, they can't help us.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_04: And they're gonna say everything that makes us like super like like get all pumped up and like divide.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_04: And but we were always like, oh, like this side's better, or this, you know, because we were also like with the like Republicans and stuff, like, oh, and this is gonna help better, and like they have a lot more values in the system, but like man, they don't at the end of the day, they're just they're both so broken, they're both and the money's broken, so that doesn't help either.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_04: That doesn't help at all.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_04: Like the core principle is gone, so it doesn't matter whatever you say or whatever you try to do.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_04: The core thing, the foundation is broken.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_04: It does not matter.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_04: And going with Jeff Booth, oh Jeff Booth's amazing.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_04: I'm always like putting my thinking cap on every time I have to listen to a Jeff Booth podcast.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_04: But he's so good because he says that all the time.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_04: Like you said, like he's like, look in the mirror, like you'll complain, you'll complain, complain, complain.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_04: But he was like, uh, why don't you just go look in the mirror?
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_04: It's actually you, and then you just exit out the system, like you said, it was so perfect, and then just go build over here and let you know, just take all your energy, your tools, your life, and just go build your life over here, and then there'll be a community that form, and other people will start to grow.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_04: And like, he's so positive.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_04: Like, I thought I was a positive person.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_04: Then you like listen to Jeff Booth, he's like there's like angels everywhere.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_04: This guy's amazing.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_04: I I love Jeff Booth, but no, yeah, I completely agree with you on all of this stuff, and this is awesome.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_04: Another thing I wanted to ask you is one of the things we like to do to like always like end our podcast is if someone's listening right now, right?
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_04: And for the very first time as a Bitcoiner, they're they're tapping in.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_04: What is some advice that you would get to them entering into this Bitcoin space?
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_04: Hmm.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_01: I think that I mean it's probably gonna be no surprise as a one-time educator.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_01: I guess I still consider myself an educator today, is learn.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_01: Learn, learn, learn.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you see some of the books behind me, you know, whether it's the Bitcoin standard or broken money is a is a fantastic, kind of broader book from Lynn Alden about really kind of the history of of money from a little bit of a different lens than um uh you know than than what Safe does with the Bitcoin standard.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um Larry Lapard, I don't know if you've had him on your show.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_01: He did a nice job with the big print.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_01: I read that earlier this year.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_01: And then kind of read some things that aren't just Bitcoin, but are kind of predictive of Bitcoin, like the sovereign individual.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_01: That actually came out in 1997.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_01: And it actually predicted Bitcoin, which is very interesting.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_01: It talks about this idea that the price of using violence to kind of coerce people into kind of staying within their country and paying their taxes and all this thing, eventually people will just be like, no, other kind of um jurisdictions will open up to say, like, no, you can come here, pay a fee, you know, you don't have to pay your tax, you don't have to have taxes or whatever, you just pay your fee, be a part of our group or whatever.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_01: And you don't have to be a part of that nation or whatever.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_01: And you can kind of be a true sovereign individual with your own land, your own property.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_01: And instead of using that fiat currency of your foreign nation, we'll use cyber money, right?
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_01: There's these kinds of concepts that are in the book that are really interesting.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: I butchered it a little, but anyway, read, learn, and don't just learn just about Bitcoin, like learn kind of about money, about human nature, about how people actually kind of work.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then I think you'll open your eyes and be like, oh, the political system isn't probably gonna solve my problems.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, now I know why there's all these debates about the the debt and deficits and all of this stuff, and it's never gonna get fixed, you know.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so you can stop to kind of put putting your heart there and say, well, where should I put my energy?
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_01: Where should I put my my efforts, right?
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_01: How do I store my energy of the work that I do in my business or my job or what have you?
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then I think Bitcoin will make a lot more sense.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_01: If you don't do the learning, I think if an individual doesn't do really kind of dig deep, do the learning, grow as a person, grow in their own understanding, they'll be carried away with just every different idea, some new crypto will come out, and they'll be like, oh, that looks fun.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_01: I'll go, you know, maybe that's the future, maybe that's a better Bitcoin and this and that.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_01: And they'll kind of get they'll kind of get carried away.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think learn, kind of build your knowledge of money, of how people work, uh, kind of get some history.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I've good old Michael Saylor encouraged me to buy the Story of Civilization by Durant.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_01: And when I heard him talk about it on podcasts, I thought, oh, I bet that'd be a nice book.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh it's uh, I don't know, several volumes.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I haven't started yet.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's on my shelf.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but he encourages you to read that because you need to learn, it's kind of like what what the Bible says in Ecclesiastes.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_01: There's nothing new under the sun.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_01: So the more you know about history, the more you know about human nature, I think the better you can navigate it going into the future.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_01: Then it's like, okay, now I understand why Bitcoin makes sense.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_01: Now I kind of I can now I can now look at Bitcoin relative to other assets and make a more informed decision and build a conviction and then stick with that conviction.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um so that that would be my advice, I think, is learn, get into history, get into the history of money, get into Bitcoin.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_01: It sounds boring.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well, start with some start with the big print, start with Bitcoin standards, start with some easy reads, and then you can go deeper from there if you want to.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that is really good.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_04: And in Ecclesiastics is my favorite too.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_04: So I'm so glad that you said that because a lot of people uh they don't know about like we're in the crisis mode, but a lot of people don't remember, you know, going back 80 years, uh like what happened.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_04: So back in the Great Depression, they took gold, they repriced gold, they confiscated anybody you couldn't even like own it.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_04: I think they just like they knocked on your door, like, hey, you you have it, like we're gonna take it.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_04: So a lot of people fast forward to now, they don't think that that would ever be a concept or a thing, like, oh, hey, like we have gold or we have Bitcoin, or well, they can't take our Bitcoin, but I'm saying, like, well, if you have it on exchange, again, that's a different story.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_04: But what I'm saying is that all of these concepts and principles are forgotten and going back to ecclesiastics because it's like vapor, you can't grab it, it's meaningless.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_04: But all of this brings us back to like it's very important that everything is on the table right now of what's going on in our economy, in the world right now.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so yeah, I I I think it's very it's it's very interesting on what's next.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_04: Like talking to younger people and older people and people who are financially illiterate, like some people say that like this can they they can keep going on for a while.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_04: And I would love to hear your take on this of keep kicking the can down the road.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_04: But again, we just hit 40 trillion in debt.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_04: How long could this possibly go on?
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, where people are like enough is enough, you can't buy a car, the average age to buy a home is 40.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_04: Um, which is wild.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_04: Like, that's wild.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_04: 40 years old and like you're someone's first buying their home, like you're probably like nowadays, you're probably like it's seven jobs in, right?
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_04: And you're like buying a house.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_04: Like I would love to hear what your take on this is.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, and that's why it was so interesting for us to talk about the fourth turning in context of Ecclesiastes, because nothing is new under the sun.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_01: And once that kind of you know, 80-year block of time that the fourth turning kind of covers, where you have this 20-year period that's a high, things are good, this that's high trust.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we trust our institutions, things are working well, and then it's kind of an awakening, and some new players are coming to the stage in terms of their focus and emphasis in the country, and then unraveling, things are starting not to work.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_01: Our institutions are kind of actually falling apart, and the next generation is already starting to try to move into power and they've already forgotten the stuff from 60 years ago, right?
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_01: And then now in the crisis mode, we have problems.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you think about where we are uh in America in the fourth turning concept, we started the crisis, the fourth turning within the the four-turning model roughly 2008.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_01: So basically after the global financial crisis when housing exploded and the and the Federal Reserve went from having hundreds of billions of dollars on its balance sheet to all of a sudden a trillion for the first time.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_01: And have they ever gone back?
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_01: No, it's only gotten more.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_01: I I can't remember from the last Porkopolis report what the Federal Reserve has, but I want to say it's like six trillion or something like that on its balance sheet.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_01: And they hold, I don't quote me on you are gonna quote me because I'm on video, but something like 20% of treasuries are held by the Federal Reserve and mortgage backed securities and all kinds of other assets.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_01: So it's interesting.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_01: So we're coming to the end of this fourth turning sometime in the next handful of years.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_01: And in the past, every fourth turning has ended with war, right?
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_01: So the if you think about 80-year life cycles, roughly, roughly.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Civil War to, or sorry, revolutionary war to the Civil War, Civil War to World War II, World War II to where we are now.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_01: So you think of these different cycles, we're kind of due, and you're seeing things break.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_01: You are seeing us in crisis.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_01: Like you said, Anthony, the zoomers and the soon-to-be jet gen alpha can't afford anything.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_01: People are having to stay at their parents' house longer, they can't afford homes, they can't afford cars, can't afford insurance, uh, people are having fewer kids, they people don't know what a what a what a man or a woman is.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's all this like truth is kind of falling away.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_01: All of these things are falling apart.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_01: So it's very much uh kind of in crisis mode.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so you ask, like, well, how long can this go on?
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, look at Japan.
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_01: Japan's probably a good example where their stock market hit its high in uh I'll butcher it, sometime in the late 90s on the Nikkei uh stock index, and then didn't hit a new all-time high until just a couple years ago.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_01: So they basically went through like what was being called a lost decade for a while.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_01: It became like a lost multiple decades, very low inflation, very low growth, um, and they just and and very poor stock returns due to a whole host of issues.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_01: You can look at the um oh, what is the name of that?
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um there's a there's a great documentary shoot.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'll have to send it to you guys later.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_01: I can't remember it right now.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um but there's a good documentary that kind of describes what happened in Japan.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_01: But they were able to kick the can down the road for a very, very, very, very, very long time.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_01: We're decades.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_01: Buying buying back their own debt and keep kind of keeping their their yields low, and then something happened.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was about last year, again, ball underwater, started to pop, and their yields started to absolutely explode.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_01: So the price of their debt went through the ceiling.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_01: The root the world basically said, Hey, we're done financing this.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_01: It looks like you guys have red ink as full as far as the eye can see.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you want us to buy Japanese government bonds, JGBs, we're gonna demand higher yields.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's exactly what's happening there.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_01: So it took about 30 years, and then now they're out of time.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_01: So we're just getting started.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_01: So I think what the work that um Bessent is doing is something called yield curve control, at least it's getting started in that direction, which all that essentially is is saying we don't want the price of our debt, the treasury yields, to get too high.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_01: Because right now we're spending about$1.4 trillion a year on interest, on interest on our debt.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we're not even paying off debt.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_01: That's just that's not even touching principal, that's just repaying the interest on our debt.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_01: And and the higher those rates go in the market, the higher that is.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_01: So you're gonna see all kinds of interesting things done by the the Treasury.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm telling you, the market does not understand what the Federal Reserve is gonna do under Warsh.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_01: They all think he's going to raise rates and do all that.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_01: None of that's gonna happen.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_01: They talk about the two go the roles of the Federal Reserve is right, uh uh employment and stable prices.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's to keep the treasury market on the tracks, it's to it's to prevent the wheels from falling off the bus of the U.S.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_01: Treasury market so we can roll our debt and keep this gravy train moving.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so if that goes off the rails and we lose global reserve currency status and all those things, like nobody wants that to happen yet.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_01: So you're gonna see yields get pinned, they're gonna figure out how to keep them from going too high, and we're gonna do what Japan did, and we can do that for quite a long time.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_01: Can we do it forever?
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_01: Can we do it for many years?
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe 10?
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe but eventually the ball's gonna pop.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why you're seeing things like gold explode last year, right?
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_01: And into this year, you saw gold absolutely explode from like I remember when you could go to Costco and get like an announce for like two grand, and then I remember going back to Costco not too long ago and it was like$5,600.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, what?
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_01: When Bitcoin, right?
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so Bitcoin now, and it was so funny.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_01: So as soon as Beston made this announcement, we're gonna start buying back more of our own debt, more of our own treasuries.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_01: Bitcoin ripped last week.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely ripped from like low 60s, hit 80k, and now I think we're sitting around 79,000 right now.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_01: So Bitcoin finally has rejoined the debasement trade.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah.
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_01: Hold scarce assets.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, this is really interesting to me because we always say history repeats itself, but no one really understands that there's actually a cycle to it.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there's actual like data that is showing that these certain, you know, four turnings um happen.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um and that's really that's really cool for me to hear because I I mean, yes, I've always said, like, oh, history repeats itself.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_02: We've see it, you know, we we hear our parents.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_02: My my dad's a huge history buff, right?
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_02: So he's always like telling me things and he'll I'm like, oh, well, that's interesting.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_02: It seems like that's happening again, or you know, like, or I'm having glimpses of what could be possibly happening.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_02: But to know that there's actual data about these fourth turnings is really interesting to me.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_02: Cause I think even for my dad who's a boomer, and he he knows we obviously, you know, uh save in Bitcoin.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_02: We know he knows we have a podcast.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um it'd be awesome for him to actually like understand, like, hey dad, look at this historical like data of what's happen, what's been happening, you know, for him to, you know, maybe for it to click a little bit more instead of just being like, oh, this is how we've always done it and this is how he is.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_02: Not that he talks like that, but it's just interesting in my mind he's talking like that.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but yeah.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_04: Hey, real quick, Mr.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_04: Lee.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_04: So, or um yield curve control.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_04: So I'm always learning, but like is yield curve control is this a new phrase that they've come out with recently, or has that been a thing before?
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_04: Um yeah.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_04: And the reason why I ask is because um, again, we're buying back our debt like crazy right now.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_04: Back then when there was like, you know, after the uh great financial crisis, it was like QE, right?
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_04: Quantity peasing, or and then how like that kind of like really came into play, you know, it's always been into play, but like really come into play.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_04: Is this yield curve control?
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_04: Is this something new or is this something just randomly made up?
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_04: Because I forgot, I think it was Jeff Booth.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_04: He said, like, hey, when they start making like these fancy words, like be on the lookout.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_04: I'm like, I'm like, this sounds like a fancy word right here.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_04: You know, so is this new or is this something that they've kind of always I know they've always bought about their debt, but like has it uh or is this if you can just chime in on that.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so yield curve control is not kind of a new term.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's I mean, that's essentially what Japan has done for a very long time.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, um so the idea is really just that the the government, and even we've done it, I mean, after World War II, you know, we had tremendous debt to GDP after the war since we financed so much of it with debt and we were able to uh inflate it away.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_01: Well, how?
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you have to run the economy hot, run high inflation, you know, have basically your bond yields be negative.
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're saving in bonds, you're actually losing money on a real basis after inflation, and eventually your debt to GDP magically goes down, and then all of a sudden, ah, we we've grown out of it, we're great.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, if you were a bondholder, you got smoked, right?
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um so yield curve control is really all about kind of pinning your rates to some level and saying, I'm not gonna let it go kind of above that.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna look at the the 10-year rate, and we're gonna, you know, do operations in the market to make sure that that rate doesn't go above uh that level.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so that's kind of what Japan was able to do for a long time.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so you basically have your central bank, you know, is the buyer of last resort and it buys up your elongated sovereign bonds and can help keep that, it creates enough demand, so to speak, to keep those yields low, and then you can continue to run your deficits and do what you want to do.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_01: So we're not fully there.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_01: That's not when I when I shared the tweet, actually I tagged James Lavish because he's the one who actually I learned about yield curve control from over the last couple of years.
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's the beginning.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_01: Because it was really the announcement for those in your audience, the announcement was fairly small in a dollar terms.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_01: It was we've been buying for several years.
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_01: The government has been, treasury has been buying back what they call off-the-run bonds.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to get too technical here, but basically it's just like bonds that are very illiquid.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_01: They're issued quite a few years back.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_01: They have kind of a lower rate, and people that are holding them don't want to keep holding them.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_01: They want something else, but there's not a marketplace to buy, you know, a 20-year bond yielding 3% or whatever when the going market rate is, I don't know what the 20-year is now, 4% or 4.5%, whatever it is now.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so the treasury will buy those back, basically kind of make you whole, and then give you kind of a current bond that gives you a current, you know, market coupon, right?
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so we we did that by about$2 billion a month, I think is what we were budgeting before to do.
• 1:01:04
  SPEAKER_01: And Bussett Basson just came out and said, okay, now we're gonna up that from two billion to four billion.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_01: So on a dollar basis, that's tiny.
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's tiny.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_01: That's uh in the in the multi-trillion dollar treasury market, you know, that's kind of a pittance.
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_01: But it was more about what does that say?
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_01: That we're trying to increase liquidity in the treasury market.
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_01: What does that mean?
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it really means yields are getting out of control and we need the tools in place.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_01: And we have to slow, and if you don't want to do something sudden, if you do something sudden, the market's gonna freak out, right?
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so we're gonna slowly add tools.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_01: So they did that.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_01: Treasury yields went down, but they went right back up the next day.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_01: And then he said, it could be more than he, I think he went on CNBC.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_01: He said, Well, we could even buy back more than four billion a month.
• 1:01:46
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_01: And then the next like a couple days later, he said, we also have access to the Treasury General account, which currently has about a trillion dollars of cash in it.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so we could back the treasury market with all of that.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_04: Oh my goodness.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_01: So that's why Bitcoin's going up because it's like I smelled the basement.
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_01: That's what's that's what's going on.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_01: So it's good to see it kind of regaining the the debasement rate and gold's been moving up too.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, that's that's kind of what's going on.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_01: And again, if you if you think back and to cycles, we just forget this kind of stuff.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we forgot that Japan's been doing it.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um we even go way back, you know, Danielle, something you were talking about with the with central banking and and all that.
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_01: We forgot that we've actually tried central banking before.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_01: We actually had two central banks before the current 1913-based central bank, uh, first bank and second bank of the United States, and we were able to shut down the second one.
• 1:02:39
  unknown: Yeah.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_01: And that but then we got a third very secretly through the again, reading Michael Island.
• 1:02:45
  SPEAKER_04: So it was like on it was on Christmas Eve.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_01: Christmas Eve, that's right.
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_01: Stuck somewhere it was during Christmas season, yeah, that I think the bill got passed.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_01: So these your your audience will have to kind of go and kind of track down the story.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but at a high level, you know, the these all of these kind of powerful banking interests, Washington interests, very secretly got on this train and went to this, you know, went to Jekyll Island kind of in the middle of of winter and hatched this idea of like, hey, we need to be able to you kind of back the banking system um and have a lender of last resort.
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so that way you kind of, you know, you're privatizing the gains and you're socializing the losses if things happen, like with bank busts and things like that, like the 1907 banking panic and things like that that caused a lot of banks to close.
• 1:03:28
  SPEAKER_01: Like, okay, we need we need a lender of last resort that can take care of us.
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_01: But if we told it to the public, the public already had a lot of distrust of banks at that time, so we have to call it something else.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so instead we kind of call I think called it a federal reserve, which made it seem like a government entity.
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's not.
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's actually uh owned by the banks.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's a quasi kind of public-private organization.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_01: That's why, by the way, the president can't fire the Federal Reserve chair.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_01: So he can he can appoint it, he can appoint the chair, but Chair Powell in the last before Warsh came in said it's not permitted under the law to be fired by the president.
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_01: How can that be?
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought it was a federal institution, it's not federal, it's it's not federal and it has no reserves.
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's crazy because it was so funny when Trump came into presidency, he was talking about how he's gonna hire a new firepower, a federal chairman, but nobody knows this.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_04: Like the general public have no idea.
• 1:04:19
  SPEAKER_04: So when he was like firing everybody and stuff like that, and it was a reporter, he was like, Hey, so at Jerome Powell, like at his, you know, he goes, and he told Jerome Powell, he goes, Hey, so are you worried that you know Trump's gonna fire you?
• 1:04:31
  SPEAKER_04: It's like not permitted under the law.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, he's like, Yeah, like what are you talking about?
• 1:04:37
  SPEAKER_04: Like, and then the reporter was like super shocked because at that point, that's when Trump was firing everybody, and then like they don't know, they just don't understand the game that we're literally getting off the nest.
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_04: Like, all of us are getting finesse, unless you do the research, and then you're like, I'm not, I'm done getting finesse, I'm gonna go stack as much Bitcoin as possible, put this bat boy in cold storage, and I'm gonna go live my life and figure things out in the meantime until it goes up.
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_04: Because when you shared right now, when uh he did announce that gold went up, they both went up at the same time, like huge jump, huge jump, and silver.
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_04: And it reminds me of what you shared too, like chasing the wind, right?
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_04: Because if you don't do the learning, if you don't do the learning, the next flashy thing, whether it's Bitcoin, whether it's AI, whether it's XYZ, you're just gonna go with it.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_04: And then you're never gonna actually like build something or like right that deep to like learn the roots of it.
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_04: Hey, is this actually worth pursuing?
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_04: No, you're just gonna be like, dude, oh what?
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_04: Girl in the red dress.
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_04: Or oh hey, you know, like uh, so I think that's really good.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_04: Um man, thank you so much for sharing that.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_04: That was awesome.
• 1:05:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:05:42
  SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
• 1:05:42
  SPEAKER_04: My pleasure, my pleasure.
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_02: I was thinking about that too.
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's really important because it allows the foundation.
• 1:05:48
  SPEAKER_02: So when you're working towards a goal, you're not gonna be wanting to put your money into certain other things.
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_02: Or and so once you understand it, nothing else matters.
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_02: Like what uh in Ecclesiastes says that too.
• 1:05:59
  SPEAKER_02: It's like nothing that doesn't matter.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_02: This doesn't matter.
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, it's uh um, it's uh what is it?
• 1:06:03
  SPEAKER_04: What is he saying?
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_02: We're gonna butcher the whole verse, but we're not gonna but it's basically what we're gonna summarize it because we're gonna you're gonna think too hard about it and it's gonna come out crazy.
• 1:06:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:06:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um but but uh no, it's I think that's such great advice for sure.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_02: And everything that you've shared with us has been so spot on.
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's been really informational for me.
• 1:06:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um and like you said, I think we're you are an educator, you're constantly sharing your thoughts with others and being able to come on podcasts and share that knowledge with other people is so helpful because you have done the work, you have gone into your hyper focus areas and and really dived into concepts.
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so we appreciate that so much.
• 1:06:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I know I really appreciate it because I'm always learning more and more about Bitcoin every single day that I didn't terms, concepts, all of that, you know.
• 1:06:54
  SPEAKER_02: So it's really awesome what you're doing for the Bitcoin community.
• 1:06:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but yeah, thank you.
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_02: And where can people connect with you?
• 1:07:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, thank you again for having me on.
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_01: I really appreciate it.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's been great to kind of get to know you guys and and uh share my thoughts.
• 1:07:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you can find me on on X uh at Mr.
• 1:07:11
  SPEAKER_01: Lee Hoddle H O D L.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_01: And uh yeah, come chat, come say hi and uh keep it civil and let's have a good conversation.
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_02: Awesome.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you everyone for tuning into To the Moon with the Lunas, and we'll see you guys all on the moon.
• 1:07:27
  SPEAKER_03: Peace.
• 1:07:34
  SPEAKER_04: You made it this far, so you might as well hit that subscribe button.
• 1:07:37
  SPEAKER_04: You won't want to miss the conversations we got coming next.
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_04: Thanks for watching, and we'll see you on the moon.